Psionic Bias?

[sonofzeal]

Those are static, you'll note, or involve die rolls. There isn't another deductible and modular point system in 3.5, unless you count arrows with Multishot. (And this is why I stayed away from guns in d20 Modern and from bows in 3.5. I'm messy on keeping track of those non-static numbers.)

Tracking hp is exactly the same as tracking pp. Harder, even, because it tends to go up and down throughout the day, while pp just goes down (short of massive hax). There's virtually no practical difference between "well this orc hit me for 5 and this ogre hit me for 13" and "I used 5 pp on Touchsight and 13 pp on Decerebrate", in terms of bookkeeping.

Which I find to be a lot more complex than just scratching fireball off your spell list and rolling for damage. Your damage rolls will be exactly the same for a fairly good period of time (levels) with fireball, versus a psionic power, where you'll roll differently and pay for it differently depending on how you augment it.

I don't see how you could say that is easier, either for the player or the DM (who has to watch for player fudges, something my DM kept catching me on with my Gunslinger.)

For the DM, magic has the same problem. Unless the DM is keeping very careful tabs on exactly how many spells of exactly which levels the Sorcerer is using, it's pretty easy to go over your allotment. Our DM doesn't even bother, he just leaves it to honour system, same with hp. If yours doesn't, just have the player tack pp-usage into his power calls. "Psionic Lion's Charge, 3 pp", "Energy Missile, 7 pp", "Decerebrate, 13 pp". That's no harder than reminding the DM what level each of your spells is.

And if you're using blasty psi powers, I think you'll find that most of the time you're fully augmenting and that it works pretty much the same as for Fireball. At 7th level you're usually spending 7 pp on Energy Missile and doing 7d6+7. At 9th level you're usually spending 9pp and doing 9d6+9. At 15th level you're usually spending 15pp and doing 15d6+15.

And since powers don't suffer from random caps like spells do (since you have to pay for that extra damage rather than get it for free), you'll often end up using a lot of your low-level powers through most of your career. They tend to scale much more smoothly and directly than Vancian magic, and a good power at level 5 is probably still a good power at level 15. This increases consistency, decreases memorization, makes the DM's job easier as he's more clear on what to expect, and I think is all around a good thing.