Further, as far as I know, the 6e material is locked, given the PHB is being released in 4 months. Was Psionics included in the UA for 6e?
Assuming that by "6e" you mean the 2024 PHB*, it will contain 4 psionic classes - Psi Warrior Fighter, Soulknife Rogue, Aberrant Mind Sorcerer, and Great Old One Warlock. *I consider it to be closer to 5.5e but I'm fine agreeing to disagree on this point.
The other issue with creating new subsystems is that they don't get any support after the initial release. Most new books will add spells, so every spellcaster has the potential to get something from the book, but subsystems stay static. And before anyone jumps to make the claim "the obvious answer is to keep supporting those new subsystems" I'm going to ask - since that has pretty much never happened before, what makes you think it's suddenly going to happen now? Taking more care and balancing stuff better will likely happen, as each iteration of psionics has been slightly better than the last, but additional support for them past the initial release is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Thinking that it will is more of a fantasy the D&D represents.
^^^ This. Even the Pact Magic subsystem, which uses spells, got shafted - because most new spells they printed that scale up with spell slot level benefit from going beyond 5th. For example, all of the new summons get an extra attack at 6th and 8th that Warlock can never access, including with their Mystic Arcanum, making them strictly worse summoners than even Bards.
What I care about is the Aberrant Mind not only requires the player to be a slimy Evil-aligned Far Planar mutant,but is also very bad at being a psychic character because all the 'psychic spells ' suck. Which you know very well, Pantagruel. We've been over this before. It just does not *work*, and saying "you can play your concept but your character has to be terrible to do so" never sits well with people.
You know very well that being tadpoled or otherwise contaminated by Lovecraftian entities is not the only possible origin for an Aberrant Mind. And Psychic Spells are fantastic actually - not merely because they can be used unobtrusively in social situations, but lacking components means they can be used while bound and gagged, with your pouch/focus disarmed or confiscated, can't be countered etc. It also, like Clockwork, gives Sorcerers two spell swaps per level instead of one (unless they change that.)
Except you'd functionally just be recreating spells if you try to write up a bunch of "psionic powers", except without the relative balance the existing system provides until you put them through a lot of trial and error. We already have spells for multiple degrees of telepathy (Message, Sending, Telepathic Bond), mind manipulation (Friends, Charm Person, Dominate Person, Modify Memory), telekinesis (Mage Hand, Bigby's Hand, Telekinesis), mind reading (just Detect Thoughts, but what more do you need), and mental attacks (Mind Sliver, Tasha's Mind Whip, Psychic Lance, Synaptic Static, Mental Prison). Why should they spend all the extra time and effort reinventing the wheel and hoping the end result is neither so overtuned as to be broken or undertuned as to fail to stand out? Those alternate power systems you cite are all very narrow in scope, being all different subclass features.
Because using spells locks you into the model that spells are built into, where every power is self-contained. If you think that's good enough, then yes, every psi class is going to look redundant to other casters. If you want any other model, spells often don't fit. (Also, that spell list is very much a small subset of the scope of psi powers as portrayed in the literature.)
And a lot of it's about feel. If you're going to make a character whose power source is not magic, making it so it feels like every magic class is unlikely to satisfy players. (This is also why sorcerer feels bad to some. You are inherently magic, but you're barely different from your common, garden-variety wizard.)
Ergo, they made a clear psion subclass with Aberrant Mind, which is handily able to make use of most if not all of the spells I mentioned above and has subclass features that further lean into the psionic angle.
It's still a generic caster with psi focus, and the inevitable question of "do I want the psi spell, or do I just want fireball?" And, in the usual D&D setup, you take fireball, because it's just more commonly applicable.
Most of the alternate power systems aren't built on existing spells. Rune knight, most monk subclasses, psi warrior, soulblade, battlemaster -- they rarely if ever just do "you cast spell X". Even the four elements monk, while it's got lots of "cast spell X", also has effects that aren't on the spell list, and they're generally better and more interesting. (Mostly, they're less overcosted.) They give the classes things they can do that fit their paradigm.
There's no reason a psionic class would have to be built on spell slots. They wouldn't have more powers than a wizard, they'd have different powers, with some overlap. The psychic spells are made for a generalist class, not a specialist, and there's not a lot of them.
I obviously can't answer how they'd be different without doing actual design work, and I don't care enough to even toss out some quick-and-dirty ideas. But there's plenty of design space to play in there.
But one of the desires was for the abilities to be less limited than those of the existing subclasses you list. Monks are usually criticised for insufficient Ki points and the others on the list are as or more limited.
Subclass abilities are more limited because they're being added on top of an extant, already-capable, class.
If there really is 'plenty of design space to play with' without upsetting existing balance, it should be easy to demonstrate that by rattling off a couple good such ideas. This is yet to happen. From anyone. It is not just WotC who can come up with such things. There are 3rd party publishers and there is homebrew. If it was easy, someone would already have something they are openly offering.
That is not to say that it is completely impossible, just that what really is easy is saying "There is plenty of room to work with" without backing that statement up at all.
You're correct. I'm not. It doesn't particularly interest me, and nobody's paying me to do it. If WotC or some third-party publisher wanted to, that would be different, and I'd do the research and flesh out one of the very basic ideas that exist, probably the one Yurei suggested a couple of pages back, and run with it. I'd probably even get interested at that point, because I'm like that.
But I've done enough game design in my time that I can see that the design space is really not very constrained. The design space that WotC might be willing to publish is far more so, but I really don't know what they think their constraints are. ("No secondary magic systems" is very likely one of them.)
Also, I find it hard to believe that homebrewers and third-party publishers haven't gone wandering in this design space. But I'm not going to look, because I do not care.
If I wanted to get into serious D&D homebrew, I'd be much more likely to do the class-by-class rebuild that's been floating on the edges of my mind since sometime during playtesting. But, while that's more interesting to me, it's still a lot of work for very little reward, so it's unlikely to happen, either.
The other issue with creating new subsystems is that they don't get any support after the initial release. Most new books will add spells, so every spellcaster has the potential to get something from the book, but subsystems stay static. And before anyone jumps to make the claim "the obvious answer is to keep supporting those new subsystems" I'm going to ask - since that has pretty much never happened before, what makes you think it's suddenly going to happen now? Taking more care and balancing stuff better will likely happen, as each iteration of psionics has been slightly better than the last, but additional support for them past the initial release is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Thinking that it will is more of a fantasy the D&D represents.
This isn't true. The subsystems that are contained within subclasses get no additional support. But then, subclasses with no additional power systems also get no new support. They're all one-and-done.
The class-level systems did. Warlocks got new invocations. Monks get new subclasses that give them alternate uses of ki. (And, in Tasha's, they even got a little extra they could do with ki in the base class.) Sorcerers got new metamagic options. Had WotC done another player-supplement book after Tasha's, perhaps artificers would've got new infusions.
Did spells get more support? Sure. They're the preeminent special-power system in the game, accessible in varying degrees to every single class except monk and barbarian. (Fighter and rogue are there, if vestigial. Even if you don't count them, it's still 2/3 of the classes.) If anything, they're probably overused, and lead to less differentiation among classes.
Theres also the fact that you can easily reflavor just about any class to be psionic:
Barbarian: literally mind over matter as you will yourself to ignore injury by tapping into vast amounts of anger.
Bard: you telepathically manipulate those around you.
Druid: You have the ability to telepathically interact with natural elements around you.
Cleric: Your god is an abstract concept that your complete belief in allows you manifest "miracles" from by force of will.
Fighter: years of discipline and intuition have given you a preternatual understanding of those around you as well as tapping into greater levels of innate instinct thus affording you an edge in combat.
Monk: Chi was literally the inspiration for the force which is basically psionics.
Paladin: you literally draw strength from a codified ideal.
Ranger: You are telepathically in tune with the natural world.
Rogue: your telepathic abilities make you better at sneaking around and manipulating others.
Sorcerer: you are literally tapping into your own mind to manifest raw psychic energy.
Warlock: an extradimensional entity has untapped a portion of your psychic abilities.
Wizard: you have studied how to utilize psionic abilties.
Like this isn't nearly as hard or convoluted as the people who want a treehouse magic system think it needs to be.
Because using spells locks you into the model that spells are built into, where every power is self-contained. If you think that's good enough, then yes, every psi class is going to look redundant to other casters. If you want any other model, spells often don't fit. (Also, that spell list is very much a small subset of the scope of psi powers as portrayed in the literature.)
Every power in the game is self-contained; D&D has never gone for a prerequisite tree system, other than 3rd edition feat trees, nor has it gone for a power building system, other than the very limited options of metamagic.
A system like that would be interesting... but you'd want to replace the existing spell system, not try to have them coexist.
Because using spells locks you into the model that spells are built into, where every power is self-contained. If you think that's good enough, then yes, every psi class is going to look redundant to other casters. If you want any other model, spells often don't fit. (Also, that spell list is very much a small subset of the scope of psi powers as portrayed in the literature.)
Every power in the game is self-contained; D&D has never gone for a prerequisite tree system, other than 3rd edition feat trees,
They've got prerequisite feats in Strixhaven, Dragonlance, and Planescape. The last playtest warlock had some too, by turning the pacts into invocations. I don't remember 4e character gen that well, since I only DMed it, but IIRC there was some of that going on. (Or maybe only at the larger scale of paragon paths and epic destinies.)
(And anything pre-3e, you didn't really have any choices to make in terms of powers. Weapon specialization requiring proficiency in 2e doesn't really count. (I also never used kits, so remember no details about them.))
But yes, they mostly work by level-gating features in 5e. But that doesn't make it anathema.
A system like that would be interesting... but you'd want to replace the existing spell system, not try to have them coexist.
A system like that would be interesting... but you'd want to replace the existing spell system, not try to have them coexist.
I don't see why.
A lot of the problem with psi is that magic doesn't have enough limitations, so you wind up being "I'm like a wizard, only worse". Fix the extreme jack-of-all-trades of current spellcasters, and a lot of the issues vanish.
A system like that would be interesting... but you'd want to replace the existing spell system, not try to have them coexist.
I don't see why.
A lot of the problem with psi is that magic doesn't have enough limitations, so you wind up being "I'm like a wizard, only worse". Fix the extreme jack-of-all-trades of current spellcasters, and a lot of the issues vanish.
Eh, you’re still somewhere between reinventing the wheel and building a better mousetrap. Truly alternative magic systems are good for stories where the pros and cons are plot points, but for games that desire more or less parity of utility it’s a particularly circuitous route to what would at best be near identical results, imo.
Theres also the fact that you can easily reflavor just about any class to be psionic:
Barbarian: literally mind over matter as you will yourself to ignore injury by tapping into vast amounts of anger.
Bard: you telepathically manipulate those around you.
Druid: You have the ability to telepathically interact with natural elements around you.
Cleric: Your god is an abstract concept that your complete belief in allows you manifest "miracles" from by force of will.
Fighter: years of discipline and intuition have given you a preternatual understanding of those around you as well as tapping into greater levels of innate instinct thus affording you an edge in combat.
Monk: Chi was literally the inspiration for the force which is basically psionics.
Paladin: you literally draw strength from a codified ideal.
Ranger: You are telepathically in tune with the natural world.
Rogue: your telepathic abilities make you better at sneaking around and manipulating others.
Sorcerer: you are literally tapping into your own mind to manifest raw psychic energy.
Warlock: an extradimensional entity has untapped a portion of your psychic abilities.
Wizard: you have studied how to utilize psionic abilties.
Like this isn't nearly as hard or convoluted as the people who want a treehouse magic system think it needs to be.
i could see a feat for certain (classes of) characters that develop psionics later: [level 4 barbarian, monk, sorcerer, warlock, or fighter] - as an Action begin concentrating. roll 1d4: while concentrating, add the number rolled + INT mod to your next skill check. if the number rolled is greater than the user's INT mod, then this action requires a rest to recharge.
if i had more time (and a bigger screen) I'd split this into different feats grouping certain skills based on separate disciplines: body augmentation (athletics, stealth), information gathering (survival, history), mind stuff (persuade, intimidate), etc. psionics isn't complete with only telepathy and telekinetics.
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unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: providefeedback!
Eh, you’re still somewhere between reinventing the wheel and building a better mousetrap. Truly alternative magic systems are good for stories where the pros and cons are plot points, but for games that desire more or less parity of utility it’s a particularly circuitous route to what would at best be near identical results, imo.
For games that desire more or less parity of utility the existing magic system is utterly horrible and a large component of the martial/caster disparity.
Theres also the fact that you can easily reflavor just about any class to be psionic:
Barbarian: literally mind over matter as you will yourself to ignore injury by tapping into vast amounts of anger.
Bard: you telepathically manipulate those around you.
Druid: You have the ability to telepathically interact with natural elements around you.
Cleric: Your god is an abstract concept that your complete belief in allows you manifest "miracles" from by force of will.
Fighter: years of discipline and intuition have given you a preternatual understanding of those around you as well as tapping into greater levels of innate instinct thus affording you an edge in combat.
Monk: Chi was literally the inspiration for the force which is basically psionics.
Paladin: you literally draw strength from a codified ideal.
Ranger: You are telepathically in tune with the natural world.
Rogue: your telepathic abilities make you better at sneaking around and manipulating others.
Sorcerer: you are literally tapping into your own mind to manifest raw psychic energy.
Warlock: an extradimensional entity has untapped a portion of your psychic abilities.
Wizard: you have studied how to utilize psionic abilties.
Like this isn't nearly as hard or convoluted as the people who want a treehouse magic system think it needs to be.
i could see a feat for certain (classes of) characters that develop psionics later: [level 4 barbarian, monk, sorcerer, warlock, or fighter] - as an Action begin concentrating. roll 1d4: while concentrating, add the number rolled + INT mod to your next skill check. if the number rolled is greater than the user's INT mod, then this action requires a rest to recharge.
if i had more time (and a bigger screen) I'd split this into different feats grouping certain skills based on separate disciplines: body augmentation (athletics, stealth), information gathering (survival, history), mind stuff (persuade, intimidate), etc. psionics isn't complete with only telepathy and telekinetics.
You don't need to add anything to it. There is no need to create a new system or argue for int or any of that you just say that it's psionics if you want to make psionics a thing.
Eh, you’re still somewhere between reinventing the wheel and building a better mousetrap. Truly alternative magic systems are good for stories where the pros and cons are plot points, but for games that desire more or less parity of utility it’s a particularly circuitous route to what would at best be near identical results, imo.
For games that desire more or less parity of utility the existing magic system is utterly horrible and a large component of the martial/caster disparity.
I wasn’t speaking in terms of martials and casters, I was speaking in terms of Magic A and Magic B.
I wasn’t speaking in terms of martials and casters, I was speaking in terms of Magic A and Magic B.
My point is that you can't introduce a new system while leaving the old one in place; you have to remove the old one, because most of the problems are caused by the old system.
I hated psionics in 2e. it was just magic but better because you couldn't detect it or dispel it. The limited classes of the 3/3.5e soul knife and psi warrior, IMO, were better. I would be hesitant to include psionics that was treated different than other magic in any game I was in.
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I started playing D&D from the basic box set in 1979.
So now we're overhauling the extent magic system and creating a whole new one on top of it?
No, we're cramming psionics into the extant magic system. The point is, if you want a new system... it's gotta be a new system that applies to everything, because otherwise it's just going to be a poor second fiddle to the extant magic system.
I wasn’t speaking in terms of martials and casters, I was speaking in terms of Magic A and Magic B.
My point is that you can't introduce a new system while leaving the old one in place; you have to remove the old one, because most of the problems are caused by the old system.
That's what I was saying.
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Assuming that by "6e" you mean the 2024 PHB*, it will contain 4 psionic classes - Psi Warrior Fighter, Soulknife Rogue, Aberrant Mind Sorcerer, and Great Old One Warlock.
*I consider it to be closer to 5.5e but I'm fine agreeing to disagree on this point.
^^^ This. Even the Pact Magic subsystem, which uses spells, got shafted - because most new spells they printed that scale up with spell slot level benefit from going beyond 5th. For example, all of the new summons get an extra attack at 6th and 8th that Warlock can never access, including with their Mystic Arcanum, making them strictly worse summoners than even Bards.
You know very well that being tadpoled or otherwise contaminated by Lovecraftian entities is not the only possible origin for an Aberrant Mind. And Psychic Spells are fantastic actually - not merely because they can be used unobtrusively in social situations, but lacking components means they can be used while bound and gagged, with your pouch/focus disarmed or confiscated, can't be countered etc. It also, like Clockwork, gives Sorcerers two spell swaps per level instead of one (unless they change that.)
Because using spells locks you into the model that spells are built into, where every power is self-contained. If you think that's good enough, then yes, every psi class is going to look redundant to other casters. If you want any other model, spells often don't fit. (Also, that spell list is very much a small subset of the scope of psi powers as portrayed in the literature.)
And a lot of it's about feel. If you're going to make a character whose power source is not magic, making it so it feels like every magic class is unlikely to satisfy players. (This is also why sorcerer feels bad to some. You are inherently magic, but you're barely different from your common, garden-variety wizard.)
It's still a generic caster with psi focus, and the inevitable question of "do I want the psi spell, or do I just want fireball?" And, in the usual D&D setup, you take fireball, because it's just more commonly applicable.
Subclass abilities are more limited because they're being added on top of an extant, already-capable, class.
You're correct. I'm not. It doesn't particularly interest me, and nobody's paying me to do it. If WotC or some third-party publisher wanted to, that would be different, and I'd do the research and flesh out one of the very basic ideas that exist, probably the one Yurei suggested a couple of pages back, and run with it. I'd probably even get interested at that point, because I'm like that.
But I've done enough game design in my time that I can see that the design space is really not very constrained. The design space that WotC might be willing to publish is far more so, but I really don't know what they think their constraints are. ("No secondary magic systems" is very likely one of them.)
Also, I find it hard to believe that homebrewers and third-party publishers haven't gone wandering in this design space. But I'm not going to look, because I do not care.
If I wanted to get into serious D&D homebrew, I'd be much more likely to do the class-by-class rebuild that's been floating on the edges of my mind since sometime during playtesting. But, while that's more interesting to me, it's still a lot of work for very little reward, so it's unlikely to happen, either.
This isn't true. The subsystems that are contained within subclasses get no additional support. But then, subclasses with no additional power systems also get no new support. They're all one-and-done.
The class-level systems did. Warlocks got new invocations. Monks get new subclasses that give them alternate uses of ki. (And, in Tasha's, they even got a little extra they could do with ki in the base class.) Sorcerers got new metamagic options. Had WotC done another player-supplement book after Tasha's, perhaps artificers would've got new infusions.
Did spells get more support? Sure. They're the preeminent special-power system in the game, accessible in varying degrees to every single class except monk and barbarian. (Fighter and rogue are there, if vestigial. Even if you don't count them, it's still 2/3 of the classes.) If anything, they're probably overused, and lead to less differentiation among classes.
Theres also the fact that you can easily reflavor just about any class to be psionic:
Like this isn't nearly as hard or convoluted as the people who want a treehouse magic system think it needs to be.
Every power in the game is self-contained; D&D has never gone for a prerequisite tree system, other than 3rd edition feat trees, nor has it gone for a power building system, other than the very limited options of metamagic.
A system like that would be interesting... but you'd want to replace the existing spell system, not try to have them coexist.
They've got prerequisite feats in Strixhaven, Dragonlance, and Planescape. The last playtest warlock had some too, by turning the pacts into invocations. I don't remember 4e character gen that well, since I only DMed it, but IIRC there was some of that going on. (Or maybe only at the larger scale of paragon paths and epic destinies.)
(And anything pre-3e, you didn't really have any choices to make in terms of powers. Weapon specialization requiring proficiency in 2e doesn't really count. (I also never used kits, so remember no details about them.))
But yes, they mostly work by level-gating features in 5e. But that doesn't make it anathema.
I don't see why.
Literally all of the settings you are citing right now come with inherent power imbalances and/or pigeonholing.
A lot of the problem with psi is that magic doesn't have enough limitations, so you wind up being "I'm like a wizard, only worse". Fix the extreme jack-of-all-trades of current spellcasters, and a lot of the issues vanish.
Eh, you’re still somewhere between reinventing the wheel and building a better mousetrap. Truly alternative magic systems are good for stories where the pros and cons are plot points, but for games that desire more or less parity of utility it’s a particularly circuitous route to what would at best be near identical results, imo.
i could see a feat for certain (classes of) characters that develop psionics later: [level 4 barbarian, monk, sorcerer, warlock, or fighter] - as an Action begin concentrating. roll 1d4: while concentrating, add the number rolled + INT mod to your next skill check. if the number rolled is greater than the user's INT mod, then this action requires a rest to recharge.
if i had more time (and a bigger screen) I'd split this into different feats grouping certain skills based on separate disciplines: body augmentation (athletics, stealth), information gathering (survival, history), mind stuff (persuade, intimidate), etc. psionics isn't complete with only telepathy and telekinetics.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
For games that desire more or less parity of utility the existing magic system is utterly horrible and a large component of the martial/caster disparity.
You don't need to add anything to it. There is no need to create a new system or argue for int or any of that you just say that it's psionics if you want to make psionics a thing.
I wasn’t speaking in terms of martials and casters, I was speaking in terms of Magic A and Magic B.
My point is that you can't introduce a new system while leaving the old one in place; you have to remove the old one, because most of the problems are caused by the old system.
So now we're overhauling the extent magic system and creating a whole new one on top of it?
I hated psionics in 2e. it was just magic but better because you couldn't detect it or dispel it. The limited classes of the 3/3.5e soul knife and psi warrior, IMO, were better. I would be hesitant to include psionics that was treated different than other magic in any game I was in.
I started playing D&D from the basic box set in 1979.
No, we're cramming psionics into the extant magic system. The point is, if you want a new system... it's gotta be a new system that applies to everything, because otherwise it's just going to be a poor second fiddle to the extant magic system.
Or we can just leave psionics in the dutbin of history, like race classes, percentile strength and THAC0.
THAC0 was great. It taught math. ;)
I started playing D&D from the basic box set in 1979.
The funny thing is that THAC0 was actually an improvement over what came before. A necessary step forward, but not one to go back to, ever.
I remember those charts in 1E. Glad that's over.
That's what I was saying.