Complicated uses of telekinesis - for combinatorial thaumatology

[nerdofdarkness]

There are some complicated uses of superpowers that might require Compartmentalized Mind or perhaps Extra Attack. I think it depends on whether telekinesis works like a dump truck or like a computer program.

Suppose you have a superhero with telekinesis. Lots of people are throwing paper airplanes at him. For some reason, he wants to grab the paper airplanes out of the air, unfold them, smooth out the sheets of paper, and neatly place the flat sheets of paper in an open drawer. That's three or four actions per airplane.
Suppose he has to deal with one airplane per second.

Perhaps he should use Compartmentalized Mind in order to have three separate actions available per airplane. Perhaps it would be enough to have two extra attacks. Perhaps the GM should allow him to do it without Compartmentalized Mind or extra attacks.
Part of this might depend on the nature of telekinesis. If you have telekinesis, can you use it like a program on a computer? I can open up two terminals on my desktop and use "traceroute" to two different IP addresses simultaneously. Maybe telekinesis works like a computer program. Or maybe telekinesis is like a dump truck. If I load my dump truck with a huge pile of bricks, I can't just "open up another copy" and load it with a cargo of television sets.

The reason I ask this is - I have some weird ideas for a very magic-oriented superhero game, kind of like Ars Magica in the modern world. Instead of "Creo Telekinesis" and "Rego Telekinesis," it would be more like "Spawn a Telekinesis process, then fork it to a "Rego" client and an "Intelligo" client."

Eventually I'll need to combined GURPS Thaumatology and GURPS Powers to make it all work, but right now I am just trying to understand the basics.

Cheers

[Refplace]

Extra Attack wont help here as you need extra concentrate maneuvers so CM.
Buy Reduced Time in it or Independent

[Dwarf99]

There's also a thing in Powers under Control that lets you treat all instances of that something as one aggregate. You should be able to appy it to all the paper airplanes, use 1 instance of CM to open the drawer, and another to place them nicely, flatly, into the drawer.

[munin]

Powers also discusses using Area Effect on Telekinesis to handle multiple objects simultaneously (p. P82). In combat, there are some restrictions, but out of combat, you could just control all the paper airplanes at the same time as long as you're doing the same thing to all of them (grab, unfold, put away, etc.). Powers discusses using AE TK to assemble a machine, which probably implies controlling all the parts at once, fitting them together -- so even opening and closing the drawer might be just part of the "unfold and put away" task so wouldn't need compartmentalized mind/etc.

[nerdofdarkness]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Extra Attack wont help here as you need extra concentrate maneuvers so CM.
Buy Reduced Time in it or Independent

Reduced Time would apply to Telekinesis, I guess.

Independent (in Powers, p. 108) looks very useful for many different superpowers.

Originally Posted by Dwarf99

There's also a thing in Powers under Control that lets you treat all instances of that something as one aggregate. You should be able to appy it to all the paper airplanes, use 1 instance of CM to open the drawer, and another to place them nicely, flatly, into the drawer.

That seems like a useful abstraction. I still need to read through Powers to get the hang of it; I'll make a note to find that aggregation rule.

Originally Posted by munin

Powers also discusses using Area Effect on Telekinesis to handle multiple objects simultaneously (p. P82). In combat, there are some restrictions, but out of combat, you could just control all the paper airplanes at the same time as long as you're doing the same thing to all of them (grab, unfold, put away, etc.). Powers discusses using AE TK to assemble a machine, which probably implies controlling all the parts at once, fitting them together -- so even opening and closing the drawer might be just part of the "unfold and put away" task so wouldn't need compartmentalized mind/etc.

Assembling a machine is a good analog for many other long tasks. After I figure out powers, I'm going to try to make complicated combination actions just like p. 82 mentions.

Thanks!