Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2011951" data-attributes="member: 18387">Fantasy Players Companion - The Inner EyeIve not yet been converted to the short PDF model, but this product caught my eye because of my love of 3.5 psionics.Published by Ronin Arts, written by Patrick Younts, this PDF is a total of 7 b&w pages (6 once you count the half-page cover and half-page OGL), all being psionic feats aimed at Psychic Warriors and Soulknives and a few designers notes by Mr Younts (a nice touch, explaining some of his design decisions and balancing acts).In total there are 35 feats in this product, each with the [Psionic] descriptor. Some are extensions on existing feat chains (Deeper Impact, Deepest Impact) while others are new ideas in themselves, and nine are based on multi-classing (Beast Mind - allowing manifester levels to stack with druid levels to determine wild shape abilities; Mental Awareness - allowing manifester levels to stack with rogue levels or other classes with Uncanny Dodge to determine uncanny dodge benefits).One that was very interesting (and will be taken by almost any psychic warrior, IMO) is Retain Focus - allowing the character to make a Concentration check to regain psionic focus for free after expending it. The catch is that the DC is at a DC 10 higher than the prior check for focus, so the first time you retain focus, it is at DC 30 typically, but retaining it again would be DC 40, and so on.Typical of the genre, the feats cover a variety of abilities, from combat potency (Deeper Impact) to defence (Chrysalis Armor grants DR 2/- while you have psionic focus), to mobility (Steel Clad Grace, Sure Footing), to Wuxia powers (Void Strike - which allows a character to strike up to 10 feet away as if in melee combat and without actually touching the opponent) and into the realm of Anime characters (Mental Strength allows you to wield weapons that are too big for you like any number of fantasy anime characters).On first read, the feats are all balanced  - some are fairly inspired while others feel much akin to other house rules feats (Retain Focus) - but none break the rules too drastically. At the same time, a key element of a successful exciting product is here, in that the feats are powerful enough to be exciting, they arent a set of yawners - they may be slightly more powerful than many core feats, but this makes the product fairly exciting.The downside is, as with many of the core feats, many of these feats require the expenditure of the characters psionic focus, making that ability even more of a precious commodity. There has to be a mechanic to avoid this, as we are really spreading out the use of (a) feats and (b) psionic focus - making it harder and harder to determine what to spend each on.The layout of this short product, however is lackluster. Plain black on black in good old 12-point Times New Roman, 2 column format. The only piece of art is on the cover, and is not very psionic in context. Even the d20 logo is b&w. There is no interior art nor layout graphics - you could probably create this layout in Word with little trouble. There are also visual inconsistencies such as all the material for a feat being in one block, with no extra carriage returns, but the examples of how it works being in another block, seperated from the feat by a blank line, as well as the name of one feat being in a much smaller font than all the others, but these are nit-picks.</blockquote>

Verification