Technical question about alternate abilities and compartmentalized mind

[BillNormal]

I'm a psychokineticist (4e). I have 13 levels of TK, innate attacks, DR, & enhanced move in there. I took compartmentalized mind and extra attack to use TK effectively twice a round. My GM says I can only use the same use of my psychokinetics twice, i.e. two innate attacks, OR concentrate on DR twice OR enhance my move, but I can't mix and match them. This seems utterly rediculous to me. I can't maintain my force field while shooting TK pebbles, because both are from the same alternate ability 'bundle'. It's so debilitatingly removed from the character concept that it becomes not really worth paying.
Is my GM wrong, or do I have to go about paying for that... differently... ? I can't conceive paying for multiple 'bundles', because all of these advantages are from the same source... I mean I thought compartmentalized mind let's me read poetry and write a scientific dissertation at the same time... Just... If there not bundled in an alternate ability?

[Refplace]

Your GM is not wrong.
The reason for that massive price discount is because only one of the abilities is available at a time. Compartmentalized Mind should not allow you to ignore the penalty you get in return for the discount.

[Aldric]

Just to be absolutely clear.
You bought all those skills payin full price for the most expensive one and 1/5 price for all the others, as it works for Alternate Abilities?
If that's the case, you can only use one of those each round.
It's generally a bad idea to have attacks and defenses as alternate abilities since you will want to use them at the same time.
It's also not how Alternate Abilities are meant to be used, but that's a different issue.

[Mathulhu]

How is the concept rendered unplayable?

If the inability to have two Powers active at the same time is the problem then that can be solved by buying the two most expensive Powers at full price and the others as Alternate Abilities. Fore example if you have Powers A, B, C, D and E then if you buy A and B at full price you can use any two from the list at the same time.

If the problem is that the character can't keep up with people using gear then the solution is to ask your GM is you can get equipment that can augment your abilities to the same level as the gear users.
I usual encourage players to only buy Powers so that they are equivalent to hold-out weapons and then offer methods to augment them beyond that. The idea is to mimic that the gun bunny can get a hold out pistol most places but will want to acquire a rifle for serious encounters.

[GasMan]

Well, look at it this way, perhaps.
If one of the abilities gets disabled, all the others would be disabled, too.

But it's a compartmentalized mind, so if you want them to still work, then they would have to their own separate things, which they are not, since you didn't buy them separately.

You could do something else while using one of your abilities, though.

As for poetry and dissertations, well I guess that would be delegated to skills, even if they are related.

Read poetry and read short story is both derived from reading, which is from "you" (which compartmentalized mind is, they're separate but 'you') so if you end up being unable to read then you'd be unable to read poetry and short stories.

Of course skills don't have, to my (admittedly feeble) knowledge the same rules as alternative abilities or attacks, so yeah, gotta go with the rules for AAs, which are "impossible to use at the same time" and "cannot be linked" and intrinsically are connected since they all fail if one fails.

Your GM can fiddle with this, though, I guess, the rules aren't set in stone, after all, but if y'all are going by them then it looks kinda grim for your situation.
Edit:
There is a "complete separation" for the mind with their own abilities, but it seems to be only if something else takes control of one of your minds.

So you have a point, but as per the game rules, it's just "how it is" or something.

[Aldric]

Originally Posted by Mathulhu

How is the concept rendered unplayable?

If the inability to have two Powers active at the same time is the problem then that can be solved by buying the two most expensive Powers at full price and the others as Alternate Abilities. Fore example if you have Powers A, B, C, D and E then if you buy A and B at full price you can use any two from the list at the same time.
.

As far as I know, that's an option for Sorcery, it would work pretty much the same for TK abilities, but I wouldn't assumed it worked that way w/o asking my GM

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Aldric

As far as I know, that's an option for Sorcery, it would work pretty much the same for TK abilities, but I wouldn't assumed it worked that way w/o asking my GM

Its a pretty standard methodology recommended in multiple places. Its also in Power-Ups limitations I believe.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Its also in Power-Ups limitations I believe.

Yes. (PU8 p8, part of the "Alternative Abilities" section.)

I want to say that rule migrated from a Krommpost to first official publication in Sorcery. But the date on my PU8 PDF is 2014, and Sorcery 2015. So Sorcery may just be the first system to put it to heavy use and draw our attention to that option.

Compartmentalized Mind buys you the ability to mentally coordinate doing two different things at once. But that supposes there are actually two different things you could do.

The "baseline" version for abilities is that you buy them all separately. As others have said, the main point of AA is exactly that you _can't_ do more than one of that set at a time. Similarly, you can't Link two abilities in your AA set to have them both activate together, the way you can if they're not in the same AA group. The abilities can't both exist together at the same time, so Link makes no sense.

If you want a model, imagine a WW II rifle grenadier. The rifle fires bullets. Or you can stick a special cup on the end, put a rifle grenade in it, load a grenade-launching propellant cartridge, and fire a grenade. But no matter how fast you can think, you can't fire both a regular bullet and a grenade at the same time. The weapon is configured one way or the other. To do two things at once, you need both the mental capacity and both weapons available.

The generalized solution to have N abilities active is to pay for the N most expensive, with the others at 1/5th price. That's still cheaper than just buying all the abilities at full price so that there's no interrelationship between them. (In this case, you presumably could pay to Link N abilities together to activate them all at once, if that somehow made sense for the concept.)

It's also possible to have more than one AA group. Someone might, for instance, divide up their long list of "because TK" abilities* into, say, the three categories of attack, defense, and movement, and buy three AA groups. Then they could have exactly one attack power, exactly one defense power, and exactly one movement power active. This build pretty much disappeared when the "N of M abilities" rule came along, because it's more complicated and you're still paying full price for three abilities (the top one in each category). On the other hand, that's not quite exactly the same thing as the three most expensive abilities in all three sets. Three AA groups might come out a little cheaper. It'll certainly come out to be a little less flexible than a 3-of-all build. But it's a possibility which might fit some cases. (Say, three magic items or alien artifacts, each with some set of abilities, but independently configured, like Larry Niven's "The Soft Weapon".)

--
* An appendix for the "Wild Cards" supers books basically handwaved all superpowers as some subconscious application of "psi" -- kind of like the way the X-Men are all "mutants", because that's somehow more logical and scientific and well-grounded than just saying "super".

"Telekinesis" is another popular handwave stretched to cover all sorts of things other than moving objects by will alone, particularly when the creators start claiming microscopic and sub-atomic manipulation of little bits of objects. It's as good of fluff text as anything else -- but that breadth not all covered by that one TK Advantage in Basic. Buy the effects, not the name.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by FAQ 3.2.30

If I have Compartmentalized Mind X, does it effectively give me another X instances of my (mental) abilities? Specifically, can I use Telekinesis (TK) at full lifting capacity once with my main mind, then X times (one per extra mind)?
Yes! Otherwise there's no point in buying CM at its current price. Compare it to Duplication. If the answer was 'no,' which would you buy, CM or Duplication, despite their prices?

Here's a reference.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Here's a reference.

Uh... Vicky, that doesn't exactly answer the question being asked.

Yes, he can grab two different things with his TK hands (or one thing and apply "double" the ST), if he has TK Grab as his active power... but he can't Grab with TK and activate his Alternate Ability of DR (Forcefield) at the same time... which was the question asked.


[EDIT]
Right... this is a case of warring Editors and biased readings (on our parts):

Originally Posted by PK

Part of the discount of an AA is that you can only use one mode of it at a time. Period. Compartmentalized Mind does not change that. (It's worth noting that Altered Time Rate does, because your ATR turns are consecutive, not concurrent.)

So if you have Pyrokinesis 3 and TK Grab 4 as AAs, plus CM 1, you can do one of the following:

1) Burn two people (or one person twice).
2) Lift two things with BL 3.2 (or combine your BLs to 6.4 to lift one heavier thing).
3) Do something non-psi while burning one person.
4) Do something non-psi while lifting something (with BL 3.2).

(It's worth noting that we've let a few things slip by that didn't follow this rule, but it is the correct rule. Where possible, we've errata'd or clarified them.)

If you want to be able to use more than one "slot" of your AA at once, see GURPS Power-Ups 8: Limitations for the full expanded AA rules. (Short version: Pay full price for the most expensive X abilities and then 1/5 cost for the rest, and you can have X abilities available or "on" at once.) If you wanted a character with CM whose minds only had access to different abilities, use the rules I just gave you to ensure that you have access to enough of them, and then limit CM with "Accessibility, Cannot use multiple 'copies' of the same AA ability" (-10%).

In this case PK explicitly rules opposite of Kromm's "it's basically mentally Duplication" ruling.

For my money, on this issue, I've always agreed with PK.
[/EDIT]