Running a spionic game

[Sorrowdusk]

Wow, I never really realized how much forum topics can trail off from the original post.

Thanks for all of your input. Continuing with the original post, any campaign ideas and/or advice is still welcome for when our psionic game comes around.

Read enough forums, and you will see. Really, its just like real conversation-but how much it is allowed to meander depends on those moderating.

 

[TanisFrey]

If you truly want to import any of the 5 Wizards, elder Elf, Balrogs, Dragons and Sauron into 3.x you need to use the rules in Deities and Demigods for divine rank to do them justice.

Characters that have no Divine rank:
The hobits, including Smeagol.
The humans.
The dwarfs.
The young Elves, including Legolas (he is only 500 or so in the book).
Young Orcs.
Half-Elves who choose to live as men, like Arwen.

Character that have Divine Rank 0:
Gandalf the Gray and the other wizard except Saruman the white.
Saruman after his staff is broken.
Elves whom have seen a age of Middle Earth (the third age was 3021 years long).
Gollum, he got this from owing/using the one ring for ~1500-3000 years.
Most Ents and all Hurons.
The very oldest of the orcs.

Characters that have divine rank 1:
Gandalf the White.
Saruman the White.
The lesser Nazgul.
Balrogs.
Treebeard and older Ents.
Elder Elves.
Shelob.

Characters that have divine rank 2:
The Witch-King of Angmar, the chief of the Nazgul.
Elven Lords whom hold rings of power, Elrond, Galadriel and whatever lord that gave up his ring to Gandalf.

Character that have divine rank 2-5:
Dragons, lesser

Character that have Divine Rank 5:
Sauron
Smaug and larger dragons

Character that have Divine Rank of greater that 5:
Morgoth had a divine rank of at least 10.
Tom Bombadil and his wife are divine rank is between 5-10 or more.

And I should amend this list to include Bilbo and Frodo gain Divine Rank 0 as they pass out of the Shire on their way to the Gray Havens to sail off into the Elf lands over the sea.

 

[pneumatik]

There's not a lot of stuff to worry about with psionics from a power-level perspective. Affinity Field, a 9th level universal power, allows for a lot of infinite-loop-type exploits when combined with a psicrystal (in short: activate AF and share it with your psicrystal. Then buff yourself and share it with your psicrysta, whose AF gives you the buff twice), but you don't have to worry about it until 17th level.

Psions are not as flexible as wizards. They have trouble doing any battlefield control (I tried) because they lack area effects. The discipline system is more restrictive and, IMHO, better than specializing as a wizard because iconic or playstyle-defining powers are discipline only.

There are some powers in either Races of Destiny or Cityscape that let you take your next turn early. These have errata that you want to follow. Complete Psionic effectively erratas powers but you probably want to, and definitely can, ignore it. Also Crystal Shard was nerfed somehow in a ruling involving all spells and SR or DR or something. Be careful before you enforce that ruling on it. Crystal Shard is pretty much the only attack spell a psion has that can ignore SR, while arcanists have several.

In addition to the "take your turn early" powers, temporal acceleration, fission, and schism (using SRD names, YMMV) a psion can have a very complicated turn in a way other classes can't. You should encourage a character doing this to plan ahead. It's this abilty that /really/ allows psions to go nova, because even if they spend max PPs on a power every round they still have some decent staying power at higher levels.

As far as we could tell Metamorphosis has no upper limit on the size of creature or object you can become. You'll need to houserule something to keep a psion from turning into something like a block of mithral 1 mile square and crushing every BBEG (and his minions, and his castle, etc.). OTOH, turning into a 10-foot cube of mithral every night to rest safely is awesome ;-]