How do I Incorporate psionics in my sci fi setting without it becoming like pic and getting space magic?

Oh buddy trust me, im not DM'ing a hard sci fi game.

I just glad out don't like fantasy elements like magic in my sci fi. It just seems like lazy writing to me to just make people with psychic abilities to be space wizards.

Outrageously complicated science that even it's users don't fully understand. Maybe a post-human machine designed it, a precursor race, or they were exposed to still unexplainable cosmological forces.

They should require a decent amount of equipment and materials to channel their powers, and it should all have a reasonable amount of half heated technobabble associated with it.

Like the Space Magic in Destiny, which the scientists in the setting just call acausal phenomenon. As in, stuff that they can't fully explain with their current scope/understanding, but they know that it must have some quantitative mechanism.

>Hardware = Body
>Processor = Brain
>RAM = Muscles capacity
>Software = Mechanic Implants
>Memory = Aerobic ability

Treat the body like a computer, with magic achieved via mechanical implants on the body.

You want to be able to lift things like telekinesis? Arms amputated and gravity wells put on.

You want to be able to read minds and have extra-sensory perception? Eyes, ears and nose are removed and replaced with an ESP interface

Just give it clearly-defined rules and limitations, that's pretty much all you need for it to fit.

Depends on the setting.

Like in Gundam, while being a new type is effectively having space magic, you can't kill people with a fireball by simply being a new type. Your simply just a human with better reflexes and natural connection with other newtypes. (Ignoring other bullshit the series intruced later)

And in Borderlands and 40k, sirens and psykers are just strait up spess whizads slinging space fire at each other.

I'm trying to avoid the specc whizad spect of psionics for my game, problem is that I don't know any good systems that do the suddle aspect of psionics properly.

Well, in Borderlands each siren has a very specific power, besides minor elemental stuff.

Lilith phase walks, Maya has her bubble thing, Angel interfaces with technology.

This. Psi should be to magic what chemistry is to alchemy, or astronomy is to astrology. Rules, limits, and structure make it feel like science. Vague handwavey do-whatever makes it feel like The Force.
That and make sure it's generally subtle. A Zhodani commando in Traveller comes across as terrifying, without really being anything like a Jedi.

Although I dislike how the rules for them work. Eclipse Phase did it well. The psychi powers you got is a corruption from an alien AI thing. it will eventually spread and kill others...maybe. But either way using powers causing stress on the mind (san-loss in the game).

I like the curse aspect of it, and very few of the powers looked magical and were more about small manipulations or mindfuckery.

Make it only people who can improve their own senses or reactions through intense focus, and have that extend to a sort of limited empathy ability where they can see subtle tells to detect if people are lying.

Basically, have psions be just really good savants, with just better mental acuity. It'll show up on a brainscan, and a psion's focused senses might detect another psion while they're focusing, but they won't be able to lift things with their mind, read thoughts, or shoot vaguely purple energy blasts.

Since Wizardy frequently has to do with studying and learning in settings due to D&D's heavy influence on later fantasy authors you could argue that Wizardy is brain powered by default.

This is actually a pretty neat idea.

The homebrew all ready has bullshit tech as is (a cyborg player has like 50 different Swiss army knives in his stomach and a lazer in each Brest cavity.

Hell, I could possibly use nanomachines as a excuse for area affect attacts and buffs 'n nerfing.

Thanks for the idea.

Fank u. I'm qutie proud of it.

That actually sound neat, having psionic powers activley that actually effecting some ones psychology.

I have to check that out.

In my setting where psionics are a thing they're Wizardy in the sense that in theory they can do anything, but limited in the sense that most Actives actually are extremely narrow in their abilities. Many of them also have pretty significant downsides to them, such as splitting headaches, nosebleeds, and symptoms resembling epileptic seizures from powerful precognitives.
Don't give psionics "spell lists" like a Wizard, give them abilities they can use. The more broad the ability (telekinesis vs far more versatile psychokinesis for example) the more powerful they potentially are.

Also, use pseudoscience a lot to make it seem more superficially quantified and rational rather then "it just works" like D&D magic usually does.
My setting has certain characters have "PKO" numbers (Psychokinetic Output) which is a very rough measurement of how much they can externally generate psionic fields to alter physical reality. I've stated a couple of times that PKO isn't a perfect measurement however because it only measures one type of effect, and can't track internal psychic abilities or ones that involve altering or enhancing the body in some way.
Right now the most dangerous bad guy psionic has a PKO of exactly zero because his one power doesn't alter anything outside of himself.

check out a wiki or download the books (they opensource) and just find the stuff about "A-Syncs" which are what psychics are calle din the setting. Ithink you'll like it.

For an example of how to do these restrictions, Traveller's psionic system puts strict physics-based limits on the teleportation ability.

Along with the usual requirement that you know or be able to see where you're going, you can't safely teleport very far across a planet's surface, else the change in angular momentum will either drive you into the earth like a tent spike or else hurl you through the air like you were shot out of a cannon.
What's more, there are limits to how far you can safely teleport up or down a gravity well, because the sudden change in potential energy will roast or freeze you, killing you via thermal shock. Zho commandoes who can teleport are equipped with body temperature regulation systems woven into their suits to allow them to push up against these limits if necessary.

The Eclipse Phase route? Psi is mostly weak, has 0 visible effects, but allows the user to think in really unusual ways,

>How do I Incorporate psionics
>without it becoming like pic and getting space magic?

Psionics ARE space wizards. They were created by the writers, who wanted to have wizards in their sci-fi setting. Psionics don't exist in real world, they are just space mages. Just get over it.

The correct way to do it, OP, is to simply limit all the psychics to having 1 power per person. That's it, you only have one ability that you slowly learn and master, a bit like Push.

That's how I'm doing it. Also @ the faggots in the thread who are like 'lel magic and psychic powers are TOTALLY the same lmao' are absolutely full of shit.

Iirc Starship Troopers has psionics, and they didn't sling space fire. They just had some abilities to see into the future slightly and read others thoughts or some shit

Magic is indistinguishable from advanced science.
The way to make something look science rather than magic is to understand its functioning from the practical applications to the theoretical basis.
Sit down and decide how your magic is going to work.
The less naturally tied to man it is the better (for example the need for external hardwares to harness psionic forces is an easy way to make it look more scientific since instruments relate to knowledge of the matter)

You could take inspiration from the endless games.
"Magic" comes from nano-technology leftovers and artifacts from a precursor race.
"wizards" are people who are infused with this essence and people who can interact with it.
amplitude-studios.com/

I think magic is something that operates on high level and is not reductive, and science is operating on low level and is reductive. What do I mean by this is that science is all about breaking things down looking for common denominators and then trying to predict new events by their small elements. Magic is mostly operating on words, symbols, concepts and other attributes of sentience. This is where Clarke's laws come in - when we don't understand something fully, we only learn high-level interactions and manipulations. What ignorant user learned to do with computer for example might as well be magical rituals, if you know nothing about electronics.

True magic would be something that is not reducible at all.

"Psionics" is just a poorly understood phenomenon that means that some minds can make other minds get headaches or explode.

There is no way to train this, you either or psionic or you aren't, and if you are, your power level is random.

Being psychic can't save you from death, it has 2 principle applications that even a psychic dog can mastery nearly immediately:

- Giving people headaches.
- Making their brains explode.

Thats it. It offers no fancy insight into the universe. It can be used to detect people to an extent because you can direct the psi effect and just see if any invisible people brains explode. It is purely an ability to be hated and feared, and anyone who rules society by the threat of its power has to spin an elaborate, false tale of what psionics can actually do in order to justify why a dude with a gun and a boombox isn't completely equal to them.

What's wrong with XCOM psionics?

>What is telepathy
>What is telekinesis
>What is every word that starts with tele-
You're not only uncultured, you're boring.

Oh, nothing.

Like I said in earlier posts, I just hate psionics that are just space magic with nothing more to it

I always was into Psionics being somewhat like magic users who simply use the power of their minds instead of magic, but also to have abilities that are very unlike or completely unlike mages or magic users.

I mean what wizard can create a telekinetic blade that is half a molecule thin?

See looper might give you some ideas...
Some of the public have low levels a few are Crazy strong
You pooper

This. Be sure that your psi is played in a very "psychic" way. No rituals or VSM components. Lots of pseudo-eastern trappings: meditation, philosophy (Jedi went Buddhism, 40k is Legalist, so why not try Taoism?), And martial arts disciplines.

Basically don't do anything Eclipse Phase does. Just saying "it's aliens" in the back story won't affect how it feels onthe tabletop.

Phillip K Dick style psionics are okay. Everything else is trash.

Think of it like in The Matrix: The universe runs on code (or something similar), and the psi "glitches" reality. If they have the required training/mindset/brain, and if they think hard enough about something, it happens

You can't cast a spell without mana, but Psi follows you everywhere, since they are part of that universe's Physic mechanics

Psi abilities are usually more limited and less powerful, but they are harder to block or cancel

Also, Psionics are usually more subtle and don't have any purpleflashing lights

just rip off mass effect

This. With no visual effects. Guy wants to levitate something, it just levitates, there's no purple energy flying around. Also, avoid overuse of mental realms with telepathy. Stuff will seem a lot more fantastical a lot faster the more time you spend in some sort of Inception-esque mindscape.

Have everyone in the setting equipped with hardwired AR/internet all the time in their brains and lots of low level biomechanical augmentation. People who can fuck with that remotely are basically psychic. The effects are the same, people call it telepathy, but the user is just accessing someone's wetware facebook feed.

>I just hate psionics that are just space magic with nothing more to it
It sounds like you want to have ~less~ to it, not more. As in, you think "space magic" is too much, and want to avoid the things that make psionics into that.

Honestly, I'm still not sure what you want exactly. The closest I can think of is that when you say "magic" you mean big flashy effects. What specifically do you think psychic powers ~should~ do? Can you give examples of settings that do it "wrong", and what they'd need to change to be "right"?

I don't know exactly what you're looking for, but personally all I would need is to slap some pseudo-scientific explanation on it and make their powers resemble things which are already possible. For instance, I wouldn't really balk at the idea of someone moving things around by generating invisible fields because that resembles magnetism. If you say they have some kind of organ or implant that lets them generate those fields, good enough for me. Likewise, there are some animals with magnetoreception (the ability to sense magnetic fields) and other weird senses, so I wouldn't balk at people with weird ESP abilities either. It's not so much about realism as the veneer of reality.

It's only "space magic" in my mind if you give it a more mystical paintcoat (like the Force in Star Wars, or psykers in 40k) or if it starts doing things which have no parallel in reality at all. But I don't really mind that either so whatever.

You don't. Psionics is an excuse for magic bullshit. There's not a single scientific explanation you can give for their existence.

muh quantum entanglement

But there are pseudoscientific reasons, which is much better than saying "it is magic, but with purple lights instead of red!"

True, but relying on Psuedoscience is still kind of lame. Then again, it's probably just because I'm a biology major and my autism is triggered by it.

>Psionics ARE space wizards. They were created by the writers, who wanted to have wizards in their sci-fi setting

No, the concept of psionics comes from scientific research into paranormal claims. While it was fringe science, it was thought to be scientifically plausible for a while, and during that time, SF writers speculated on it.
It's no longer considered anything but hokum today, but like simple no-relativity FTL travel, it's grandfathered into the space opera genre because most of the classics used it.