A recent clarification occurred regarding which level of Mental Endurance to use for which Psionic skill calls.
That clarification states that all Psionic Calls are counterable by Basic Mental Endurance, with the sole exception of Master Pyrokinetics. Master Pyro is, of course, only counterable by Master Mental Endurance being already in effect.
There had been some initial confusion, initially caused because of the Master Pyrokinetics exception, and so we would like to let players know that BMV and AoE Psionic Calls are, in fact, still countered by Basic Mental Endurance. This also includes the Agony effect, even if they are not strictly Psionic in nature, which is also countered by Basic Mental Endurance; Agony is defined in more detail on the Lexicon page at http://www.dystopiarisinglarp.com/lexicon.
The catch? Not all By my Voice or Area of Effect calls may be psionic in nature. An environmental call such as “Sound of my Voice, Earthquake: Knockdown” wouldn’t make sense if you could counter it with Mental Endurance, and Avoid does not work against AoE or Sound of my Voice calls; but in this case, Balance would! Area of Effect or Sound of my Voice calls that are psionic-based, and thus defendable with Basic Mental Endurance, should have the word “Psionic” in the call. For instance, Basic Telepathy (even though it is a single Target attack) has a full skill call of “Psionic Suggestion: [Three words]”.
This makes the full skill call even more important than it had been. Some of the skill calls are, for better or worse, rather lengthy and memories can fail in the moment while you’re watching your friends die. It’s happened to all of us. But not only is the length of the call part of an inherent balance in Big Impactful Master Skills taking a dramatic amount of time, the words in that call really are super important. Particularly with Psionics, you usually shouldn’t be whispering the words or stringing them so fast together it sounds like you’re singing along to songs you don’t actually know the lyrics to; you’re visibly bending the world around you in ways that it doesn’t bend in real life. Say those words with conviction, loud and proud!
Going forward, we’ll be striving to better and more accurately be using the full skill calls as intended. And likewise, your characters will be better able to respond to dangerous situations accordingly.