Simple Mental Powers

Some caveats:

• Read this post from me to see where I'm coming from.  Today's post concerns inherited mental powers.
• If you're looking for something more conservative in how it clarifies and reorganizes D&D's Psionics system check out Mr. Campbell's work here.
• This is a portion of an unfinished system.  The other parts I'm working on are a tree-based power selection for learned mental powers and a flavorful but simple means to resolve mental combats.
• I loathe bookkeeping and calculations and have sacrificed options and power potency to avoid it as much as possible.
• This is a draft that I haven't tried in play yet.  Suggestions, as always, are welcome.

Okay, so here, in 4 steps and 2 pages, is a way to offer your players some new toys/tools.  It is much more likely that players will have powers than in the older systems (someone with one exceptional stat has a 1 in 3 chance), but I figure what's the point in having a cool subsystem if no one gets to use it (do you know how many times I rolled for psionics in 1e and failed?!).

I've tried to limit the powers so that even if a whole party gets them they won't be flinging dragons around and flying about like Glitterboys.

I wasn't sure whether the player-empowering choice of abilities or the fun of randomness was the best approach so I tried to have my cake and eat it too.  Players can sacrifice choice for additional power.  This also offers a way to mitigate really crappy power rank rolls.

I tried organizing the powers by how much of an affect they can make in play, and making those most powerful less common, but this order could be easily changed-- moving Hypnosis up, for example.

Of course, you could tinker with everything here-- like making the units of weight 100s of coins rather than stones-- I think the main innovation I'm trying, is to avoid power point tracking by using the more granular session, game day, hour divisions inspired by 4e's encounter powers.

The briefness of the power descriptions will require some thought from each DM, but I'm hoping this is just enough to make a system while stepping out of the way to let you decide how things run in your game.

Update: Whoops, I made a copy paste error, I originally intended the telekinesis power to allow for moving 1 stone per power rank, which is 1/10 the power listed in the first pdf I posted.  So, if you saw that someone with TK could move half-ton boulders and thought what is he talking about "I tried to limit powers," umm, that's why.

Of course you can make it whatever scale you want but I would suggest something that is easy to remember for your players.

10 Toxins

An attempt at interesting Poison tools for PCs. No saves for the victims for these effects.  But to make them less potion-like and more poison-like:

Dosage
Player administering the toxin has to guess the victim's current hit point total -3.
If the guess is actually HP-6 or lower, the toxin has no effect.
If the guess is exact, -1, or -2 above the actual HP total, the toxin is too strong and victim must save or die.

1. Amber or White honey.  Immiscible, heavy liquid that will sink beneath other liquids in a container.  Erases memory of the hour prior to drinking.

2. Devil's Breath.  Fine powder.  When inhaled by victim they become completely susceptible to suggestions for 1 hour. (see folkloric view of scopolamine).

3. Hush.  An intravenous toxin.  Causes loss of speech in victim for 1 hour.

4. Skulk, sometimes also known as Hush.  Coin-sized tablet will effervesce to produce 10 cubic feet of odorless, colorless gas.  Inhalation causes deafness for 1 hour.

5. The Drunkard in the Morning.  Small crystals that resemble salt.  Ingestion will do nothing until a loud noise-- like a gong or weapons clashing in combat- triggers the toxin, then the victim will sleep for 1 hour.

6. Still or Bone Butter.  Thick, bitter paste.  When ingested, the victim will for all intents and purposes be dead.  In 1 hour they will revive.

7. The Bickering Couple or Dark Twins.  Two clear contact toxins brushed onto objects.  Touching only one of the pair does nothing, touching both results in aggravated paranoia for 1 hour.

8. Seep or Red Aunt.  Usually placed on a blade, it will prevent wounds from fully closing.  A wound will seep blood for a week.  Causes no additional harm to the victim but makes secret attackers easier to track or identify later.

9. Iocaine.  As normal poison, but a person that manages to ingest the proper dosage for 5 sessions of play will become permanently immune to it.

10. St Petruccio's Spit.  Usually placed on a blade, it prevents a victim from dying from a mortal wound delivered by that blade.  They will remain lucid and a feel no pain for 1 hour, then expire normally.

3 Ways to Forsee III

The Future as Web (aka the Grand Destiny)
This view of the future isn't really a third model, but a complication of one of the other two.  It's just the idea that events have more than one cause and to change the future can be a complex undertaking.  Avoiding a negative future is more difficult than just assassinating one person.  Ensuring a good future equally involves chains of smaller events that have to happen or be avoided.

Trapped in History
I think his view of the future has become popularized, oddly enough, by seeing the future from the past.  In other words, time travel stories.  A character travels back in time and the problem becomes, not predicting the future, but how the choices that character makes interact with a future we already know.

In that sense Future as Web is most commonly related to a Future as Fate.  The events in the time traveler's future are inescapable because, well, that's our history.  But the Future as web isn't about that so much as a means used to prevent any change from happening.  Oh, you think you can stop WWII from happening just by killing Hitler?  Well, you actually killed a body double who was conspiring to replace Hitler.  Or, you miss your shot and make Hitler more paranoid and dedicated to his war aims.  If the Future as Web is used with the model of the future being fated, the layers of causes act as a buffer to any change to the future that's already known.

Alternate Histories = Future as Possible Paths
There are some examples of the opposite, though, basically any story where history as we know it is malleable.  This is frequently seen in time travel stories where something has been screwed up by the traveler and they need to make things right so the future happens as expected.  A familiar example is Marty McFly trying to get his parents to fall in love.  This is the Future as Possible Paths, because we see, even when Marty succeeds, he returns to a different present.  Again, Future as a Web is not in reference that he could change the future but the idea of the interconnectedness of all the causes that result in what will become the future.  It isn't as easy as just getting his parents in the same room, he has to deal with Biff, the principal, and the time crunch of scheduled events.

The Future that's Bigger than You
Because Future as Web is about something harder to change with many interconnected causes , it's usually about something bigger than any one person.  It is a kind of Grand Destiny.  Wars, the succession of Kings, great plagues, these are foretold.  To avoid destiny takes more than a single act.  The seer will still be affected by future events but this future isn't their personal fate (even with Marty, there's also the existence of his siblings hanging in the balance).  Future as a Web is less "how do I prevent the halfing from stealing my purse" and more "how do we ensure the Empress Dowager is dethroned?"

Mechanics
I think these Grand Destinies can come into play either as adventure hook prophecies that players hear, or when players desire to make a big change in the world and go to someone with sight of the future to give them guidance on how to achieve it.

Rather than a table here to generate particular Grand Destinies, I'll just say they should be things that happen in a sandbox but not require players to interact with them.  My post here looks at some possible examples and one way of handling them, escalating things over time if players don't get involved.  Contrary to my advice in the Future as a Possible Paths post, because these destinies are harder to avoid, I don't think they should be related so closely to things the PCs own or people they know.  That route leads to frustrating railroading.

Now, how you model predictions of these magnitudes depends on which of the two views of history you are using.

If Future is Fate, I think you can choose a destiny and several smaller trigger fortunes.  Then, use Zak's method of allowing players to say when a foretold event happens except that those smaller fortunes either a) have to happen in a particular order, or b) need to happen simultaneously.

Example:  The Empress Dowager will lose her throne when a feast is prepared but not eaten, a rope snaps as music plays, a crown rolls across a stone floor.

The PCs realize the heir apparent will be hung for the pleasure of the Empress and her court and wish to prevent it for their own reasons.  They interrupt the execution/banquet, manage to snap the noose, and roll the hereditary Great Crown they've recovered across the floor for all to see.

The courtiers and generals present are shocked and pivot to support the heir.

Here, the predictions become a kind of key to the prophecy; if players can arrange a situation where they all happen, then the prophecy comes true.

If the Future is Possible Paths, it becomes trickier (for the DM at least).  Because prophecies are just one possibility, players can just work against them to make them not happen.  There isn't the sense of "stickiness" or difficulty in working against destiny.  Here's an idea for a way to allow players to do what they want and still give that sense of the complexity of changing what is destined:

Usually players will be trying to prevent foretold events, because otherwise they could just stand back and let them happen.  For a particular event of great importance that players want to stop, come up with 4 smaller events or preconditions that will affect its likelihood.  Let these be discoverable by players-- wise npcs advise them, they find them in books, they see them in dreams.  When it comes time to see if players can prevent the destined event roll 1d6, 6 = yes.  Modify the roll by +1 for each of the smaller events that PCs managed to make happen.  I think I would make this transparent to players, to give them a sense that they are up against that die roll and destiny itself.  But allow players to come up with additional factors that would result in modifiers.

Example:  Prophecies say the Empress Dowager will rule for a 1000 years.

PCs learn that getting her generals against her will make a difference (+1), they learn that the Great Crown that true Imperials wear has been missing (+1).  They learn the heir apparent is secretly held captive in a tower (+1).  Coming up is an important political/religious ritual where the Imperial power is reaffirmed (+1).

They speak with the generals, even performing some tasks for them to win them over. They rescue the heir apparent and recover the crown. They plan to present him to the court on the ritual day. But, worried this won't be enough to shake the 1000 year reign, they decide to search for evidence of the unlawful way the Empress Dowager seized the throne and present it to all as a magical projection (+1).

That is enough, the heir apparent takes the throne. The prophecy has been avoided.

To liven it up, agents of the parties desiring the prophesied outcomes could actively work against the PCs-- the cultists wishing the World Plague to occur, the rebels desiring the Elf-Dwarf War.  If this works as I envision it, any time Players chafe at a grand prophecy could result in a whole mini-campaign of them trying to overturn it.

My Origin Story

Zak asked on G+ for folks to share their degrees/areas of interest.  In thinking about it, I doubt mine would tell you much about me.  Well, maybe as a person, what I was most curious to learn-- but not so much as a D&D blogger, why I'm so interested in simplifying and systematizing. So here's the real scoop.

I come from Okies.  On both sides.  Folks that learned to keep everything because if it isn't valuable now it might be later.  My father's parents had a wrecking yard.  I grew up playing on piles of radiators and broken batteries.  My aunt stored old clothes in broken down cars.  I got to see what ruined in the weather, what lasted-- the plastic bits and glass and brass.

In a world like that I guess you either give yourself up to chaos or your start trying to process it all.  You learn to categorize.  You learn to sift.  Someone sees a pile of trash, you see the radiators as scrap brass and the batteries as scrap lead.  Someone sees a garage full of junk, you learn to save the knick-kacks from occupied Japan as well as the family letters and photos: the ephemeral.

So when I see 1e's Psionics, I see a pile, yes, but there's some cool stuff in there-- I found a set of Russian text books in a junked car once, a lighter from the Berlin Olympics in an old shed-- and I want to pull that pile apart and organize it.

When I see all the moving parts a DM needs to be able to handle-- the potions, the rings, the spells-- I want to isolate them, one-by-one, and master each category.  I recognize that things can exist in multiple categories at once, and that sometimes all you get from digging around is something smelly on your hands and a tear in your Levis.  But you have to try.

Sometimes I see other folks talking about their games and it seems like they are sitting in lawn chairs propped up on big piles of stuff.  A roll of stiff garden hose under one foot, a shoe box of tattered romances under another.  They're smiling and having fun.  It stresses me out and puzzles me.  I want to say "Hold on, we can make this easier on everyone.  Get up from your chair and I'll sort through this for you."

And as you become familiar with the categories of things you also become a lover of the hard to find.  Someone says they have a way to model fatigue without tracking points, someone offers a way to make travelling through the abstract wilderness come alive, you say "Could you put that aside for me?  I'm driving right over with my checkbook."

So reading blogs becomes like cruising garage sales; you see the same baby clothes, the same old particle board furniture and you wonder why you're getting sun burned for this.  Then you'll see an old nail puller for a dollar or a Moon Knight comic peeking from a basket of coloring books and it gets you excited all over again and you want to tell someone and you want to hurry to the next pile to dig through.

Toy Poisons

I wrote a while back that for poisons to interest me they would need to be cool tools for players rather than just doing varying amounts of damage or having varying chances of lethality.  The Dee flick's use of a triggered poison got me interested in actually trying to come up with some.

So, what would make poisons interesting to you as a player?


Here are some initial ideas from me:

• sneaky administering-- so gases, contact poisons that can be slathered on chairs, and liquids of various densities
• precise control-- some interesting triggers, like light, heat, loud noises, as well as antidotes for most everything
• variety of effects-- make someone mute, blind, appear dead-- so, yeah, more toxins than poisons

I'm realizing now that there seem to be two main ways they might come into play 1) secretly to help you in heists or negotiating with factions, and 2) as straight up combat enhancers on blades and arrows.

Anyway, back to you.  You're in my game wandering around the bazaar, what kind of toxin do you want available?