Re: Mental Powers: Classes of Mind Question
I've actually foound this to be an interesting dissusion due to the num of mentalists/mystics in my current campaign. I've had players raise some simulair points. Something no one has yet mentioned is that the Fred offers an optional ruling (which I use) about affecting classes outside of ones base, but suffering a -3 to EDCV and -10 to the effect roll. This allows Scanner style stunts(in those movies the class of minds was human, but they could effect machines with some difficulty). In my campaign only effecting humans would be a limitation(and not an uncommon one at that). That having been said I tweak the CoM as well. Frankly I didn't get Alien. Sure Clark Kent isn't a homo sapien, but his mind is close enough. I changed the human class to humanoid(which groups all basically human type creatures), added a mineral class(for non-organics) and turned Alien into a modifer instead of a class. In this system one takes a penalty when using the mental power on a different class, and a penalty(that stacks) when using on a mind with the alien modifer. As for ultility purposes, I assume everything has a mind/spirit. i.e. With the right power one can talk to anything, cars, rocks, flowers, etc. Command is less usefull sometimes, but I am fairly liberal with interpritations of comands given to non-moble minds.