While the Three Rivers Academy is currently between seasons, we are recording new sessions. Some of you may have tuned into our recent LiveCast for a Halloween special. If you did you met Chad (the Human), The team’s new psychic. During a recent discussion other famous comic book psychics me up to establish some benchmarks. Namely the powers of a certain school principle in upstate New York. So here are a few thresholds for Telepathy.
“Telepathy: Able to read minds and project his own thoughts into the minds of others within a radius of 250 miles (on Earth). With extreme effort he can greatly extend that radius. When synched with Cerebro or Cerebra, he can connect to every mind on a planet.”
Power: Telepathy
- Support: Expression/Parent Attribute: Intelligence
New Communications: Telepathy (Cost: Typical 1 AP)
Secondary Role: Offense (Cost: Major 2 AP)
- Defended By Psyche (Cost: Major 2 AP)
- Devastating (Cost: Major 2 AP)
Before we jump into telepathic communication at 250 miles, lets scale things back. To do this we’re going to call 250 miles anywhere within the state or half a state away. This lets us back things down to, Greater Metro Area (Beyond the city), City, district, and neighborhood.
Now that we have some basic ranges beyond line of sight, lets establish a base Difficulty. Looking at the Difficulty levels we settle on Advanced (25). This represents a modest challenge to low powered heroes but something a classic hero could accomplish with little to no effort.
“Advanced (25) At this Difficulty, characters of average skill with no other supporting characteristics to aid them will often fail. Example: Locating a loophole in a contract written by a corporate lawyer. Lift: 400 Kilograms ”
With this in mind we now scale the difficulties up:
District: Very Advanced (30)
City: Laborious (35)
Greater Metro: Very Laborious (40)
State: Challenging (45)
We know that the Professor can almost always contact someone within the state assuming there is nothing blocking him. That implies his base Roll will Put him around 45. He’s also one of the most powerful psychics in his universe. Lets call him a Focused High Powered character, with an Intelligence of 20 and a Telepathy power of 15.
This puts his base Roll at 35 +3d6, Already he succeeds half the time. The average Roll on 3d6 being a 10. However, we want him to almost always hit that, assuming no interference. So we give him the Specialty Communications 4 (Cost 2 AP)
This small investment changes his Roll to 39 +4d6. Now the Professor only fails on a Roll of 4 or 5 will. Unless something is interfering, there is no reason to roll. The GM should just let the Prof have this one. Now, lets go bigger:
Region Very Challenging (50)
Country: Hard (55)
Continent: Very Hard (60)
Hemisphere: Heroic (65)
World: Very Heroic (70)
Unassisted the Professor can reasonably reach someone’s mind in the region he’s in. With Effort the entire country. Rolling a 16+ unassisted or spending one point of Willpower to double his Die roll.
So what does his Psychic Amplifier give him?
“When synched with Cerebro or Cerebra, he can connect to every mind on a planet.”
This means hitting around a 70 on his Roll with little effort. If we simply call the Amplifier High Powered gear it would give Prof X a nice 15 to Telepathy. With that his base Roll up to 54 +4d6. This falls a bit short of Hitting anywhere on Earth, with little effort.
Here’s where a bit of speculation comes in, Chuck’s a bit of a homebody, So we’re going to give him a Specialty for using his Amplifier 10 (4 AP, or 12 XP) This brings him to a solid 64 +4d6 when communicating telepathically, or 60 +4d6 for any use of his telepathy.
Of course, that’s the Professor, not Chad (the Human). However, this gives us clear goals for the character as he develops his own powers.
