Psionics or Psychics with d20 Modern rules

[Stormborn]

Doing some long term campaign planning for the group now and based on some recent discussions I am trying to cobble together a new type of campaign for later this year.


I am planning on using d20 Modern rules, but not a Modern setting. Lots of things I could explain about the setting , but the one that is germain to the thread at hand is that I want magic to be real, useful and usable both in and out of combat, but feel different to the players from what they have used before. I don't want the magic level to be as high as standard DnD, but not Grim Tales or CoC level either. I am currently considering some form of psionics as a substitute for magic.Everyone would see it as magic, and it would basically be the only kind of magic allowed to PCs, but it would use psionics rules.

My question is for those of you who have experiance using the rules with d20 Modern. No one in my group has ever used psionics of any kind so I am wondering if I should:

a) relable the Psionic classes and abilities in the MSRD and port them into the game as is mechanically but with setting flavor and names
b) use Green Ronin's excelent Psychic's Handbook which is feat and skill based, but does eat into skill points (I bought it and read it some time ago but have never used it even though I really like it.)
or
c) come up with something else.

Thoughts from those who have used GR's PH or the d20 M psionics rules would be particularlly desirable.

 

[JBowtie]

Blue Rose uses a variant of the Psychic's Handbook system.

Specifically in your case, they simply assume that:
You use a feat to gain access to one or more powers.
You have max ranks in powers you have access to.

You get a feat a level in Blue Rose, don't know how that compares to d20 Modern. In any case, this simplifying assumption works really well without eating into skill points. I'm using it in my campaign, have not had any issues whatsoever.

 

[Khorod]

I was recently poking at an idea for a Psychic advanced class- using entirely my own rules. I stopped work on it to develop a more general occult subsystem instead... the Psychic might get mental juices flowing.

http://dre.grayside.org/wiki/index.php/Psychic

 

[Ranger REG]

Blue Rose uses a variant of the Psychic's Handbook system.

Yeah, but the Psychic's Handbook cost less than the Blue Rose rulebook. And it does provide an adaptation to d20 Modern (like the Cavalier's Handbook).

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I used the Psychic AdC in a recent game ... It's NOT low-powered. It can be pretty high powered. My player said he was going to see what he could do with it, and built a Precog/Postcog specialist who pretty much couldn't fail. But that was pretty specialized.

I wouldn't say it was high-powered a la D&D but including the AdC will make them useful. I was intending to run a much lower-powered game (in terms of SFX) so I stripped out the class.

--fje