http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/tags/psionics Gaming Outpost Discussions » Tag: psionics - Recent Topics en-US Thu, 24 May 2012 11:03:37 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/search.php http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/jhiaxus-iii-shinobi-and-family-man-adams-second-verse-continues#post-32400 Sat, 20 Nov 2010 10:09:41 +0000 kyler 32400@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Last thread didn't want to cooperate.</p> <p>Last post I made was something along the lines of,</p> <p>"Tan looks at you curiously, clearly asking with her eyes." </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/jhiaxus-of-the-hidden-leaf#post-28964 Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:10:13 +0000 kyler 28964@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>You and Tan both emerge from the Between on the outskirts of a town with traditional Japanese-style architecture. You were not seen arriving, in spite of the business many can be heard going about not even a block from here.</p> <p>Tan asks you, "Do we bring them out now, or wait until we've settled a bit more? The two of us can probably avoid notice a long time, but an entire family will definitely attract attention. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/time-stop#post-19025 Sat, 15 May 2010 17:00:43 +0000 WilliamTWodium 19025@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>So Maxx is about to attempt a pseudo-time stop via personal hyper-acceleration. The rule book is not terribly helpful in this regard. I find 14@1 Slow, 14@2 Haste, 14@4 Suspended Animation, and 14@8 Time Stop. Slow and Haste have baselines that adjust subjective time for the target by a factor of two. Suspended Animation is like a Slow that slows the target so much that time for the target has practically stopped. Time Stop actually stops time within a limited area, which Maxx has specifically said he is not doing.</p> <p>What I don't see listed is a Haste counter-part to Suspended Animation: a skill which accelerates the charter so much that time has practically stopped for everything else. Should this just be a new listing, perhaps at P14@5? That seems odd, though, because the skill is superior to the higher-biased 14@8 Time Stop in that it has no need of an area of effect.</p> <p>Thoughts? </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-rapier-wit-parallel#post-19063 Sun, 16 May 2010 22:36:50 +0000 Tadeusz 19063@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Note: I need to make something simple as my brain is getting tired.</p> <p>There is a parallel between the Courtiers who attended a king's court, and the Political Nation of the Internet Age.</p> <p>There are about 300,000 people in the Political Nation currently according to Dinesh D'Souza, political pundit. I'm one of them. These are the people who shape the political discourse in the nation at large. Of course, in the rankage of people in this group, I'm about 280,000th in importance with Obama being #1 and Sarah Palin or Rush being #2.</p> <p>The diffferences between the Courtiers and the Political Nation are that the Nation is two to three orders of magnitude larger than the Courtiers. Also, the Political Nation is spread out by the linking power of the Internet (although it is still heavily concentrated in Washington and NYC.)</p> <p>Courtiers are known for 1)Hanging out in the King's Outside Courts. 2)Dressing Nice 3)Passing the time of boredom in the outer courts with conversation and games and flirting with each other. 4)While being mostly men, still giving place to steely willed older females and nicely dressed younger females. 5)Getting in duels with each other with rapiers 6)Factions and clever arguements 7)Taking bribes to advance some side. 8)Poisoning others.</p> <p>For the political nation read 1)Hanging out on political forums on the Net 2)Um, okay, wearing Pajamas might not fit. 3)Games, chatting, and pron...that sounds like the Net. 4)Yup. The Net's rulers are mostly men, but pretty young girls have a definite edge. 5)Blogwars between certain bloggers. 6)well yeah. 7)If you were perchance a high level State Department official and you wanted to ensure a pleasant retirement you could do worse than chatting up the Saudi ambassador. 8) People do try to personally destroy each other on occasion.</p> <p>There are a lot of things in this world that are simply the latest iteration of a previous phenomenon.</p> <p>As to how to turn this into a world, ah, uh, I'll think about that. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/what-i-dont-like-about-mixing-concentration-and-chaining#post-17313 Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:33:17 +0000 M. J. Young 17313@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Maxx has been developing psionic skills rather quickly and impressively, and doing two things that make sense within the context, but which I feel inherently ought not work together, and I'm having trouble determining how to disconnect them. He's asked what I don't like about his latest chaining application, and the answer really is that he has already combined two concepts that are contradictory to each other, and now taking advantage of that contradiction to increase the power of his abilities significantly.</p> <p>So I'm using this thread to hammer out my thoughts and get some input hopefully from people who can help me make sense of how it "ought" to work.</p> <p>The problem begins because Maxx has been using preparatory concentration to bonus his psionic skills. Psionic skills are in the main envisioned as "instant activation" skills with carefully circumscribed levels of power--you think it, it happens, but if you want something very powerful to happen you either need multiple success rolls (e.g., to fly is easy, but to fly at supersonic velocities takes a lot of successful rolls to accelerate) or you have to take significant penalties on making it happen (e.g., you can crush with lethal damage at ranges up to 30' long, but if you want to increase the damage to fatal or the range to 60' that's a -10 penalty on chance of success). Thus it makes sense that if instead of doing it at the beginning of the minute (RF1) you do it at the end of a minute of preparatory concentration (1:00 TF), you've gained at least +10 for the conversion. It then follows that for every doubling of the time for you are genuinely focused on preparation you get another +10, and with his 30:00 concentrations he is getting +59. That makes him very nearly failure proof on most skills. Now, I certainly don't disallow "failure-proof" skills, if someone wants to invest the ritual into the magic or whatever the bonuses are to get a chance of success over one hundred percent. The detriments are built into the skill.</p> <p>The problem is that it has also been inherent in psionic skills that they are easily chained. That is, if you have launched a clairvoyance and tracked your target in flight for fifty miles when the end of the skill's duration arrives, in an instant you can restart the skill and keep it from failing. That makes perfect sense, because it would only take an instant to activate the skill anyway, and your chance of restarting it is the same as your chance of maintaining it, and presumably you know where the target is from tracking him, so it's not a big deal. It actually gives the character a bonus, because he gets two rolls--one to keep it from fading, another to restart it immediately.</p> <p>And I would not object to someone chaining a TF skill with a TF of one minute, because you probably have about that long before the skill dies; and thus assuming you're not doing something else that prevents you from concentrating on this, you should be able to put the minute into the preparatory focus necessary to keep the skill alive. Thus without really talking about it, skills with preparatory concentration also get their chaining on a successful roll, and the bonus for the preparatory concentration is included.</p> <p>But Maxx has skills that require half an hour of preparatory concentration which then makes them nearly failure proof, and he is chaining them without repeating the preparatory concentration but at the same probability of success.</p> <p>Part of this is because some of the skills in which he did this initially required skill success rolls to make changes in their effects. If you created a force object such as a support wall and you wanted to move the wall or bend the wall, you would have to make a skill check to see whether you managed to get it to do what you wanted; but this is not really "chaining" the skill in the same sense. It is successfully manipulating the skill while it functions, and incidentally includes extending the time if the new roll happens to add to the time (that is, if you have twenty minutes left on the skill and the manipulation skill check is a 30, you would have thirty minutes from the moment of the manipulation skill check, or an added ten minutes). If you are flying and roll to accelerate your velocity, it is the acceleration that is at issue; the increase in duration, if there is one, is secondary to this.</p> <p>At present, though, Maxx is attempting to chain a retrocognition skill that reads targeted objects in a fashion that allows him to move from one object to another. It strikes me that if he were reading his mother's mind and wanted to read his father's mind, I would not allow that as chaining--that's a different targeted mind, with a different chance of success (because his mother's mind is more familiar to him). I should not permit a chaining of retrocognition to connect to a different object, by that reasoning.</p> <p>If a skill requires an extended preparatory concentration, "chaining" rolls are thereafter limited to such purposes and targets as were envisioned when the preparation was undertaken, and any change in those purposes or targets which takes it beyond the initial parameters will require a fresh performance of the skill including the preparatory time.</p> <p>Thanks for asking, Maxx. That seems the fair solution.</p> <p>--M. J. Young </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/david-weber-and-linda-evans-and-bias#post-14518 Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:19:41 +0000 Tadeusz 14518@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I'm reading "Hell Hath No Fury" by Weber and Evans right now, and it had an interesting bit on bias.</p> <p>In 'HHNF', there are two multiversal civilizations which use interdimensional portals to expand out into virgin Earths. And they bumped into each other, and things went south dramatically.</p> <p>One side has psionic Talents, and the other side has what they call magic Gifts. One of the Talents, a Voice (aka a long-range and short-range mindreader and mindsender) and her husband were captured by the opposing side, and are being brought through many dimensions and across tens of thousands of miles of 'railroad' to the home dimension.</p> <p>And one of the features of a Voice link is that the Voice can pick up a little of the emotions and such, the sideband, of the true message. This sideband is weakening after they got deeper into enemy territory.</p> <p>The protagonists' initial off the cuff theory was that Talents got weaker after a prolonged exposure to the Gifted. I, of course, instantly thought of Bias, of the rules in dimensions changing.</p> <p>"HHNF" could be similar to the Triverse in this, but with a more subtle breakdown and rebuilding of bias that stretches over a dozen dimensions between the two areas most amenable to their own type of power.</p> <p>==========</p> <p>Also, they did something like what you did with TK, where you broke it up into varying parts. There are Voices, and there are Sifters (who can tell if you lie), and some other type of talent which lets you feel the type of person the other person is, and their general leaning at that time. As the character in the book puts it...He feels like he's about to stick a dagger in your ribs and get away with it.</p> <p>And you have Distance Viewers who are the top, and then there are Mappers who can show an area, and Plotters who can show the living in an area.</p> <p>=======</p> <p>This is in large part an FYI post. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/advantage-of-simple-vs-heavy-tk#post-7607 Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:59:04 +0000 Graham 7607@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I was wondering; is there any advantage to using simple telekinesis verses heavy object telekinesis? </p> <p>For example, I have a 1@10 SAL in Heavy Object TK, but something lower in Simple Object TK. Is there a situation in which I would decide that using Simple Object TK is better than Heavy TK (assuming that Heavy TK is not curved out of the bias)? </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/worldsaplings-psionic-world-astral-weavery#post-5506 Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:56:43 +0000 Tadeusz 5506@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>The gi'ratIMAK came in the midst of the 22nd century to do us a favor. They wanted us to live in harmony with the universe, which in their conception of things meant that 5/6ths of the human race must die, and the rest would serve the gi'ratIMAK as personal servitors because using machines was evil.</p> <p>However, using mental powers was a-ok to the gi'ratIMAK. But it did not provide enough, so they found they had to find slave races to take over to work for them. Otherwise an Enlightened Being might have to sully his mind with actual thinking about work.</p> <p>Humanity took the new ideas about psionic power to heart, and their own tech, and fought back. The slave race, the Stol'cazm, are ten feet tall, naturally armored, move as fast as a mongoose, and bloodthirsty. The Blood Brigades took three years to reduce Earth to a charred cinder. Thus the environment was saved.</p> <p>Earth had fought as hard as it could behind fixed defenses in the Outer System, and then the Earth and the Moon fought. Meanwhile, a thousand, thousand ships set out. They were powered by designs given to us by the Rip'ti'tor who pretend very hard to be loyal to their masters while subverting them every chance they get. These antimatter powered hyperdrive ships faced one problem.</p> <p>No one had licked FTL communications. And without communications, the Grand Diaspora was licked before it began. No one ship had enough knowledge on its own, enough ideas on its own. Plus, no one ship could guess when suddenly a psi-powered Starcracker battleship might appear out of hyperspace and smack them into dust.</p> <p>But if the Ships could talk to each other, then they could compare ideas. And stealthy scout ships could keep an eye on the enemy battleships, and send orders for those who needed to hide or flee to do so.</p> <p>All that was required were thirty thousand astral travellers. Telepathy did not work in this world, and for Humans, telekinesis was unreliable. But with the proper trance state, and drugs, Humans could astral travel at FTL, and deliver and receive messages in a great Net between the stars.</p> <p>And so the guerilla war between the Ships and the Enlightened Ones continues....who knows what will happen. Maybe a human will find an ancient alien race's tech, or the Enlightened Ones will develop a means to detect stealthed scout ships? Maybe the Ri'pi'tor will be exposed, and come out to fight? Will the Stol'cazm ever put aside their unquestioning loyalty? And what about the dozen or so other races that slave for the masters? </p>