Ok, so I am going back to basics with this. Before I assign any development costs anywhere, I decided to take a look at what was already there, and see what I could learn.
The real difficulty lies in decided what costs to assign what profession. To that end, I took a look at my rulebooks and came up with the following data:
There are officially four classes of spell users: Pure, Hybrid, Semi, and non. For my purposes, that works well enough. I decided I didn't really need to go looking through each profession and track any variances from the norm there might be.
There are seven levels of Psionic ability. Psychic being the best, and criminal being the worst. So it's much like the magic users, Psychics are pure psions, criminals are non-psions, and the rest fall somewhere in between. The only real difference is that there are more levels in between those two points.
Now for some basic assumptions:
In privateers, it seems to me that each profession is given a chance to develop psychic powers, but the descriptions of the professions give no real solid reasoning why they might. Since psionics is mostly a personal, interior mental trait, I also see no particular reason why they might go the magic route. The profession descriptions are all non-spell users.
Among magic users, however, there is some exposure to unusual capabilities. So it is easier to justify them picking up psionics than it is for a pilot (for example) to decide to learn magic. In addition, I tried to favor mentalism-based professions, since mentalists are just fantasy versions of psions in a lot of ways. Essence users ranked pretty high as well due to their familiarity with drawing on unusual sources of power. At any rate, there is only one profession that got the best list of psionic costs, and that was the pyshic.
So if all of the privateers professions are potentially psionically empowered non-magic users, it became real simple: Psychics are treated as semi-spell users, and everyone else as non. Since they already have the ability to develope psionics cheaply, there is little need to do better for them than that (plus we don't want uber psionic mages ruling the galaxy). Maybe this becomes faulty logic when you read the next part. Let me know what you think.
The hard part is deciding where the rest of the professions lie on the psionics line. I numbered the different strength psychic professions with 1 being the best (the psychic) and 7 being the worst (the criminal). And then on a case by case basis, tried to decide where along that line the profession should lie.
Before I did this, though, I tried to split psionic powers into four categories: Pure, Hybrid, Semi, and non. I had already decided which category each fantasy profession belinged to. Then I started copying down psionic costs. This was when I found the seven categories. This made things better because when I tried to align them with four categories, I didn't like the results. Clerics and Paladins, for example, fell into the same category. This didn't seem right. Seven categories works much better.
Magic costs for sci-fi professions:
Psychic = Semi user
All others = non users
Psionic costs for fantasy professions (with sci-fi professions)
Type 1 = (Psychic)
Type 2 = Mentalist, Enchanter, Seer, Arcanist, Wizard, (Scientist)
Type 3 = Magician, Illusionist, Mana Molder, Mystic, Elementalist, Arcane Elementalist, (Technician)
Type 4 = Monk, Healer, Lay Healer, Sorceror, Magent, Astrologer, Warrior Mage, Mage Hunter, Warlock, (Recon), (Soldier)
Type 5 = Warrior Monk, Cleric, Animist, Dabbler, Runemage, Elemental Champion, Elemental Explorer, Summoner, (Explorer)
Type 6 = Priest*, Elemental Priest, Paladin, Ranger, Mythic, Chaotic, Armsmaster, Bard, Alchemists**, (Pilot)
Type 7 = Fighter, Thief, Rogue, Layman, Outrider, Sage, Swashbuckler, Barbarian, (Criminal)
* If you use the alternate priest construction rules from the chanelling companion, you may want to adjust their ranking based on the choices you make. Pure priests for example might rate as high as clerics, while arms priests might rank as fighters.
** In the same vein, you may want to tweak the alchemists as well, with mentalism alchemists coming out better.
At this point, I have not actually started copying DP costs to any given profession. I thought we might be able to haggle out where they all lay before I started, to save editing later.
So, what do you think? What should I change, and why?
