Power Play Trivia Quiz

Answer: Soulknife

Soulknifes are psionically gifted warriors whose abilities revolve around shaping blades from pure mental energies and using them for devastating attacks. While they only have the medium attack progression, at the highest levels, they can imbue their blade with an inherent +5 bonus and a special ability worth another +4 as well as using their move action to add up to 5d8 of damage to any strike.

While this is certainly powerful, we want to wield some actual psionic powers in this quiz, so let's choose one of the three other classes!

Answer: 9th level

Just like arcane and divine spells, psionic powers come in all levels up to 9th although not all of the classes reach this pinnacle of power. As a psion, you attain 9th level powers at class level 17, as a wilder, you'll need class level 18. Psychic warriors, a class combining psionic power with a fighter-like feat progression, can reach up to 6th level powers, similar to a bard. "Complete Psion" adds another three power-wielding classes - the ardent, also capable of learning 9th level powers, and the divine mind and lurk, both of which max out at 6th level.

Answer: 0-level powers do not exist in 3.5

While the original Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 Psionics Handbook introduced 0-level powers called talents, these were silently dropped for the 3.5 edition. This was at least partially due to the complicated bookkeeping involved in using these talents: you got to use as many talents for free per day as you had class levels, but afterwards, you had to pay one power point. You can imagine that this tracking gets unwieldy at higher levels - and these single points rarely matter when your daily allotment is over 300.

All power-wielding characters except the divine mind get access to 1st level powers at the start of their career; the divine mind has to wait until level 5 before using any powers.

Answer: Manifesting

Psionic powers are manifested, not cast. Manifesting a power is a purely mental action, so you will not need any verbal, somatic or material components, which can be quite handy when your party is bound, silenced or deprived of its equipment. However, it is almost impossible to disguise the use of a power as you get side effects called displays. Those can be visual, auditory, olfactory, material or mental and immature players with a penchant for "breaking wind" humor can have endless fun giving their characters nonstandard displays.

Answer: Power points = twice power level minus 1

All powers' base costs are odd numbers, ranging from 1 to 17. Most powers can also be augmented by paying a higher cost to get a greater effect - unlike most spells the effect of a power does not increase with manifester level but rather requires an appropriately greater investment.

As a hard rule, the cost for any power you manifest can never exceed your manifester level, thus limiting the augmentations and metapsionic feats you can use on it.

Answer: Erudite

With the flexibility to learn as many powers as they want while not having to lug a hefty spellbook around, erudites can be among the most versatile characters in the game, but they are difficult to play effectively as you only get a relatively small number of different powers (half your erudite level plus 1) you can manifest every day. A day of mixed challenges, some combat and some noncombat, can very quickly exhaust this supply, leaving an erudite with no useful powers to manifest even though she may still have a large number of power points left over.

The other options are all psionic prestige classes.

Answer: Temporarily raise your manifester level

If you overchannel a power, you get to use it at a higher level than you normally could. Depending on your level, you can increase the manifester level by up to 3, but the price can be quite high - at this highest tier, you take 5d8 of damage and, unlike for many such abilities, this is lethal damage, so you can kill yourself by overchanneling a power.

If you want to increase your manifesting maximum on a regular basis, you can get a similar benefit from the wilder's wild surge class feature, but you risk enervating yourself and losing one round of actions when you do so.

Answer: Psion

Only psions do get access to discipline powers and they get to specialize in only one of the six disciplines, making these much more restrictive than the schools of magic. Ardents and divine minds get so-called mantles that each have a power list associated with them; some of these lists do include discipline powers. As an example, the life mantle grants access to Psionic Revivify and Psionic Restoration, both of which are psychometabolism powers.

Any manifester can take the Expanded Knowledge feat which allows them to permanently learn a single additional power beyond their normal maximum - and that power can be from any discipline or mantle and even from a different class.

Answer: Psicrystals are similar to scrolls

Dorjes are the exact psionic equivalent to wands: They hold a single power and 50 charges with which to use it. Psionic tattoos are like potions - they can hold a power of up to 3rd level and anyone, even unskilled characters, can use them. "Universal item" is simply a term for a psionic wondrous item.

A psicrystal is most similar to a familiar, being a sentient crystal that gains various abilities as the character gains experience. The equivalent to a scroll - a single-use power completion item - is called a power stone. There is also a psionic equivalent to a staff; it's worn on the head and called a psicrown.

Answer: They are the same except for the purpose of using skills and feats

For most purposes, magic and psionics are the same in the default rules. A Detect Magic spell can detect powers and manifesting Dispel Psionics can remove a spell. However, the skills and feats are different - you cannot use a metamagic feat on a power and Spellcraft will not help you identify a psionic power.

Two main variants are presented as optional rules: One is that magic and psionics are entirely different and do not interact, the other is that there is a diminished effect: Spellcasters can affect psionics with higher level spells than they need to affect spells (Dispel Psionics is a 5th level spell for example) and vice versa and spell/power resistance as well as antimagic/anti-psionic effects have a reduced (roughly halved) impact on the opposite energy type.