Allowing the feats from the Psionics Handbook in an Agents of Psi game?

[Paul_Klein]

A few of my players are playing physics in my d20 Modern campaign. One asked if he could choose feats from the Psionics Handbook, and I said sure.

Now, I don't know *anything* about the D&D Psionics, and am worried now that I may have just let him have access to a bunch of too-powerful feats.

What doy yuo think?

 

[takyris]

After about ten seconds of thought, I'm not really that worried about it. Two reasons:

1) A lot of those abilities are PP dependent, and since players can only multiclass into psionic classes, it's unlikely that they'll have a ton of PP lying around either to keep in reserve or to spend on something like "Deep Impact".

2) As long as you don't make any of those feats bonus feats for any class, the PCs are not going to get many of them. With the number of feats out there, if it came down to a choice between running along the walls or being 3 points of damage harder to knock out or drop to -1 with a single shot from full hit points, I think I'm gonna go with Massive Damage Threshold instead of the wall-running Matrix-y one.

The biggest consideration would be whether it fits with the flavor of your game. It's perfectly reasonable to want to limit psionics to telepathy, mind-control, ESP, and so on, if that's the flavor of your campaign -- and in that scenario, people running around on the ceiling or growing giant energy claws really isn't what you want.

 

[Spatula]

The biggest consideration would be whether it fits with the flavor of your game. It's perfectly reasonable to want to limit psionics to telepathy, mind-control, ESP, and so on, if that's the flavor of your campaign -- and in that scenario, people running around on the ceiling or growing giant energy claws really isn't what you want.

Some of that stuff is already in d20 Modern, though. The Battle Mind's power list and class abilities are very flashy.

I would evaluate the PsiHB feats on a case-by-case basis. A bunch of them (the metapsionic feats, power focus, etc.) have already been added to Modern through Urban Arcana, along with a new psionic prestige class and expanded power lists for the Telepath and Battle Mind. Some of the other PsiHB feats might be too good. The ones that require the psi to spend PP are probably okay for the reasons Takyris mentions.