I recently picked up a copy of Psionic Institutes; T4 isn't my usual edition, but I thought the book might be useful for other points in the timeline. I'm not sure if I missed something while reading through the book, but I didn't see any use of the generated Departmental Quality (DQ) other than needing a number greater than 0 for the department to exist. Everything in the book seems to run off the overall Quality of Institution (QI) with no reference to DQ. Did I miss something (either in this book, another book, or errata), or does DQ serve no purpose at all?
T4 Only: Psionic Institutes - is Departmental Quality irrelevant?
- Thread starter TheDark
- Start date
That's entirely possible, but it would be one heck of a multi-page error in both text and formulas. QI is calculated for the school as a whole based on the student/instructor ratio, amenities rating, and DMs based on institutional type (educational, government, commercial, or secret). The department ratings are calculated individually for each psionic discipline (Awareness, Clairvoyance, etc), and only have DMs for institutional type, which are very different from the DMs for QI. They're also separate categories for the Universal Institute Descriptor. My first expectation was that they would be the maximum rating that a school could train a student to, but as far as I can tell there's no purpose to them in the text of the book.
This IS T4 we're talking about here, so, this isn't necessary unreasonable.
Very true, but I feel like it's more likely to be one of the (many) omissions in the rules rather than a consolidation. Unfortunately, the only errata for Psionic Institutes in the T4 Consolidated Errata is the omission of the text for Lightning Calculator, and I didn't find any reference to this in a search (admittedly cursory) of board topics.
I suspect most of us who used it used only the powers, not the rest of it...
Coming back to this, what I ended up house ruling was that Departmental Quality is the maximum level that the Institute can train a student to in that branch of psionics. That gives it a reason to exist, a reason for characters to care about it, and (as best as I can tell) runs no risk of breaking anything else within the rules.
BackworldTraveller
SOC-13
How did Psionics start if you can only use them if trained? Almost every other cognitive or motion or whatever ability requires practice but not a trainer. How do wild talents learn? How did the first talents get to the point of founding institutes? Did the suppression of institutes really stop psions learning?
There had to be a First. Probably a Wild Talent trained themselves through trial and error. Then through curiosity, looked for other Wild Talents, and then maybe wondered if other people had the ability, but were not Wild Talents, or they needed their ability to be jump started by a Wild Talent Trainer.
