I love me some Space Opera. 

One of the tropes are psychics.  For some reason space travel coincides with psychics leaving the phone center scam artist jobs behind and develop into full blown super powers. 

Specifically I'm talking about Stars Without Number RPG. 

I like their powers.  However, I've never played it.  On first reading it looks ok, but when I start doing the math it seems that Psionics are strong, but good god do they NOT have any duration. 

The fuel for powers are called Effort.  Effort is either your Constitution bonus or Wisdom bonus, +1 more, plus your highest psionic skill level.  We're talking 3-5 as a starting character. 

If you want to be Luke Skywalker, blocking gunshots with a sword, you're out of power after just 3-5 blocked shots.  M

Is the game balanced?  Or do players find their psychic powers are just situational, but to save them for the right time since you have so few uses of them?

You may be missing that not everything you do costs effort, or costs it in the same way. 

Lets assume you are a psion with Biopsionics, and you want to heal an ally.  You can commit effort for the day to use Psychic Succor.  Lets assume you have Biopsionics-2, so for the rest of the "scene" (the encounter, likely around 15 minutes), you can touch someone each round as your main action and heal them for 2d6+2.  The real cap to how much you can heal is the system strain, and if you can get to someone before they are actually dead.  But you commit effort once to cast this as many times as you need. 

Similarly, if you are a telekinetic, you can commit effort for the scene to move something around over several rounds, and a telepath initiates contact for the day to make contact fort the scene.  With facile mind, this may instead require committing effort only for the scene, or even not committing effort at all.  Flawless Mastery allows anything to work without effort at all, though that is a very late game power. 

Anyway, basically, some powers only require effort be committed whilst in active use, others only for the scene, and only certain ones make the effort go away until the next day.



If you want to block stuff with your sword, yes, you'll be out very fast- but you also got there by committing sunblade effort, because you are a Sunblade not a Psychic.  And while that particular power is actually overcosted (by a lot if you're trying to duplicate some of the things that the late Jedi order is capable of- Sunblades are more like the Jedi when they were just getting started), a sunblade certainly doesn't require effort for everything interesting that they do either.

I had forgotten about the Sunblade stuff.  I was asking about just the default game powers only.  If you try to simulate a Jedi it's damn near impossible and only lasts a few turns at most. 

I'll double check the sunblade expansion. 

Still, my preference will probably come back to more rules lite games as it always does for me.  Probably Mini-Six Bare Bones with my own Deflect Ranged Attack power instead of that game's Sense Danger or Star Wars D6 Lightsaber Combat power. 

Let me add that one of Kevin Crawford's stated design principles was that Psionics should be able to do things nobody else can, but should NOT get to overshadow other characters in their own specialities. I daresay blocking incoming shots would violate that principle: "I can stand here all day and they can't hit me" is already the speciality of another class, namely the Warrior, who does it by wearing heavy armour (and also has a relevant class ability).

My players that play psychics have had fun with them, and definitely appreciate the resource management challenge of just when to burn Effort, and why. By far the most disappointing power is Telekinesis, because everyone who gets it quickly gets their hopes and dreams of "Force Choke" and "Magneto" dashed—although Force Choke can easily be a reskinned Telekinetic Armory technique. But TK ends up being the Swiss Army knife power by level 3.

The rest of the powers are very strong, useful, and in some cases utterly terrifying. Level 3 Telepathy is not to be trifled with. Level 4 Telepathy is scary AF. Teleportation naturally messes up all the basic GM challenges, so it's been fun to re-evaluate my adventures knowing that there's a guy who can easily go "nope" and upend everything. I like Metapsionics because it gives players additional information about the setting all the time. Best still, at no point does the Warrior or Expert ever get overshadowed for more than a round, the Warrior is still the best offensive and defensive combatant. And in terms of skills, no one comes close to thr Expert's competence.

The thing with Effort is that some expenditures are for the day, while others are for the (combat) scene, and yet others are committed until the player decides otherwise. So there are lots and lots of options. A first level psychic can easily start with 3 Effort with the right focus picks. And they'll gain effort quickly enough if they increase their skills accordingly.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on April 06, 2023, 09:57:32 PM
I had forgotten about the Sunblade stuff.

This is absolutely and without question where you want to go for Jedi.

QuoteI was asking about just the default game powers only.

The default psychics are not suitable as Jedi.  They have powers Jedi do not, and they lack almost everything that makes a Jedi powerful.  You'd have to forgo a lot of powerful choices, and there wouldn't be enough stuff to make you viable.  This is definitely why the Sunblade got printed.  Also, there's no way that the Jedi shouldn't have a good attack bonus, as the Sunblade do and psychics don't really.  A partial sunblade / partial psychic could work.

Ultimately, the classes, sunblade included, are made with a lot of effort towards being reasonably balanced with each other at the table, and having some niches kind of protected.  Jedi implemented properly are simply too powerful for essentially any system- only a high level wizard in D&D is at the level of a Jedi, and frankly, there's absolutely every reason to believe that without Foresight, even that wouldn't be a close comparison.

So what kind of Jedi do you want?  If you want a team that has someone at the level of the Jedi that are just "pretty great", like Kit Fisto (....lol), that's doable with the condition that a warrior will probably be overshadowed, so you should take the Sunblade class and simply reduce the cost and triggering abilities on the things that are pretty obviously Jedi powers.  Make blocking incoming ranged attacks require committing effort for the scene instead of the day, and make it last until the end of your next turn instead of just one shot.  Remove the limit on which enemies it can be used again.  Honestly I don't want to think too much about it because I bet someone on the net already did all this work.

Basically you have the pieces to buff it into a Jedi, all ready to go, but just remember while it will still be a totally fair and good character, it will overshadow some guy who is like "I have a gun and some cool foci lets rock".  If the table understands that, then you're probably good to go.