Not yet started running Traveller and I was wondering if psionics can break plots to any great degree, eg. Telepathy in a murder mystery, etc. The Companion pre-ed option Psionic Community pretty much allows any player to roll up a psionic so I'd just like to be prepared for any potential game breakers!
Is psionics a plot breaker or OP?
- Thread starter mb345345
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Reisender
Cosmic Mongoose
Just because it is written somewhere does not mean a referee has to allow it.
And yes, Psionics is a game changer. But keep in mind if the PCs can have so can the NPCs.
Psionics as written are pretty weaksauce. They are not going to break your plots if you are aware of what that PC can do. It isn't any different than accounting for the fact that one of your PCs has really good social skills or whatever unique capability. You are not adding Jedi to your game (at least not without reworking the rules)
I have a character in my campaign with Telepathy and Teleportation. By far, the most significant impact they make is with Life detection as a form of recon. Read Surface thoughts and Telempathy are okay, but kind of expensive. I generally have them use it as a Task Chain with whatever social or investigative skill they or a partner are using, because they are only getting what the person is thinking about, so skilled questioning is important in bringing that out.
Suggestion and Probe can be problematic in theory. But they are not easy to use (12+ rolls with the effect level mattering a lot). And they are very short range. Suggestion is a bit better than Persuasion skill, but the higher base difficulty offsets that a lot. The guy's gonna have to be pretty hostile to your idea for a 12+ PSI roll to be the better option than the Persuasion (SOC) or bribery or whatever else to get the job done. Probe is very short range (less than 5 meters) and it takes 1d6 minutes. The easiest way to deal with it if your character is good enough to reliably do it is just assume that's one of the ways they can get the clues in your mystery.
Assault is ridiculously terrible. 14+ and 8 PSI to KO someone instead of thumping them with a shock stick.
Other than Teleportation, which has a lot of restrictions, all the PSI abilities are just doing things that other characters can do with technology. Micro drone spies or hacked cameras instead of clairsentience. Remote ops instead of telekinesis. Drugs and augments instead of Awareness.
If you don't like the idea of psionics, don't use them. But if you and your players think its cool, then run with it. Design your adventures around the fact that pull a "These are not the droids you are looking for" move off sometimes. Let them be cool. Don't end the mystery with "It was Colonel Mustard!". Make the actual problem be "Oh no!, it was Colonel Mustard. And he's in charge of the gendarmes. If he finds out we know it was him, what are we going to do?!?"
I have a character in my campaign with Telepathy and Teleportation. By far, the most significant impact they make is with Life detection as a form of recon. Read Surface thoughts and Telempathy are okay, but kind of expensive. I generally have them use it as a Task Chain with whatever social or investigative skill they or a partner are using, because they are only getting what the person is thinking about, so skilled questioning is important in bringing that out.
Suggestion and Probe can be problematic in theory. But they are not easy to use (12+ rolls with the effect level mattering a lot). And they are very short range. Suggestion is a bit better than Persuasion skill, but the higher base difficulty offsets that a lot. The guy's gonna have to be pretty hostile to your idea for a 12+ PSI roll to be the better option than the Persuasion (SOC) or bribery or whatever else to get the job done. Probe is very short range (less than 5 meters) and it takes 1d6 minutes. The easiest way to deal with it if your character is good enough to reliably do it is just assume that's one of the ways they can get the clues in your mystery.
Assault is ridiculously terrible. 14+ and 8 PSI to KO someone instead of thumping them with a shock stick.
Other than Teleportation, which has a lot of restrictions, all the PSI abilities are just doing things that other characters can do with technology. Micro drone spies or hacked cameras instead of clairsentience. Remote ops instead of telekinesis. Drugs and augments instead of Awareness.
If you don't like the idea of psionics, don't use them. But if you and your players think its cool, then run with it. Design your adventures around the fact that pull a "These are not the droids you are looking for" move off sometimes. Let them be cool. Don't end the mystery with "It was Colonel Mustard!". Make the actual problem be "Oh no!, it was Colonel Mustard. And he's in charge of the gendarmes. If he finds out we know it was him, what are we going to do?!?"
Pretty much this.
I used to avoid psionic PCs in my games but in the two campaigns I run there have been psionic PCs (one player request, one a plot device). It has not been a problem in either game - as noted, it's not as powerful as it looks at first blush.
alex_greene
Guest
A FGHP-16 is a game changer. A disintegrator pistol is a gamechanger. Recon-5 and Streetwise-5 are game changers.
Of course psionics is a game changer. It's an advantage your character has that none of the other characters would have. And yes, feel free to use it in a murder mystery to magically work out who the killer is like Columbo.
Here's a hint. The best referee is the one who listens to the players, and lets their plan succeed even if it's nothing like the way the referee wants the story to go.
Dave: "OOC, it's Mr Tamm the museum curator, because he's in the closet, and Harold, the victim, has been blackmailing Victor for ages, and tonight he was about to out Victor Tamm and his lover Michael Frederick, and he didn't want Michael's homophobic boss to fire him. Tamm stabbed him."
Me, as ref: *checks notes - it was Lady Herringford, Harold's wife, because she wanted to claim two million creds on his life insurance, and she poisoned him* " ... Shiiiii ... Dave, I don't know how you do it. You got him bang to rights again. Was it the cigarette lighter that VIctor was holding in his left hand, because the stab wound could only have been caused by a lefthander?"
alex_greene
Guest
Every Traveller is a game changer, by their very existence. Some have skills above and beyond the norm - refs should cap NPC skills at 3, tops, and it's the Travellers' 3, 4, and 5+ skills that land them the Patrons and the juicy contracts - and telepaths have their psi skills, and even Telepathy 1 should always be enough to land the big money Patron contracts.
Psionics strikes me as the equivalent of magic in Unknown Armies - tech is better and more reliable, but psionics’ discreetness and unexpectedness can make up for that. I had an npc in my game comment that the Imperium’s fear of Psionics is way overblown - even the most powerful practitioners have hard limits on what they can accomplish.
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
I included a Seidr in my Sword Worlds campaign as an NPC confidant to one of the main investigators. (Psionic Warrior path)
She's also a good pilot. So, they tend to want to keep her on the ship. And consequently leave her behind when she could be giving insight to their investigations. Only one person knows for certain she is psionic (she sometimes talks to him from behind sealed bulkheads or from inside the ship when he is just outside), and he seems to forget about it.
Recently, some of their NPCs got kidnapped. I made them play the kidnapped NPCs for two games, until they escaped the planet, three days after the main ship arrives searching for them. They escaped on a ship that was bringing in Psionic bugs (Medium size creatures) for study at a Sword World uni. Their psion is not going to be happy if she finds out about it. Less so since the NPCs didn't copy the computer logs and are planning to sell the ship as salvage.
She's also a good pilot. So, they tend to want to keep her on the ship. And consequently leave her behind when she could be giving insight to their investigations. Only one person knows for certain she is psionic (she sometimes talks to him from behind sealed bulkheads or from inside the ship when he is just outside), and he seems to forget about it.
Recently, some of their NPCs got kidnapped. I made them play the kidnapped NPCs for two games, until they escaped the planet, three days after the main ship arrives searching for them. They escaped on a ship that was bringing in Psionic bugs (Medium size creatures) for study at a Sword World uni. Their psion is not going to be happy if she finds out about it. Less so since the NPCs didn't copy the computer logs and are planning to sell the ship as salvage.
I don't think they're a game breaker. I've also never run a literal murder mystery in Traveller, so I haven't had to account for that.
Separate from being truly game-breaking, I don't care for how the book rules dump a number of skills/abilities on one character at once when you test for psi. It's disjointed from the rest of character creation. The faint saving grace is, as Vormaerin points out, they're individually not all that powerful. But it still became a perverse incentive in one group I played in, before I GMed. If I reboot now I'll probably house rule that you only get one ability on first generating a psi score.
I've said in another thread, one of the first things I hacked in 1e was dropping the book psi careers and homebrewing a few of my own. Not because mine were that great, but they did fit my setting and campaign feel better. And, it now occurs to me, they were more focused. There was a psionic martial artist, and a psionic astrogator/teleporter, both of which had more focused powers on their skill tables than the book careers. That made me more willing to drop in psionic test events in character creation. So despite my sounding down on psionics sometimes there was a way to get them.
Separate from being truly game-breaking, I don't care for how the book rules dump a number of skills/abilities on one character at once when you test for psi. It's disjointed from the rest of character creation. The faint saving grace is, as Vormaerin points out, they're individually not all that powerful. But it still became a perverse incentive in one group I played in, before I GMed. If I reboot now I'll probably house rule that you only get one ability on first generating a psi score.
I've said in another thread, one of the first things I hacked in 1e was dropping the book psi careers and homebrewing a few of my own. Not because mine were that great, but they did fit my setting and campaign feel better. And, it now occurs to me, they were more focused. There was a psionic martial artist, and a psionic astrogator/teleporter, both of which had more focused powers on their skill tables than the book careers. That made me more willing to drop in psionic test events in character creation. So despite my sounding down on psionics sometimes there was a way to get them.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
To the OP:
It can be OP if you let it be OP.
But it really depends on two things: a] where your campaign is and b] how ticky-tack you want to be about it
- Your campaign's location is pretty important. The Spinward Frontier [the Marches, Foreven, Gvurrdon, Trojan Reach] are fairly hardened against psionics. The military and police have a long history of dealing with Zhodani and their intelligence services. Psionic crime, OTOH, is actually harder than dealing with espionage because most psionic crime comes from native Imperial citizens rather than Zhodani citizens. Imperials are, by and large, more devious and nefarious than Zho's and Zhodani intelligence agents have to go special schools to learn to think like an agent... The Zhodani don't have Tom Clancy and John le'Carre novels to spur their thinking.
Other regions of the Imperium will have a somewhat less robust response to psionics... Ley Sector might have some training and doctrine left over from the Psionic Suppressions, but that training isn't as stringent as that of someone on Regina.
-Insofar as rules-picky about psionics, I encourage you to be VERY rules observant. Most Traveller PCs will have low-to-medium Psionic Strength stats and will require psi-drugs in order to do some of the high-end activities. I mean, it really does suck to be a Teleport sensitive with a PSI of 4, right? So be stringent with ranges, power point costs, point regen times, and drug availability.
It would also be helpful if the PCs were see some negative examples of the risks of using psionics too frequently... perhaps a contact gets hauled off by the police wearing a psi-shield helmet and the PCs see him 'get the stick' of a dose of Psi Blocker. Perhaps a PC psion uses a psionic drug and it's a bad batch that causes hallucinations etc. 'You really ought to learn to check the use-by dates on those, Eneri...'
Keeping the downsides in play is always fun, but make sure that being psionic is still awesome the way being a crack shot or a computer whiz would be. Remember, this isn't something they get on top of their normal skills, at least not beyond the initial level 0 of whatever Talent they know. Every rank of a PSI talent is a rank of other skill they don't have.
If you don't want the player to have awesome moments with their psionics, don't let them have them in the first place. Don't waste everyone's time by giving someone cool abilities and then slapping them around for using them. That's just jackassery.
If you don't want the player to have awesome moments with their psionics, don't let them have them in the first place. Don't waste everyone's time by giving someone cool abilities and then slapping them around for using them. That's just jackassery.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
Building on this comment and my earlier post...
Vormaerin is right... Psionics are a skill-set just like Science or technical or military skills are. They each have their uses and each deserve their opportunity to shine. The big difference is that PCs can teach other PCs how to shoot, but no PC can make another PC psionic. Because of the rarity of the skill-set, it can lend itself to abuse, but that same kind of abuse can arise from a PC with Persuasion 5 and Streetwise 4.
I still encourage you to be very picky about rules and power-point usage regarding psionics. There's a reason why the psions didn't take over the Third Imperium in the first half of its history, after all. Psionics SHOULD be difficult and nit-picky to use, but they should also be allowed the successes and their utility.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
alex_greene
Guest
The thing that irritates most referees, and the game designers all the way back to MWM (pbuh) is that psions can use their powers to get out of trouble. They can scan a Patron and pick up deceitful intentions (most notably the desire not to want to have to pay the Travellers at the end of the contract), they can use Clairvoyance to avoid danger and traps, and in general it can cheese referees off if their carefully-laid ambushes are sensed a kilometre away and deftly avoided.
Psions can enjoy lives free of conflict by being more aware of the world and its dangers than most oblivious Traveller. But here's the thing.
Travellers can pick up on the same signals, and avoid the fiendish traps and ambushes just as easily. Recon-5 is just as good as Telepathy-1. Streetwise can pick up on the feel of the street when a car rocks up and guns start sprouting out of windows. A kid on a bicycle is as good a lookout for the po-po as a Clairvoyant.
Designers who hate psionics layer on rules upon rules to nerf them. Psionics have Durations measured in minutes. They have Ranges, and ranged psionic powers cost Psionic Strength heavily.
Thing is, using mundane skills doesn't cost your Traveller INT or STR every time you use Athletics or Recon. And no, people don't lose END from strenuous work. You get FATIGUE. Not END loss.
Psionic Strength is an artificial rule to nerf psions, make them so weak that it's not worth making your Traveller a telepath. It's like this Puritanical streak built into the game: how dare you, a player, want to have fun. Traveller is about suffering. You are supposed to struggle to make money. Money is the single sole objective of the game. You are meant to labour under terminal capitalism to make enough cash to keep the bank happy on your Starship's mortgage for the last forty years of your life. You can't just hop into your ship at Rhylanor and say "Next stop, Regina." No, you have to crawl up the Main like a snail and take a year to get there. And don't complain, or we'll tweak the rules to make it ten years next time.
They just tweaked the rules to make it impossible for you to take your ship and travel to the next planet, a journey of fifteen hours. Now, you have to do a microjump and take a week.
They are so scared of rule breakers that people can't help but trowel in new rules to stop people from doing something they never thought of before, until the rule came along that highlighted what they could have been doing to make Traveller fun all along, but that somehow someone thought it would be cheating to enjoy the game.
Psionics are not a deal breaker. They are the salt on the back of your hand to go with your tequila shot. It's not the same without it.
End rant.
Psions can enjoy lives free of conflict by being more aware of the world and its dangers than most oblivious Traveller. But here's the thing.
Travellers can pick up on the same signals, and avoid the fiendish traps and ambushes just as easily. Recon-5 is just as good as Telepathy-1. Streetwise can pick up on the feel of the street when a car rocks up and guns start sprouting out of windows. A kid on a bicycle is as good a lookout for the po-po as a Clairvoyant.
Designers who hate psionics layer on rules upon rules to nerf them. Psionics have Durations measured in minutes. They have Ranges, and ranged psionic powers cost Psionic Strength heavily.
Thing is, using mundane skills doesn't cost your Traveller INT or STR every time you use Athletics or Recon. And no, people don't lose END from strenuous work. You get FATIGUE. Not END loss.
Psionic Strength is an artificial rule to nerf psions, make them so weak that it's not worth making your Traveller a telepath. It's like this Puritanical streak built into the game: how dare you, a player, want to have fun. Traveller is about suffering. You are supposed to struggle to make money. Money is the single sole objective of the game. You are meant to labour under terminal capitalism to make enough cash to keep the bank happy on your Starship's mortgage for the last forty years of your life. You can't just hop into your ship at Rhylanor and say "Next stop, Regina." No, you have to crawl up the Main like a snail and take a year to get there. And don't complain, or we'll tweak the rules to make it ten years next time.
They just tweaked the rules to make it impossible for you to take your ship and travel to the next planet, a journey of fifteen hours. Now, you have to do a microjump and take a week.
They are so scared of rule breakers that people can't help but trowel in new rules to stop people from doing something they never thought of before, until the rule came along that highlighted what they could have been doing to make Traveller fun all along, but that somehow someone thought it would be cheating to enjoy the game.
Psionics are not a deal breaker. They are the salt on the back of your hand to go with your tequila shot. It's not the same without it.
End rant.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
I read the entirety of your rant and I get your points.
I agree with some and disagree with others.
Way back in the LBBs Psionics were an optional rule that could be included or not. Then came the Zhodani and as the OTU developed psionics became more and more part of the canon.
But the PSI Strength stat and range rules have ALWAYS been there. The likely need to take a PsiBooster in order to Teleport has been there since 1977. None of this is a 'nerf'... nerfing is updating rules to apply new limitations to players who are using abilities deemed 'too powerful'. And I repeat, the limitations on psionics, both mechanical and social in the 3-I have always been there.
But we've come a long way since 1977... the game is a lot more about the story than it used to be. Psionics can be an interesting conflict hook to use in that story.
The problem with psionics is that the referee has to be very clever to keep the adventure fun for everyone at the table and still leave room for the psion to use their powers. With a little bit of thought and planning a ref can handle psionics just as well as he can handle a player who is good at fast-talking his way out of challenges. A character with Brawling 4 and Slug Rifle 3 has to be careful about where and when he uses his skills. Use them at the wrong time and that PC could wind up in jail. There isn't anything wrong with asking the same thing from a psion.
As for the rest of your rant... One easy way to take the terminal capitalism out of the game is use the ship payment as a spur to adventure, not an accounting sheet. If your PCs want to play the Trade and Commerce tables, fine. But for the most part you can handwave most of the payment system off. 'You've been making your payments on time, but this month you're a little short. A cargo that was a sure thing three months ago didn't sell for as much as you thought. It looks like you're gonna have to take some side work [aka 'an adventure'] to make payroll and/or maintenance this month.' Boom. Now the ship is an avenue to which PCs live adventurous lives rather than an anchor dragging them down to despair.
If you want to handwave travel times, you can do that too. Using your example, the PCs can board a ship at Rhylenor and the ref can say, "It's been a fairly dull three months. You've been able to fill the cargo hold at each leg of the journey, but you've basically broke even with expenses. After 6 jumps, you arrive in the Regina system." No long slog, no miserable tallying and retallying the cargo logs.
Traveller isn't about making you miserable. It isn't trying to limit your creativity or imagination. You know why there isn't FTL communications in Traveller? To give the PCs more agency and leeway to be adventurers, that's why. Information travels MUCH slower than, say, Star Trek... where a starship captain can detain an 'adventurer' [Harry Mudd, anyone?] and get his whole criminal record from headquarters in hours or minutes.
Reisender
Cosmic Mongoose
I guess every referee treats this differently. For me neither Recon nor Streetwise go beyond the mundane possibilties.
*shrugs* I find that psionics are pretty effective. They just aren't the psionics of superhero games. The only real weak point in making a psion in the RAW is that PSI strength is a separate thing from other characteristics. So you can't put your best of multiple rolls in it, like you can with the standard characteristics. Not having psions be Jedi but instead just being an alternative to tech solutions is not suffering.
The psion in my campaign was incredibly lucky. She hadn't planned on being a psion, but rolled the psion event in College and then rolled an 11 PSI, though this was somewhat offset by only learning Teleportation and Telepathy. Because she had good PSI, she actually took a psion career but with lesser PSI probably would've done a regular career and just had a few emergency tricks.
Traveller does have a few dumb rules put in for hypothetical "rules abuse" like the 1000D limit on M-Drives. But the rest of that rant about suffering is nonsense. The Charted Space setting is designed for galactic Age of Sail. Those things you think are to punish the players are actually to keep the authorities out of their hair so they can run around doing wild adventures and don't have to be the Stainless Steel Rat, where FTL comms and all the overbearing surveillance state of modern times can chase them down.
Mortgages matter if you are a merchant, where you have the ability to make hundreds of thousands of credits a month just as a space trucker even without the rediculously simplistic and generous speculation rules. The game doesn't assume that, though. In fact, it more often figures you don't have a ship or you have a detached duty scout. The latter has practically no expenses because you don't have a mortgage, the scouts do your annual maintenance, It's like three or four thousand a month to keep that in operation?
The psion in my campaign was incredibly lucky. She hadn't planned on being a psion, but rolled the psion event in College and then rolled an 11 PSI, though this was somewhat offset by only learning Teleportation and Telepathy. Because she had good PSI, she actually took a psion career but with lesser PSI probably would've done a regular career and just had a few emergency tricks.
Traveller does have a few dumb rules put in for hypothetical "rules abuse" like the 1000D limit on M-Drives. But the rest of that rant about suffering is nonsense. The Charted Space setting is designed for galactic Age of Sail. Those things you think are to punish the players are actually to keep the authorities out of their hair so they can run around doing wild adventures and don't have to be the Stainless Steel Rat, where FTL comms and all the overbearing surveillance state of modern times can chase them down.
Mortgages matter if you are a merchant, where you have the ability to make hundreds of thousands of credits a month just as a space trucker even without the rediculously simplistic and generous speculation rules. The game doesn't assume that, though. In fact, it more often figures you don't have a ship or you have a detached duty scout. The latter has practically no expenses because you don't have a mortgage, the scouts do your annual maintenance, It's like three or four thousand a month to keep that in operation?
alex_greene
Guest
I use Recon and Streetwise like crazy. Even my psion characters pick up those skills. The ability to work things out like Columbo is not to be sneezed at.
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