Level Up (A5E) A Unique Psionics System Structure

[RangerWickett]

The next step up, where it has 3 disciplines working together

I think this is where you're losing me. Are powers necessarily going to have more disciplines at higher level? What's an example? Like, normally you sorta do a hop-skip-and-a-jump from charm person, to suggestion, to dominate person. Are you going to have a "mind control you and set you on fire and fling you across the room" power?

 

[Steampunkette]

I think this is where you're losing me. Are powers necessarily going to have more disciplines at higher level? What's an example? Like, normally you sorta do a hop-skip-and-a-jump from charm person, to suggestion, to dominate person. Are you going to have a "mind control you and set you on fire and fling you across the room" power?

No, they won't. And it's kind of the other way around. Disciplines won't always have powers where that particular discipline works with 3 others.

But it's also, again, not about -power-. It's about -theme-. Here's the baseline Empathic Interference power:

Empathic Interference (Empathy Discipline)
Power Rating: 1st
Range: 30ft
Target: 1 Creature.
Utilizing your emotions and control over them you can affect a target in one of the following three ways. Firstly, you may read their current emotional state, unwilling creatures make a wisdom saving throw, and on a success they resist the effect, but they are unaware of the attempt. Secondly you may attempt to interfere with the target’s emotions to make them more positive, causing them to regard you or another creature in a more friendly manner, granting an expertise die to the next charisma based skill check used against them. And finally you may influence your target to regard a creature in a negative manner, imposing disadvantage on the next charisma skill check that person makes against your target. Should any charisma skill check result in a natural 1, the target becomes aware of the emotional manipulation.

By expending 1 Power Point you can alter the following aspects of the power in the following ways:
Range: +60ft per point spent
Emotional Trauma: By heightening your target’s emotional state you cause them to take 1d8 psychic damage per point spent on a failed saving throw. On success they take half damage.
Charming Banter: If the target fails its saving throw against this power the effects last for 1 minute, and the target refuses to do you or your allies harm.

By expending 2 Power Points you can add the following effects to the power:
Grapple: A creature that fails its strength save against this discipline is also grappled so long as you maintain concentration, though it may attempt to end the grapple normally.
Manipulation: By expertly twisting your target’s emotions you can make them perform a single task they would be unwilling to perform for a friend. This task can take up to 5 minutes, but the target is aware of the manipulation when the effect ends unless they rolled a natural 1 on their saving throw.
Split: You may target an additional creature or object with this power, or a large number of small objects within a 5ft square. Each further point spent in this way creates a multiplier. 3 points allows you to target 4 creatures, 4 allows you to target 6, and so on.

By expending 4 power points you can add the following effect to the power:
Domination: By taking direct control over a creature’s emotional state you are able to bend them to whatever your heart desires so long as you can communicate. You may issue commands to your target on your turn and it will do it’s best to fulfill them. You may also directly take control over the creature, expending your action, bonus action, movement, and reaction to control each of its actions during the turn.

A level 1 Psion can take this power with no pre-requisites. This power, itself, has a Friends component, baseline, put down 1 power point for a Charm Person like effect. Soon, you unlock the Suggestion style effect when you can put down 2 points in a turn, and you gain Dominate once you can put 4 points into the power.

You don't get or need a second Empathy discipline power that you later take to access Dominate Person. But you could take Reality Shifting as an Empathy/Telepathy discipline to create Illusions of the mind that groups of creatures all see.

 

[Steampunkette]

My husband found a great analogy.

Every individual power is like a Spellbook. You start out with a spellbook that has spells from 1st to 7th level but they're all in one sort of focused school.

Getting another power is like getting a new spellbook, with more spells from 1st to 7th level, but they're all in a different sort of school.

The spells aren't stronger, they're just different.

And to get the weirder/cooler spellbooks, you need to have done the course-study for before you get there.

 

[tetrasodium]

My husband found a great analogy.

Every individual power is like a Spellbook. You start out with a spellbook that has spells from 1st to 7th level but they're all in one sort of focused school.

Getting another power is like getting a new spellbook, with more spells from 1st to 7th level, but they're all in a different sort of school.

The spells aren't stronger, they're just different.

And to get the weirder/cooler spellbooks, you need to have done the course-study for before you get there.

The idea has promise but GURPS is a good example of it having gone too far. I don't remember specific details but one example I think I might recall is the haircut spell being dramatically more difficult to obtain than fireball or being needed for some other totally unrelated "how the heck are they connected?" type spells.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So this is a thing I've been postulating about pretty often, usually on these boards... Psionics should feel different from magic.

So there's a few ways I wanna make it different:

1) A lot fewer powers that have wider flexibility.
Rather than having a dozen pages of individual spells most of which are meticulously drawn out to have very specific functions, a broader baseline power concept that you can customize with power point expenditures and use to create a variety of effects as you level up.

2) A Tree structure to make it feel more like sci-fantasy.
Spells in Level Up are super haphazard. You get level ranges to use them at, sure, but their types mean very little except as a keyword. Martial Maneuvers create a narrowing of schools which is interesting, but what if we took it a step further and said 'You must have one of these two schools to get this higher level school?". That's kind of where I'm going with this.

3) The tree structure isn't about increased power, per-se, it's more about increased theme.
Some stuff 1st level characters probably should not have access to, like Teleportation. But we can set that up to a slightly higher 'Level' by saying "You have to take this power first before you can teleport", but the damage isn't based on what type of power you have access to, but how many power points you have available, and what your current point cap is.

For the moment I'm looking at 4 Disciplines.
Empathy: Emotional Control, and Manipulation.
Kinesthetics: Mind over Body.
Telekinetics: Mind over Distant Matter.
Telepathy: Mental Contact and Manipulation.

Which in turn give us 4 'Basic' powers, and then a set of 6 'Advanced' powers.
Chiurgery: Kinesthetics/Telepathy Healing allies and altering bodies.
Energy Manipulation: Empathy/Telekinetics. Pyrokinesis, for example, is tapping into anger/rage and directing it.
Psychoportation: Kinesthetics/Telekinetics. Transporting your body (And other bodies) from place to place.
Reality Warping: Empathy/Telepathy. Illusions of the Mind.
Empathy/Kinesthetics and Telekinetic/Telepathy are two powers I just haven't thought of a name for.

To get Chiurgery you need to have a Basic power which is from the Kinesthetic or Telepathic discipline, for example.

And then the next tier is the intersection of 3 different Disciplines. Of which you must have powers in at least 2 of the 3 disciplines to gain.

And then every time I come up with a new Discipline, you wind up with, like, 6-7 more individual powers spread out across the different tiers.

So that's the plan, there... and here's an example of the power structure I'm looking at... I wanna know what you all think of this kind of design and whether I'm on to something interesting or not.


For the sake of argument, let's say you've got 5 points to spend on a given turn. You could Split for 2 points, put the other 3 points into damage, and Telekinetically strike two targets for 4d8+Psion Level damage. Or you could put 4 points into Lift, 1 point into Damage, and render your target incapable of meleeing your party or moving to cover while your allies pump magic arrows into them while doing 2d8+psion level damage, yourself. Even if they're a creature that can normally fly, this stops them.

Let's say you're right on the cusp of going from 5 points per round to 6 points per round. You use the Flight variant of the power to affect yourself, and the next turn you apply it to an ally. That's 8 points spent out of your pool... Gain a level, and now it costs 6 points to use Flight and Split in the same round, and you can still use the base effect of the power to hit an enemy for 1d8+psion level or manipulate an object at a distance. Split that flight on you and your Berserker friend, then pull the lever on the far side of the room to make the floor drop open and send an ogre tumbling into an acid pit, below, while you two hang in the air, safe as houses.

Split a Manipulate for 4 points for a total of 6 targets shoved 15 feet off a cliff. Wheeeeee!

What do you think? Should I keep messing with this idea?

I am interested and would like to read your brochure.

 

[lichmaster]

OK, expanded thoughts on this.

Your powers are basically cantrip-level, maybe 1st-level-level, in terms of power. You can either use them X times per rest, or at will. But you also gain a number of psi dice. Perhaps equal to your PB, or your Int mod +1, or simply a set number based on your level. You regain spent PB after a (long?) rest. You can then spend one or more of these dice to increase your power's level. The die probably starts out as a d6 and increases as you go up in level.

Basic TK is the equivalent of mage hand in terms of power level (10 pounds). Spend a die to up the amount you can carry. Maybe by a set amount, maybe by number rolled times 5 or 10.

Or, you can throw the object you're lifting, as per catapult. Damage would be on par with other cantrips, say 1d8. You can also roll psi dice to add to that damage or increase the range.

You can spend multiple psi dice at a time. You can also have the dice explode, which is definitely useful if you're rolling multiple dice.

As you go up in level, the base ability increases as well. At 5th level, your mage hand can carry 25 or 50 pounds, plus whatever the psi die does; the thrown object's base range increases and it does 2d8 damage now.

Yes, this is similar to your original point-based idea, but somewhat more random (due to rolling a psi die) and uses fewer points, since you'd only get a small number of dice.

This seems something between a reskinned Sorcerer and a reskinned Bard using reskinned cantrips.
There's nothing wrong about it, and it's probably a good idea if one does not want to come up with entirely new systems, but I think OP wants to create a new system.

I'd be totally in for a freeform, point based "psi/magic" system. I keep repeating that porting Elements of Magic into 5E would be fantastic, but I'm told it requires a lot of work. Still, if it doesn't come up and I manage to find time I may actually start working on it myself.

 

[RangerWickett]

I keep repeating that porting Elements of Magic into 5E would be fantastic, but I'm told it requires a lot of work.

If someone wants to throw $5000 at me, I could make it happen.

I like the idea of basic spells you can spend limited resources on to tweak and improve. There's just a nigh infinite number of things magic can do, and codifying it in a meaningful way feels a bit harder in 5e than 3e.

 

[Faolyn]

At this point, I'm halfway wondering if you were to have both a psion and a wizard in a system, if you would want to get rid of all the "psion-y" spells that wizards have. Up to and including things like charm person and detect thoughts. Have things like that be psion-only.

 

[Steampunkette]

Me? Nooo...

Some purists might, but magic has been doing it's thing for way too long for me to think of cutting it apart for Psionics.

 

[lichmaster]

If someone wants to throw $5000 at me, I could make it happen.

I can't give you 5k on my own for this, but I'd definitely be backer #1 if it were to happen on KS. I'd even love to be engaged more directly on the development/testing.

I like the idea of basic spells you can spend limited resources on to tweak and improve.

Me too, and it would marry perfectly with the concept of rare spells in LU, among other things.

There's just a nigh infinite number of things magic can do, and codifying it in a meaningful way feels a bit harder in 5e than 3e.

Well, it's not that 5e spells do very different things from 3e spells. Of course the scaling is different, and some spells work in a different way, but the overall basics are the same. Plus, A5E also already has non traditional "schools", which could be the first candidate for the "secrets".
Associating each class with a set of secrets would also make for an even stronger class identity IMO.

There are already many ingredients in LU that can support an Elements of Magic style spellcasting, IMO, so the brunt of the work would probably be the rebalancing

The more I think about it, the more I think this could really work and make for a unique play experience. Let me know if you think it could work, I'd really like to be involved if this were considered viable.