I did see that, and pondered it.
There are no posters on the streets.
There are posters on bulletin boards in various businesses. You do have the "lost pet" variety and a few "for sale by owner" bits, but most of the ones you mention have a seal somewhere on them indicating that they are approved by one or another division of the government--bowling leagues by the Division of Recreational Activities, book clubs by the Division of Education, bands by the Division of Approved Entertainments, and so on. Alice has never gotten anything like that printed, but she knows that there are registered printers who know how to take someone through the steps of getting authorization and then getting businesses to permit the postings.
--M. J. Young
I'm not touching government authorization procedures with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. Word of mouth it is.
Thursday afternoon in the park, be on the lookout for a likely customer - adult at minimum, age otherwise irrelevant, male preferable - anyone within those guidelines who might be tired, sore, or (at minimum) stationary. I will approach this person near a bench (they've sat down on it already, for preference).
"Hi, I'm William." Hello, William. "I'll get right to it. How'd you like to make five dollars in five minutes?"
(I've brought maybe ten five dollar bills with me. They're in my right shorts pocket. I have no shortage of small bills at home, thanks to my sub-table income.)
_
Edit: And of course I'm interested in V-me's opinion of whether he maintained his Mind Blank until bedtime Wednesday, and of course either way I want to reinitiate it upon waking with the intent of keeping it up until once again unconscious.
It's difficult to be certain about the blank mind, because you are mostly conscious of it when you attend to whether it is operating, at which point it usually is, but whether that's because you've restarted it as simply as that or because it was working all along is much less certain.
I'm afraid that today it's raining, and the only people at the park are hard-core joggers who are intent on doing their run and getting inside, dog walkers struggling with umbrellas in one hand and leashes in the other, and one old guy sitting by the pond feeding soggy bread to the ducks seemingly oblivious to the fact that he's soaking wet despite the Gorton's-of-Gloucester style yellow rain hat.
--M. J. Young
. . . well, alright. I'll just alter my approach.
I'll walk over (absent even the protection of a yellow rain hat) and sit next to the man feeding the ducks. I'll wait a moment, then,
"Nice day, huh?"
(This is said with quiet appreciation; if there is irony, it is deadpan.)
"They like it," he says. "And it's the kind of day when no one will bother you for sitting on a bench in the park."
--M. J. Young
"That's not a crime yet, is it? Sitting on a park bench, I mean."
It occurs to me that I could catch a cold, sitting in the rain like this and taxing my immune system. It also occurs to me that if I can fall into space without dying, I can probably protect myself from the rain. Then again, if I wait until I actually get sick and cure the disease, instead, I don't risk using psionics in the event that my immune system holds up after all.
These thoughts are fleeting.
"Who says you have to commit a crime for them to bother you?" He smiles knowingly, almost a gleam of confederacy in his eyes. "But you didn't bring bread, so you're not here for the ducks. And you don't look like you're here for the non-conformists, either. So, what brings you to my bench?"
--M. J. Young
"Ah. Well."
I look away, and then back.
"I've got a bit of a business venture I'm trying to get off the ground, so I was going to walk up to somebody on a park bench and bother them. But with this rain, you know. It keeps the sort of person I'd use a sales pitch on indoors. Or on the move, with an umbrella.
"So when I got here I figured that out, and I saw you. I like the rain, and you don't seem to mind it; and I thought maybe if I just explained to you what I was all about, and what I wanted to do, you'd trust me enough to try it out. I mean, I had a whole bunch patter and marketing and whatnot all worked out in advance, but this way I don't have to feel like a snake-oil salesman."
I really do like the rain, and ponds, and ducks. I won't mind if he's not interested, I think.
"I'm interested," he says. "Anyway, you seem comfortable in the rain, and that's not something most Americans are. Ever do any farming? I was a farmer, once, before the big coops took over so much of the land. Now I work the docks. Either way, you've got to be willing to work in the rain once in a while.
"So tell me, what's this business proposition of yours about?"
--M. J. Young
"Well -
"I'm working in a bar, making food nights, and I'd kind of rather not be if I could make money another way; I'd like to have more time for my side projects. Well, speaking of side projects, one of them's already borne fruit. I've come up with this technique for, ah, I guess it's a kind of physical therapy; long-lasting relaxation and comfort with minimal fuss. It's great -- it takes minutes, it lasts days, it's non-invasive - you could do it in public, if you cared to - and I've had pretty strongly positive results with it thus far.
"It seems like something there'd be a demand for, you know? Service industry. I mean, people pay massage therapists a lot more than I'd probably end up charging looking for essential the same result, and ninety percent of your over-the-counter medications are just indirect ways to try and get at what I'd be providing directly. Not that it's, strictly speaking, a medical procedure . . . and of course I'm not licensed to practice medicine, so that's a good thing. And it's not the kind of thing I could easily patent, and I'd like to avoid official advertising if I can . . .
"So I was hoping to rely on just word of mouth, work out of this park for a while until I built up enough of a customer base to take out a business address. But for there to be any word of mouth, there have to be folks who've tried the product talking about it, and I could envision it being tough to get people to try something that sounds as incredible as this is.
"I figure for my first few folks I'm not interested in charging so much as I am in convincing someone first-hand that this is real deal - making converts, you could say, not money."
(Of course if he has interjections I answer them at that time; this is only the flow of the monologue if he just lets me talk.)
He raises an eyebrow.
"So this is something you could do here on a park bench in the rain?"
He thinks about your answer (which I'm assuming amounts to "yes").
"Do I have to take my clothes off?"
He thinks about your answer (which I'm assuming is "no").
"And this is going to relieve me of some of these aches and pains and all that? And it's legal?"
--M. J. Young
"Yeah, sure. I mean, you'd get a little wet, but . . ."
"Nope. Well, maybe your hat, but I'm pretty good at balancing things, so . . . no, prob'ly not."
I think for an instant about waffling and not making any guarantees, but really - where's the faith?
"You'll feel lots better, that's for certain. And I would be flabbergasted if they'd gotten around to writing a law against this - even considering who we're talking about."
I assume he's getting around to volunteering, just as planned. If he's willing, I'm game. (I of course have my holy symbol with me, under my shirt because I'm in public.)
_
It occurs to me, out-of-game, that atheism in the subject could create a chance of failure for this skill; that hadn't been an issue before because whatever Alice's prior beliefs, I'd altered them to include a growing acceptance of the supernatural. I'm not sure whether total ignorance of religion (of the kind she displayed) would be better modeled as atheism or agnosticism in-game. I'd lean toward minimum-SAL atheism, but I haven't thought about it deeply. I'm interested in your analysis.
"Yeah, sure. I mean, you'd get a little wet, but . . ."
He laughs. "I don't think I can get much wetter than I am," he answers, "so that's probably not a problem."
I do see the problem. I'm inclined to think these people are minimum-SAL atheists, because they don't entertain the possibility that there might be gods or spirits or supernatural beings. I agree that it will make your chance of success slightly lower, but you still have pretty good odds, if I recall correctly.
He agrees and asks what the next step is. He also mentions that his wallet is empty, so if this is some elaborate scam to rob him there's nothing to take.
--M. J. Young
He also mentions that his wallet is empty, so if this is some elaborate scam to rob him there's nothing to take.
I laugh. "Are you kidding? I came out here with money to give away. Five-dollar satisfaction guarantee, payable in advance. If it turns out I'm a nutjob, you still made five dollars in five minutes. Win-win."
_
Posting this much, adding more later. Thought I would be awake to finish this, but apparently not.
"Keep your money. If it's all you say it is, I should pay you, and if it isn't, it's not likely to hurt me--and if it does, five dollars isn't going to pay the medical bills, is it?
"All right, what do I have to do?"
--M. J. Young
"Lie on the bench face down and take off your hat. You can lie on the ground if you'd rather, or sit, but it's important that I be able to reach your neck and your spine. Don't wiggle around during the treatment. It's okay if you move a little, it won't ruin anything, but it's better if you don't, so you should be comfortable. And relaxed, definitely relaxed; half-asleep would be best, but I'll take what I can get. Oh, and I'll be talking during the treatment, but you shouldn't worry about trying to respond. It's just part of the therapy; the words will do their part whether you're listening or not."
Once he complies,
"And I have to put this on your head. If you wiggle around it'll fall off and I might have to start over, so please don't. It's best if your mind is clear, but if you get mentally restless and you have to focus on something, I recommend focusing on the weight of this thing on your head."
(I don't show him the symbol when I say "this;" that's when I'm putting it on his head.)
And then I do the ritual. Hail Eris and hope this works.
The ritual is:
1@4 Induce Pleasure/Comfort M+13@1 Caster places his holy symbol atop the target's head and, in each hand, holds a wingnut while forming the numeral V sign; he then lightly pokes the target all over with both hands while pronouncing specific passages* selected from the Principia Discordia. The caster then snaps the fingers of both hands in the target's ears, saying, "There; feel better?" Target remains comfortable and feels pleasurable sensations for RS/20 days, which over time may result in +1 bonuses to all skills and attributes (including, additionally, averaged attributes) at the referee's discretion; sound necessary, TF 2:00, +49 SM
"Whoa," he says as you snap your fingers. He sits up, feels himself with his hands, stretches a bit. "A man ought not be able to do something like that to another man. Son, I'm not sure whether what you're selling ought to be legal, but as long as it is count me a customer. What do you expect to charge?"
--M. J. Young
"I have a rough idea, but I'm taking suggestions. What do you think it would be worth to you? Assume it lasts a day or two, and you have to be able to afford it for it to be worth it."
"Well, now, that's certainly an issue. I don't know how hard it is for you to do, but it seemed to take about five minutes, maybe; if they were lined up and waiting and you had two benches, you could probably do ten in an hour. Charge as much as a pack of cigarettes or a couple ales at the counter, maybe three bucks a shot, you could be collecting a healthy thirty dollars an hour, and some people would come every day. Make it ten bucks, and it's more like going to a movie, and a lot less people could afford it every day but some would, and some would come every week, and some would come once a month. But you could probably charge thirty dollars for it and still have one customer per hour all day all week--you'd just be looking at a more elite clientele, as they say, and seeing most of them monthly, some of them weekly, and a lot once or twice a year--like a beauty shop treatment. At least, that's how I see it. I'd like to be able to afford it every day or two, but if you charge as little as that and word gets out, you'll have to find another way to limit your customers or you're going to be overbooked pretty quickly."
--M. J. Young
"Good thoughts. Thank you, that's very helpful." Hmm.
"Well, I had in mind already I didn't want to charge any more than twenty dollars a pop, if only for convenience of currency. I like the idea of more customers, but I don't have a steady base of operations yet and I'll need to limit my clientele to those I can service when and where I'm available, at least at first; add in that I'd rather charge too much and bring it down later than charge too little and raise prices on my customers, and I'm thinking . . . fifteen dollars? Twelve? Twelve, that's about the cost of a good haircut with a tip, right? I'll want folks coming back more often than for a haircut, but if it's in that familiar service-type price range they might not notice - and besides, it's a higher-end product, so that's all right.
"Of course, for first time customers it'll be five dollars, to sweeten the deal and ease the transition, and at some point once I have more data on how long it tends to last I'll start selling bulk packages in advance at something of a discount.
"But for you, today, all I'm really expecting is that you spread the word, and thank you for your courage."
Also (possibly after additional words are exchanged, but perhaps not),
"Do you think if I were just in the park every day, for about four hours, at reliably the same spot, that people would come see me?"
"Well, if the guy at the cheap barbershop happens to be good, then yeah. You'll pay eighteen for a haircut at a stylist, and barbershops are hard to find anymore."Twelve, that's about the cost of a good haircut with a tip, right?
"Do you have a way of knowing which customers have never seen you before, or are you relying on memory?"Of course, for first time customers it'll be five dollars....
"No problem; but there aren't many people who sit and talk with that old coot who feeds the duck, you know, so I probably wasn't your best choice of spokesman. But I'll tell people if they'll listen."But for you, today, all I'm really expecting is that you spread the word, and thank you for your courage.
"Tough question. I mean, you need to attract attention, but you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention, if you catch my meaning. You'll have that problem no matter what you do, of course, but since you probably can't open a licensed massage parlor you probably have to work on benches for the present. You'd be better off, of course, if you could win the favor of a few key people who would pay you to come to their homes and recommend your services to their friends, but that takes time, and you're not likely to meet those people on park benches, are you? So it looks like a rough way to start, but the only choice you really have, assuming you don't know some wealthy prospective patron who will get you started."Do you think if I were just in the park every day, for about four hours, at reliably the same spot, that people would come see me?
--M. J. Young
"Well, if the guy at the cheap barbershop happens to be good, then yeah. You'll pay eighteen for a haircut at a stylist, and barbershops are hard to find anymore."
"Yeah, I guess so. I've had my hair cut by the same barber all my life, so I guess I'm spoiled.
" . . . I guess I'll have to find another barber, huh? Now that I'm here, and all."
"Do you have a way of knowing which customers have never seen you before, or are you relying on memory?"
"Well, sure, I figure I'd . . . well, I'd have these, um . . . huh. Good point. Well, I guess I'd go by memory at first, and once I'd seen enough people that I couldn't remember them all, I'd just end the promotion."
You'd be better off, of course, if you could win the favor of a few key people who would pay you to come to their homes and recommend your services to their friends,
"Yeah, maybe, but that's not really the direction I want to go. Pleasure for the people, you know? We all need to loosen up a little, not just the rich folks."
Looking back a bit, today is Thursday, September 6th, the third day after my recent trip to Round Valley State Park.
"Well, I'm here every day anyway - rain or shine - so if anyone asks I'm here most every afternoon between four and six. I'll probably keep giving away free money, maybe through the end of next week; after that I'll probably phase into a money-back guarantee, so if anyone you talk to seems interested, tell 'em sooner's more profitable than later."
I think that probably concludes the business elements of the conversation (though I could be wrong).
"Well, I understand your idea of paying people to try it, but really, don't cheapen it. People are more likely to think something is worthwhile if you put a price on it. In fact, what you probably want to do once you've decided on your intended price is to go with a half-price introductory offer. That way people are paying you something, and feeling like they got a good deal. Word will probably get around."
Not trying to get the last word; I just thought that was something he'd suggest.
What next?
--M. J. Young
Go back into the routine, with the exception that while in the park doing my skateboard/Tur Ki Foo/falling practice I keep an eye out for likely targets (er, customers) to whom I can peddle my service: adult at minimum, age otherwise irrelevant, seated or stationary preferred, must have pockets or some other object which could contain money or a wallet (which would itself presumably contain money).
I'm not offering money to try it out; it's fourteen dollars, with a first-time customer discount of 50% for seven dollars if you buy today.
I'm not planning out my approach - better to do this on the fly, tailor the pitch to the mark - but just as a generic example, I could see myself trying something like:
"Hi, how're you doing?"
Generic response, probably "fine" or "all right" or "pretty good, yourself?" or something equally rote
"Oh, we can do better than that. I'm Scott Horton, I'm an entrepreneur; I've pioneered a revolutionary technique in the field of relaxation and pain relief. Five minutes from now, I could have you feeling better than you have in months, and I guarantee you'd still feel that way tomorrow."
That last sentence might wait, depending on my read of the potential customer, but it's only intended as an example, anyway. I'm confident of my ability to sell this without being creepy or coming across as pushy. I believe in my product, and I'm not desperate for sales. I'm an expert in my field with an answer for anything. I have nothing to hide, nothing to fear, and no competition worth mentioning.
I'll give this a week before reevaluating my strategy unless outcomes are dramatically outside of my expectations.
You pick up one new customer a day for the first five days. Then on the sixth day, you pick up a new customer, and one of your previous customers returns for another shot, and someone arrives who heard about it from a friend.
I make that $63 this week, if I'm doing the math right.
--M. J. Young
Add that to my $36/night at Mel's minus my $40/week contribution to the grocery bill, and I've profited $275 this week in total.
(Out of curiosity, am I more frequently accepting exact change from my customers or making change for them? I only ask because up to now, I've been able to track my exact inventory of bills by denomination. I suppose this new endeavor will inevitably result in my having to abandon that level of accuracy on my inventory sheets. Ah, well.)
An excellent beginning! Of course there are ceiling effects limiting how many new customers I can acquire by stalking the same location at the same hours every day, but there is no cap to word of mouth beyond the population of the nearby areas of the city, and as my customer base shifts to being predominantly returning customers, my per-transaction revenue will increase.
I'll keep this up. No change is necessary yet. If there ever comes a single day in which I perform six treatments, I'll give Mel my two weeks' notice.
Oh, and of course I monitor Alice over the course of this week. I suppose I notice that she doesn't "come down" until the fifth day?
Also, I'll attempt to get feedback from the returning customer. I'm hoping to get an idea of how long this effect lasts before fading. Alice's results could be typical, minimal, superlative, or anything else, and I won't know which without more data points.
I'm tempted to keep skipping time, but I just know that at the end of this week V-me will start doing something to advance one of his other agendas - the psi defenses, maybe, or Alice's magic - so it might be best to hold off until I know what he's doing, which will be next post.
I expect that three out of four people would give you the larger bill and expect change back for it; you can decide whether the full price patron paid with exact change or not and since it's not a number of patrons evenly divisible by four you can decide your exact bills as you like within those approximations.
Since you're watching, you would notice when the effects wear off for Alice.
The customer is the first one you treated after the old man, and thus the one from the first of these five days. She says it wore off just an hour or so ago, and she thought it would be worth doing it again to feel that good. She smiles a bit coquettishly as she says this; she's near forty, but prim and handsome, probably a business woman.
The next five days also produce seven customers, this time two returning and two referrals, but not so many from the park area itself.
--M. J. Young
I can barely believe it's been three months. Fixing that now. I see from above that the reason we're not skipping time by the month* yet (instead of by the week) is that I'm tracking two projects with botch-potential: developing psi defenses by experimentation and teaching Alice magic via a glacially-paced lesson plan.
At some point "this week," I'm want to bring back up with Alice the topic we discussed here, in particular the idea of designing for her a fetish - she mentioned at one point that childhood trips to the mountains have left her with a sense of wonder or of connection to the ineffible, and the idea would be to envision a physical object which would hold similar significance for her and that would thereby ease the task of slipping back into that state of mind (which I have claimed is important for the performance of magic).
At first, I'm just interested in her initial thoughts as to what such an item might be, include, or entail.
___
* in-game, I mean
It might take me a couple posts to get up to speed again, for which I apologize; it's good to have you active again.
Her initial thoughts are that there are a lot of things in the mountains, like rocks and pine needles and birds and trees (well, more of those things than there are in The Big Tomato); but none of them really capture the grandeur or the memory of being there. The other thing she remembers about the mountains, though, is the smell--the fresh air and nature smell that you don't have, maybe can't have, in the city. She doesn't know what can be made of that, but that's the thought.
--M. J. Young
And an excellent thought it is. If we can find something that can capture that scent - something fresh from the scene, perhaps - then the only question becomes how to preserve the scent permanently without ruining it.
(I actually have a few ideas in that regard - I'm hoping that odor preservation can be classed as a Cantrip* type effect, making it a 0th level spell and thus likely available to me given the magical power levels here).
Perhaps we should plan a day trip to mountains, see what inspiration strikes us?
___
* Moving, soiling, coloring, flavoring . . . seems about on par. Permanency makes me uncertain, but there's little harm in trying, right?
On the "cantrip" question, I know what those are in D&D, but I think in Multiverser they're really spells that are highly bonused with very little power. 0@ and @0 magic skills do not tap magical power.
On the other hand, the back of my mind is telling me that Harry has an @1 purify skill that he uses to freshen spoiled food or prevent food from spoiling (might be two skills), and something like that might be what you've got in mind.
"A day trip to the mountains sounds like fun. The Watchungs and Palisades aren't far, but they're not that much like mountains. The Catskills and Ramapos are a bit farther but a bit better, but I think we want to head west to the Poconos if we want something mountain-like and unspoiled. There're probably places like that in the Ramapos, but not anywhere you can get by bus.
"And we'll probably need to go somewhere we can go by bus, and plan to stay overnight and return the next day, which means it has to be when both of us have two days off. Unless you have some other way to get there and back? And won't it cut into your business?"
You can tell she's excited at the idea.
--M. J. Young
"No, the bus is fine with me. I work pretty much every night unless I switch shifts with somebody; they're six-hour shifts, but still. You find out when you've got two days off together and I'll call my boss and see if I can shift some hours around.
"And don't worry about my business. I'll just put the word out that I won't be there for those two days - once I know when we're going, at any rate. If my customer base is growing by word of mouth, word of mouth will have to be good enough for my vacation notice."
On catrips - yes, I'm aware. It's only that V-me doesn't have much to go on in the way of magical theory (particularly what's more complex/powerful than what) besides various incarnations of D&D. It's worked well enough for him so far.
I'm confident that a 3@1 Preserve Food/Drink variant will do what I want. I'm just hoping my in-game justification for trying it and having thought of it is good enough to assuage my player's conscience.
"Let me see--" She pulls a sheet of paper out of her pocketbook. "Hmmm--it looks like this week and next my days are split--Sally is going to be out having her baby, so the week after is going to be hectic, too, what with not knowing when she'll return or how much she can work. So I'm supposed to be off Wednesday and Thursday of that week, but I'd better not plan anything, because I really don't think she'll be back that soon. It looks like--it'll be a month from now." She gives you dates about a month away for two days mid-week. (I know you've been keeping calendars of some sort, so I'll let you sort out when that is rather than dig back through the thread to figure it out myself.)
"Does that work?"
--M. J. Young
"Absolutely. With a month's notice, I can probably move a mountain. Shifting my work schedule in that time should be cake."
That gives us another week of practice and business before I start telling the folks who visit me that I'll be gone on a particular two days next month.
Next post I'll have figured out the dates, and possibly which psionic defense I attempt to develop and how.
Alice seems particularly upbeat over the next few days, apparently looking forward to an overnight outing to the mountains.
--M. J. Young
It's been two weeks since my Thursday, September 6th conversation with Gorton's of Gloucester, making my discussion of the fetish with Alice Thursday, September 20th - which, incidentally, is exactly one month after my most recent round of SAL increases due to practice. Just tossing that detail out for future reference.
By my journal calendar, it's Setting Orange the 32nd of Discord, Year A.
I'm heading out presently, but I'm confident I'll be back before you get to the board. If I'm right, I'll edit this message out when I post again.
(Second post.)
We'll say that the outing will be the seventeenth and eighteenth of October, 2007 (a Wednesday and Thursday), and that after a week passes (so, starting 9/27) I'll start informing my customers of this.
The previous two weeks of business are covered in these two posts, each yielding $63 cash profit; I'm hoping this third weeks sees growth of my customer base.
On Thursday, September 27th, I consider myself ready to develop my next psionic defense. This one will be intense confrontations, where my opponent has already found me and I need stouter protection than Mind Blank provides. Referring to my list, I decide I like the look of Tower of Iron Will.
As I recall this one was expensive to use, which I imagine will translate into 'taxing' or 'tiring' in the real world. I also recall it could cover an area - allies within five feet were also protected. This suggests a sort of projection of psionic power beyond the self - a wall of psionic force actively opposing outside intrusion, preventing attacks from even reaching the mind by intercepting them (with a 'tower of iron will').
This would be easier to test and verify if I had a companion to attack me while I had it up, but I'll attempt to develop the technique all the same. First I will cast my Deflect Notice spells - both of them, long first, then short - with the target activity being the development of the Tower technique. I will not check to see if the spells worked; either they worked or they didn't.
Here's hoping I don't melt my brain.
I'm expecting this to be difficult, tiring, but very effective. If you need anything more from me, I'll be happy to provide it.
I'm looking at a P2@3 Barred Mind, and thinking that at a -10 sit-mod you can extend it to a five foot radius (that is, it will always be -10 to use and always extend to five feet); that is a wall across which any psionic power must exceed the power of the wall to work. (RS creates a threshold: attack rolls not greater than the threshold fail, but those which exceed the threshold are not penalized.) It would not be a protection against non-telepathic psionics as I understand it; if you want something that protects against telekinetics and such, that would be a different skill. If you abandon the area protection you can eliminate the sit-mod penalty. I know I didn't ask a question, but the whole statement should be construed as asking.
You cast the spells.
--M. J. Young
Works for me. It would be really cool if it protected against retrocognitives like Read Person as well, but it seems doubtful that it would work that way unless the particular skill in question was also somehow telepathic.
I wouldn't expect to be able to maintain this and Mind Blank at the same time. I'm leaving that your call.
I'm also expecting, in character, that my own telepathics would not be blocked by this - that is, it's a one-way wall.
Also, is a side effect of the radius that a person within five feet of me would not need to overcome the threshold?
In any case, proceed.
Works for me. It would be really cool if it protected against retrocognitives like Read Person as well, but it seems doubtful that it would work that way unless the particular skill in question was also somehow telepathic.
Agreed: it would protect you from retrocognitive mind reading and empathic skills, but not from scrying of any sort.
I wouldn't expect to be able to maintain this and Mind Blank at the same time. I'm leaving that your call.
I would not have any objection to maintaining both of these at once. It is not as if you have to be thinking rational thoughts to maintain the block. I might penalize one, though, as I consider the block to be a high concentration skill.
I'm also expecting, in character, that my own telepathics would not be blocked by this - that is, it's a one-way wall.
That's interesting and worth discussing. My recollection of Tower of Iron Will (admittedly from a long time ago and rare uses) is that it blocks all telepathics, but that might be wrong--after all, although we rarely had psi combat in my games, it must have been possible to maintain the defense and launch an attack. My vision of the shield would have said it could not be crossed from either direction, and that's what the book suggests--it notes that telepathic links through the shield would be gaps in the armor. I can think of a couple resolutions to the conflict.
- You can use telepathic skills as long as you beat your own threshold.
- You can use telepathic skills without penalty, but to do so lowers the threshold by weakening the wall.
- You can take another -10 penalty on the skill to include that you can use telepathy that would be blocked from others. I'm hesitant about this, because I keep thinking that if you can read minds or open a two-way link you're getting information coming in, which is what you're trying to block otherwise. I would be more inclined to say that at a -10 penalty you can have
outgoing telepathy--project thought, illusion, suggestion, mental attacks--but not incoming. But I don't really want to penalize you -20 for the ability to read minds across your own shield, so I'm swithering in this.Thoughts?
Also, is a side effect of the radius that a person within five feet of me would not need to overcome the threshold?
Yeah, I wondered this, too. You described it much as a bubble, that there is a wall around you that can't be penetrated. I was actually going to make it a 10' radius, but then I realized that that would give a lot more room for people to be inside it, and controlling the radius would be taking control of another variable--although I don't know that a ten point penalty would be necessary for doing that in psionics, I would have to hit you for a couple points for that. But to prevent someone inside the bubble from succeeding it would have to be a field, not a shield, and I'm not unhappy with a field--no particular reason to prefer one model over the other success-wise, since the advantage of a shield is that your friends inside it can communicate with you and the disadvantage is your enemies can, too.
Thoughts?
--M. J. Young