Psionics

Psionics

Esper Grave 16 Dec 2006 19:58

I was just wondering what the extents of the different psionic disciplines were.
Could a telekinetic fly or jump really high using his own power to carry himself? could a person with psychometabolism of significant power prolong his life indefinatly? etc.. Also how does the strength of psi abilities compare to a mage of the same age and experience? While mages can study and learn many different spells, a psi typically only has one disipline to work with, and would focus only on that discipline…

Re: Psionics

RavenB 16 Dec 2006 22:17

Good questions, Esper!

Psis of varying strengths might be able to do any of the things you suggest. The key thing to understand here is that there are two components to psionics: power and skill.

Your power level is something that you're born with; it represents your raw ability to access that particular psionic discipline. The Psi Collective ranks power on a scale from 1 (equivalent to a third-degree apprentice mage who knows one or two cantrips) to 15 (equivalent to a demigod). Psis who possess power in a given discipline tend to fall on a bell curve, with each Power Level representing characters within a range equivalent to half a standard deviation (σ).

Power Scale:

1: 3.0σ to 2.5σ less than the mean
2: 2.5σ to 2.0σ less than the mean
3. 2.0σ to 1.5σ less than the mean
4. 1.5σ to 1.0σ less than the mean
5. 1.0σ to 0.5σ less than the mean
6. 0.5σ to 0.0σ less than the mean
7. 0.0σ to 0.5σ greater than the mean
8. 0.5σ to 1.0σ greater than the mean
9. 1.0σ to 1.5σ greater than the mean
10. 1.5σ to 2.0σ greater than the mean
11. 2.0σ to 2.5σ greater than the mean
12. 2.5σ to 3.0σ greater than the mean
13 or higher: 3.0σ or greater than the mean

Equivalents to Magic Users:

Power 1 to 2: equivalent an apprentice wizard.
Power 3 to 4: equivalent to a minor adept
Power 5 to 6: equivalent to a major adept
Power 7 to 8: equivalent to an exempt adept
Power 9: equivalent to 1st-degree master
Power 10: equivalent to 2nd-degree master
Power 11 to 12: equivalent to 3rd-degree master
Power 13 or 14: equivalent to high master
Power 15: equivalent to demigod

In practice, the most powerful known psis have Power 13, and only a handful of those are known.

Power isn't enough, though: you have to know how to wield it. That's where skill comes in, and that's something that you can increase with training and practice. A character with high power but low skill is going to be like a 50-foot-tall toddler: a danger to himself and others, unable to control the power he wields unless he is very careful and only uses small amounts at a time. An example of a character with low power but high skill might be the telekinetic who can't lift a 1-pound rock, but can use his power to maneuver a coin into a slot on a vending machine … or to squeeze shut your carotid arteries and cut off the flow of blood to your brain.

This separation between power and skill is one of the big differences between magic and psi. A mage can learn to access more and more mana as he gets older, and can do bigger and flashier spells that can accomplish enormous things. A psi, on the other hand, never increases his power level, but can learn to use the power he has with ever-greater finesse and creativity. This might lead to an increase in the power that he can use safely or effectively, but he's not actually getting more power; he's just learning how to better use what he already had access to.

One final note: psi drugs can affect a character's effective power or skill for as long as they are active in the character's body.

MD-109 ("Mad John") increases a character's effective Power Level by 2.
Mentat increases a character's effective skill without altering Power Level.
Vortex increases Power Level by 5 but dramatically decreases the character's ability to control his power.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Re: Psionics

Esper Grave 18 Dec 2006 01:57

so i guess my next question would be: Can Psi characters be strong in more than one discipline, or can they be strong in one and weak in another? The reason I ask is because I wanted to make a character that was reasonably strong in telekinesis, and fairly weak in esp (for the pk shield) and telepathy…

Re: Psionics

RavenB 18 Dec 2006 06:22

<nods> As I stated in the Psionics article of the Writer's Bible:

Most psis are only gifted in one [discipline], or have one primary strength and weak abilities in one or two other areas. Psis with strong gifts in two different disciplines are almost unheard of, and often feared by those who know of them.

As a rule of thumb, even the strongest psi characters shouldn't have a total combined power level of more than 15; the character's secondary discipline should be no higher than Power 6, and the tertiary discipline (if any) should be no higher than Power 3. Abbey Preston, for instance, has Power 12 Telepathy, Power 3 ESP, and no tertiary power, and she is considered one of the Collective's more valuable assets in Metamor City (though her effective status is diminished substantially because she is incapable of having children).

For Psychokinesis, remember that the character needs to specialize in one, or at most two types of energy manipulation: heat (pyrokinesis), cold (cryokinesis), kinetics (telekinesis) or electricity (electrokinesis). Being able to control telekinesis well enough to fly well would probably require a total devotion to that particular sub-discipline. A teek would need to have Power 6, at minimum, in order to be able to fly, and Power 10 in order to fly fast. Propelling objects as deadly projectiles would also require Power 10, and would require a lot of skill to do well (unless you're just dropping big rocks on people).

For the PK Shield, a Power Level of 6 would be enough to stop a knife, a sword, or the claws of some nasty hellspawn hiding in a dark alley of the Street … on its first attack, at least, and assuming it's not an enchanted or mithril weapon. You'd need Power 10 to stop a bullet cold, though a Power 8 character could probably form the PK shield into a wedge that would deflect the bullet (assuming a high degree of skill). ESP Power 1 is sufficient for a basic shield, or Power 2 if you're arranging the molecules of the shield in creative ways (like the deflection wedge mentioned above). All PK Shields drain a character's energy reserves pretty fast, though, so you'd better be carrying some kind of alchemical pick-me-up — or have a really strong constitution — if you want to last long in a fight with PK Shields as your only defense.

Thoughts on Psionics

krtbuni 18 Dec 2006 21:35

Power corrupts. Absolute power feels pretty darn good.

With this in mind, I have a few proposals on the nature of psionics that I'd like to pitch out there to the masses. I don't know how much groundwork has already been laid, but these are some thoughts I've had on the subject for a while that I'd like to share. I realize that I'm directly contradicting something written above, but I'm going to propose it anyway in hopes that it will open up psionics to a bit more dark mystery. *grin* It looks at first blush like a lot of this has been drawn from GURPS, so I'm going to do the same since everything written below was initially for a Psis campaign I created but never ran.

Generally speaking, the typical human brain is not wired up for psionics. For those that have it, there's something in the nature of the neural connections that are formed in the brain that allow those people to directly exert their will over the real world. This isn't like magic, in that there's no external power source for any of this; it's all personal fatigue and the occasional chemical or alchemical stimulant providing the energy. This means that something specific about the way the psionicist's head is "wired," for lack of a better term, allows this ability.

While this means that the average psi is pretty damn powerful, lacking any tethers that an outside source could control, it means that there's a trade-off. All those neurons dedicated to psychic ability had to come from somewhere, since most psis don't have huge bulbous heads filled with extra brainmeats, and that means those neurons aren't being dedicated to other, more mundane tasks like keeping people well-integrated and sane.

In other words, the higher a Psi's overall Power rating, the more prone that person is to mental illness. This isn't to say that every high-powered spook is crazy; people who are born with high Power ratings tend to be fine since their brains have been wired this way from birth. However, people who started off as low-powered psis who trained themselves to be heavier-hitting show a strong correlation between power rating and mental instability. This means that one dirty secret inside the Collective is that it's not the case that people are fixed at a given power level for life; a fuller explanation of this is that the amount of effort and energy you'd have to devote to improving your power level comes with too high a price for most people to pay. It's easier to tell people and win approval for the idea that people's power levels are just set than to try to convince people both that they can improve if they really want it, and that no matter what they think they really don't want it.

This also means that one of the Collective's quieter inside jobs is policing its members to ensure that their instabilities don't cause problems, either for themselves or for anyone else. People who have mental problems that are low enough Power can be "corrected," either by psionically healing the damage, or in extreme cases by amputating the parts of the mind that give access to psionic powers. This form of "killjoying" leaves restores people to near-normal mental function, but kills off any hopes of being psionic; it reduces their effective Power to zero. However, it tends to leave people with other permanent mental disabilities like chronic depression or reduced intelligence. This is something that the Collective and its officials prefer not to do in any but the most extreme cases, but it has on a few rare occasions been the only way to stop some people from doing great harm to a large number of innocents.

Among those within the Collective who know this is possible, there exists a persistent rumor that there's a method of curing these mental illnesses without losing power or suffering from other instabilities in the process, something that whatever heads of the Collective seek to dispel at every turn. Dirty secret number two is that they're right, and there is such a means, but using it is considered grounds for killjoying or worse. For those of extreme power and extreme insanity, turning one's mind in on itself and exerting control over one's own thought processes, it's possible to heal one's own damage, but the cost is that people lose volition over their abilities. Powers that used to be under perfect control will operate at the whim of the subconscious, or even a casual thought. For those familiar with GURPS, this would be a trade of mental disads for appropriate supernatural ones. Since the Collective serves in many ways as the ultimate police over their members, and they retain that control through rigorous management of both their people and their image to those outside their ranks, it's in their best interests to ensure that anyone that manages to develop this ability is simply… removed as a threat or potential activist.

Again, I know that a lot of what I'm proposing is in contradiction to the idea that power is a fixed score, but I'm hoping that at least some of the above suggestions will prove interesting enough to be worth a revisitation of the current bible.

Kristy

Re: Thoughts on Psionics

Mystic 19 Dec 2006 00:42

While interesting in concept, is it not difficult to keep a secret in a society of telepaths for whom forming gestalts is a recongized part of the decision making process?

Re: Thoughts on Psionics

krtbuni 19 Dec 2006 01:19

That's a fair cop, and I wrote much of the above before getting a chance to get too deeply into the extant documents on the
Collective. I saw they didn't have an entry on the wiki and wrote much before getting to the old bible, so my bad on that.

That said,
I also suspect there would be levels of intimacy and privacy between telepaths. You might be willing to share everything with someone
you planned to share children and church and household with, but you might not be so keen on doing the same with someone not of
your faith, for example. Not all people are going to get along with all other people, and that's true among telepaths as well as everyone
else. While divisions between groups are probably more painful for telepaths than for non-, I'm fairly sure I'm safe in saying that they
do exist.

One example of this mentioned in the bible that I found was covert ops. If you've got one person in the Collective spying for the
government, that person would need a way to keep his or her thoughts quiet from the gossipy old Ms. Betties who loves to snoop
neighbors' casual thoughts for the latest dirt. Sure, we can say that those types don't last long in the company of other psis, but if
Ms. Betties is of child-bearing age and has the strength to make her desirable, then you might have to put up with her, even if that
means finding a way of keeping her thoughts to herself, and yours to you.

Finally, there are psis in the Collective who aren't telepathic, and many of those already present a problem to the Elders. Their
inability to create gestalts causes some amount of friction, and I don't have a hard time imagining that among that group there would
be some resentful enough to try to develop telepathy to fit in, or else to work on breaking the dominance of the telepaths in the
Collective by forcibly amassing more power.

I do think it's a fair question, and I'm interested to hear other input on the matter. How does the Collective handle irreconcilable
differences between members?

Kristy

Re: Thoughts on Psionics

RavenB 19 Dec 2006 02:57

An Elder of the Collective would probably say that there is no such thing as a truly irreconcilable difference when you all have the same data and access to each other's points of view — but he'd be excessively optimistic, at best. The psis do thoroughly believe that they're breeding a better species of human, one in which war and strife will be a thing of the past, but as long as individuals have differing personalities there will still be some degree of conflict.

In some cases, the solution to "irreconcilable" differences is to simply agree to disagree. The Collective has taken this tack on the subject of religion: different cells come to differing conclusions on the nature of the evidence, and they allow those differences to remain unsettled even in gestalt. (Anyone who says that you can't hold two competing ideas in your mind and believe in both of them simultaneously is probably unfamiliar with the history and practice of … well, just about any major religion.) These differences of opinion do not greatly affect the Collective's goals, so they live with the dissonance for as long as the gestalt lasts.

There are more serious cases, of course, and covert ops are one example. The psi-teams that work for the government are often required to remain in isolation from others of their kind, beginning at the point where the specific details of the mission are disclosed and ending when the mission is over (or, sometimes, a set period of time after the mission is over). The Collective has proven itself assiduously reliable in keeping its clients' information confidential from outsiders, so the government doesn't worry too much about letting these psis return to their families when the mission is over; anyone who is part of a breeding cell that contains a psi-operative will understand the importance of secrecy.

Characters like Ms. Betties are another problem. Such a character might be telepathically retrained not to engage in such violations of privacy — again, if she is sane and rational, using gestalt to show her the likely consequences of her actions may be enough to make her hold her tongue when it matters. In the worst case, she would be transferred to a hive in some out-of-the-way place (like Flatlands Province) where she is unlikely to ever encounter any piece of information that would be dangerous for her to have. There may be entire hives that engage in only limited communication with the rest of the Collective because their members are considered a security risk; communication between sensitive hives and such "compromised" hives would have to take place through a third party who was shielded from the sensitive information, acting as a sort of "double-blind" connection.

As for the question of increasing power at the risk of insanity — well, there's certainly some precedent for it, as you know by now if you've read the background material. Exposure to high levels of life-aspected mana does produce psionic abilities in Mundanes — along with other changes, as Project Lightpath discovered — and it may likewise increase Power in existing psis (or cause them to develop access to new disciplines). Of course, the danger of such a tactic is substantial, and only someone who was already unbalanced would try something as crazy as trying to make a trip to the Rift. Even the Collective is not perfectly skilled at rooting out insanity, though, as they discovered with Victor (whose story will be told in "Making the Cut", the prequel to "Troubled Minds" that I'm currently working on).

If there are risky ways of increasing Power — other than the temporary effects of psi-drugs — this knowledge might be restricted to certain hives that have limited contact with the rest of the Network. Everyone in that Hive would know about it, but they would also know the risks in their entirety because they would be able to draw on the memories of how things went wrong. Such information would trickle slowly from hive to hive on a need-to-know basis, always making sure that everyone understood the risks before the meeting was adjourned. Those who proved unable to give assent along with the rest of the gestalt would probably have their memory of the event erased and be transferred to the Flatlands for their own safety.

The idea of a "killjoy", short-circuiting a psi's abilities, is one that the Collective would find extremely distasteful. They might dampen a young psi's abilities in order to help her learn to control them, and they would certainly restrict the telepathic access of an insane teep while he was undergoing rehabilitation. But such actions would always be seen as a temporary measure, a way of "turning the safety on" until the person was ready to have access to his/her power again. A psi considered too dangerous to have access to his power is a psi who is too dangerous to exist; the telepaths rehabilitating him would either have to completely rebuild his mind, taking as much time as it requires, or have him put down. No psi-block is completely reliable, so turning off a psi's abilities and then casting him adrift as an effective Mundane would be risky as well as cruel. Better to die or have one's personality rewritten, the Collective would say, then to be turned into a mundie; that would surely drive them mad, if they weren't already.

Re: Thoughts on Psionics

Cubist 20 Dec 2006 22:06

I like the notion that any brain-circuits used for psionics aren't available for any other purpose. This would make psionics rather different from most anything else the brain does, seeing as how different bits of the brain can be 'retrained' to do different things than they were originally meant for.
With this "specialization" schtick in mind, the more of your brain is being used to support psionics, the less neurons you have left for anything else. It's kind of like point-allocation in HeroSystem — you have (let us say) 20 points to spend, and normals spend it all on normal brain-stuff, while psionics spend X points on their psi and (20-X) points on Everything Else. Push this to the upper limit, and you end up with a psi who has vast psionic power but isn't intelligent enough to tie his shoes by himself…
Given the fact that normal neurons can be retrained to perform other tasks, it shouldn't make much difference if you only spend 1 of your 20 points on psi — the "missing" 20th pt. worth of Normal Brain-tasks is sorta-kinda distributed over the existing 19, and it's all good. But the more points you spend on psi, the more "doubling up" the normal bits of your brain are forced to endure, and this could very easily mess you up big time.
I suggest that the fraction of your brain that's devoted to psionics should be the limiting factor on how much psi-energy you can throw around at any given moment. A teke with .1% psi-neurons can maybe lift a thimble; with 1%, he could exert 1 kilo worth of force; etc etc. I think the neurons/energy relationship should be exponential, or a least nonlinear. Square or cube relationship.
It's worth noting that even a normal human brain sucks up a wildly disproportionate percentage of the body's resources. This should be even more true of psionic brains. I would like to propose that psionics is fueled by the body's own energy reserves; someone who tekes a 200-lb boulder will burn exactly as many calories as someone who lifts that same boulder with mundane muscles. This means psis will tend to be slim-ranging-to-skeletal in build, and that psis will also tend to be noted for their voracious appetites.

Re: Thoughts on Psionics

RavenB 21 Dec 2006 02:07

Re: Hungry Brains

I can definitely get behind the idea of psis having to eat more in order to maintain their high-powered brains, especially if they're exceptionally powerful psis. I don't think I can buy an exact 1:1 ratio between food calories burned and psi-energy manifested, though; for one thing, it would make pyrokinesis impossible, since you would literally be burning your own flesh in order to produces the flames. Similar troubles arise with electrokinesis, or high-speed flight.

It seems to me that psis would have to be fueled by something that is linked to the Aether, just as wizards' magic is ultimately drawn from the Aether. The difference is that the psi's link is somehow internalized; the psi's own mind forms the connection and draws on the power needed without having to rely on something external to him to draw forth the mana. Or maybe the psi draws on his own soul-energy, and his soul is somehow more tightly tied to the Aether than that of the average person and can therefore replenish itself readily. If we're going to just bend the laws of physics and not break them into tiny pieces, anything as powerful as magic or psi ultimately needs to be feeding on something outside the person's own body.

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Re: Power vs. Smarts

The idea that psis need to devote more neurons to psi in order to channel more Power does seem to line up with both the idea of a natural limit on Power and the idea that boosting Power too much leads to insanity and/or a loss of control. This does lead to an odd sort of paradox, though. Psis tend to be smarter than average people — I think they would have to be, in order to skillfully wield whatever Power they have — but any neurons dedicated to channeling Power would tend to decrease the capacity for intelligence. Given that we don't see many idiot-savant telepaths in fiction, how do we reconcile that?

I would suggest that something in the brain structure is changing, giving more processing capacity in the same volume so that psis can be smart even with "half their brains tied behind their backs" (to paraphrase Rush Limbaugh). Maybe they have increased folding that increases the surface area of the brain. Maybe the glial cells have evolved in some way that allows for better signal integration. Or maybe it's something else entirely.

Anyhow, the two basic ideas here — that psionic brains are expensive and draining, and that boosting an individual's Power leads to a loss of cognitive function — are good ones that fit well with the setting. If we try to quantify it too much, though, we'll risk running aground on the shoals of Unintended Consequences. I'd hate to see someone throw out a good story idea because they couldn't figure out how their psionic hero was going to get the extra 6.25 kilograms of mass that he needed to beat the bad guys without dying of starvation. :) It's fine if you want to plan a story that puts a character in that situation, but this is one case where I think the mechanics can be flexed a bit to serve the plot.

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A note on the physical appearance of Psis

I wanted to mention this in the Bible somewhere, but never really found a place for it, and Cubist's remark about psis ranging from slim to skeletal reminded me about it:

This is mostly personal preference, but I'd like to see the members of the Psi Collective be very ordinary-looking people. Heroic fiction is full of folks who are trim, muscular and beautiful, with great hair and snappy fashion sense; heck, I have a number of those sorts of people in MK2K, not even counting the Merron twins, who have to be gorgeous to be in their line of work. I think we tend to fall prey to Hollywood Reality, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm as guilty of it as anyone.

But the Psi Collective doesn't care about that sort of thing. They're not looking for people who are beautiful and glamorous and in perfect health. All they really care about are three things: psi ability, fertility, and loyalty to your fellow psis. The people who get held up as idols and role models in the Collective will be very different from the sorts of people that we mundies obsess over. A gawky guy with weak eyesight and thinning hair might be a stud male who impregnates hundreds of women every year, while a guy with movie-star looks and perfect teeth might be unable to win a spot in a breeding cell if his psi-talents are weak.

I'm going to highlight this difference in priorities in Making the Cut, which I intend to write (or at least make a hefty start on) during Christmas vacation. This doesn't have to be something that gets harped on in every story — indeed, it shouldn't be. If you're going to introduce psi characters, though, don't be afraid to make them … imperfect, in one fashion or another. Even if psis do have hungry brains, don't be afraid to make them a little pudgy — it may be that their appetites overcompensate for what they actually burn in the use of their powers. It's okay to give them stringy hair, or bad eyesight, or whatever, and still have them be significant characters who are looked up to, admired by, and even sexually desired by their peers. In the world of telepaths, more so than anywhere else, it really is who you are on the inside that counts. :)