[Drop Dead Studios] Spheres of Might Open Playtest

[Ssalarn]

Legitimate concerns about the implementation of drawbacks in SoM have been brought up, both in relation to SoP and when looked at in a vacuum, and those concerns don't seem to have been addressed.

"Haven't been addressed" and "weren't addressed the way someone wanted them" are two different things. Drawbacks having mandated talents was a result of extensive feedback and review; the drawbacks originally didn't have mandated talents but players brought up concerns accompanied by builds, we reviewed those, looked at multiple ways of addressing those issues, and settled on mandated drawbacks (there were almost no drawbacks at all), since we saw that that solution was capable of addressing all the outstanding issues that had been brought up without putting cumbersome or excessive hindrances on numerous spheres and talents.

At best, those concerns have been met with the equivalent of, "it's for the best, we know what we're doing", but that kind of response doesn't provide any real answer. Please don't say that the decision was made for balance and to address potential problems without actually stating what those balances and problems actually are.

The thing is, we have answered those questions, numerous times, starting with when people asked us why those limitations weren't in place. While we understand that you may not have read those questions and answers, there's a point where "We've been over this extensively" has to be enough, otherwise we're repeating ourselves over and over across multiple forums. There's not a wiki out there for "why we did things the way we did".
For reference, the things we're limiting are 6+ hit combos as early as level 2 with drawback manipulation, level 3 wide area field wipes, and a number of other issues I don't have in front of me right now. These issues were created by drawbacks allowing accelerated access to options that were ultimately supposed to be compatible, but shouldn't have been possible to assemble that early on.

Remember, we don't hear any of your internal discussions, we are only looking at the end result.

There was a year long playtest where all of this was discussed. As I mentioned, the reason we knew to look into this was because a playtester caught it and brought it up in the forums. No one expects you to know what into every design decision, but at some point "We've looked into this and have verified as a team that it's the best decision" needs to be acceptable; we don't have the time to repeat these answers over and over, and they're "why" not "how" questions, which means inevitably that's going to lead to more questions and statements about how someone thinks it should be done. We don't have time for that. Ehn and I both explained why we made that decision. We don't have time to link fifty forum posts and review hundreds of hours of design threads for all of those reasons every time someone isn't happy with that answer.

The end result is that talent stacking using drawbacks as was seen in SoP is impossible in SoM. You can only (functionally) get a single drawback in any given Sphere (otherwise you would exclude almost all of the content of said Sphere, the only exception being the Trap Sphere, where you could functionally get two and still be viable). The abuses that your team seem so wary of don't exist.

Except they do. Because we've seen them. This is a fundamental misunderstanding on your part; you're comparing SoM to SoP in a way that we've said multiple times is incorrect. In SoP, gaining as many talents in a single sphere as fast as possible is a significant way to gain power, because each sphere is an island; it doesn't really cross over with other spheres. In SoM, every sphere is a link in a chain; they build off similar and often compatible triggers, creating an end result where having a shallow spread across multiple spheres is just as valid as dedicating to one sphere. This is entirely intentional and part of an over-arching design paradigm to make the widest number of character concepts possible, but it meant that certain dynamics, like drawbacks, when applied alongside the right martial traditions, opened up combos far too early. By choosing the talents, and types of talents, that were associated with drawbacks, we were able to provide another tool for character customization without that tool creating shortcuts to later game combos. We blocked off the shortcuts to those abuses (and there were more than a few) while leaving the majority of the structure intact. You can get 10 different talents across 5 different spheres with drawbacks, but since most abuses involved needing a particular martial tradition combined with a particular series of specific kinds of talents from a variety of spheres, the drawbacks won't shorten those roads and they'll still only be accessible according to the normal procurement rates.

See my previous two posts on this page for why most of the current limitations don't work. Hearing that the teams response to criticism of the current limitations on SoM drawbacks is going to be adding even more limitations (instead of explaining/addressing the current issues) comes off as tone-deaf and... troubling.

Unfortunately those arguments made fundamentally wrong assumptions. You assume we were trying to prevent SoP abuses; to the contrary we were addressing abuses unique to SoM that don't come into play at all in SoP.

Again, this isn't to say that specific limitations can't work, some of the current ones do, but most don't. The reason why is something that needs to be discussed more openly than has been done so far.

This wasn't some quiet, behind the scenes decision. Some individuals who brought it up here did so specifically because they are aware of the conversations that went into this and are hoping they can backdoor a change in here now that the conversation is half a year old. Just because you weren't there for it doesn't mean something isn't public.

However, in my view of a ideal game, there should be as little difference between the capabilities of a martial character and a caster character as possible.

I don't know that we'd entirely agree with that statement. Our working premise is "assymetric balance". We're not just going to give you spell cards with the magic bits crossed out and replaced with "sword", "axe", or "kick", we tried to follow the natural flow of martial abilities into techniques and tricks that have a foundation in martial arts traditions, movies, cartoons, etc.

And while the two systems have certainly made huge steps in the balancing between martial and caster, I don't think we can reasonably say that SoM martials are yet equivalent to SoP casters in terms of power or versatility.

Take a step back and look at the two core rulebooks side-by-side. Set aside the issue with the Incanter being too dippable. Allow your martials legendary talents because you want them to be on par with casters. I would fundamentally disagree with you. A conscript can fly, swim, burrow, move and attack for significant result, debuff, AoE, and he can do whatever combination of those things you want to assemble at pretty similar markers to when the Incanter can, the raw versatility of the Alteration sphere not withstanding; the limit on traits means that while Alteration does allow for gaining certain arrays of options faster, it still can't put them all together until the conscript can too.

The easiest way to prove this, is to simply look at the number of SoM Legendary Talents that are effectively replicated with SoP Base Spheres. If I want to raise an undead army, I could grab the Warleader Sphere and then take the Legendary Talent, Armies of the Dead, which has a BAB +6 prerequisite. Even then, I have to succeed on a Diplomacy check to raise the undead's attitude all the way to friendly, and all of that assumes that undead are even around for me to use Diplomacy with in the first place. Compare that to any Spheres of Power caster, who can simply take the Death Sphere. Sure there are limitations to the undead you create (mainly longevity), but the character concept of a necromancer is still functional.

Warleader sphere isn't the Death sphere. If you could completely replace Death with Warleader, than we screwed up because now why take Death? Remember, Warleader gives tactics and shouts too, so it can buff your party members, debuff your allies, and it's going to make every single one of those undead better than they are base. Warleader may be a mediocre Death sphere, but it's a great Warleader sphere that allows you to do numerous things Death doesn't.

Now make a real comparison. Instead of saying that the orange isn't as good at being an apple as the apple, be impressed that it can imitate an apple at all and look at what the actual apple is doing. Beastmastery is the proper analogue for Death if you're talking about raising undead, since they're both minionmancy spheres. Really dig into the Beastmastery sphere and see what's there, then compare that to the Death sphere. Then compare Beastmastery and Warleader together against Death and War.

Spheres of Might isn't just Spheres of Power with the names changed. It's a new system that builds on the base rules and marries their strengths to the finesse and flexibility of the sphere system while shedding some of their weaknesses. An incanter teleports, the conscript backflips. The incanter throws a ball of fire, the conscript does a wide radius sweep with a longspear (or throws a vial of Imp. Alchemist's Fire).

So when we compare the two systems directly, it's pretty clear which system has more "power." And this is before getting into stuff like the Life Sphere, for which there is no direct analogue in Spheres of Might. With this in mind, I have no idea how you can write off the abilities one obtains from Spheres of Power as "being worth a trait" and then directly say that the abilities one gains from Spheres of Might as "being worth a feat, or more." I fear there's a major disconnect in opinion here if this is true. That's not to say the SoM stuff isn't worth more than feat (one would hope so, IMHO), only that I think you may be drastically underselling Spheres of Power.

Alteration is a fun sphere to draw comparisons to because it's so versatile, even you can't use it all at the same time. You can get a wide base but most of it is exclusionary. A conscript won't have to throw away his spear to fly once he learns how. He won't have to clip his wings to swim.

But if all of the abilities are balanced against each other, then why does it matter if I get an ability I choose for myself or an ability that is already chosen for me?

Because no martial talent exists in a vacuum. Finding particular types of talents across multiple spheres, such as talents that grant extra attacks or have compatible triggers, means that if you can assemble a shallow array of specific talents (which ones vary based on what you're trying to do) then you can create combos that are supposed to be naturally gated by speed of acquisition. 5 extra talents during the first few levels, especially certain combinations of talents across about half of the spheres, is really significant and can lead to things like massive multi-combos many levels before they're supposed to come online. When given the choice between drastically limiting character options or simply mandating talents for the drawbacks so that the combos couldn't be short cut too, we went with the mandatory talents. That leaves us the room to continue to add new drawbacks and talents while having a standard for what kind of talent is appropriate for a drawback and what isn't.

We're not taking away choice; we're leaving the largest pool of choices we can while still avoiding extreme abuses of the system. Normalizing that across all drawbacks is in part to avoid having to have a conversation like this again, or risk a future freelancer not getting the memo on drawbacks and inadvertently opening a can of worms that forces a more intensive errata, like cutting the spheres off from each other and limiting the kind of talents we can add to various spheres. Our choices were make the spheres completely incompatible with each other and throw out dozens of cross-sphere character concepts, remove an entire swath of talents from about half of the spheres that were only problematic due to drawback abuse, put a gate on the drawbacks and specify which talents they grant so that we can avoid making the cross-sphere combos an issue in the first place, or just be cool with 5+ hit combos being a thing from level 1. Of all those, mandated talents on drawbacks was a clear winner.