Topic: Alchemy Companion: Thaumaturge list Personal Power Imbedding

[rdanhenry]

I like the concept of this list: a Mentalism based "Alchemist" creating items by imbedding his own knowledge/skill/power in the item. However, this implementation appears largely useless until one can cast the 75th level Retain Power spell, since in most cases you end up without your abilities if you don't have the item, but are no more powerful with the item than you would be if your abilities had not been imbedded in them. The exception is the Personal Bonus Imbedding spells, which allow for exploiting diminishing returns by imbedding, e.g., your 23rd rank in Loitering. You'd lose less than +5, but the spells explicit state that one imbedded rank is indeed +5 (until you're embedding more than 10). I suppose you could make the items for sale, but if someone wants your abilities, it seems better to keep them and be employed to use them yourself.

Has anyone had experience with the Thaumaturge and this list in particular? Was it useful? Was the list modified to make it more useful?

[Marc R]

I've used them, and essentially in the two methods you laid out. . .i.e. gaming the diminishing returns logic, or doling the items out to others. . .and a third. . .of an elderly mentalist, body worn out, embedding their physical/in the field skills into items to give to his grandson/apprentice. . . .those ranks of martial arts end up not being so useful for the 95 year old, but for the 30 year old, very handy.

The only instance in which I ever saw it put to large scale use, was an instance where a a group of mentalists had overdone merge into mentalist and become a hive mind. . .in which case the hive had little care about retarding certain sub units in order to jack up certain others or it's hirelings/retainers, as it looked at all the individual mentalists as parts of itself.

As an aside, in games where "DP in place of XP" was the house rule (i.e. you get DP instead of XP, and every time your DP/40 or DP/50 went up 1, you leveled) these spells took on a different nuance. . .the character actually embedded the ranks, in effect reducing their spent DP, which could cause them to go down a level. . .when you get up into the diminishing returns levels, it can be a decent strategy to earn DP, go up a Level, embed ranks into an object causing you to go down DP, losing a level, then earn back those DP and repeat. That's out into house rules land though.

[rdanhenry]

Doing that trick with level derived from DP goes against the spirit of the list, as it does specifically forbid that same exploit with character levels using the level-embedding spells.

[Marc R]

That last one always did feel a bit sketchy to me.