Author Topic: Getting Rewired Discussion  (Read 5314 times)

Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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Getting Rewired Discussion
« on: December 20, 2015, 02:34:24 PM »
10 pages of looking through discussion threads was required before I was sure I wasn't duplicating anything by following protocol

Thread.

Start:
I remember having to go through this several times as the clutch example wasn't very clear. Apparently the tattoos have to use the full 2D area ... otherwise some of the stuff wouldn't work as intended

This is a good resource ... but it could be clearer.

Btw are we supposed to post after the handbooks now or not?
Could you clarify what parts you find difficult? What do you mean the tattoos have to take up the full 2d area, otherwise it wouldn't work as intended? What specifically wouldn't work?
Well for one, all we have is 2 people's comments about the rules ... not the actual rules. Everytime anyone has to show their DM the actual material, they must go hunting.

Basically none of the "what to do with this" is a logical progression. It's a smattering of "you can do this" ... but I don't want to take your word for it. I want to see why I can do those things. Even the one detailed part about a triggered revivify tattoo suspiciously makes no mention about XP. There are so many other questions, like why Plane shift is listed as 3rd level. Etc.

tl;dr there is a massive lack of citations that makes this handbook unusable for people who actually need to use the handbook to learn

Offline awaken_D_M_golem

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #1 on: December 21, 2015, 04:53:36 PM »
Links have become wotc-ified.
Parts of the early posts are SRD verbatum.

Original article (also on the OP)
http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/psm/20031225a

wayback of Bacris' Thread (some discussion)
https://web.archive.org/web/20070327125752/http://boards1.wizards.com/wotc_archive/index.php/t-330627


Recharge = fun.
Some Psi Tattoos =/= some other Psi Tattoos
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Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #2 on: December 22, 2015, 03:18:18 PM »
Thanks. That's enough for the original source, but 100% of the guided parts are still lacking a logical progression of how/why they work.

Challenge: read this handbook aloud to your wife and see if she can follow why all of those combinations are legal. If the text was well-written she would always say "Yup, that's logical," instead of a "that does what again?"


Offline phaedrusxy

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #4 on: December 22, 2015, 09:01:12 PM »
Thanks for starting a discussion thread, and for pointing out the problems with the thread. I basically just rescued this from an earlier thread, and had only put a bit of work into further detailing it.

Plane Shift is listed as 3rd because an Elocater can get it as 3rd. Same for Teleport.

The Revivify tattoo would carry a one time extra cost for the XP required (and it would only require the "base" amount of XP, since it immediately revivifies you, not several rounds later as per the augment), per the standard rules on creating psionic tattoos. This extra cost is also listed in the example (that's the +1000 gp or +200 XP, as IIRC if you pay someone to make a magic item they charge 5gp per XP).

I expanded the explanation of that setup, and also noticed an error (I think... it's been years since I looked at this stuff...). I think you'd need a second relay to make it work as stated.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2015, 09:12:56 PM by phaedrusxy »
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Offline Garryl

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #5 on: December 22, 2015, 09:36:49 PM »
It's worth mentioning that the expanded psionic tattoo rules were printed for the 3.0 psionics rules. Old psionics are notorious for being one of the few 3.0 things that doesn't really fit into its 3.5 incarnation, despite seeming so damn similar at a glance. It really should get some sort of update/alteration to adapt to the 3.5 psionics system mechanics, rather than trying to use it directly.
- 3.0 and 3.5 psionic tattoos work about the same out of the book, IIRC, although 3.0 psionics had a limit of 17 tattoos, while 3.5's limit is 20.
- 3.0 crawling tattoos cost twice as much as 3.5 crawling tattoos (which in turn have the same price as 3.0/3.5 psionic tattoos).
- Despite being universal psionic items, crawling tattoos (in both editions) reference counting as normal psionic tattoos in all ways except their crawly exceptions. A number of special tattoos should work with them as a result. Since the tattoo removes itself from you once activated, capacitor shouldn't work, but I think the rest will.
- 3.0 and 3.5 powers work differently, especially when it comes to augmentation (didn't exist in 3.0). In particular, augmentations, and the save DC increases that they frequently provide, took the same conceptual place of heightening the power's level. The Psionic Tattoo Mastery feat includes a heightening component (+1 level per +2 ML) which wouldn't be necessary or appropriate in a 3.5 conversion.

Edit: Phaedrus, the "detailed writeup" says 2 slots for Psionic Revivify. It should be 5 slots (5th-level Egoist power).

Edit 2: 3.0 crawling tattoos bypassed all saves of the power. 3.5 crawling tattoos only bypass Reflex saves.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2015, 03:55:18 PM by Garryl »

Offline phaedrusxy

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #6 on: December 22, 2015, 09:48:29 PM »
The original thread (by Bacris) was called Getting Rewired, and was specifically supposed to be a 3.5 update to these rules (this is stated in the first post of the thread). Everything else mentioned assumes you're using this 3.5 update (not the original 3.0 Mind's Eye article verbatim).

Good catch on the Revivify tattoo. I'd missed that. Basically... I thought this stuff looked really cool, but never actually used it in a game...
« Last Edit: December 22, 2015, 09:55:30 PM by phaedrusxy »
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Offline Garryl

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #7 on: December 22, 2015, 10:49:39 PM »
Fine, but I'd like to stress my recommendation that the auto-heightening of powers at higher MLs with tattoo mastery should be removed in a 3.0-to-3.5 conversion. The purpose that increased power level served in 3.0 has been subsumed into the augmentation system in 3.5, so keeping it around would be double-dipping.

Offline awaken_D_M_golem

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #8 on: December 23, 2015, 03:29:02 PM »
love Crawling Tattoos = Touch Attack
and to bypass Improved Evasion ... 
quite useful in late game (and shenanigans).


if Potions ~= Tattoos , is mostly in effect, then :
http://dndtools.pw/classes/master-alchemist/
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Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #9 on: December 24, 2015, 04:41:59 PM »
Thank Garryl. Not sure how that happened but its fixed.

Thanks for starting a discussion thread, and for pointing out the problems with the thread. I basically just rescued this from an earlier thread
You're welcome. I like the idea ... I'm just not sure its ready to be used like a normal handbook: "Hmm I think I want to dip cleric. I guess I'll spend two minutes reading this handbook."

Instead its like 15 minutes of intense reading where you constantly cross-reference things until you either a) force yourself to be comfortable with the material or b) give up because its not worth the effort. I used to be in camp a) but after a few years went by I slipped into the second camp. It appears that Garryl is still in camp a).

It totally makes sense that you've not used the material in a game PXY. Just imagine trying to explain it to a DM who can follow 3.5 psioncs but only once had a psy war PC a year ago. Now imagine that DM is a sticker for making sure all the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted. Now imagine he's looking over your character sheet and he wants to know exactly how the 10 tatoo slots you have listed are used. Questions like "what does that one cost" and "how does that one work" are going to be asked for every single logic gate listed.

You'd save yourself a lot of trouble if you just labelled everything clearly so he doesn't have to ask 20 questions (literally) before you plug one single aspect of your character.

Offline Garryl

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #10 on: December 24, 2015, 06:06:54 PM »
A quick guide to psionic tattoos...
  • Psionic tattoos are like potions for powers.
  • Crawling tattoos are related. They'll walk over and apply themselves to someone else instead of you when activated. Also good for attack powers. Not the focus of this discussion, however.
  • Special psionic tattoos modify your other psionic tattoos to do neat things, like not being consumed on use or breaking the action economy.
  • Warning: Psionic Tattoo Mastery and advanced psionic tattoos are unupdated 3.0 psionics, use with caution.

And on to the slightly more detailed summaries...
  • You can have only 20 psionic tattoos as a time.
  • Psionic Tattoo Mastery lets you make advanced psionic tattoos that do special things, and lets you make psionic tattoos of higher than 3rd level powers and at above minimum ML. Higher level tattoos take up more slots, though (1 slot, +2 per level above 3rd).
  • Special tattoos link up to regular psionic tattoos on your body. A special tattoo can usually only link to one psionic tattoo at a time, but Relays can break that limit.
  • Relay: Linked tattoos (up to 3 of them) fire off one per round in order when you activate it. Lets you spend a single standard action to fire off multiple powers (albeit over time and with a delay). It's kind of like the Linked Power metapsionic feat, but with fewer limits. Also useful for letting Capacitors and Mental Taps and other advanced tattoos apply to multiple psionic tattoos instead of just one.
  • Mental Tap: Activate a tattoo as a swift action instead of a standard action. Action economy, go!
  • Capacitor: Turns linked tattoos from single-use items to rechargeable. Saps 1 PP per day from you until it's recharged the power's normal manifestation cost, then the capacitor is usable again (the psionic tattoos are still available normally as single-use items while the capacitor is offline). This is probably what makes advanced tattoos so damn appealing, even more so than Mental Tap's action economy shenanigans.
  • Transducer: Lets you recharge a Capacitor directly. You have to pay twice as much PP, but you can charge them up much faster, even in the heat of battle. You can also use leftover PP at the end of the day, etc.
  • Amplifier: Scalable Empower on psionic tattoos by spending your own PP. The power is empowered by +25% per 2 PP spent, and you can spend no more than the difference between the power's normal PP cost and your ML (in other words, the amount of PP you'd be able to spend on metapsionic feats if you were manifesting it yourself).
  • Inducer: Contingency for tattoos. Takes 3 tattoo slots instead of 1. Lets you do neat things like automatically Revivifying yourself after death.
  • There are a bunch of other special tattoos, but these are the big ones that do fancy things you don't get anywhere else. The rest are to do with protecting your tattoos from being destroyed (Fuse, Circuit Breaker), changing which tattoos are linked to which (Integrated Circuit), reproducing a scroll of Prismatic Spray (Emitter), being a cheaper Cognizance Crystal (Psychic Battery), and interacting with the stupid psionic combat rules 3.0 psionics had (Transmitter, Receiver).

I hope that helps clear some things up PBMC.

By the way, Phaedrus, you seem to have left out the entry for the Amplifier tattoo.

Edit: Just had a thought about some of the other things in the article. Specifically, the Overload Tattoos power could be used to shatter the action economy. Give up your save to have all 17 (3.0) or 20 (3.5) tattoos fire off instantly (although you might want some to be Capacitors instead for reusability).
« Last Edit: December 25, 2015, 10:50:27 PM by Garryl »

Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #11 on: December 25, 2015, 12:03:10 PM »
Yes that's very helpful. Just simply, clear explanations is what I was hoping would happen (to the handbook).

It seems to me that 1) All tattoos need capacitors, because you don't want to lose your hard earned tattoos.
2) a character then only wants 1 or 3 actual power-holding tattoos (due to the limit on relay tattoos). Do nonpower-holding tattoos count against this limit?
3) a character should have atleast 1 contingency (inducer) tattoo: "as though the power stored in the tattoo were affected by the contingency power" means there is still the clause of "You can use only one psionic contingency companion power at a time" still applies. This means you only pay 56 once rather than 15 xp everytime you blow your contingency.
4) atleast the contingency tattoo, and probably any other high-use tattoos, should have a recharge (inducer) tattoo so you don't have "down" days.

Note that for the above I had to use your elucidations and then cross-reference the handbook; its simply not clear enough to read directly and quickly. I'm also pulling the above from the post were bracis seems to be quoting the original rules, but just to be sure I had to be the one to cross-reference this because the handbook didn't say... In fact he is quoting (atleast the piece that I checked) correctly.

I seem to remember crunching the numbers and realizing that tattoos weren't worth the gp for normal buff powers. It would probably take me a while to recreate that math. Can I get some "how to quickly tabulate costs" examples?

Am I wrong that there are basically 3 uses for the tatoos: contingencies, active tattoos and buffs?

btw PXY that elocator powers find is very nice.

Offline Garryl

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #12 on: December 25, 2015, 10:41:32 PM »
Damn, have I been reading and remembering things wrong with Psionic Tattoo Mastery, and with Capacitors.
- The actual printing of Psionic Tattoo Mastery for 3.0 allows for metapsionic-enhanced powers. Boris's 3.5 adaptation, which is quoted in the Getting Rewired handbook (which, to reiterate, is not an official WotC-printed update) tosses out metapsionics. For some reason, it feels the need to add in augmentation (superfluous, 3.5 Scribe Tattoo already allows to to make tattoos at any ML) and automatic power heightening (which I've railed against elsewhere and won't repeat here). See the spoiler for my take on how the feat should be.
- I reread the description of capacitors and I believe my previous understanding and explanation of their function was flawed. It's the capacitor that needs to recharge (and retains/records/repays the PP deficit), not the psionic tattoos it was linked to, so they do remain usable while attached to a depleted capacitor. It also means that once a capacitor is depleted and goes into recharge, it doesn't actually have to remain attached to the psionic tattoos and can be detached safely with an integrated circuit.

(click to show/hide)

Yes that's very helpful. Just simply, clear explanations is what I was hoping would happen (to the handbook).

It seems to me that 1) All tattoos need capacitors, because you don't want to lose your hard earned tattoos.

Pretty much. Without a capacitor, a tattoo is basically just a potion, and charop consensus is that potions are not worth the cost in the vast majority of cases.

Quote
2) a character then only wants 1 or 3 actual power-holding tattoos (due to the limit on relay tattoos). Do nonpower-holding tattoos count against this limit?

You really want at least 2 slots per 3 psionic tattoos to be used for relays and capacitors (1 capacitor can link to 3 power tattoos attached to 1 relay). An integrated circuit lets you share a single transducer among multiple capacitors if your priority is tattoo slot efficiency over PP efficiency (just link it, out of combat, to whichever capacitor you want to recharge at a time). An IC is nice to have with a lot of tattoos, anyways, if only because it makes it easier to adjust things if you need to (change the order your relays trigger powers in, for example).

Non-power tattoos don't count towards a relay's 3 tattoo limit. Most of the special tattoos can attach to the relay-linked trio as a whole. I don't know why the example in the article has 3 capacitors, one for each of the powers on the relay, while having a single mental tap for the trio, as the wording for the two special tattoos is identical as far as I can tell.

Quote
3) a character should have atleast 1 contingency (inducer) tattoo: "as though the power stored in the tattoo were affected by the contingency power" means there is still the clause of "You can use only one psionic contingency companion power at a time" still applies. This means you only pay 56 once rather than 15 xp everytime you blow your contingency.

The text doesn't have enough clarifying information to solidly argue one way or another (at least, not as solidly as I would like). I lean towards the other way, that multiple inducers are feasible and that they don't interfere with the Psionic Contingency power, either. Your interpretation is probably more likely to be correct that mine, however.

Quote
4) atleast the contingency tattoo, and probably any other high-use tattoos, should have a recharge (inducer) tattoo so you don't have "down" days.

If you have enough high-use tattoos that don't require instant recharging, it may be more efficient to use one transducer and an integrated circuit to move it between your capacitors, or to have multiple capacitors and use an IC to swap a fresh one in after the previous one is used.

Quote
Note that for the above I had to use your elucidations and then cross-reference the handbook; its simply not clear enough to read directly and quickly. I'm also pulling the above from the post were bracis seems to be quoting the original rules, but just to be sure I had to be the one to cross-reference this because the handbook didn't say... In fact he is quoting (atleast the piece that I checked) correctly.

I seem to remember crunching the numbers and realizing that tattoos weren't worth the gp for normal buff powers. It would probably take me a while to recreate that math. Can I get some "how to quickly tabulate costs" examples?

It's the cost of the psionic tattoos themselves (50 gp x ML x power level + 5 gp/xp; the actual formula, rather than a table, is found in the Scribe Tattoo feat's text) plus that of any special tattoos. There's nothing complicated about it.

For reference, a relay has a market value of 50 gp, and a capacitor has a market value of 1250 gp. Those are probably the most commonly used special tattoos.

Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #13 on: December 30, 2015, 02:13:56 PM »
Okay. Well, although the discussion has been helpful, I'm still finding the present state of the handbook lacking. I remember feeling this way about the grafts handbook before I redid it. I think it simply needs a complete overhaul/reformatting.

PXY, are you up to redoing the handbook? Garryl? If I do it, it would most likely be after my upcoming info dump.

Offline Garryl

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #14 on: December 30, 2015, 05:10:09 PM »
Blink and you'll miss it, but the article suggests the possibility of building Psionic Tattoo Mastery into the baseline Scribe Tattoo feat for campaigns where psionics/psionic tattoos are common.

Quote from: http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/psm/20031225a
In a campaign with a lot of psionics or one where psionic tattoos are commonplace, you may want to simply replace the Scribe Tattoo feat with the Psionic Tattoo Mastery feat.

Offline phaedrusxy

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #15 on: December 30, 2015, 06:53:14 PM »
Okay. Well, although the discussion has been helpful, I'm still finding the present state of the handbook lacking. I remember feeling this way about the grafts handbook before I redid it. I think it simply needs a complete overhaul/reformatting.

PXY, are you up to redoing the handbook? Garryl? If I do it, it would most likely be after my upcoming info dump.
if you want to do it, feel free. I'm pretty slammed IRL right now...
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Offline Garryl

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #16 on: December 31, 2015, 12:11:43 AM »
I just finished my own psionic tattoos guide. Mwahaha!

Offline awaken_D_M_golem

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #17 on: December 31, 2015, 05:17:06 PM »
 :clap to all involved.
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Offline nijineko

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Re: Getting Rewired Discussion
« Reply #18 on: December 31, 2015, 08:02:05 PM »
its not a third party book, it is offical wotc content.

and you can own it as easily as downloading it from the officially designated host: athas.org.
Or for everyone else, WotC's offhand "go get your AD&D campaign fix over there and leave us alone" comment != "Official Content." There is no editing or oversight on fan-based D&D websites. They could literally make up anything they want over there.

Also Discussion Thread.

the fact that wotc declared them official overrides any opinions you, myself, or everyone else has. the content creator/owner made them coequal. that status has never been rescinded, therefore, it is official content.

and thank you for the discussion thread link.