Thomas Sowell is a serious thinker of the modern age. I've recently read his The Einstein Syndrome which is not his usual sort of book as he is an economist.
It describes highly analytical, very intelligent, but late-talking children like Einstein was in his youth.
The theory is that gray matter resources got diverted from regular patterns,a nd additional resources were made available to the part of the brain that does analysis.
Its interesting that asthma and allergies are far more common among highly intelligent children than normal children. The theory suggests that some of the mental resources that would go to fine-tuning the autonomic nervous system instead went toward analysis.
Also, that the resources used verbally at an early time went to analysis with those with the Einstein Syndrome catching up later.
So, while interesting, what does this have to do with Multiverser and psionics? Well the beginning level psionicist is, in one view, using sections of his brain, that he hasn't used before. This may impinge on more established sections of the brain. This may in old movie fashion make neccessary the bulging skull of the mentalist.
That requires some more thought as it depends on what theory of psionics you're using.
More simply, it may be that psionic botches should include things like
1. Lose language understanding
2. Allergic hypersensitivity to X
3. Social awkwardness as 'nerdification' due to collapse of Charisma
4. Analytic skill difficulty as 'all mental challenges of simple level automatically become difficult challenges, and automatic successes become simple challenges.'
I'm playing with this in my Worldwalker novel with my hero Jackson Wellington. He's developed a form of Lucid Dreaming/Eidentic Memory, and he's suffered a migraine attack from a botch.
eric
If you include anything like this, keep in mind Multiverser's antipathy toward crippling effects; at the very least, the character should have some chance to resist something as drastic as a decrease in Charisma or language ability, or else it should be temporary (like Brain Burn).
Actually, it strikes me that these are best suited as botch results for those skills which target the character's own psionic ability - psionic teaching attempts, skills which invest the character with psionic power, and so on. They seem like good candidates for "sleeper botches," the kind that seem like simple failures at first but which get you bad in the end, and since you got the idea from contemplation of what training in psionics might produce in the way of negative consequences, it seems more appropriate to associated them with metapsionics than with, say, telekinesis or clairvoyance.
Edited to add: when I arrived at the forum, the Freshness of this thread was "0 seconds." How freaky is that?
What about things like Hyper-senses? You're trying to do something psionic, and the botch is suddenly your sense of smell or hearing goes through the roof? Or perhaps you lose a sense, and the other 4 become hyper? Temporarily go blind, and then have DareDevil's radar hearing? I could imagine quite a few fun times that could be had with something like that.
I'd certainly agree these would be temporary.
There are different theories of what should be associated with what skills in a botch, but this theory has no real association. The association would be 'what's next to the overextended area of the brain?'. So if you as a GM decided the clairvoyant center of the brain was next to the taste differentiation center of the brain then a CV botch yields a loss of taste and smell. Its a physical/real estate theory of psi-botches. There are other useful theories--I'd like to see an article which discussed each theory of psi powers, and the associated botches.
John, thats more the model of idea related. Which is a good theory--my character got versed out in The Valley when his pyrokinesis melting sand into glass to make a map backfired, and he became a torch.
I was giving it some thought, and I think there would be a good way to put your new botch table to good use. I have never refereed a Multiverser game (or any RPG for that matter) and my time playing Multiverser online is about the only RPG experience that I have. If I were running someone that was new to RPGs, I would use non-lethal botches for that person. Painful perhaps, but non-lethal. I mean what fun is it if you die in a botch after only being in the world for 10 seconds? Kind of like when you were a kid playing a video game for the first time. You put it on the easy level, until you got a feel for how the controls worked. For an inexperienced RPG player, I would use only non-lethal botches. Like your idea of allergies, my idea of hyper-senses, until the person got an idea of what they were doing. I mean really, seriously, how many people would really want to use psionics or magic if there was a risk of dying every single time you used it? In real-life, verser or not, if there was a risk of dying for using psionics, I would use it rarely if ever. I think most people would probably take that stance. If the worst consequence was a severe headache or a bad allergy that lasted for a few hours or days, I'd probably be more savvy on the idea.
A clever idea, but I have to disagree as a general rule. However, it may be an occasional option.
I say occasional because one of the best things I did to an annoying player was kill him twice in less than ten minutes of play. It turned him into a wonderful player. This is Captain Chris, the energy sword wielding charming guy who can in an instant become a killer.
I will also note that most psi botches are not lethal. Even moi, who is notoriously lethal and bloodthirsty as a GM, might well have handed out more non-lethal botches than lethal ones.
Brain burns are VERY common.
Myself,I prefer switching minds with rabbits. I think that may be why MJ gave away that rabbit--he got tired of switching with its mind.
I did not give away the rabbit. He left me.
Hypersensitivity of senses is a very common botch in connection with clairsentient skills. To some degree, that aspect of the way of defining botches is very like this "real estate" approach, but that it assumes that if you're doing clairsentience you're using sentience areas, while telekinesis is using motor skills areas, and so on. The idea that there might be damage to a "random" area adjacent to the area in use is appealing, but that I'm bound to run into someone who can tell me why this ability is in the hypothalmus and that one in the cerebral cortex and the two are so far removed from each other that they could not possibly be affected that way, or something like that. In other words, if no one knows otherwise the idea works, but as soon as someone can claim that those "adjacent areas" cannot possibly be adjacent, I've got an argument I can't really win.
I think the charisma and reasoning abilities are already covered under neural breakdown. Call it the luck of the dice, but I think I list neural breakdown every time I list brain burn, and I roll brain burn far more often. I even roll psionic shock wave more frequently than neural breakdown (which also makes all those same lists). That suits me fine, because I really don't like handing out neural breakdown outcomes, and they're hard to run until they're resolved.
Good ideas, though.
--M. J. Young
Well, you could just say that it attacks a random area of the brain. It wouldn't have to be adjacent or even close to the area you were using. I mean if ANYTHING is truly possible, then that is as well. You could be refereeing a brain surgeon that knows exactly what cells of the brain are being used, but simply making it totally random, not even he could argue against you.