Theoretical House Rule: Ardent

[Pyromancer999]

So, when it comes to psionics, I've come across multiple things on how the ardent can be a little weaker at times compared to the rest of the WoTC psionic classes. One house rule that one person I know had for his Ardent character was that the Ardent knows all level-appropriate powers from his mantles. Another house rule for Ardents that I've heard of is that the Ardent automatically knows all level-appropriate powers from his primary mantles, and that they do not count against his number of powers known.

How would either of these house rules affect the Ardent's power levels/gameplay/etc.?

[Psyren]

All you need to fix any perceived power gaps with the Ardent is right here. (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/psm/20070629a)

Also, Ardents are just fine out of the box. Psions are stronger, but Ardents can hold their own.

[Answerer]

Ardent is also by-far the best option for multiclassing of any subsystem-using class outside of Tome of Battle, thanks to the way they learn Powers and the existence of Practiced Manifester.

[Pyromancer999]

Thanks for the comments, but as opposed to fixing the Ardent, I'm just more wondering what the house rules would do.

[Psyren]

1) Automatically learning mantle powers would be a slight boost, but typically all an Ardent would have to do is wait a couple of levels anyway for the same benefit. So rather than a steady increase across several levels you would have a spike of powers known at certain levels, followed by a couple of dead levels in between.

2) Not making primary mantles count against their limit effectively raises their powers known cap. This helps a little bit too but unless you're doing mantle substitution to fill in the gaps, or doing tons of unique power research, you won't learn mantles fast enough to really take advantage of the higher cap.

So I guess the answer is that neither of these does a whole lot.