Re: [GENERAL] 3rd Party Content
They don't have spells. There are 20 spheres with names like Alteration, Death, and Mind, each of which gives you one or two base abilities. Warp lets you teleport yourself or someone you're touching to somewhere in Close range as a standard action. Time lets you touch people to grant bonus attacks (haste) or stagger them (slow) as a standard action. You can do these things all day and forever.
What you get as level up is access to talents, which either unlock a new sphere for you or improve on or add to your base abilities. Fate can learn to apply penalties to enemies alongside the bonuses to allies it begins with. Darkness can learn to apply a Constitution-damaging drain to their pitch-black playgrounds. These aren't usually level-locked or prerequisite-bound, so the more you invest the better you'll be overall at a sphere, but if you switch from focusing on Weather to focusing on Illusion halfway through your career you're not missing out on high-level effects or being forced to select low-level ones. Normal Pathfinder casters are multiplicative: one 9th level spell is worth like a hundred 1st level spells. Sphere casters are almost completely additive. Your 20th talent is as good as your 1st was, and the difference is just which order you picked them in.
The almost is Advanced Talents, which are an optional rule: these are noticeably more powerful than base talents. But they're usually just level-locked, so you can spend your first 13 levels learning Nature and Life and then buy an Advanced Talent in Protection without needing to do anything special except know Protection.
They have like ten classes built around various themes, from the mageknight to the psionic-themed symbiat to the shifter (yes, there is a whole class for shapeshifting that isn't messing around with per-day anything, it's great) to the fey adept. Their signature class, the incanter, gets 32 talents overall in a 1-2-1-2 progression (everybody gets two "free" talents for being a sphere casting class) and the opportunity to trade out some or all of their many bonus feats for various sphere specializations. Most everybody else has either 10 or 15 talents. Caster level scaling is a big deal also, and most everybody else has either max 10 or 15 of that as well.
They do have spell points, which are a resource they can expend for advanced effects or to supercharge things If you know Time, Warp, and Telekinesis, you are never unable to stagger, teleport short distances, or pick up rocks with your mind, but you might not be able to steal other people's time or teleport long distances or throw ogres over cliffs against their will.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:37, Tue 01 Dec 2015.