How do folks handle adepts and their powers when the adept in question wants to swap a power? Say the adept has a power he never or rarely uses and wants to trade for a different one. Do you treat the powers like spells, once chosen, never changed or more like cyber/bioware, where you can change it out?

If it's a new player during the begining of a campaign, sure, no problem. Just trade it over, but after a months long campaign, he wants to change it? No, sorry.

can't have more powers than you can store in your adept powerpoints, but the number of powers is not limited at all.
all powers are allways online, if not otherwise specified too. if you learned a power, there is no unlearning it again.
if you don't have enough pp left for the new power you want . . tough cookies, earn soem karma and spend it.

I would agree with this, though I would be slightly more generous; there are, imo, reasons other than being new to the game for not knowing how good a power will be.

but basically, once you know an adept power, the only way to change it is a retcon (which will of course require GM permission). well, that or losing essence and then gaining magic later, but that isn't really swapping the power out.

I would probably let an Adept do so with an Astral Quest (or something similar) once play had been going on for a while. Maybe they changed Mentor Spirits, or had a Magical Epiphany that caused them to alter the way they perceived their magic, or whatever... Not outside the realms of possibility.

You mean something like the crysis of confidence?

In SR5, you can have switchable powers, in a limited fashion, by bonding more qi foci than you can have active at once (without risking focus addiction). Have a rating: 4 qui focus to give you 2 extra points of combat sense in "combat mode", one to give you 2 extra points of improved ability: sneaking for "stealth mode" and one to give you 2 extra points of voice control for "face mode".

Early in a character's lifetime, I'd let a player switch out a power or a spell that they thought sounded cooler or more useful but then never found a use for, with no problems.

Later on?


I'd let them pay a pittance of Karma to swap out a power they never used, two pittances or so to swap out a power they only used a few times and then didn't like.

If they wanted to swap out a keystone power, something that you can count on them always bringing into play, I'd go with the quest of self reinvention thing.

FWIW, I'd also let 'em swap stuff out when new books hit that might have a power they'd prefer in it. I grant the same leeway to other characters (when Move-By-Wire comes up, sure, if you've got the cash to pay the difference, buddy, we'll just say you had that instead of Wired Reflexes all along, or whatever)...if a splat book comes out that makes an existing character choice nigh-obsolete, I don't have a problem letting a play "trade up" as long as they can cover the different. There's a mini-retcon in every supplement, you might as well roll with it.

Yeah, that might work. Not something that you do every month to switch out powers willy nilly, but to re-aspect with change over time due to character change and growth.

this sort of thing would be a good example of when i would consider someone to have a legitimate reason to not know their power wasn't the right one, in spite of not being new to the game. especially if they took a few other things that sort of did what they wanted, and then a new power was released that does exactly what they wanted or something like that.

Thanks for the replies. This was more about the odd powers like Magic Sense, than the 'everyone has it' powers like Improved Reflexes or Combat Senses.