How should psionics be introduced into SR? I'm imagining something powered by drugs, like in Akira, and enhanced by biotechnology. Maybe have it be dependent on essence, but don't factor in bioware, and make it a lot less versatile than magic, but more powerful in many ways? Perhaps have complex forms for different powers, like one for psychokinesis, one for pyrokinesis, one for mind- control, and one for mind-reading, and have all of them be dependent on the "power of the mind" stat.

In past editions psionics has just been another school of magic. There will most likely be rules for it in Street Magic.

Yeah, but make it something other than magic, something cool. It seems wrong to limit the supernatural to the various premodern traditions.

Well, I suppose restricting the "spells" to those that would be thematically approriate for psionics and lowering their drain a bit could work. Of course, then you get into the question of what is thematically appropriate.

Psions in literature and comics have done everything from force fields to flight to altering reality (usually via illusion) to reading and controlling minds. About the only thing they don't do (at least not frequently) is summon / create allies and matter.

fluffwise it may be anything, but mechanicaly it will be magic.

sure it can be triggerd by drugs, but it may well be that the subject is a latent magican and the drugs just help him see the "light" (shamanic visionquest style).

so in the end there is no need to introduce a new mechanic just for psionics. btw, complex forms, as in technomancers? im not sure i want to see where this is going. and isnt technomancy allready strangely close to magic from a mechanics point of view?

It is; there should just be something separate from it that is also cool.

IF someone wanted to play a psychic I'd suggest taking a mage, not putting points into ritual magic or any of the conjuring group and taking only appropriate spells (What you deem appropriate is up to what you feel psionics can do). Drain could be based on intuition and you don't bother applying any spirits to the tradition.

The rest is just flavour for the tradition.

However I feel psychics should be able to astrally perceive and project.

I think what Emo is suggesting is a new quality altogether, which IMO is unnecessary as you can just generate a new tradition with new trappings. That seems to me what the move from "Shaman or Mage" was all about encouraging.

Psions/Psychics may, depending on how un-cannon you want to get, have nothing to do with magic in which case you could have completely new mechanics for them. I won't expect such a thing to be released by the producers though.

SR3 psionics was a form of magic based on the works of modern psychics and charlatans. Paradoxically, the psionic tradition denied magic and instead bogged down the spellcasting and summoning processes with jungian symbolisim and new-age mumbo-jumbo.

Instead of spirits psionists summoned "Thought Forms", which psionists believed to be manifestations of the summoners subconsious and which other magicians thought of as little more than great form watchers (a feat itself if true, since watchers can't be invoked). Psionists cast spells just like other magicians but their spell selection was limited by their paradigm. For the most part, the rules treated them as self-deluded magicians whose off-the-wall beleifs hindered them.

That comment may apply to emo, who is self-admittedly twinkish, but it's far from true generically. A psionic system that is unique, balanced, and flavorful is possible. Certainly possible enough that "nothing good" from that route is an incorrect statement.

Here's some thoughts on how I'd do it:

1) Psionic powers are not magic. Otherwise psionics would in fact just be a magic tradition, and that's not what you're going for. Counterspelling wouldn't work on psionic, and "counterpsionics" wouldn't work on psionics.

2) I'd separate psionics from the astral plane. No astral perceiving or projecting. Also, no summoning. They would interact with spirits as any mundane would. In fact, they would be "mundanes" for the most part.

3) Psionics would cause drain. It just seems appropriate.

4) Magic spells in SR are pretty broad, and I think psionic powers would be too, but in some cases more broad, and with fewer overall powers.

5) Mechanically, I'd work it the same. Pick a force; roll your attribute (better to stick with one. It was a mistake they made in D&D psionics 3.0- people were getting screwed because they needed 18s in all their stats to get the powers they wanted), plus a skill. Some powers would be resisted with Body, some Willpower, some would work like indirect combat spells (like hurling something with TK).

Finally, I might re-write SR history to fit in psionics, but probably keep it to a small group compared to magic. I think psionicists would mostly be characters with other skills and a few powers, rather than experts focused on developing powers, like a magician.

Could awakened (magically activ) characters be psionically-enabled as well? Probably not for the most part, and almost definitely not for PCs.

More later.

Dread Polack

This sounds a lot like Technomancers in some ways. Wonder what kind of explaination will emerge ( ) for TMs in Emergence, and if that sort of not Magic magic could be used for a fluff explaination of the existance of Psionics that aren't actually magic.

perhaps if psionics were made a subset of technomancers?

it could be costed like a mystic adept or adept, and provide a similar level of power.

Now, powers that need to be on the list include sensory (clairsentience), psychokinesis (moving things with your mind), and telepathy (affecting minds of others). Each selection should reward specialization over jack of all trade-ness.

Charisma for telepathy, intuition for clairsentience, logic for psychkinesis, willpower for healing. we could say, you have to buy levels in each, and then buy powers. so you could get a 5 psion stat, and spend 3 on telepathy and 2 on clairsentience. or 1 on each and the 5th on some cyber/bio. and so on. a power (costed the same way spells are) could give you a dice pool equal to your power in that ability plus relevant skill. Psion as a whole would effect drain and overcasting.

With telepathy, i would teir the abilities. 1 sor empathy, 2 for mind-read, 3 for sending, 4+ for anything approaching control. make it require some specialization to do that stuff to people.

for psychokinesis... mass afected based on power, with 1 being 'move a coin', 2 start to include hot/cold (light a match), 3 to include an electric spark. 4+ for lethal damage.

sensory, power would affect range. basic senses at 1, and at higher levels add in astral projection, reading the past of an object, and limited prophecy/future sight. 4+ for any kind of combat bonus to reaction for defense.

healing, could heal stun at 1, then lethal, reducing poison, disease, and drugs at a higher level. higher level to affect others.

So end result, is its weaker than a mage, with a more narrow focus, but has a number of advantages within that narrow feild. should do a couple things nothing else does at higher levels (6+)

The trouble with trying to come up with a psionic system that is unique... is that magic already duplicates nearly every psionic ability that you could think of, from telekinesis, to mind-reading, to healing, to thought control, and so on. Plus, the mechanic for spellcasting is probably about the same thing as what you would use for psionics. The only difference is that counterspelling would not apply (although mental shields are a common staple of psionics, so maybe they would even have their own version of that).

I see psionics as being similar to mystic adepts - some adept-like abilities combined with some spellcasting abilities - both slightly more limited than magic. But this approximation only creates a mystic adept by another name, instead of something different and cool.


There is one drastic way that you could do it. It would make magic less cool, but give psionics its own niche. Remove the control manipulations, as well as clairaudience, clairvoyance, and mind probe, from magic, and make it so that only psionics can have those particular abilities.

As a note in D&D 3.5 magic and psionics work on each other ie dispel magic works on psion powers and dispel psionics works on spells. They just have different mechanics on how they work ( and 3.5 psionics are very nicely done).

Personally I dislike the sepration of the two. Most modern day "psychics" are really just like wiccans with a different set of trappings. Psionics is a creation of sci-fi writers (i think) it's really just magic by another name. I like having a unified blag (mana/astral in this case) for all supernatural. The methods are different you concentrate hard I chant spells taught me by Dionysus.

On a counterpoint though I would like a wider range of magical oddities that do different things entirely, some ideas/rules for this would be cool. By different i mean not already covered by spells and adept powers like creating astral shallows around you.

Yeah that sort of thing, damn you for thinking of that when I missed it. My intention is to allow for once in while cool concepts for jaded players and to act as interesting plott macguffins.

Maybe make them weaker, but allow their astral projection to let them read things, since they have ESP.

hmm, this is starting to sound like a "spell adept" with astral perception, possibly projection...

Hmmm.... If you want to make psionics unique, then you give it some unique abilities. How about this?:

Psionics works through a commlink or datajack. You can't use psionics to hack a file or a device. You can use psionics to affect a mind.

Allow multiple psionicists to cooperate in real-time; i.e. make it as fast as regular spellcasting, instead of slow like ritual casting.

Come up with some unique psionic foci. How about a psionic program or IC?

Disallow the non-psionic.

Limit psionics to mana spells; give it astral traveling, masking, shielding, centering, etc.

Eliminate summoning and mentor spirits; allow astral combat and banishing.

heh, the smiley was supposed to indicate that it was aimed as a joke.

we avoid doing the strangest things in this mundane world of ours, not because they are bad in any physical sense, but because they are seen as socialy unacceptable. this just shows what lengths of self-limitation we humanoids can go just because be think in a specific pattern.

Okay explain to me how and why PSIONICS are not people using MAGIC? Cause psionics sound a lot liek hermetics who think they ar the only ones right...

Because the GM wants them to be different.

There isn't really any more explanation necessary. The presence of psionics in many science fiction settings gives plenty of support to the idea that psionics are not magic, at least not in certain settings. Likewise it's possible that psionics is an evolved ability that would have happened with or without the mana coming back.

It has got to be a tradition in a way...Psionics is another tradition, they start with great form watchers and get super specialize watchers and can learn to summon elemental forms (and possibly open up the sub-elementals). Sort of a western form of Wu or betwean Wu and A Mage

I personally don't think SR needs psionics as it already has magic as a supernatural way of doing wiggy stuff. Still if one wants to include them it would certainly be possible.

I still think psionics would be best implemented as an alternative magic tradition, rather than generating some home brew system, as that would take a lot of work to get balanced and I really don't have the time.

I'd be inclined not to confuse matters by drawing on SR3 traditions though, those are likely going to be in Street Magic anyway and I wouldn't want to jump the gun.

That being said, there used to be a metamagic technique for psychometry which would suit a psychic tradition and perhaps allowing that without initiation, while restricting some other magician power would be the way to go. IIRC the precedent exists in SR3 with some traditions (druids?) being able to summon great forms without initiation at the expense of being restricted to a certain summoning location.

There are varying levels of sci-fi. Only hard science fictionrequires the scientific portions be possible by our current levels of knowledge. By your definition any book written about going to the moon 100 years ago would have been fantasy, then changed into sci-fi as our knowledge increased, and finally become alternative history once we got there.

Oddly enough I was in a discussion about what constitutes sci fi just the other day on a different board. Here's a few interesting links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction: Science fiction (often called either sci-fi or sf, though there are distinctions in the way these abbreviations are used) is a genre of fiction in which the story depends (at least in part) upon some change in the world as we know it that is explained by science or technology (as opposed to magic). Other portions of the page agree with you while some don't. There are some definitions which agree with neither of us because we haven't included other story elements.

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/scifi/d...rmaldefine.htm: several definitions of science fiction by various authors and critics, some of which agree with you and some of which don't.

http://www.onelook.com/?w=science+fiction&ls=a a bunch of different definition of science fiction, very few of which (if any) restrict it to hard scifi only.

plausible, possible.

Any case psionics are not plausable. THey are magic with fancy names to make readers forget it is magic.

You mean like FTL travel, artifical gravity, and FTL communication, staples of science fiction stories almost since the genre came out.

What's plausible changes over time. Men flying was not plausible for a loooong time, then became reality.

Here is the trick. Man has new tools. Man doesn't have new powers. Tools evolve with the time. Man doesn't/ We have not really changed in meaningful way besides dietary habits in thousands of years. WHat I mean by the that is that yes, we may seem to have different lives than cave men, but if you take away our toys, would we be any better than than them?

Our intellect increase compared to neanderthals is a "new power."

Do I think that we'll suddenly become psionic? No, because even if it is possible we gave our evolution over to technology long ago.

Do I think it's possible? About as possible as faster than light travel.

Is it plausible within the context of a science fiction story? Very much so.

YMMV, but definitions of terms disagree with you.

Depending on who you believe, the CIA has thought psychics plausible for a long time.

What if the psionics comes from technology? It leaves the realm of new powers and becomes new tech. Is it then science fiction?