Complete Psionic, Worth It?

[Oberoni]

Frank, I'm curious...do you like any part of D&D?

This is a serious question. So far, I think you strongly dislike:

1) psions,
2) rogues,
3) spellcasters, and
4) non-spellcasters

for different reasons. Yes? No?

[User3]

1145574269[/unixtime]]Psionics can have a silly, tacked-on feel in certain campaign worlds (FR, Greyhawk). In others (Darksun), it makes the world what it is.

Funny you say that, because incorporating psionics into Dark Sun was, to me, the most unfortunate aspect of that setting.

A brutal desert world ruled by sorcerer-kings, gladiator areanas and runaway slaves, templars and defilers that corrupted the land with their spells: all that stuff was cool. Needing to buy the Psionics Handbook to play that setting was not. Nothing in the actually premise of the setting really had anything to do with psionics. Psionics was arbitarily ingrained into Dark Sun without any real reason as far as I can tell.

If you didn't want to run a psionic game, you had to do a lot of work to pull all that stuff out. I would have much rather have had the setting use traditional D&D classes, keeping psionics optional, the way it should be.

[User3]

This is a serious question. So far, I think you strongly dislike:

1) psions,
2) rogues,
3) spellcasters, and
4) non-spellcasters

for different reasons. Yes? No?

No. I don't like the following:

1> Psionics. The whole fvcking thing. All crap.

2> The interaction between the power level of non-magical and magical abilities.

3> The high-end crazy-tastic spell bullshit, especially shape changing.

4> The story and battle power reserved for the Warriors at mid and high level.

5> The non-extensibility of many monsters and characters.

That's not the same statement though. The basic Wizarding thing where you have spells that you can prepare, then you prepare them, and then you use them - that's fine. It's actually really fun and interesting as a predictive and tactical challenge as well as being a mechanism for characters being distinct without being stagnant.

The basic Warlock thing where you pick an incredibly small number of exclusive powers and then you use them any time you want - that's pretty cool too. But let's not kid ourselves - the Warlock isn't playing the same game that the Wizard is, and he just can't compete in a meaningful fashion against the same challenges.

The demon model works too. That thing where you get a number of use at will crap and a pile of prepared spells that can be used a set number of times each - that's awesome. Unfortunately, it's not extensible because the D&D authors never bothered to write classes to extend monsters in a way that is good.

Then of course, Skills are trying to be two things, which means that they aren't doing anything satisfactory at all. DMs basically have to house-rule skills to fit their campaign, and I hate it when that happens.

Mundanes are fvcked by design, and I don't think they should even exist in the fantastic setting that D&D is rooted in.

---

So yeah, I think that Wizards, Warlocks, and Baatezu are frickin sweet. I just wish that people could be bothered to put them on a platform where they could all play the same game for a significant period of time.

Note however, that "spell point" BS isn't even on the list of things that could be balanced or cool. It simultaneously isn't something that is a chess-like power like an at-will ability and it isn't a Sailor Moon style "alpha strike" set-up. And it involves a lot more math. Everyone can count to three fireballs a day, and while you can subtract 9 from 71 until you run out of fire attacks - you shouldn't have to.

D&D has many games which are individually balanced and fun - they just often aren't balanced against each other. And Psionics isn't part of any of them.

-Username17

[User3]

Note however, that "spell point" BS isn't even on the list of things that could be balanced or cool. It simultaneously isn't something that is a chess-like power like an at-will ability and it isn't a Sailor Moon style "alpha strike" set-up. And it involves a lot more math. Everyone can count to three fireballs a day, and while you can subtract 9 from 71 until you run out of fire attacks - you shouldn't have to.

D&D has many games which are individually balanced and fun - they just often aren't balanced against each other. And Psionics isn't part of any of them.

I'm going to have to call you out on this, Frank.

There's little arguing that a mp system is much less balanced than pretty much any other spellcasting scheme.

But I have personally seen more people complain about the spells/day system than I ever have about people who count off magic points in their system; people who played NWN when they were used to a system like Final Fantasy complained a lot about this.


Also:

D&D magic is based on the Sailor Moon model, where you have a couple of ginormous tricks that you can do at the beginning of the fight or the end, and you have some minor crap that you use without thinking about it. Psionics is based on the Shock and Awe model, where you spend everything on doing your biggest and most hard core thing over and over again until you're out of juice and then you go hide and hope the rest of the party can handle everything else that day.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't D&D magic supposed to work like the Shock and Awe model, where your lower tiered spells eventually become filled with things like True Seeing and Summon Monster?

That is cooler than the psionics system, but that seems like something that can be fixed easily. Such as you can't repeatedly throw out big powers (it imposes increasing penalties to a manifester check or something) and you have to throw in some lower level powers or risk burning out?

That way, your power point scheme becomes something that you manage meticiulously, but you have the option of gambling. That sounds fun.

[Lago_AM3P]

Hey, in the back of the book, right after the little blurb about the Erudite in the bottom corner in the page Bruce Cordell basically admits that psionics is completely unbalanced.

...

I don't know about you guys, but I actually like the flavor of psionics. I like the idea of a system that makes you more and more alien in mindset the further you go down the line just by sheer force of will--whether it's by hatred, curiousity, suffering, greed, or whatever. It's like stealing the power of Cthulu and then telling it to go fuck itself.

I also think the alternate psionic themes like the skins and the ectoplasms and the dorjes and whatever are hella sweet in appearance and theme. They give the game a touch of alien artificiality and unwholesomeness.

However, psionics 'works' like the alternate spell system crap in Tome of Magic. It is playing a completely different game than what everyone else is doing. The game sucks because you are encouraged to blow all of your power points on your strongest powers, all the time. If you do this in a preparation spellcasting system, you still get a consolation prize of having lower-tiered spells to cast. Psions just cry and suck up experience. Or they always use their best mojo all of the time. And that's dumb.

So I don't know what to do with it. I don't want psionics to go away but I don't want to make the people who don't like the flavor and the additional rules wrangling to cry.

[User3]

Sorry about the above message. The wireless crashed while I was posting it, and the whole page re-loaded. Anyway...

1146462139[/unixtime]]
So I don't know what to do with it. I don't want psionics to go away but I don't want to make the people who don't like the flavor and the additional rules wrangling to cry.

If you think the current spellcasting system is fairly balanced, just take the sorcerer, remove all of the 'components' for spellcasting (although psions sometimes say stuff, wave their hands, and mess with crystals...they don't have to, and the showy stuff is for dopes).

Remove the metamagic restrictions on them. Give them some stacking metamagic to imitate augmentation. Give them more meta feats then the wizard gets.

Give them a new spellcasting list, and remove those which don't fit the flavor. Add those which do.

Depending on how you want to have them balanced, speed up their spellcasting progression, give them MAD, reduce or increase their spells known, and/or reduce or increase their spells per day.

[Lago_AM3P]

I am curious, though, of the mind who thought of the weirdness that is D&D psionics.

To this day, there are people who have never played D&D insist that 'magic' and 'psionics' are completely different things--which baffles me completely. I mean, you see this sort of distinction made in fuggin' comic books. Superman is weak against 'magic' but is strong against 'psionics'. What the hell? Still, I am amused that a system as alien and broken has made such an impact on nerd thought.

And yet, psionics as currently conceived doesn't seem to have a thematic connection to previous source material. I mean, there's ectoplasmic monsters and swords made out of mind crystals and mental combat and people made of mind crystals and weird astral caravans and little mind crystals that augment your personality. What the hell?

[Crissa]

Window, Door, Skylight, Short-circuit cameras all let you look outside, too, Lago.

-Crissa

[Hey_I_Can_Chan]

I mean, you see this sort of distinction made in fuggin' comic books. Superman is weak against 'magic' but is strong against 'psionics'.

There are a couple of distinctions, depending on the setting.

1. Inborn vs. Learned: Anyone with sufficient training can become a magician. One has to be born a psion. This is not the D&D paradigm, but it can be rationalized that way. That bonk on the head activated something in your brain and now you can start taking levels in psion or whatever, but the wizard's all book learnin'--he even lugs one around!--and anyone who's willing to commit to it can cast magic missile if he wants to.
   
2. External vs. Internal: In 1st edition, all spells were powered by astral energy that the magic-user channelled through his body to different effects. If the big bad made the astral plane go away (eek!), magic-users were hosed. Psions, however, draw their power from inside, relying on the strength of their own will to do so.
   
3. Fantasy vs. Realism: This is the Superman paradigm. So firmly rooted in the material, realistic, honest world is Superman--so iconic is his birthright--that those things that violate the natural order are physically painful to him despite his invulnerability. Psionics, with their drawing from the human mind and all, just aren't that big of a deal. Magic, drawing from the power of the Outer Planes, the Winds of Watoomb, or even the Gem of Cytorrak, violates the natural order and makes him cry.
   
4. Science vs. Magic: This is the Traveler paradigm. Psionics can be learned by talented folk, but most people would rather light you up with a flamer and kill you than light you up with pyrokinesis and make you kinda toasty. What primitive people considered "magic" was, all along, psionics. They just didn't know any better. In this paradigm, only psionics exists but primitives call it magic 'cause it's easier to explain that way, while a high-tech scientist can tell you what part of the brain allows some dude to use his telekiniesis to contol the weather or whatever.