[transmetahuman]

Originally Posted by Ejidoth

It's worth noting that dropping the modular abilities will make the Hardcore Improvisation option much more difficult.

Using Abilities at Default has a few things you need to keep in mind:

• It has to be a plausible variation of your existing ability. For Sorcerous Empowerment, that's easy--since the modular ability can be any spell, you can swap in any spell. If you don't have a modular ability and only have, say, Telekinesis and Mind Control, though, you have to choose something that's a plausible variation of telekinesis or mind control, so, e.g. Warp is probably just off-limits.
• The penalty is -2 per 25% of the cost of the ability you're substituting from. If your most expensive ability is Modular Abilities, that's simple; that can be anything, so you can always use a proportion of the full point value. If you just have a collection of psi powers, though, improvisation will have to be based on the power you're varying: if you have telekinesis and mind control and you want to do a telekinetic improvisation, you need to use -2 per 25% of the cost of telekinesis, even if you have significantly more points in Mind Control.
• There's an extra -2 penalty if the ability you're improvising is a significantly different 'type' than the one you're basing it on. Once again, with Sorcery this can be ignored because the modular abilities build can be any type of ability. On the other hand, if you want to improv 'Detect Minds' from 'Mind Control', that's enough of a difference in ability type to probably require the extra -2.

I know some people aren't fans of the modular ability thing in Sorcery because it's an expensive ability that doesn't seem to do much, but aside from the low-cost spells it lets sorcerers cast, it's doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes in terms of simplifying the improvisation rules.

Those are all excellent points that I didn't think of. I stand corrected.

I'll instead suggest that Psis should at least make use of the ability to pay for the second most powerful ability at full price, and maybe the third as well, so that they can have two or three abilities operating simultaneously to make up for the lack of Sorcery's fire and forget structure. It'll also give those Compartmentalized Minds something to do besides extra uses of the main slotted ability.