Far Beyond Humanity Career Week
Day 5 – Psychic
#FBHCareers
The Psychic was ostensibly the most difficult career to create, and went through a number of iterations before I was even ready to commit it to page. Like Kinetic, the Psychic career has some mighty big shoes to fill in regards to recreating popular sci-fi. Star Wars, and Star Trek, and Babylon 5, and Farscape and, and, and.
I ended up with too many skills. The community here on G+ was a big help with feedback and suggestions; hopefully this latest version hits the right notes for this very essential Career.
Precognition was, of course, the most complex one. While I really did like the other popular implementation that leveraged xp triggers, it felt very… unstable? Precarious? Like it would topple over very easily. This version of Precog is less elegant but more solid. Plus it gets the player to tell everyone a “what if” story, which is a plus in my book.
I ended up folding Telepathy and Empathy into one, and re-formatting it. Pretty happy the way it turned out, they lacked punch by themselves.
I clarified the wording of Probe and Suggestion to make their application and usage very distinct from one another.
Not 100% sure about the workspaces, but I really couldn’t come up with anything more fitting. Dollars to donuts I’ll come up with something brilliant a few months after FBH is published. -_-
Tomorrow: The Xenologist
https://www.dropbox.com/s/iq9r2cliaijakz0/Career%20-%20Psychic.pdf?dl=0
Spock meets Yoda
I like the changes here. Definitely gonna use this.
My group is going to be exploring a nearby system of frozen planets where the star is encased in a Dyson sphere of unknown origin – when they breach the sphere, I play to begin introducing a couple FBH careers when fictionally possible. Psychic and Kinetic are definitely on that list.
I really love this one. I love the set up for Precognition. I like the idea of failing a roll, and telling this story about what would happen next, and then:
>if your new roll succeeds, the GM can just pepper in little references and asides to how things “could have been” as play continues.
>if you new roll also fails, the GM has ideas for how to bring down the hammer as play continues.
That’s awesome.
Right I really like the idea that if you say, roll a 5 originally and then roll a 6, then it’s close to what you predicted. But if you roll a 5 again on the reroll, the GM makes your prediction happen.
This is phenomenal because it allows you to have entire sessions trying to defeat fate
Looks great, as usual, and the skills are in a really good place.
Suggestion for another workspace type that’s less same-y than Tranquil:
“Artistic” – Basically a place for psychics in a very strange headspace to express some of that internal strangeness. I’m imagining a cabin that’s been converted into some sort of crazy paint-flinging modern art studio.
I think I preferred the previous 7-9 description of “Suggestion” that implied they would come to their senses fairly quickly, rather than the current “unpredictable” one which means a partial success may possibly have been no success at all.
Should “briefly describe the immediate or long term consequences” be “briefly describe the horrible immediate or long-term consequences?” I certainly intend to reserve the right to insert an appropriate leading adjective when my players trigger this move. 🙂
+Chris Wilson I think the unpredictable is much more interesting than “it won’t last long.” “Won’t last long” is basically a time pressure with the same solution always… Everyone hurry up. But “unpredictable” (provided the GM treats the 7-9 as a success, which the book makes very clear is what it is) lets the GM have some ‘monkey paw’ style fun with whatever instruction the PC gave.
So, as long as GM’s do their job, as the rest of the book explains, then a 7-9 on suggestion should never be a failure. Your PCs instruction to “let me inside” will be obeyed… But maybe he interprets it as one way only so there’s no getting out.
Chris Wilson Absolutely on both the 7-9 Suggestion and the horrible Precog consequences.
While I appreciate Alfred Rudzki ‘s counterpoint, I find myself agreeing that “unpredictable” is not awesome. I’ll see if I can’t find middle-ground between the two extremes.
This looks great. We recently started a campaign and worked up a Telepath based off the Psychic from Beyond. Looking forward to trying this out instead. I know you said in other threads that you don’t like stat swaps, but I’m not a huge fan of Probe at +Interface. I think +Mettle, or +Influence would be better. That’s probably mostly a flavor choice thing though.
I totally get why Probe +Influence works in a vacuum, it was mostly to add a bit of stat diversity to the career (Mettle and Influence being covered), and because it’s an Access-altering move (which is Interface’s signature move).
All that said: you are absolutely free to change any and all stat uses! 😀