How do you determine how much PE a creature has?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Check their course schedule?
More seriously: What's "PE"?
Psychic Energy.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I mean if you're making a whole new monster that has psychic spell like abilities. How do you determine Its max PE.
Huh, I've never seen that mechanic. I was under the impression that psychic magic was always Vancian the same way regular magic is. Is this a Bestiary 5 thing or does Occult Adventures also describe it?
I mean if you're making a whole new monster that has psychic spell like abilities. How do you determine Its max PE.
It's an arbitrary creation of the monster designer, just like the number, spell level, and frequency of uses of its available SLAs. This came up in some other thread and that was the answer one of the devs gave.
I mean if you're making a whole new monster that has psychic spell like abilities. How do you determine Its max PE.It's an arbitrary creation of the monster designer, just like the number, spell level, and frequency of uses of its available SLAs. This came up in some other thread and that was the answer one of the devs gave.
That seems really weird to me, but it does answer my question so thanks.
Huh, I've never seen that mechanic. I was under the impression that psychic magic was always Vancian the same way regular magic is. Is this a Bestiary 5 thing or does Occult Adventures also describe it?
It was introduced in Bestiary 5. It's a system similar to mana in games like Final Fantasy; each spell in their repertoire has a PE cost, and they can cast that spell as long as they have enough PE. It's closer to casting spells than using SLA's, because Thought and Emotion components still apply. The DC is tied to the PE cost instead of the spell level, and you can undercast applicable spells by spending 1PE less per reduced spell level. Spells costing 0 PE can be cast even when your PE pool is empty. You can apply metamagic effects to spells by spending an amount of PE equal to the level increase and increasing the casting time as normal.
I'm personally a big fan of this system; it gives you more options and flexibility in how you want to use the monster's magical toolbox.
Seems kinda tacked on to me, honestly. The design of psychic magic in Occult Adventures seems aimed to keep it as similar as possible to existing magic, hence not using the PSPs from 2E or some other mana substitute. Introducing them for monsters only after the fact is . . . well, it's just weird.