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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 7007040" data-attributes="member: 53980">I agree with  [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] that it's problematic. If you're going to make it draining, I'd recommend basing it on hit points, since those go up and down regularly (and scale with level), and there's no need to recalculate modifiers. Plus, hit points scale much better with level. If your psychic takes nothing but feats, their ability scores will remain the same at level 20 as they were at level 1. Even if not, given that typical characters start with somewhere around a total of 65 ability points (after racial modifiers), gaining 10 more over 20 levels isn't much.A design that I've been tinkering with (but haven't had much time to work on) is that psychics use a reverse spell point system, which I tentatively termed Stress. As a psychic uses their powers, Stress accumulates. The more powerful an ability, the more Stress it causes the psychic (I was thinking of giving all powers the ability to scale, akin to how spells like Sleep and Fireball work). Eventually, perhaps when they hit some threshold, or maybe when they roll a natural 1 to activate the ability (that's something else I was considering, as in 2nd edition their powers might not be automatic) their powers go out of control, endangering both themselves and everyone in the vicinity. Maybe something like a large, powerful vortex of psychic energy surrounds the psychic but instead of being powered by Stress it drains the psychic's hit points. If you have specialties like Telepath and Telekinetic, the vortex might be based on that (a telepathic scream, and a telekinetic whirlwind, respectively). Assuming that the psychic survives, their Stress gets reduced. As such, unlike spell slots and spell points which form a hard cap on how many spells a caster can use in a day, the psychic has a soft cap. They can use their abilities as much as they like, provided they're willing to risk the cost. Anyway, that's the gist of it.EDITPerhaps on a failed activation roll, the power still succeeds but simply results in more Stress. Or maybe the player can choose between taking the additional Stress or allowing the power activation to fail. Perhaps the additional Stress could be randomly rolled after the player decides to force activation, to preserve a sense of gambling. For example, if the player rolls poorly on their activation, they could choose to turn it into a success but gain an additional 1d8 Stress.</blockquote>

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