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View Full Version : An Idea for a Psionic Feat Chain



Arbitrarious
2009-12-02, 10:41 PM
I've been working on some ideas for a kind of off the wall character concept and I wanted some feedback on the various parts I'm homebrewing for it. I would prefer if they weren't character specific. Hopefully these will seem interesting to a variety of characters without being overpowered. Please PEACH.

Impressionable Mind [Psionic]
You can readily attempt to use powers you see in use.
Prerequisites: Wis 13+, Manifester level 3rd+
Benifet: When a character manifests a psionic power within 30ft you may expend your psionic focus and make a psicraft check DC 15 + power level. If you succeed you may manifest the power on your next turn. You manifest as though it were one of your powers known and must pay all normal costs + 2 pp. If you do not manifest this power on your next turn this ability is wasted and you must activate it again.
Special: If you are an Erudite with the spells as power variant you may activate this ability in response to a spell being cast but the DC is 20 + spell level.

Retention [Psionic]
Prerequisites: Manifester level 5th+, Impressionable Mind, Int 13+
Benifet: When activating your Impressionable Mind feat you may retain the knowledge of the power for a number of rounds equal to 1 + your Int mod. Once you manifest this power once you lose knowledge of it.

Improved Retention [Psionic]
Prerequisites: Retention
Benifet: When using your Impressionable Mind feat you retain knowledge of the power for up to 1 minute and have no limits on the number of times you may use it.

Milskidasith
2009-12-02, 10:49 PM
It's too situational to be useful, though if you condensed everything into one feat, it might be worth it. Maybe.

pyrefiend
2009-12-02, 11:17 PM
I disagree. This would be great in a party with more than one psionic character, and if the campaign world contains them in any number, I can see it getting use fairly regularly. That check shouldn't be too hard for a character with lots of intelligence and little to do with his skill points.

EdroGrimshell
2009-12-03, 06:25 AM
Improved retention has itself as a prerequisite

Arbitrarious
2009-12-03, 07:33 AM
Improved retention has itself as a prerequisite

Oops, fixed.

Mulletmanalive
2009-12-04, 09:27 AM
I for one completely disagree with Milskidasith that this is a pretty interesting ability and definately not too situational to be useful, though in some campaigns this may be true...

Where you would actually want to take it, Psionics are going to be a major part of the setting in the form of monsters and stuff. Lets face it, who hasn't wanted to play a Blue Mage at some point, just to see if it would be cool?

You thought of putting together a maybe 3-5 level PrC that builds on this and does a little Blue Mage type action, maybe the ability to hold onto one ability per level from your enemies and switch them around [I'm reminded of Pokemon here but still]?

Arbitrarious
2009-12-04, 01:59 PM
Actually I hadn't thought of doing a class. But I think I have an idea I might build upon. Also, I will collapse it into 2 feats as 3 seems to too many for anyone not getting regular bonus feats.

Milskidasith
2009-12-04, 03:02 PM
I disagree. This would be great in a party with more than one psionic character, and if the campaign world contains them in any number, I can see it getting use fairly regularly. That check shouldn't be too hard for a character with lots of intelligence and little to do with his skill points.

With more than one psionic character, you can use metaconcert (it gives you free actions with a new creature, and it has all your power points!), or Psychic Chirugery, or Psychic Reformation. The skill check is easy, true, but I didn't mention anything. Here's the problem:

You expend your psionic focus to copy an opponent's power at PP cost +2, in a very limited range. That means that you cannot manifest high level powers, it takes you your psionic focus (eliminating metapsionics as an option) to use, it requires wisdom (not a major problem, but PBing 13 wisdom for a bad feat when I could buy up con or dex is a bad choice), and it only works within thirty feet, while most powers have a longer range.

To break it down:

For one feat, you can:

Capture powers of one level lower than the max you know (which means it would require a mook to be using it, or a decent enemy to be augmenting lower level powers, which is possible), in a range shorter than the range of all useful powers, for your psionic focus, which is useful for plenty of other things. You then must use that power the next round, so if the enemy is manifesting anything that wouldn't be more useful than your current powers, then it's worthless to even capture it.

For two feats, you can:

Get all that, but have a few rounds to delay.

For three feats, you can:

Get that long enough to last all of combat, and manifest it as much as you want.

Make it one feat, please. If you make it one feat, you are still very limited with your one bonus power, but at least you spent your psionic focus on something useful.



Where you would actually want to take it, Psionics are going to be a major part of the setting in the form of monsters and stuff. Lets face it, who hasn't wanted to play a Blue Mage at some point, just to see if it would be cool?

Even then, you are only getting lower level powers, and it costs two feats to get it to be something you can use proactively instead of reactively, and three to be useful enough to justify not just taking Expanded Knowledge.


Actually I hadn't thought of doing a class. But I think I have an idea I might build upon. Also, I will collapse it into 2 feats as 3 seems to too many for anyone not getting regular bonus feats.

One feat, please. Compare Expanded Knowledge, or Psychic Reformation to that. For three feats and your psionic focus, your feat lets you capture a power the enemy is using and use it for one minute, at a heightened cost, within a range too close for comfort unless you are a psywarrior fighting another psywarrior. For one feat with expanded knowledge, you get a power one level below your max (which this gets you as well), but you get it permanently. For the cost of one power known and a bit of EXP, Psychic Reformation lets you get any power you are capable of choosing. Those two are strictly better than this.

So here's my idea:

Impressionable Mind [Psionic]
You can readily attempt to use powers you see in use.
Prerequisites: Wis 13+, Manifester level 3rd+
Benifet: When a character manifests a psionic power of at least one level lower than the maximum you can manifest and is within eyesight [possibly change phrasing, but anybody you can see or hear] you may expend your psionic focus and make a psicraft check DC 15 + power level. If you succeed you may manifest the power at it's normal cost for the next minute, after which you lose knowledge of the power.
Special: If you are an Erudite with the spells as power variant you may activate this ability in response to a spell being cast at the normal DC (no reason to punish Spell to Power erudite, though all the readings of that class are broken.)

Mulletmanalive
2009-12-04, 03:26 PM
I'd go with most of your conclusions, though i'd say that being able to use the stolen power more than once from a single capture is too good for one feat.

While I can't fault the idea of holding onto it for the whole combat for one feat [even if i'm personally willing to pay more than one feat for the privelage, mostly because of the bonus hp], I think it's a little too much to ask of one feat slot that you can use the power multiple times...

Were this an epic feat, i'd be agreeing wholeheartedly, but it isn't

Milskidasith
2009-12-04, 03:29 PM
I'd go with most of your conclusions, though i'd say that being able to use the stolen power more than once from a single capture is too good for one feat.

Expanded Knowledge. That's infinite uses of a power. Why can't this one give you 10 (if you use it every round for a minute)?


While I can't fault the idea of holding onto it for the whole combat for one feat [even if i'm personally willing to pay more than one feat for the privelage, mostly because of the bonus hp], I think it's a little too much to ask of one feat slot that you can use the power multiple times...

There's no bonus HP listed, unless you mean the fact that you have Psionic Body (or the one that's 2 HP/psionic feat), and that's not particularly good except at very early levels.


Were this an epic feat, i'd be agreeing wholeheartedly, but it isn't.

Epic is broken. Epic feats include getting a +1 to your NA, and getting Epic Spellcasting. Epic feats run the gamut from weaker than most normal feats to being so broken it's absurd they ever got printed. Even if you meant epic feats should be powerful, this just... isn't. Wow, I can get one more power known for a short time, assuming the enemy uses it and it can work against the enemy.

Mulletmanalive
2009-12-04, 03:41 PM
Expanded Knowledge. That's infinite uses of a power. Why can't this one give you 10 (if you use it every round for a minute)?


This one is entirely a gut reaction. It just seems somehow wrong that a character can see an enemy use a power once and use if multiple times. It honestly doesn't matter to me overtly that i could buy Expanded Knowledge and then jigger around with my brain with Psychic Reformation, partly because the only other ability to steal abilities i can think of, the Spellthief, can only steal one use.

I'm sure you'll defend your position but the furthest i'd agree to would be a number of uses equal to a stat that's not directly connected to my manifestation, simply because of the feel of the ability.

Milskidasith
2009-12-04, 03:45 PM
This one is entirely a gut reaction. It just seems somehow wrong that a character can see an enemy use a power once and use if multiple times. It honestly doesn't matter to me overtly that i could buy Expanded Knowledge and then jigger around with my brain with Psychic Reformation, partly because the only other ability to steal abilities i can think of, the Spellthief, can only steal one use.

Wait, what? How does it make sense that if you see an enemy do something, you can only repeat it once? Does that mean if a fighter sees somebody slash somebody with a sword, he can only use a sword once? It's odd enough that you lose the power at all, losing it after one use just makes it weak.


I'm sure you'll defend your position but the furthest i'd agree to would be a number of uses equal to a stat that's not directly connected to my manifestation, simply because of the feel of the ability.

The fluff should not require the crunch to be useless. Your suggestion would make it so.

Mulletmanalive
2009-12-04, 03:50 PM
The fluff should not require the crunch to be useless. Your suggestion would make it so.

Say that it was Con based and I had watched as my friend manifested something. The ability to copy a power that i don't know myself twice would be useless? This doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to me [a +2 Con being pretty common amongst the casters i've ever played with].

I watch you do something with your hands and copy it as best i can [hence the 2 extra pp]. I try again an hour later and muck it up because it's faded from memory. I'm like this with origami, why not psionics :smallcool:?

Milskidasith
2009-12-04, 03:53 PM
Say that it was Con based and I had watched as my friend manifested something. The ability to copy a power that i don't know myself twice would be useless? This doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to me [a +2 Con being pretty common amongst the casters i've ever played with].

Why constitution would matter for this I do not know, and why you couldn't repeat it, I did not know.


I watch you do something with your hands and copy it as best i can [hence the 2 extra pp]. I try again an hour later and muck it up because it's faded from memory. I'm like this with origami, why not psionics :smallcool:?

That's fair enough, but the issue is that limited uses don't make sense; if you were to do origami by copying somebody, and kept repeatedly making the shape, you'd still be able to do it until you stopped and forgot, right?

Mulletmanalive
2009-12-04, 04:11 PM
From personal experience, i'd need to repeat a shape about a dozen times or more to get it in my head, while i can copy you maybe once.

If i'm adventuring, I'd probably have somewhat more pressing matters to attend to than manifesting a power over and over to get it ingrained and then meditating a bunch to build the psionic curcuits in my brain [or whatever the explaination of the limited capacity is].

The inverse, actually doing the practice, would be learning the power as part of a feat or level gain.

I agree with the Con being silly part, i simply chose it because i couldn't remember if anything manifested off Wisdom. The idea being that it shouldn't be the primary stat of the manifester, simply because that somehow feels off; adaption feels like it should come from something other than the core stat of your house of cards somehow.

Psions using Cha for determination, Wilders using Wis for calm, Wis based manifesters using Int for speed of thought or something...

deuxhero
2009-12-04, 04:18 PM
Ugh, "feat chain", AKA "Spent 1/6th your life learning something neat? You still can't do it well, spend 3/6th!". Make it scale (I'd go with basing it on highest power level known or just giving it all at once).