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A recent thread was talking about how mages sometimes have trouble in crossover games because other supernatural types tend to get a lot of power up front while mages don't really start coming into their own until later on — at which point the frames turn and mages start dominating through sheer diversity. Put more simply, most gamelines feature powers that are fairly tightly focused, and thus highly effective from the get-go; whereas mages tend to go broad, at the cost of taking longer to get really good at things.
So I'm wondering about the idea of more narrowly defined versions of the Spheres. This got me thinking about Wonder Spheres, from the Revised Sons of Ether Tradition Book: pay half cost for a Sphere that's restricted such that it can only be used to put Effects into Wonders.
This lets you buy Spheres “on the cheap” at the price of not being able to do as much with them as with a standard Sphere. But if what you want to do with them falls within the bounds of the restrictions imposed, that's not a bad deal.
So how could this concept be generalized? What other kinds of restrictions could be imposed to allow a mage to develop her Spheres more quickly? One possibility is the Specialties that every Sphere has: normally, you have to wait until the fourth for before you can choose a Specialty, which them lets you count 10s as double successes when the Specialty is in play. But another way to do it would be to define a kind of Limited Sphere that's restricted to just one Specialty. In addition to the potentially large restriction of not being able to do anything outside of that Specialty, you also don't get the usual benefits of a Specialty unless and until you've removed this restriction from the Sphere.
This could be used for such things as a Fire Mage (Specialized Forces limited to the element of fire) or a Seer (Specialized Correspondence limited to Scrying). And so on.
So this gives us two kinds of Limited Spheres: Wonder Spheres and Specialized Spheres. What other possibilities might there be?
One final note: my inclinations would be to say that taking Prime as a Wonder Sphere implicitly still lets you use Prime to make Wonders, as per the Artifice Specialty of Prime. That is, the Wonder Sphere restriction isn't “you can only use the Sphere to determine what kind of Effects you can invest into a Wonder”; it's “you can only use the Sphere in relation to the rules for Wonders”. So Prime would still be usable to make, break, or repair Wonders; Spirit wouldn't just let you create ghostbusting gear, but would also let you make Fetishes; Correspondence would let you make Virtual Wonders as well as letting you create teleporters and scrying mirrors; and so on. And of course, every Wonder Sphere would let you make Trinkets of the appropriate type.
Note that while I cited crossover as the inspiration for this thread, I'm not actually thinking in terms of crossover here. Rather, I'm thinking more along the lines of letting mages fine-tune what their Magick is capable of, instead of being forced to be generalists. It's fine to say that the Avatar might take exception to this and demand that the character generalize the Sphere before her next Seeking, or something to that effect, casting an in-game implication that broad is better than narrow; but that sort of thing should be a choice made by the Storyteller and the player, not an edict handed down from on high by the rules.
So I'm wondering about the idea of more narrowly defined versions of the Spheres. This got me thinking about Wonder Spheres, from the Revised Sons of Ether Tradition Book: pay half cost for a Sphere that's restricted such that it can only be used to put Effects into Wonders.
This lets you buy Spheres “on the cheap” at the price of not being able to do as much with them as with a standard Sphere. But if what you want to do with them falls within the bounds of the restrictions imposed, that's not a bad deal.
So how could this concept be generalized? What other kinds of restrictions could be imposed to allow a mage to develop her Spheres more quickly? One possibility is the Specialties that every Sphere has: normally, you have to wait until the fourth for before you can choose a Specialty, which them lets you count 10s as double successes when the Specialty is in play. But another way to do it would be to define a kind of Limited Sphere that's restricted to just one Specialty. In addition to the potentially large restriction of not being able to do anything outside of that Specialty, you also don't get the usual benefits of a Specialty unless and until you've removed this restriction from the Sphere.
This could be used for such things as a Fire Mage (Specialized Forces limited to the element of fire) or a Seer (Specialized Correspondence limited to Scrying). And so on.
So this gives us two kinds of Limited Spheres: Wonder Spheres and Specialized Spheres. What other possibilities might there be?
One final note: my inclinations would be to say that taking Prime as a Wonder Sphere implicitly still lets you use Prime to make Wonders, as per the Artifice Specialty of Prime. That is, the Wonder Sphere restriction isn't “you can only use the Sphere to determine what kind of Effects you can invest into a Wonder”; it's “you can only use the Sphere in relation to the rules for Wonders”. So Prime would still be usable to make, break, or repair Wonders; Spirit wouldn't just let you create ghostbusting gear, but would also let you make Fetishes; Correspondence would let you make Virtual Wonders as well as letting you create teleporters and scrying mirrors; and so on. And of course, every Wonder Sphere would let you make Trinkets of the appropriate type.
Note that while I cited crossover as the inspiration for this thread, I'm not actually thinking in terms of crossover here. Rather, I'm thinking more along the lines of letting mages fine-tune what their Magick is capable of, instead of being forced to be generalists. It's fine to say that the Avatar might take exception to this and demand that the character generalize the Sphere before her next Seeking, or something to that effect, casting an in-game implication that broad is better than narrow; but that sort of thing should be a choice made by the Storyteller and the player, not an edict handed down from on high by the rules.
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