Please choose more powers instead of telepathy II
Telepathy II would at most give us Mind reading at tier 3 and is basically equivalent to a single extra power.
It's the only telepathic power we would have and so the manifestiation bonus from Telepathy II would be marginal.
More powers allows us to gain two or more powers from the telepathy discipline meaning Mirandes already VERY high education level can be leveraged across a wider spectrum.
Remember the formula for manifesting powers is
D100 + Willpowerx2 + ((Education trait level +Discipline level + Warp conduit level)/2)
Increasing telepathy to level 2 gives a bonus of five points on the manifestation roll and allows for Mirande to gain Mind reading. Getting more powers would mean Mirande will have a much broader set of abilities to throw that manifestation bonus behind.
I don't think I really understand the system well enough to understand how this part works. Can you explain?
It ties into a couple of things. Mainly the way powers are gained as part of training actions or through discipline power boosts and through what the education trait and discipline traits actually do.
Say Mirande wants to boost Mind edit to tier 3
Mirande has a lot of routes she could take to achieve this.
The different methods are
Invest in the discipline directly, with telepathy that grants you a single power boost you can put any where and the level of the power being boosted is irrelevant.
Invest training actions to learn a power and then boost them over time that way. We know from earlier on that powers seem to double in time needed at every level so gaining powers by this is most efficient early on so that you can use the discipline direct boosts later.
With the training actions the costs are roughly as follows
Least - 100
Lesser - 200
Normal - 400
Greater - 800
Advanced -1600
That means grabbing more powers earlier on allows you to use discipline dumps to improve powers that would otherwise be vastly more expensive.
As an example imagine we take more powers here and we get 400 points of powers to distribute. Assume Mirande does the following
Mind edit to Lesser
Uplink to Least
If mirande then gains Telepathy II in the future and we would have otherwise put that into say mind edit doing so after investing in more powers means that you can get a 400 point cost boost in power for what would have been worth 100 points before hand.
Now obviously you can mix and match how you boost your power sets but the most optimal method is to boost your powers with actions first and then with discipline improvements later.
The education trait muddles things up a little.
Education trait bonus works as follows
Another +3 willpower another discipline level that can go anywhere and some ancillary stat bonuses to the other stat lines.
The education trait also builds on what is already there. Say we were going to put the discipline level into Telepathy.
Well training Telepathy to level 1 required 200 points and I think again the scheme follows a rough doubling.
Telepathy I - 200
Telepathy II - 400
Telepathy III - 800
Telepathy IV - 1600
Telepathy V - 3200
This again means it's strictly more optimal to use training actions early on to boost your discipline levels to higher levels before jumping on the education trait level which will allow you to boost an existing discipline regardless of what level it's currently at.
We're almost certainly going to be putting the free discipline level from the education trait into Divination because of how it acts as a cap on the other discipline levels but it's strictly more optimal to push the powers and then the discipline levels because of the way everything builds on its self.
