a question on wording

[Chaos018]

Midnight metamagic says to pay with essentia instead for spell slots. question is....what is essentia? essentia = power points? DM in my games suggested this feat for my psion, which I am already planning to multiclass into wizard. simple question I suppose, but I still get the simple stuff confused

[Omoikane13]

Essentia is a character's personal store of Incarnum, from the Magic of Incarnum book. It can be obtained via the melding classes, Incarnate and Totemist (we don't talk about Soulborn), or through specific feats like with most alternate magic systems.

[Yanisa]

Essentia is from Magic of Incarnum book. You either need classes or feats from that book to gain Essentia, normally characters don't have access to their essentia pool. (You can read a bit of the fluff here (https://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20050907a))

Edit: Hey a real ninja ninjad me. :smalltongue:

[Darrin]

Midnight metamagic says to pay with essentia instead for spell slots. question is....what is essentia? essentia = power points? DM in my games suggested this feat for my psion, which I am already planning to multiclass into wizard. simple question I suppose, but I still get the simple stuff confused

Magic of Incarnum has rules for an entirely new sub-system that lets you shape part of your "soul-stuff" into glowing quasi-magic-items that you can then bind to "chakras" on your body. They are powered by points of essentia, which are a little like PP but instead of getting a daily allotment you spend on powers and then recover later, your essentia points are granted by your race, your class, and certain feats you take.

Once you have essentia points in your essentia pool, you can invest these points into your soulmelds, feats, or class features to pump up your bonus or open up a new ability. The amount of points you have doesn't change, but every round you can shift around where those points are invested as a swift action. If you need a damage buff on round one, you can pump 2 points of your essentia into your Bloodwar Gauntlets soulmeld. But on round 2, if you suddenly need to increase your speed, you can shift those 2 points of essentia into your Cerulean Sandals soulmeld. It's a little like when the USS Enterprise shifts engine power from phasers to shields: your essentia doesn't go down or change, you just decide which sub-systems you want it to power.

Incarnum-based feats are a little different, however. When you invest essentia into a feat, it generally gets locked in there for 24 hours before you can take it out or reroute it somewhere else. Midnight Metamagic works a little like this: once per day, you can invest essentia and tie it to a particular spell, and you can use that essentia to offset the level increase of a metamagic feat. When the spell is cast, you get the essentia back, but have to wait until the next day to use the feat again.

Except... there's a trick you can use to do this more than once per day. There's another feat called Psycarnum Infusion that you can take. When you expend your psionic focus, you can choose one of your soulmelds, incarnum feats, or class features that can take essentia. Until the start of your next turn, that essentia receptacle is considered to be filled at its maximum capacity. So anytime you need to apply that metamagic again, just concentrate and expend your psionic focus.

However, it's feat-intensive and your essentia capacity (usually 1-4, determined by your character level) limits these sorts of shenanigans to lower-level metamagics, such as Extend Spell, Empower Spell, or Shape Spell. And it may only work with spontaneous spells. And your DM may throw books at your head for abusing this. So make sure your DM knows what you're doing if you try to pull this off.

[Kazudo]

Indeed, Divine Metamagic is more user-friendly and abuse-ridden than its less organized brethren.

Man that book's confusing.