Making Empty Vessel LA+0

[Pleh]

Planning to start up an Eberron campaign and a player was wanting to make an Empty Vessel Psychic Warrior escaped from the Inspired planning to go into Quori Mindhunter later.

Problem is I've told the players to make ECL 1 characters, so I've asked them to use LA+0 races.

So I start looking at the EV's neighbor races that are LA+0 to compare what they get. I've been using human, kalashtar, and xeph to triangulate where the LA+0 sweet spot should be.

Out of the gate, one problem is EV is a straight upgrade to human, not any real tradeoff (unless you count losing "any" multiclass, which I don't since I usually happily forget multiclassing XP costs).

Comparing with Xeph and Kalashtar, they don't get any bonus feat, but they do get a free psi like ability. That reminds me of Wild Talent/Hidden Talent, which a human could theoretically take with their racial bonus feat. The bonus PP don't scale with level for that feat, but Xeph and Kalashtar get Naturally Psionic and are still LA+0.

Hopefully you see where I'm going with this. I decided to make EV LA+0, you lose the bonus feat and gain a 1st level psionic power of your choice (almost as if you took Hidden Talent with your Human Bonus Feat).

I don't think it needs any other changes, since the racial and bonus skill points aren't breaking the bank here.

Thematically, it feels right. Bred and trained as a vessel, you cut out early before your training was complete, losing the bonus feat you would have if you stuck it out and got possessed by Quori. But life as a fugitive forces you to rely on natural talents, making your favorite psionic power overdeveloped compared to the others. All the psionic pedigree of an Empty Vessel (skills and naturally psionic), but lacking the bite of complete training.

What do you think?

Btw, if you're concerned about the feat loss for getting into Mindhunter, I've told players I'm happy to waive the sillier feat taxes many PrCs have. Quori Mindhunter likely won't require Iron Will as those are exactly the kinds of feat taxes I'm willing to overlook.

[Psyren]

Comparing with Xeph and Kalashtar, they don't get any bonus feat, but they do get a free psi like ability. That reminds me of Wild Talent/Hidden Talent, which a human could theoretically take with their racial bonus feat. The bonus PP don't scale with level for that feat, but Xeph and Kalashtar get Naturally Psionic and are still LA+0.

Hopefully you see where I'm going with this. I decided to make EV LA+0, you lose the bonus feat and gain a 1st level psionic power of your choice (almost as if you took Hidden Talent with your Human Bonus Feat).

A free psionic power and a free psi-like ability are not the same thing; the latter automatically augments for free and has no XP costs. Could you clarify which one your EV is getting? Does the player get to choose the power? This could get very powerful very fast if they pick something scalable like Astral Construct or Charm.

[Pleh]

A free psionic power and a free psi-like ability are not the same thing; the latter automatically augments for free and has no XP costs. Could you clarify which one your EV is getting? Does the player get to choose the power? This could get very powerful very fast if they pick something scalable like Astral Construct or Charm.

My idea was to have the power selection work similar to Hidden Talent, since it is almost like playing human choosing Hidden Talent as a bonus feat, meaning it is a power of their choice from any list, but it has to be 1st level.

I confess psionics were always a weak point in my system mastery.

[The Viscount]

A little confused why you're not just using kalashtar to represent this.

As for using your own racial stats, compare with Talaire from Complete Psionic. This race loses the bonus feat, and gains one of six psi-like abilities that increases with levels in psionic classes. Given this, you can maybe beef it up a little bit from just having Hidden talent.

[animewatcha]

Empty vessels character traits are in eberron campaign setting page 291. They are literally humans with half the abilities of kalashtar. So as a LA 0. They can start as human. Next 'level up' they gain the rest of the template with a change of favored class and languages.

[Nifft]

Empty Vessel is just the human chassis (skill + feat), +2 to all 3 social skills, and +1 pp/level.

IMHO the latter two abilities are not worth paying LA +1 over just being a regular human.

[Pleh]

A little confused why you're not just using kalashtar to represent this.

Kalashtar have abilities related to their spirit partners, which an Empty Vessel doesn't have. I was trying to avoid being overly crude with race substitutions.


As for using your own racial stats, compare with Talaire from Complete Psionic. This race loses the bonus feat, and gains one of six psi-like abilities that increases with levels in psionic classes. Given this, you can maybe beef it up a little bit from just having Hidden talent.

Having trouble finding Talaire in Comp Psi. I do see something about the Synad and their 6 houses that sounds similar to what you're talking about?

[Troacctid]

Kalashtar have abilities related to their spirit partners, which an Empty Vessel doesn't have. I was trying to avoid being overly crude with race substitutions.
Empty vessels don't have spirit partners; hence the name. When they're inhabited by a quori spirit, they become an Inspired instead.


Having trouble finding Talaire in Comp Psi. I do see something about the Synad and their 6 houses that sounds similar to what you're talking about?
I was going to recommend Talaire as well; it's a good fit for "Human but with psionics". One of the houses is online here (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060403a&page=6).

Alternatively, you could replace the human's bonus skill points with bonus PP.

[The Viscount]

Having trouble finding Talaire in Comp Psi. I do see something about the Synad and their 6 houses that sounds similar to what you're talking about?

That stuff about the 6 hidden houses after Synad is the details for Talaire. I have no idea why they didn't just write it like a normal race, but CPsi has a lot of questionable decisions. Each house has the associated very different version of Wild Talent which isn't how Wild Talent works, so they might as well have written up the racial traits.

[Troacctid]

That stuff about the 6 hidden houses after Synad is the details for Talaire. I have no idea why they didn't just write it like a normal race, but CPsi has a lot of questionable decisions. Each house has the associated very different version of Wild Talent which isn't how Wild Talent works, so they might as well have written up the racial traits.
It counts as Wild Talent for Fist of Zuoken though, which makes it better for monks than if they did it the other way! :smallsmile:

[PairO'Dice Lost]

That stuff about the 6 hidden houses after Synad is the details for Talaire. I have no idea why they didn't just write it like a normal race, but CPsi has a lot of questionable decisions. Each house has the associated very different version of Wild Talent which isn't how Wild Talent works, so they might as well have written up the racial traits.

It's because the Six Hidden Houses and the Psigate are a conversion of 3.0 psionics material from Dragon Magazine (specifically the "Mind Lords of Talaron" article from Dr281) just like the Erudite was. In that article the Talaire were specifically vanilla humans and 3.0 didn't have a Hidden Talent feat equivalent, so the CPsi authors apparently decided that "vanilla human with a fixed alternate-Hidden Talent bonus feat" made them more true to the original than writing up a full variant human race entry.

[Malphegor]

The way my group does things with LA is generally either remove it entirely or you have the racial features divided up over their class levels (if based on spells, coming online when the equivalent spell is available to a base class), and any attribute bonus bigger than +2 is divided up over multiple levels