[Dragon Mag] Do Athasian Humans (Dr319 p26) gain bonus PP from their CHAmod?

[AnonymousPepper]

Athasian Humans are the humanoid sub-race from Athas, aka the Dark Sun setting, and gain innate psionic powers - not Psi-like abilities - known as they level (and leveling in class counts for this), and a power point pool.

I was reading this as I was building NPCs and noticed that their manifesting stat is either Charisma or their class's casting stat, and realized, wait, if they have a manifesting stat, do they also get bonus PP?

If so, that means this 16th-level Charisma-based NPC has enough power points to potentially use their power for something other than occasional utility...

[Sagetim]

If they have powers and a manifester level and charisma based manifesting, they get bonus power points per day as a manifester of their manifester level with that charisma bonus. But you're sure they have manifester levels and so on, and that's it's not a manifester level for psi like abilities, right?

Also, a level 16 npc should have enough power points in their pool to do things other than a little bit of utility anyway, the base power points per day for a Wilder (the closest equivalent I can think of) at 16th level is 221. That should be more than enough to do some things other than just utility.

I'll have to dig up the source and look it over to give a definite yae or nay, but keywords to look for include 'manifests as (insert class here)'. That's usually the kind of language used when a thing with racial hit die powers has actual casting instead of spell like abilities (like the draconian in dragonlance that gets mystic spellcasting levels with it's hit dice).

Edit: Athasian Humans are the best EL +1 race I've ever seen. Now I want to play one. Thanks for that -.-.

Ahem. So, after looking it over, the inborn powers trait that they have works very differently from, for example, the draconian I mentioned earlier in this post. Rules as written, they do not get bonus power points for charisma because it does not specify that they do. If you are the DM, feel free to interpret that Athasian Humans get bonus power points for high charisma. To determine how many, you're going to look at the chart in the expanded psionics handbook on page 18. Character level is Manifester level for this, so line up that and charisma mod and you're good to go.

This gets complicated if your npc has actual manifester levels, at which point I would not give them double bonus power points. For how I think these rules should interact, we'll need to go into a specific example. Let's say that 2 of the levels of this npc are wilder levels and he has 20 charisma. That would normally net him 6 power points from his class, + 5 more for charisma modifier, for 11 power points. Rules as written, he would have 18 power points from his inborn racial abilities, 11 more from his manifester class levels, for a total of 29...and a question of interpretation arises as to whether or not he can actually use any of his higher than first level powers, because no mention is made of stacking or overlapping for manifester level in the racial description.

So, my interpretation is this: Bob the Athasian, with 20 charisma and 2 levels of wilder mixed into his build has a manifester level of 16 (his character level). This is because his race gives him a manifester level that overlaps (does not stack) with his class based manifester level. He gets 6 power points for being a level 2 wilder, 18 for being 15+ as an Athasian Human, and 40 bonus power points for high charisma. Because of the explicit restriction on power level known on wilder, his wilder powers have to be first level powers.

To finish out the example: Bob the Athasian, with 20 charisma and no manifester levels in his build is a 16th level manifester (from his racial ability) and has 18 power points for being a level 15+ Athasian human and 40 bonus power points for high charisma. Kick some ass Bob.