What is the attraction to psionics? Is it the idea of a class who can create magical effects through pure concretration? Is it a spell caster using a power point system?
No one player can speak for the entire group of folks who want a thing. In my specific case, it's a combination of "magic is messy and annoying and actively punishes you for trying to do anything cool" and a deep enjoyment of/affinity for the broad ability set of psychokinesis. Psychokinetic characters are among my favorites in most any IP where they exist, and even beyond my enjoyment of kineticists I find psychic abilities to be cleaner and possessed of a much stronger identity and throughline than 5e magic. It's also why the existence of "psychic spells" pisses me off so badly - not only do these "spells" eliminate a lot of the design space for psychic characters, they strongly contribute to 5e Magic being a giant awful morass of wildly disparate and often clashing/contradictory effects that have absolutely zero unifying traits, identity, or throughline.
As Pantagruel keeps saying while trying to convince people to give up their interests and stop wanting what they want, if you're not a summoner kineticist battlemage priest animist illusionist necromancer alchemist aethermancer manasophist spellbinder? You are quite literally nothing and the game is actively and intentionally out to punish you for your hubris. This Is Not Okay, and until people stop screaming at anyone who doesn't want to play The OmniWizard for the forty-third time? You're gonna get threads like this one.
No one player can speak for the entire group of folks who want a thing. In my specific case, it's a combination of "magic is messy and annoying and actively punishes you for trying to do anything cool" and a deep enjoyment of/affinity for the broad ability set of psychokinesis.
The core problem is: you want D&D to be something that it isn't. D&D has a large number of sacred cows which can't be slaughtered without going down the 4th edition path of "doesn't feel like D&D any more". D&D isn't going to do that, which means your choices are accepting what D&D has to offer, and playing a different game that comes closer to what you want. Because really, if you don't want the core D&D experience... you might as well switch to a game system with actually good mechanics.
Wow, that’s a striking amount of wildly inaccurate generalizations. I really don’t even know where to begin, aside from pointing out that I’ve never seen someone try to play a caster who does literally everything, and in point of fact it’s pretty close to impossible to actually attempt to be all things at once even for a Wizard. The limit on known/prepared spells alone pretty well precludes it.
And, honestly, it seems a bit like you’re contradicting yourself when you say you like the “broad ability set” of psionics, but hate that magic offers a similar spread of options. Given that throughout the breadth of spec-fic one can find “psychic powers” that do literally everything magic does in D&D, then conceptually it’s a distinction without a difference. Which highlights the headache of trying to make the two concepts coexist in a hard system: if we limit psionics to say, the non-Phoenix Jean Grey kit, we’re talking something like 20-odd comparable spells, which is not a great repertoire for what is supposed to be a caster-adjacent class. And if you want to start throwing in Firestarter or Mage: the Awakening “I manipulate and reshape the world with the power of my mind” type powers, then you are going to end up copying the majority of the spells in the game.
And if you want to start throwing in Firestarter or Mage: the Awakening “I manipulate and reshape the world with the power of my mind” type powers, then you are going to end up copying the majority of the spells in the game.
Alternately you wind up with a character that's sl absurdly overpowered they make Vecna at his most outright absurd look like a trash mob.
I say "the broad ability set" of such things because if I usd specific terms, people start picking infinite nits and quibbling with definitions. If I said I'd love to play a character whose primary ability is psychokinesis, I get "well then duuuhhh, jut take Mage Hand, Catapult, and eventually Telekinesis and boom there you go problem solved!"
I hope I don't have to explain how utterly boneheaded that sort of response is. I likely will, because apparently the D&D playerbase thoroughly despises anything that isn't Woo-Woo Finger-Waggling MaJiK, but I really shouldn't have to explain how fundamentally stupid telling someone to play a spellcaster with only three spells is.
Other people disagree with my definitions of various psychic talents and abilities. I could use my more precise terminology and get mired in endless pointless semantic ****ery, or I could try and speak to the broad ideas and get accused of hypocrisy. Which is more annoying to deal with?
So how exactly do you think psychokinesis would work if not in the same manner as spells like Mage Hand, Catapult, Eldritch Blast, Magic Missile, Bigby’s Hand, and Telekinesis? If you want to be all cinematic and “it depends on the circumstances”, then D&D simply isn’t the right medium for it, as cinematic/stylized abilities are much more the province of soft RPGs like the World of Darkness titles.
Really, D&D's spell system is downright awful at modeling any archetype except "D&D caster".
That’s every hard magic system ever, because by definition a hard magic system is built on a collection of distinct fixed rules. This is not some unique failing of D&D, just the nature of the genre.
Pretty much every RPG magic system I've seen, hard, soft, or weird, matches some subset of the genre moderately well.
D&D's is so idiosyncratic that it matches nothing* except itself.
* Yes, I'm given to understand that it was based on the magic in some of Jack Vance's books. I've also seem claims that, while you can see the influence, it doesn't match that, either. I've never read any Vance, so cannot judge.
So how exactly do you think psychokinesis would work if not in the same manner as spells like Mage Hand, Catapult, Eldritch Blast, Magic Missile, Bigby’s Hand, and Telekinesis? If you want to be all cinematic and “it depends on the circumstances”, then D&D simply isn’t the right medium for it, as cinematic/stylized abilities are much more the province of soft RPGs like the World of Darkness titles.
I feel like I've explained what I want a thousand times and people keep demanding I do it again. But fine. Here we go.
A "psi" spellcaster gets to use their "psychic abilities" three or four times a day tops, because spell slots ******* suck. The upshot is that mages are supposed to have a huge diversity of options for those three or four daily casts, so they always have exactly what they need.
I would prefer for a psychokinetic character to have at-will access to their abilities, in exchange for not having the ability to cast Counterspell or Conjure Elemental or Hypnotic Pattern or Stinking Cloud or Animate Dead or Polymorph or Blight or Steel Wind Strike or Aganazzar's Scorcher or Wall of Stone or Globe of Invulnerability or Manual Breathing or Dominate Karen or Bestow Taxes or all the three million and fourteen things every single spellcaster in D&D is required to have ready to go at an instant's notice or wind up on CritCrab's channel being excoriated by the entire Internet.
This does not always mean "permanent Telekinesis from level 1". It does mean doing better than goddamn Mage Hand before ninth level.
Really, D&D's spell system is downright awful at modeling any archetype except "D&D caster".
That’s every hard magic system ever, because by definition a hard magic system is built on a collection of distinct fixed rules. This is not some unique failing of D&D, just the nature of the genre.
Pretty much every RPG magic system I've seen, hard, soft, or weird, matches some subset of the genre moderately well.
D&D's is so idiosyncratic that it matches nothing* except itself.
* Yes, I'm given to understand that it was based on the magic in some of Jack Vance's books. I've also seem claims that, while you can see the influence, it doesn't match that, either. I've never read any Vance, so cannot judge.
I mean, if we’re talking the nuts and bolts of spell slots and levels then yeah you’re not going to find much analogous material since those are artificial constructs that exist for game structure, but the basic capabilities are pretty typical for a sword and sorcery character. And you’ll find the general concept of VSM components crop up in a lot of places.
Again, with feeling: if mind flayers are perfectly valid in D&D, so are psychic PCs.
I actually agree with you - but what you haven't explained is why "psychic PCs" has to = "an entirely separate subsystem for psionics that's fundamentally different from spellcasting or feats" that's just going to end up being poorly supported, convoluted, or both, as we've seen every single time they've tried to do that before. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, there are other ways to implement psionics.
What is the attraction to psionics? Is it the idea of a class who can create magical effects through pure concretration? Is it a spell caster using a power point system?
I think until we can clearly define this ask, we'll keep going in circles.
In my specific case, it's a combination of "magic is messy and annoying and actively punishes you for trying to do anything cool" and a deep enjoyment of/affinity for the broad ability set of psychokinesis. Psychokinetic characters are among my favorites in most any IP where they exist, and even beyond my enjoyment of kineticists I find psychic abilities to be cleaner and possessed of a much stronger identity and throughline than 5e magic.
...Eh? If anything, D&D spellcasting is the least punishing subsystem for doing "cool things." And how are classes like Psi Warrior and Soulknife not "psychokinetic?"
As Pantagruel keeps saying while trying to convince people to give up their interests and stop wanting what they want, if you're not a summoner kineticist battlemage priest animist illusionist necromancer alchemist aethermancer manasophist spellbinder? You are quite literally nothing and the game is actively and intentionally out to punish you for your hubris. This Is Not Okay, and until people stop screaming at anyone who doesn't want to play The OmniWizard for the forty-third time? You're gonna get threads like this one.
So you don't want generalist spellcasters, but current implementations of psionics are dissatisfying because they aren't generalist enough? I'm just not grasping what it is you want. That you don't want something that is spellcasting-adjacent is clear enough, but without knowing what you do want as well as how they should address the problems they ran into before, we're just going to be left vaguely guessing.
I feel like I've explained what I want a thousand times and people keep demanding I do it again. But fine. Here we go.
A "psi" spellcaster gets to use their "psychic abilities" three or four times a day tops, because spell slots ******* suck. The upshot is that mages are supposed to have a huge diversity of options for those three or four daily casts, so they always have exactly what they need.
I would prefer for a psychokinetic character to have at-will access to their abilities, in exchange for not having the ability to cast Counterspell or Conjure Elemental or Hypnotic Pattern or Stinking Cloud or Animate Dead or Polymorph or Blight or Steel Wind Strike or Aganazzar's Scorcher or Wall of Stone or Globe of Invulnerability or Manual Breathing or Dominate Karen or Bestow Taxes or all the three million and fourteen things every single spellcaster in D&D is required to have ready to go at an instant's notice or wind up on CritCrab's channel being excoriated by the entire Internet.
This does not always mean "permanent Telekinesis from level 1". It does mean doing better than goddamn Mage Hand before ninth level.
This is better (fast moving threads yo) but you still need to explain how say, Telekinetic (which IS at-will) doesn't accomplish this objective. Anything much more powerful than this is probably too strong to be at-will.
So how exactly do you think psychokinesis would work if not in the same manner as spells like Mage Hand, Catapult, Eldritch Blast, Magic Missile, Bigby’s Hand, and Telekinesis? If you want to be all cinematic and “it depends on the circumstances”, then D&D simply isn’t the right medium for it, as cinematic/stylized abilities are much more the province of soft RPGs like the World of Darkness titles.
I feel like I've explained what I want a thousand times and people keep demanding I do it again. But fine. Here we go.
A "psi" spellcaster gets to use their "psychic abilities" three or four times a day tops, because spell slots ******* suck. The upshot is that mages are supposed to have a huge diversity of options for those three or four daily casts, so they always have exactly what they need.
I would prefer for a psychokinetic character to have at-will access to their abilities, in exchange for not having the ability to cast Counterspell or Conjure Elemental or Hypnotic Pattern or Stinking Cloud or Animate Dead or Polymorph or Blight or Steel Wind Strike or Aganazzar's Scorcher or Wall of Stone or Globe of Invulnerability or Manual Breathing or Dominate Karen or Bestow Taxes or all the three million and fourteen things every single spellcaster in D&D is required to have ready to go at an instant's notice or wind up on CritCrab's channel being excoriated by the entire Internet.
This does not always mean "permanent Telekinesis from level 1". It does mean doing better than goddamn Mage Hand before ninth level.
Can you explain why a Sorcerer wouldn’t scratch that itch you’ve got? They lack the diversity of spell options and, ash they level, they become able to cast their spells many, many times.
Psyren, I can't really explain it better than I already have a thousand times before.
Either someone agrees with the fundamental assertion "psychic abilities are not spellcasting, whatsoever, and have no bloody business being treated as such", or they don't. If someone is not capable of seeing/perceiving/understanding that to some people it's simply wrong to treat psychic abilities as being identical to magic, they'll never understand why anyone would object to just being a bad spellcaster.
Pantagruel, Ace, Ashla, and the rest have made it chear they see no difference whatsoever between psychic abilities and magic. They've all said that a surface level reflavor is all someone needs to get 100% of what they want from psychic characters and anyone who thinks otherwise is just dumb. There's no convincing people otherwise. They'll never "get it", and will rail against people who want a better system forever.
People for whom magic and psychic abilities are distinct, separate, and in many cases straight up incompatible - like myself - will never stop being upset that psychic abilities have been handled so incredibly poorly in this edition. Mages stole their lunch and are getting away with it scot free, and that will never stop being a sore point.
Can you explain why a Sorcerer wouldn’t scratch that itch you’ve got? They lack the diversity of spell options and, ash they level, they become able to cast their spells many, many times.
This is what I keep coming back to as well. You can even demand that they use the Spell Points variant in the DMG if "slots" are the sticking point.
Yurei, you've failed to articulate a need for a distinction at this point between fantasy magic and space magic.
You'll note that I've referred to it as space magic because psionics was a concept literally created by science fiction writers that were scared to just admit that they wanted magic in their universe.
So how exactly do you think psychokinesis would work if not in the same manner as spells like Mage Hand, Catapult, Eldritch Blast, Magic Missile, Bigby’s Hand, and Telekinesis? If you want to be all cinematic and “it depends on the circumstances”, then D&D simply isn’t the right medium for it, as cinematic/stylized abilities are much more the province of soft RPGs like the World of Darkness titles.
I feel like I've explained what I want a thousand times and people keep demanding I do it again. But fine. Here we go.
A "psi" spellcaster gets to use their "psychic abilities" three or four times a day tops, because spell slots ******* suck. The upshot is that mages are supposed to have a huge diversity of options for those three or four daily casts, so they always have exactly what they need.
I would prefer for a psychokinetic character to have at-will access to their abilities, in exchange for not having the ability to cast Counterspell or Conjure Elemental or Hypnotic Pattern or Stinking Cloud or Animate Dead or Polymorph or Blight or Steel Wind Strike or Aganazzar's Scorcher or Wall of Stone or Globe of Invulnerability or Manual Breathing or Dominate Karen or Bestow Taxes or all the three million and fourteen things every single spellcaster in D&D is required to have ready to go at an instant's notice or wind up on CritCrab's channel being excoriated by the entire Internet.
This does not always mean "permanent Telekinesis from level 1". It does mean doing better than goddamn Mage Hand before ninth level.
So, this is hard to parse through all the hyperbolic rhetoric, but basically you’re saying you want narrower but stronger abilities. While not objectively impossible, as people have repeatedly noted here the sticking point for D&D is hitting the Goldilocks Zone where the difference is strong enough to stand out but not so strong as to create an unbalanced class. I know in Pathfinder (and so presumably in 3rd edition) different spells could have different levels depending on what class list they were on, so a certain 3rd level Wizard spell might be 4th level spell for a Bard. This could be a way to do that, but I also note that feature was one that didn’t make it into 5e, and it’s not hard to guess the reasoning- attempting some kind of balance with spells is even harder when the baseline for when the effect will come into play is variable. Again, not impossible to compensate for, but for all that there’s a great deal of gnashing of teeth and shaking of fists over it lately, D&D is and has nearly always been a business venture, so they’re gonna weigh how much work a proposal sounds like against how much it really adds. And attempting to create a whole suite of alternate powers runs into that same obstacle.
And, regarding your point about upgrading Mage Hand, Unseen Servant is for all practical purposes such an upgrade unless you’re saying you want a combat option, in which case Thunderwave and Gust of Wind easy to flavor as TK blasts while Hold Person is a TK grip.
I mean... If you want a combat telekinetic power as a go to thing you can just take the move modifier invocations for eldritch blast so you can push, pull or slow people.
I understand a little better what the issue is now.
Yurei doesn’t want Psionics to be affected by Counterspell, Detect Magic, Dispel Magic, Disjunction, etc. That’s because Psionics is supposed to be something very different. If a Wall of Force is created by a Psionic effect, magic fireballs should be able to go right through it. If a Psion creates an effect to prevent mind reading, it should have no defense vs. divination spells.
I don’t agree with Yurei, but I appreciate the clarity. they’ve given.
Yurei, you're as frustrated as the rest of us because we're not communicating effectively at all. Would you outline a psionicist class that scratches your itches? Like a pseudo-homebrew at least?
I'll also say that the sarcasm and condescension you include in every post only serve to enflame people rather than clarify your meaning.
No one player can speak for the entire group of folks who want a thing. In my specific case, it's a combination of "magic is messy and annoying and actively punishes you for trying to do anything cool" and a deep enjoyment of/affinity for the broad ability set of psychokinesis. Psychokinetic characters are among my favorites in most any IP where they exist, and even beyond my enjoyment of kineticists I find psychic abilities to be cleaner and possessed of a much stronger identity and throughline than 5e magic. It's also why the existence of "psychic spells" pisses me off so badly - not only do these "spells" eliminate a lot of the design space for psychic characters, they strongly contribute to 5e Magic being a giant awful morass of wildly disparate and often clashing/contradictory effects that have absolutely zero unifying traits, identity, or throughline.
As Pantagruel keeps saying while trying to convince people to give up their interests and stop wanting what they want, if you're not a summoner kineticist battlemage priest animist illusionist necromancer alchemist aethermancer manasophist spellbinder? You are quite literally nothing and the game is actively and intentionally out to punish you for your hubris. This Is Not Okay, and until people stop screaming at anyone who doesn't want to play The OmniWizard for the forty-third time? You're gonna get threads like this one.
Please do not contact or message me.
The core problem is: you want D&D to be something that it isn't. D&D has a large number of sacred cows which can't be slaughtered without going down the 4th edition path of "doesn't feel like D&D any more". D&D isn't going to do that, which means your choices are accepting what D&D has to offer, and playing a different game that comes closer to what you want. Because really, if you don't want the core D&D experience... you might as well switch to a game system with actually good mechanics.
Wow, that’s a striking amount of wildly inaccurate generalizations. I really don’t even know where to begin, aside from pointing out that I’ve never seen someone try to play a caster who does literally everything, and in point of fact it’s pretty close to impossible to actually attempt to be all things at once even for a Wizard. The limit on known/prepared spells alone pretty well precludes it.
And, honestly, it seems a bit like you’re contradicting yourself when you say you like the “broad ability set” of psionics, but hate that magic offers a similar spread of options. Given that throughout the breadth of spec-fic one can find “psychic powers” that do literally everything magic does in D&D, then conceptually it’s a distinction without a difference. Which highlights the headache of trying to make the two concepts coexist in a hard system: if we limit psionics to say, the non-Phoenix Jean Grey kit, we’re talking something like 20-odd comparable spells, which is not a great repertoire for what is supposed to be a caster-adjacent class. And if you want to start throwing in Firestarter or Mage: the Awakening “I manipulate and reshape the world with the power of my mind” type powers, then you are going to end up copying the majority of the spells in the game.
Alternately you wind up with a character that's sl absurdly overpowered they make Vecna at his most outright absurd look like a trash mob.
I say "the broad ability set" of such things because if I usd specific terms, people start picking infinite nits and quibbling with definitions. If I said I'd love to play a character whose primary ability is psychokinesis, I get "well then duuuhhh, jut take Mage Hand, Catapult, and eventually Telekinesis and boom there you go problem solved!"
I hope I don't have to explain how utterly boneheaded that sort of response is. I likely will, because apparently the D&D playerbase thoroughly despises anything that isn't Woo-Woo Finger-Waggling MaJiK, but I really shouldn't have to explain how fundamentally stupid telling someone to play a spellcaster with only three spells is.
Other people disagree with my definitions of various psychic talents and abilities. I could use my more precise terminology and get mired in endless pointless semantic ****ery, or I could try and speak to the broad ideas and get accused of hypocrisy. Which is more annoying to deal with?
Please do not contact or message me.
So how exactly do you think psychokinesis would work if not in the same manner as spells like Mage Hand, Catapult, Eldritch Blast, Magic Missile, Bigby’s Hand, and Telekinesis? If you want to be all cinematic and “it depends on the circumstances”, then D&D simply isn’t the right medium for it, as cinematic/stylized abilities are much more the province of soft RPGs like the World of Darkness titles.
Pretty much every RPG magic system I've seen, hard, soft, or weird, matches some subset of the genre moderately well.
D&D's is so idiosyncratic that it matches nothing* except itself.
* Yes, I'm given to understand that it was based on the magic in some of Jack Vance's books. I've also seem claims that, while you can see the influence, it doesn't match that, either. I've never read any Vance, so cannot judge.
I feel like I've explained what I want a thousand times and people keep demanding I do it again. But fine. Here we go.
A "psi" spellcaster gets to use their "psychic abilities" three or four times a day tops, because spell slots ******* suck. The upshot is that mages are supposed to have a huge diversity of options for those three or four daily casts, so they always have exactly what they need.
I would prefer for a psychokinetic character to have at-will access to their abilities, in exchange for not having the ability to cast Counterspell or Conjure Elemental or Hypnotic Pattern or Stinking Cloud or Animate Dead or Polymorph or Blight or Steel Wind Strike or Aganazzar's Scorcher or Wall of Stone or Globe of Invulnerability or Manual Breathing or Dominate Karen or Bestow Taxes or all the three million and fourteen things every single spellcaster in D&D is required to have ready to go at an instant's notice or wind up on CritCrab's channel being excoriated by the entire Internet.
This does not always mean "permanent Telekinesis from level 1". It does mean doing better than goddamn Mage Hand before ninth level.
Please do not contact or message me.
I mean, if we’re talking the nuts and bolts of spell slots and levels then yeah you’re not going to find much analogous material since those are artificial constructs that exist for game structure, but the basic capabilities are pretty typical for a sword and sorcery character. And you’ll find the general concept of VSM components crop up in a lot of places.
I actually agree with you - but what you haven't explained is why "psychic PCs" has to = "an entirely separate subsystem for psionics that's fundamentally different from spellcasting or feats" that's just going to end up being poorly supported, convoluted, or both, as we've seen every single time they've tried to do that before. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, there are other ways to implement psionics.
I think until we can clearly define this ask, we'll keep going in circles.
...Eh? If anything, D&D spellcasting is the least punishing subsystem for doing "cool things." And how are classes like Psi Warrior and Soulknife not "psychokinetic?"
So you don't want generalist spellcasters, but current implementations of psionics are dissatisfying because they aren't generalist enough? I'm just not grasping what it is you want. That you don't want something that is spellcasting-adjacent is clear enough, but without knowing what you do want as well as how they should address the problems they ran into before, we're just going to be left vaguely guessing.
This is better (fast moving threads yo) but you still need to explain how say, Telekinetic (which IS at-will) doesn't accomplish this objective. Anything much more powerful than this is probably too strong to be at-will.
They clearly want a psychic that does psychic things.
Can you explain why a Sorcerer wouldn’t scratch that itch you’ve got? They lack the diversity of spell options and, ash they level, they become able to cast their spells many, many times.
Psyren, I can't really explain it better than I already have a thousand times before.
Either someone agrees with the fundamental assertion "psychic abilities are not spellcasting, whatsoever, and have no bloody business being treated as such", or they don't. If someone is not capable of seeing/perceiving/understanding that to some people it's simply wrong to treat psychic abilities as being identical to magic, they'll never understand why anyone would object to just being a bad spellcaster.
Pantagruel, Ace, Ashla, and the rest have made it chear they see no difference whatsoever between psychic abilities and magic. They've all said that a surface level reflavor is all someone needs to get 100% of what they want from psychic characters and anyone who thinks otherwise is just dumb. There's no convincing people otherwise. They'll never "get it", and will rail against people who want a better system forever.
People for whom magic and psychic abilities are distinct, separate, and in many cases straight up incompatible - like myself - will never stop being upset that psychic abilities have been handled so incredibly poorly in this edition. Mages stole their lunch and are getting away with it scot free, and that will never stop being a sore point.
Please do not contact or message me.
This is what I keep coming back to as well. You can even demand that they use the Spell Points variant in the DMG if "slots" are the sticking point.
Yurei, you've failed to articulate a need for a distinction at this point between fantasy magic and space magic.
You'll note that I've referred to it as space magic because psionics was a concept literally created by science fiction writers that were scared to just admit that they wanted magic in their universe.
So, this is hard to parse through all the hyperbolic rhetoric, but basically you’re saying you want narrower but stronger abilities. While not objectively impossible, as people have repeatedly noted here the sticking point for D&D is hitting the Goldilocks Zone where the difference is strong enough to stand out but not so strong as to create an unbalanced class. I know in Pathfinder (and so presumably in 3rd edition) different spells could have different levels depending on what class list they were on, so a certain 3rd level Wizard spell might be 4th level spell for a Bard. This could be a way to do that, but I also note that feature was one that didn’t make it into 5e, and it’s not hard to guess the reasoning- attempting some kind of balance with spells is even harder when the baseline for when the effect will come into play is variable. Again, not impossible to compensate for, but for all that there’s a great deal of gnashing of teeth and shaking of fists over it lately, D&D is and has nearly always been a business venture, so they’re gonna weigh how much work a proposal sounds like against how much it really adds. And attempting to create a whole suite of alternate powers runs into that same obstacle.
And, regarding your point about upgrading Mage Hand, Unseen Servant is for all practical purposes such an upgrade unless you’re saying you want a combat option, in which case Thunderwave and Gust of Wind easy to flavor as TK blasts while Hold Person is a TK grip.
I mean... If you want a combat telekinetic power as a go to thing you can just take the move modifier invocations for eldritch blast so you can push, pull or slow people.
I understand a little better what the issue is now.
Yurei doesn’t want Psionics to be affected by Counterspell, Detect Magic, Dispel Magic, Disjunction, etc. That’s because Psionics is supposed to be something very different. If a Wall of Force is created by a Psionic effect, magic fireballs should be able to go right through it. If a Psion creates an effect to prevent mind reading, it should have no defense vs. divination spells.
I don’t agree with Yurei, but I appreciate the clarity. they’ve given.
Yurei, you're as frustrated as the rest of us because we're not communicating effectively at all. Would you outline a psionicist class that scratches your itches? Like a pseudo-homebrew at least?
I'll also say that the sarcasm and condescension you include in every post only serve to enflame people rather than clarify your meaning.