Psionics in 4th Ed: I'm not getting it...

[Archangel Beth]

*nod* Pee Kitty did a pretty darn good job of adapting the "feel" of 3e Psi to the newer rules of 4e. My suggestion is: get GURPS Psionic Powers if you haven't already ( http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG37-0132 ). Go to Chapter 3. (Not 1, not 2, but 3. Go back to the other chapters later, but since you're going from 3ePsi to this, the other chapters may well be more confusing if you start there. Flipping through Chapter 3 should get you feeling comfortable enough to take in the stuff from the prior chapters, betcha.)

Basically, there are now two ways to represent what used to be flat Power from 3e.

1) Talent. If you have the Talent for that Psi Power grouping (telepathy, telekinesis, electrokinesis, anti-psi, etc.) then it's pretty much equivalent to buying 3e's Power 1 with no skill, and the presumption that it's latent. As you gain points and/or the excuse to spend them on psi powers, you buy the actual advantages. It also grants the normal bonus of being a talent, when you do buy the skill.

(E.g., Jane buys Talent 1 for Astral Projection powers, for 5 points. She's a psi! She doesn't need to buy any of the advantages listed there, yet, and that's a good thing, because she's in a "start with 25 points" game with a crazy GM. O:> Later, when she gets more points, she can pick up something else and she'll have a +1 to skill when she finally buys skill in her powers.)

2) Just buy the advantage! While most powers no longer have a flat cost-per-level, there are usually at least a few levels and you can just take which one gives you the power level you want. If you have no skill, this is also pretty much the same as Power X, Skill 0 from 3e.

Ignore the Statistics part. It's for looking under the hood.

(E.g. Joan is in that same crazy 25-point psi game. She buys the first level of Astral Sight, for 6 points. It's an Astral Projection advantage, so she's a psi, too, and can pick up more, later. She doesn't get +1 to any skill she picks up, though, unless she buys Talent later.

Meanwhile, James bats his eyes at the GM and just buys a Perk of Near-Death Projector. The GM figures this counts as a Psionic Power for the power-group, so James is a psi also! He doesn't even need skill! Just to be nearly dead... But he can use that as his excuse to buy more Astral Projection stuff in the future, same as Jane and Joan.)

Skill is bought normally, IQ/Hard. Add the level of your talent to IQ.

[Double-check what it means by "optional" such as in Astral Amor. (I think it means that you can toggle it on and off, and have to have at least some skill to figure out how to turn it on. That's how I'd play it, anyway; Pee Kitty, if that's not what you meant, it needs errata! I can't find anything pertaining to that usage by searching on "optional." O:> )]



Unless I'm totally blanking, the assumption in 4e is that if you have any power from the power-grouping, you have a chance to buy the rest later -- see Joan and James. If you would rather go with something closer to 3e's "figure out if you're a one-trick-pony or if you can do it all within your power-group," use Talent to be the placeholder version for "I can have it all, later" and buy individual powers at their minimum level for the "can only do this one thing" option. At low levels, depending on the power, this can be more expensive for latent psi, so you might want to assign a weaker Talent that only applies to a given power/skill combo, but that's getting into customization and complexity. Suffice it to say, it wouldn't take much to get something that looks a lot like the old 3e system -- though the point costs will be more in line with non-psis doing much the same thing.

...does that help?