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Savanik
2011-01-13, 02:39 PM
Hey guys,

Newbie here. Well, sort of. I've read and referred to these forums often enough, but I've never bothered creating an account before.

I've been doing some research lately for a modern-era Champions game (Hero System, 5th Ed. Revised) and doing some of the underpinning metaphysics. Basically, in this interpretation, people are composed of three parts (body, mind, and soul), and powers come from one of these parts (mutant abilities, psionic abilities, and magical abilities respectively). While there are many different ways to get various effects - for example, super-speed can be achieved through a spell, or a mutant ability, or psychically increasing your metabolism - each of these spheres also has its own set of laws it must follow and things it can't do.

As an example, mutant powers cannot be learned. They derive entirely from DNA, and can never be changed or improved. E.G. Cylcops's energy blast will never become more powerful than it already is. (Note: Characters can still spend character points on it to represent things like getting more experience, allowing them more flexibility with those powers.)

Magic has distinct rules enforced by the universe at large: No time travel, no resurrection, no permanent effects, and karma is real.

It seems trivial to identify characters who are psions (Jean Grey, , but pinning down anyone talking about their 'rules', as it were, is difficult. What would you say are the limitations of Psionics, specifically? What can and can't it do?

Sincerely,
Savanik

Psyren
2011-01-13, 03:03 PM
I don't know much about the Champions system, but it sounds like you just want a list of psychic tropes commonly used in fiction. This list (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAndPowers) mixes some magic in, but if you focus on the ones labelled "Psychic" you should find plenty of commonalities.

As for what it can do - a common theme of psionics is that it requires nothing more than effort of will - no gestures, no magic words, and very little in the way of diagrams or components. (Maybe some incense or a favorite song to focus the mind, but little beyond that.)

Prime32
2011-01-13, 03:45 PM
As an example, mutant powers cannot be learned. They derive entirely from DNA, and can never be changed or improved. E.G. Cylcops's energy blast will never become more powerful than it already is.Eh, there are plenty of instances of powers changing over time. Most Marvel-verse mutants don't have powers before puberty, for instance.

Then you have the guys who "evolve" over time (some going as far as a catterpillar-like metamorphosis), or are genetically engineered (eg. Spider-Man), or can absorb DNA from others (eg. Cell (http://www.dragonballencyclopedia.com/wiki/Cell), Aptom (http://guyver.wikia.com/wiki/Aptom)).

kamikasei
2011-01-13, 03:54 PM
The first law of psionics is: you don't think about psionics.

Seriously? First off you need to decide how much niche protection you want between psionics and magic. With that in mind, if I had to come up with a core set of abilities to define the field I'd go with mind reading, telepathy, object reading, precognition, manipulation and false sensory input (essentially, illusions and enchantment/compulsions) and enhanced mental function.

Savanik
2011-01-13, 04:02 PM
It's not so much a list of common themes in psionics that I'm looking for, but more along how they work, which people usually define by their limitations.

As near as I can tell, most psychic powers fall into one of four categories:

Pure Forces (force shields, walls, TK, pyrokenesis)
Mentalism (telepathy, mind editing, empathy)
Perception (Precognition, postcognition, remote viewing)
Wacky Stuff (biometabolism, cellular reconstruction, stopping time, and fun with quantum physics brought to the megascale)


First three are fairly easy to define. The fourth has me a bit flummoxed. What can't Psykers do if they're capable of bending the very fabric of space and time with but a thought?

Sav

Psyren
2011-01-13, 04:17 PM
One thing I've consistently seen as a difference between magic and psionics is summoning - reaching across planes to bring in angels or demons is a distinctly magical niche. It also tends to involve lots of comonents - silver powder or chalk drawn into a circle, chanting, incense, etc.) Psionics, when it creates things, tends to do so locally rather than pulling them from elsewhere.

Psionics is also better at working together - two psions can more easily combine their power than two wizards, because while psionics is more individual, manifesters tend to be tied by an Astral Plane of sorts. (This is true for D&D. Marvel and other universes.)

Psionics also tends to be less capable at lasting external effects. I can modify my own body as much as I please through psychometabolism, but modifying someone else's body is typically easier through magic (unless I transplant my mind into their body, taking it for my own.)

Reluctance
2011-01-13, 04:45 PM
The Wacky Stuff you mentioned falls into two categories; psychically affecting one's own body, and magic by another name. Magic by another name can probably be easily cut, since you have honest actual magic to do those things.

So psi can affect Mind, it can affect senses, it can affect the user's own body, and it has a limited ability to project force. That doesn't cover every psychic character out there, but you don't want to do that. D&D tried to roll all magic use under two broad umbrellas, and that didn't work out so well for them.

Dreadn4ught
2011-01-13, 04:51 PM
Maybe a psion's mind grows weaker as he uses his powers. This means that his powers would get weaker and weaker as he uses them, and if he uses his powers TOO much he may go insane temporarily.

After all, if magic is only limited by the laws of the universe, psionics should be limited by your own ability!

Of course, it's only a suggestion.

Psyren
2011-01-13, 04:59 PM
Maybe a psion's mind grows weaker as he uses his powers. This means that his powers would get weaker and weaker as he uses them, and if he uses his powers TOO much he may go insane temporarily.

After all, if magic is only limited by the laws of the universe, psionics should be limited by your own ability!

Of course, it's only a suggestion.

Alternatively, have his body get weaker as his overactive mind begins depriving his other systems of energy. This can be easily modeled in D&D using Vitalizing (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/spellPoints.htm#spellPointVariantVitalizing) because Psionics is points-based, but again I know nothing about the OP's system.

NichG
2011-01-13, 11:05 PM
I would look at it this way. Magic is ritual, metaphorical, and spiritual. It does not bother with the laws of physics - it obeys the laws of sacrifice, compact, contagion, etc - its own laws. As such, magic does not bother even rewriting the laws of reality to accomplish something, it simply makes this reality such that it has been accomplished and doesn't worry about the how. With magic you can bribe a cloud to rain.

Psionics on the other hand is the most intimate direct connection between will and physics possible. Anything one could do with technology, the psionicist does with the pure force of their mind. But what they cannot do is reshape the laws of reality - they must obey the laws of physics, though they can be tricky on the how.

A psionicist who lifts a three ton object with their mind must pay for the energy and momentum needed - the energy they pull from ambient sources, even super-science sources like vacuum energy, but it is limited and conserved. At a point, there are environmental and physical flashbacks from drawing too much. For the momentum, a great blast of air shoots back and runnels appear in the earth behind them, or they must simply transfer the momentum to some other object (causing a nearby car to whumph into the ground). Mostly this is cinematic, but it matters when a psionicist is operating in a very starved environment (e.g. moving an asteroid in space).

A psionicist must also obey thermodynamics. They cannot spotaneously chill a portion of the environment and use the heat to start a fire, for instance. They must pay that entropy somewhere. Those who are uncautious will burn themselves, or even accidentally halt their own body chemistry paying the cost.

The other law of psionics is, one has tools but one must have the intellect to use them. It is easy to create a blast of force, or set something on fire. But it is hard to reconstruct the body of someone that has died - one would need to hold the position of every protein in their mind at once. As such, the focus of psionic powers tends to be narrow - control the thoughts of one individual, not the thoughts of a thousand - without some sort of super-brain or at least a trick behind it.

Similarly, those whose psionics involve garnering large amounts of information from the environment face mental overloads as their brain fails to handle the information, and need to use tricks to help encode it.