Psychics as PCs

[SanitariumPr]

[psyberwyche]

That's close to how we run it – it works because he's a good player. His character is more of a dilettante, who doesn't make it public knowledge that he's psychic; so when he has an 'episode' he tries to cover it up as best he can.

[GBSteve]

Here's some AP about Cthulhu (Delta Green d20 in this case) with a psychic PC.
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Bring Back the Kult of Keepers!

"Gibber, gibber, meep", as the Ramones would have said had they read Lovecraft.

[MrHandy]

There are psychic PCs in Ash, a play-by-post survival horror on Play@Yog-Sothoth. I believe Laraqua is using the powers from DG. One of the psychic PCs is a little girl named Dahlia, the only natural psychic, who can see past events (Psychometry). Another is one of my characters, Dr. Lionel Carpenter, who developed a psychic power - he can see the future (Precognition). He's never managed to succeed at it, but Dahlia has used her powers sometimes. There's at least one NPC with psychic powers too. He can read minds. Too bad he isn't very good at either concealing his abilities or owning up to them when he's caught at it. Any PC can develop psychic powers if "lucky" enough, but it's probably for the best not to do so. There is indeed a high price to pay, and the potential Sanity loss is only part of it. Only grief has come from psychic powers in this game.
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A Blood Brothers style play-by-post forum-based RPG using CoC rules

[Dan55]

I would have trouble using psychics in a game because even though the opportunity is there to create a lot of atmosphere, many players would treat it like some kind of superpower, and this (for me) goes against the whole idea of CoC.

[moonbeast]

[psyberwyche]

Like I said earlier, the one time my psychic investigator tried to solve the mystery using his powers alone, he got his fingers burned bad, and I think it's the mutual responsibility of the keeper and player to maintain a balance. I reward good play with the occasional clue or an abstract flash in his dreams. He doesn't take advantage, because he knows SAN loss and his character's reputation are on the line every time he rolls on his Psychic Sense skill...

[Eryx_UK]

One of the players in my current campaign started out with a psychic character (charlatan but with some minor talent). The exact nature of the powers were left up to me but all I did was allow him to sense that somewhere felt wrong and have limited psychometry. Both of which often had him reeling and losing 1 or 2 sanity depending.

Unfortunately that character was the first death of the campaign.
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Change of the Seasons campaign.
Chapter 11: Spirit of the Mountain.
Books used last session: CoC, White Dwarf #99, Arkham Unveiled and Malleus Monstrorum.
Total: 4 Character Deaths. 0 Insane.

[CAThompson]

I've had two games with psychics. They didn't work out well, for the psychic.

First was a game I ran after picking up DG: Countdown, the players were investigating the hard to spell expat Russian cult and one of the players had Psychometry. He had it at a semi-low percent, 30 or something like that. I rolled for it randomly when something was connected to strong emotions/events. So he shakes hands with one of the priests and his roll impales. After a two minute description of a blurry dream like sacrafice with dark young and screaming children he wound up down one bucket of SAN. He never recovered.

The second time was someone else's game. We were talking with a person who could read minds. You had to be thinking about something for her to see it. She shows herself to have some mythos knowledge, we've been flailing around in the dark mostly just shooting everything and burning what can't be shot. So we start to ask her about all the things we've seen. By the time we finished she was completely insane.

I'm sure it's possible to play one as some kind of superhero, but for that you need one of a few power types and most of them don't really work that well. As an NPC living in a little NPC apartment on fourth street it's fine. But as far as an investigator running around shooting at dark young and being stabbed by cultists the powers don't work well enough as superhero territory.

Even before you start adding random possession by monsters etc they come with drawbacks and enough SAN loss to make their use hard.

[spookyparadigm]

Ran a modern "paranormal" and not mythos game with a psychic PC. She could read objects (can't be arsed to look up the specific term right now) and get a mix of past and future imagery (some symbolic). Not surprisingly, this led to greater sanity loss due to what she saw.

Furthermore, down the road her character was going to be in tremendous peril of becoming a Wendigo cannibal (not tied to the Ithaqua idea) in a town where mindwiped military psychics had been resettled without knowledge of each other or their own pasts, and then bad things happened that specifically endangered the psychically sensitive.

For resolution, I was inspired by the Zener card system in ConspiracyX, and came up with something like target numbers vs. her POW, or something along those lines, which basically meant that depending on what she was trying to do, she had to guess 1, 2, 3, or more of the five Zener cards I had placed face-down on the table. Added a lot to game atmosphere. I'm not remembering it exactly, but you get the jist of it.

Personally, as others noted, there is nothing remotely contrary to the idea of psychic powers in Lovecraft's stories. The workings of Cthulhu involuntarily bends the minds of men thousands of miles away. The Great Race transfers consciousness across great gulfs of space and time. Whoever is in Asenath Waite's body dominates and transfers minds with relative ease. The Burning Three-Lobed Eye dominates Robert Blake. Etc. None of Lovecraft's protagonists have psychic powers, but that says less about their existence and more about the general technique of making his protagonists solid society people or college students, especially in the later Mythos stories.

However, I would not go any further with psychic powers outside of mind-connections or obtaining information remotely. Superpower-style psychokinesis and other Jedi type tricks do not fit except perhaps as the core of a particular story where things have gone horribly wrong.

That said, I'd handle it nebulously, don't have skills or disciplines or anything smacking of quantifiable psionics. It should be mysterious.

[blackstone]

Thank you for all of the feedback so far.

I think I would have one investigator with psychic powers, but rather limited and could experience serious consequences.

Keep 'em coming.

[rabindranath72]

I had characters with psychic feats in d20 CoC and they worked nicely.

[Dzan]

i have also had success with psychics. You just have to remmebr not to give away the farm.

I've used psychic premonition and retro-cognition in the forms of dreams.

[Fallorn]

So there are currently at least 4 different published psychic systems running around in Call of Cthulhu(BRP)?

Coming Full Circle
Delta Green Countdown
Parapsychologist's Handbook
Basic Roleplaying

Out of those books I only have Countdown.
Can anyone speak to the basic differences in the various systems?
The way the powers are developed?
Costs of Using Psychic abilties?
Relative Power Levels of the abilities?
Number of abilities described?
etc?

Be Seeing You,
Fallorn

[Careless]