Applications of Mind Link 6e / 5e

[g3taso]

I like mind link but i am in a rut. I keep thinking of it as 1) a phone i pay points for, 2) conference calls i pay more for and 3) coordination bennies 

 

Seriously folks. I am forgetting all the other cool stuff it can do. Help me here.

[Duke Bushido]

Not get dropped, broken, ruined by immersion in salt water, or subject to Altell service outages?

[dsatow]

Mind link also allows mental powers if the recipient accepts the call.  So, it can act as a way to help fight mind control using the mental powers vs mental powers style rules.  You can use it as a bug, where with telepathy, you can effectively see and hear what the other person is seeing and hearing (surface thoughts).  You can buy a detect as a mental sense and use it to detect status.  Are they hurt, tired, stunned, dominated, etc.  One annoying loophole I've used is mental illusions through mind link on a party member.  If you get enough, you make them believe you are healing them stun and end.  With mind scan, if you have mind link on them, you should almost always know where they are even if they don't know themselves as having a mind link is a perfectly good filtering mechanism.

[g3taso]

Now that is thought provoking

[BoloOfEarth]

There's also the benefit of a group communicating without chance of being overheard.  As you noted, coordination bennies, but it also allows teammates to chime in with suggestions both during as well as outside combat.  And if the Mind Link is maintained pretty much constantly, it makes it nearly impossible for something to happen to one team member without the others knowing all about it.  So foes lose a lot of the benefits of surprise, unless they surprise the entire team.  For practical purposes, I allow the players to act on table-talk comments and suggestions from teammates, unless the Mind Link is down.  So if, say, Nexus is about to use her Lightning Bolt on someone and another player remembers that person is vulnerable to cold, they can suggest that Nexus use her Elemental Blast, set to Cold, instead.

 

Technically, according to The Ultimate Mentalist (p. 50), Mind Link doesn't allow the linked person to actually see and hear what the other person sees and hears - it just conveys info about what the person is seeing and hearing (e.g. if your mind-linked friend is looking at the Empire State Building, you wouldn't see the building itself, but would know that's the building she's looking at.)  That said, I currently treat it as sharing the person's senses (if the person is willing to share, of course), though I'm thinking of changing that in my next Champions campaign to follow the RAW.

[dsatow]

On 10/28/2019 at 10:19 AM, BoloOfEarth said:

Technically, according to The Ultimate Mentalist (p. 50), Mind Link doesn't allow the linked person to actually see and hear what the other person sees and hears - it just conveys info about what the person is seeing and hearing (e.g. if your mind-linked friend is looking at the Empire State Building, you wouldn't see the building itself, but would know that's the building she's looking at.)  That said, I currently treat it as sharing the person's senses (if the person is willing to share, of course), though I'm thinking of changing that in my next Champions campaign to follow the RAW.

 

Yup, mind link is basically radio but with the added benefit that it counts as line of sight for mental powers.  This is why telepathy at the surface thought level could probably get away with what they are seeing or hearing.  Of course, the target could close their eyes and think "nyah nyah nyah" in their head and the mind linker would only get "nyah nyah nyah",  but then again IIRC they could just close the link.  You could probably also use clairsentience vs ECV only through mind link participants.