S&P: Revisiting Spheres

“The impact of your experience applied in the worlds around you” -the S&P Character Sheet, description of Spheres.

What’s below (set in Times New Roman) is the description of Spheres as it’s written in the (most recent) v3 SRD. What I’d like to do is make every investment in Spheres have equal mechanical weight regardless of (or in addition to) what’s currently in place. Additionally, I’d like to add some additional sphere types to allow for more interesting interplay between mechanics and fiction.

Proposal #1: whether they’re languages, expertise or resources, they offer the +1 die “self assist” benefit as written presently. Someone could, for example, “invoke¹ ” a language sphere to grant the bonus die when negotiating with someone who speaks that language, or when trying to perform a successful translation of text in another language. A resource sphere could equally be invoked on such a negotiation. The only difference with resource spheres is that depending on the fiction they’d have a chance of expiring (being removed from the character sheet).

Proposal #2: To give equal mechanical as well as fictional weight to spheres, such a volatility might have to be applied to all spheres regardless of type. Maybe your expertise is no longer relevant and you have to take “continuing education” to brush up. Maybe you’ve worn out your welcome with a contact and they don’t want anything to do with you anymore. Maybe the volatility can be tied directly to the challenges they’re used in: failures contribute overall to advancement and accruing development points, but they erode if you lean on them too frequently.

Proposal #3: A new list of spheres and their respective areas of relevance:

• Eloquence (languages, codes, ciphers, translating; nuance of language in social situations, rhetoric, articulacy)

• Influence (contacts, friends, followers, devotees)

• Expertise (special interests, concentration, specialization, academic focus)

• Reputation (character qualities)

• Bounty (material wealth, purchasing power, streams of currency)

• Opportunity (anecdotal, auspicious happenstances; momentous occasions)

1: Invoke is a term graciously borrowed, as are a variety of other concepts, from Fate.

(original text from SRD below)

Spheres are similar to skills but differ in an important respect: whereas spheres also represent things that a character is good at, it's through skills that the character shapes their own course in worlds of uncertainty. A character might be good at baking or playing the tuba, but unless you're in a baking contest, or a battle of the bands, your capability with either of these things is categorized as sphere rather than skill, mechanically speaking. This doesn't mean, however, that spheres have no mechanical impact on a character. On the contrary: spheres either represent languages the character knows, subject areas the character has expertise in, or the capacity to acquire material goods and services through various means. At creation, the maximum number of spheres a character begins play with is equal to their KNO.

Languages: The ability to speak languages is covered under the category of spheres.

• Characters begin play able to speak (and write, if the language has a written form) one language of their choice that makes sense within the fiction;

• The ability to speak or write additional languages is available to characters if they are chosen as identity spheres;

• This can also cover secret, fabricated, or cipher languages, depending on a given setting, genre, or style of play and consensus among the group.

Expertise: When a sphere is identified as an expertise, once per game session a player may call on that sphere to gain one(1) additional die when rolling to either issue or answer a challenge, provided that the player can reasonably justify how the sphere would factor into the challenge in question. This bonus die functions as all other dice do, and can generate a critical if an unmodified 10 is rolled.

Resources: When a sphere is identified as a resource, this means the sphere is one possible avenue for the character to acquire material goods and services or to influence through the means of goods and services.

• Every resource sphere contributes to the character's resource cap, a number equal to one or greater that represents both wealth in tangible assets as well as purchasing power.

• Characters cannot purchase items whose cost rating exceeds their resource cap.

• Items whose cost rating is equal to or lesser than the character's resource cap can be purchased, but may have a chance of reducing the cap.

• The chorus should pair a range of cost ratings with a rarity heading as is appropriate to the game or setting in which the game takes place.

The cost ratings of items represent a combination of the value of an item as well as its availability. (An item's legality, for instance, can affect its cost category; a pack of cigarettes might be considered of common cost in one country of your game's setting, for example, but in another country, where tobacco is a religious taboo, it might be considered of rare cost). Circumstances throughout the course of a story might result in one or more characters being granted a temporary increase in their resource cap (finding a cache of jewels and coins, a boon from a king or wealthy lord, the theft of antiquities from an ancient history museum). This temporary boost should be correlated to a specific number of scenes before being expended.