Psionics toolkit

[Aragathor]

I don't think having separate power points would add anything to it. Star Wars Force powers run on a Feats and Skills system and use Vitality. T20 Psionics are Feats with an extra Psi score powering the Spheres of Influence but could easily be modified to use the Stamina/Lifeblood aspect. d20 Trinity treats them like Cleric spells with a Granted Power for each discipline and again a separate Psi attribute powering it. I've been working on converting d20 Trinity to a skills and feats system and for a high powered psionics system, that would probably work great.

For a low power system, tho, I always thought it should be run as a D&D style Template (i.e the Sensitive or the Reader).

Of course, I could be wrong...

SW D20 used vitality for force powers, now they use a completely different system.
The problem with every vitality based system is the moment where the user is better off not using his abilities, because other things are just as effective and don't hurt him.
And SC is a system where a lot of such things exists.

[Mister Andersen]

SW D20 used vitality for force powers, now they use a completely different system.

The problem with the original d20 star wars was that they stuck each separate Force power into a different skill, and which didn't work like the myriad of video games out there that employed the Force.

The problem with every vitality based system is the moment where the user is better off not using his abilities, because other things are just as effective and don't hurt him.
And SC is a system where a lot of such things exists.

Care to expand?

[whiterabbit]

I'm currently in the process of converting a setting that combines Bubblegum Crisis with Akira from the Hero system. There are two types of psioncs in the setting: Psychokinesis (dealing with the physical world), and Espers (dealing with mind-to-mind powers). I had originally intended to use the d20Modern system to do this, but found that the base/advanced class system interfered with the flavor of the setting. How can you have 8 year olds flinging around tanks with their minds if the youngest character has to be at least 15?

That's when I decided to take the plunge with SC, and boy am I glad I did. Not only can you start out with psionic powers and not be diminished by having to essentially wade through three levels of fluff levels (minimum), but you already use the VP/WP system for added deadliness and realism, AND the NPCs are easier to manage. Then the much better autofire system is leaps and bounds above the d20M way. It's like upgrading from a Gremlin to a Corvette.

Anyways, back to the point. I'm going to try the two classes with powers taken like a sorcerer, powered by power points. The big difference was inspired by the new 4ed DnD stuff I heard about. Instead of working with a certain amount of points per day, they are given a much smaller pool (about 1/4 IIRC), and recover at a certain rate. This allows them to be more useful at lower levels over a longer period of time, rather than blowing their wad and being useless the rest of the day. Of course, I had to make entirely new powers for the psychokinetic (or PK as they're known), in order to better represent them, but they practically wrote themselves, once I figured out the way psionics work in 3.5.

[Krensky]

You might want to look at the Shadow Force Archer PDF which includes Psioncs and ritual cult based magic. IT's a SC1 book, but the PDF includes a conversion document. Also consider picking up a copy of Spellbound to see how Crafty does D&D like magic. The crucial differences are that your power point pool is per scene and that magic users are uncanny and meaningful even without using magic.