Re: Mind Block"...the character can not sense anything, can not use psychic abilities, nor be influenced by others."
--Mind Block, Palladium Fantasy Second Edition, p. 166
--Mind Block, Rifts Ultimate Edition, p. 174
--Mind Block, Heroes Unlimited Second Edition, p. 302
--Mind Block, Nightbane, p. 75
--Mind Block, Beyond the Supernatural Second Edition, p. 101It's pretty much identical in every book I own in which the power is mentioned. The follow-up text only confirms that sentence; yes, the phrase "psychic abilities" definitely includes powers like Empathy, Telepathy, and Hypnotic Suggestion. But it also includes Psi-Sword, Sixth Sense (I'm still looking for 6th Seance though, maybe it has a special exception), Ectoplasm, and Telekinesis, too. Not to mention psychic abilities like Recognize Psychic Scent and Closed to the Supernatural from R.C.C.s/O.C.C.s like Dog Boys and Nega-Psychics. Though there's an argument to be made for the latter of those two.
Some rules, like the one in RUE, do thankfully clean things up a bit with a clarification that limits the extent of that ability to attacks that affect the psychic's mind or emotional state, so in those cases it won't completely blind and deafen you--or worse, put you into an effective coma where you're oblivious to everything due to a complete and total lack of sensory input--or have any effect on skills like Bargain or Seduction. Nor will it affect things like Telekinesis or Psi-Sword. But in other games without that clause it would.
If you're keeping to a strict reading of the rules.
And
again, I'm not saying that's how it should be ruled, or even that it was intended to be that way. But it is
how it's written, and if you insist on being a stickler about it--as psiandco states in
this post--then it most definitely includes all psionic powers, psychic abilities, and even mundane senses and attempts to influence the so-called 'protected' mind.
I'm not sure what's hard to process there. As written it and its two derivatives are a completely broken and unfeasible mess of badly-written rules. But, also again, that's where having a GM with a brain comes in and fixes that. But
how they fix it or even just interpret it is up to
them and will vary from game to game. As demonstrated repeatedly in this thread alone, even by people who seem to believe their house rules are official rules handed down by God himself.
Re: psiandcoI'm not going to lie, your responses are a confusing mess. In
one post you seem to really hate the idea of a GM coming up with house rules or otherwise fixing broken rules. But then a few moments later in
this post you seem to be upset about the exact opposite.
You also both praise and then hate on the fact that Rifts has a huge mish-mash of balance issues between character concepts. That's literally a
feature of the game, not a bug, and has been both confirmed and addressed by its original creator on several occasions.
Perhaps you'd be happier playing the Savage Worlds variant? While I'm not a fan of that rule system, it's my understanding that it's a far more balanced one. Or at least the difference between a 'low power' concept and a 'high power' one isn't as drastic as it is with the Palladium rules.