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Psychic powers, Cipher! To me this is just another mage archtype. Using his will power (call it intellect if you will or what they will) to bend reality and others mind...yes, another mage. Different aproach but never the less the same. Should have been a sub mage class, or specialisation.

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Psychic powers, Cipher! To me this is just another mage archtype. Using his will power (call it intellect if you will or what they will) to bend reality and others mind...yes, another mage. Different aproach but never the less the same. Should have been a sub mage class, or specialisation.

wizards and Psionists are 2 different beasts altogether
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As I understood it in D&D it went like this: The world is infused with magical energies. Much like we have gravity as something that just is, and is everywhere, the magical energies for all spells exist in the world or can be ripped into it from one of the many planes.

 

Mages learn through study and intelligence exactly how to manipulate these energies to gain the desired effects.

 

Sorcerers are innately magical, and through force of will alone the energies bend for them.

 

Psions ignore these energies and instead bring about effects through the strength of their own power.

 

That's why I always liked psions a little more than mages and sorcerers.

 

Here it sounds similar, where souls are all the source of power, and psions apparently manipulate others' souls?

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Certainly sounds potentially fun as a class to play - but more intriguing to me is how they will fit into society. Mind controllers are typically written as being ostracized & feared by society - and for good reason. A single psion could become supreme leader of the world if unchecked (a la The Mule in Foundation).

 

So, do they form secret societies (as suggested by their name)? Are they hunted down or limited by other groups? Are they cursed in some way or have severe limitations?

 

This is the one power that gives me the hibby jibbes, someone could find out your deepest darkest secrets, alter your emotions/memories, can make you do whatever they want and there is little you could do about it. In the x-men comics, I do not how many times xavier or gene grey would read the minds of her companions, or how many times they casually would alter the memreries/emotions of other people. I could never trust someone with power like that. Am I helping them because I want to or they made me want to? Did I really kill the guy or has my memory been altered? How did they know what I did last week? Did someone tell them or did they read my mind? Why do they laugh when they see me, do they know my embarassing secret?!?! Am I in love with her or is my emotions being manipulated by her? etc....

 

In one comic, some heroes were magically labatomizing a villian, batman cought them in the act and they used their powers to make him forget. He starts to remember later and goes super paranoid, creating a vast computer network to spy on every hero and villian ignoring their privacy and learning their secret identities.

 

Like I said, I could never trust people who could read peoples minds or manipulate memory/emotions.

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Never played a psionicist. What exactly do they play like?

 

They play like a more versatile sorcerer. You pay power points to manifest powers, but you can choose to infuse more power points into attacks (up to your manifester level) to augment their power.

 

So, imagine a sorcerer who could burn a ninth level spell to get 9 more casts of magic missile, or if he could put so much power into magic missile, it basically cast as a 9th level spell.

 

Their effects also tend to be more interesting to me. One of the spells that's my favorite is dissipating touch, where you touch a creature and do 1d6 damage for every power point you burn, and you basically scatter their flesh across the cosmos. I used it to get rid of a fireball trap once by dissipating the rune inscription... The DM had the whole rune appear still in tact in another part of the dungeon (because all teleport effects were supressed or warped somehow in this dungeon)

 

I play a kineticist - raw power for the win: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/classes/psion.htm

Edited by Hypevosa
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This class actually worries me a bit. If a Cipher is someone who manipulates souls, that implies the Wizard does not. Rather, Wizards are just going to be some AOE bore tossing generic elemental spells.

 

yep, sucks to be a mage fan when ciphers are around stealing all your chicks and hogging all your glory...

 

/smugface

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Hımm what about soulles husks, undeads and animals. It seems like we can use only our own soul in situations like this.

 

Or we can manipulate our party "friends"es souls for usage. :insertevillaugh:

Edited by cyberarmy

Nothing is true, everything is permited.
 

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Cipher just sounds like it focuses on that manipulation, that doesn't mean a mage shouldn't be able to affect other souls at all.

 

The only advantages I can see to manipulating other souls is to cancel their powers, hinder their abilities, etc. Cipher sounds like its best use is debuffing the enemy somehow, not necessarily kiling them.

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Cipher just sounds like it focuses on that manipulation, that doesn't mean a mage shouldn't be able to affect other souls at all.

 

The only advantages I can see to manipulating other souls is to cancel their powers, hinder their abilities, etc. Cipher sounds like its best use is debuffing the enemy somehow, not necessarily kiling them.

hey man, if dragging around a backpack full of books tomes like some poor over worked asian kid going to school sounds like your idea of fun then be my guest...as you're flipping through one of those tomes trying to find the page to that fireball spell I'm sure there will be a cipher around TK crushing all the foes that are encroaching on your position. Its all good.

 

/NoWorries

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I'd like to see Ciphers, and mind control in general, incorporated in an intelligent way. Say there's a woman who's grieving over her husband who was brutally murdered by burgulars trying to get a magical necklace from her house. Grief has destroyed her life - all her friends and family have deserted her for being as she is - and the reason why she can't get over her grief is not because her husband is dead, but because of the horrible and mentally scarring manner in which he was killed right in front of her. Now as a cipher would it be right to alter her memories so that her husband died in a manner that was much more peaceful, knowing that the are no other people left around to remind her of the truth? Is it right to make this call knowing that if you asked her she would tell you she wanted to remember the truth, but also being sure of the fact that if you did alter her memories she could finally be happy and at peace? In a broader sense, is mind control always inherently a violation, even if it can be used for good? That's how I'd like to see ciphers used in this game, also mind controlling the bad guys and making them fight each other is always fun.

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I've always like psionics in D&D; so I hope we hit the stretch goal to have Ciphers.

I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do "must" and "cannot" meet? Yet I must - but I cannot! ~ Ro-Man

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