Even if it's true that other power structures aren't going to be as powerful as standard-issue spellcasters, there's plenty of room for "just fine" before you get to "atrocious". WotC aren't going to make an alternate power system deliberately bad just to prove some kind of point.
Imo spell slots are better than most anything else that's practical for the general combat format. Mana pools or similar resource systems either encourage throwing the biggest punches you can or make those big punches so inefficient that they'd basically be traps in turn based combat.
Spell slots already work that way, so that's not really a change. If you really want combat not to amount to "throw your biggest alpha strike in turn 1", you need to do one or more of
Make the big spells bad.
Add a lot of uncertainty to combat so you don't really know what to do.
Add setup powers (rather than starting with a fireball, start with a debuff vs fire resistance, then use fireball)
Add a power accumulation system (you build up energy with cantrips, then expend it to throw bigger spells)
Add a randomization system so your big abilities might not be available at the start of combat.
However, the only difference between spell slots and spell points is that you're forced to mix up your spells because you may not have the slots to keep casting the same spell over and over again, and there are other methods of doing that, many of which work better than spell slots.
Even if it's true that other power structures aren't going to be as powerful as standard-issue spellcasters, there's plenty of room for "just fine" before you get to "atrocious". WotC aren't going to make an alternate power system deliberately bad just to prove some kind of point.
Imo spell slots are better than most anything else that's practical for the general combat format. Mana pools or similar resource systems either encourage throwing the biggest punches you can or make those big punches so inefficient that they'd basically be traps in turn based combat.
Spell slots already work that way, so that's not really a change. If you really want combat not to amount to "throw your biggest alpha strike in turn 1", you need to do one or more of
Make the big spells bad.
Add a lot of uncertainty to combat so you don't really know what to do.
Add setup powers (rather than starting with a fireball, start with a debuff vs fire resistance, then use fireball)
Add a power accumulation system (you build up energy with cantrips, then expend it to throw bigger spells)
Add a randomization system so your big abilities might not be available at the start of combat.
However, the only difference between spell slots and spell points is that you're forced to mix up your spells because you may not have the slots to keep casting the same spell over and over again, and there are other methods of doing that, many of which work better than spell slots.
There's a difference between "always open big" and "only ever use your highest level spell"; with spell slots your big moves are very limited until you're into tier 4, plus with LR's people rarely open with their biggest move since they are pretty much guaranteed not to get most of the punch from it. But if you can repeat the move for 5+ turns, suddenly it works as simple attrition.
Also, don't forget the ease of use aspect. The more elements you toss in that people have to track, the slower combat will be and the more you'll put off people who don't want to memorize a five step process to cast a fireball.
Also, don't forget the ease of use aspect. The more elements you toss in that people have to track, the slower combat will be and the more you'll put off people who don't want to memorize a five step process to cast a fireball.
Spell slots are terrible for that, you wind up with a bunch of low-value slots that you still have to track but aren't doing a lot for you. There's a reason they're shifting away from spell slots for monsters.
Also, don't forget the ease of use aspect. The more elements you toss in that people have to track, the slower combat will be and the more you'll put off people who don't want to memorize a five step process to cast a fireball.
Spell slots are terrible for that, you wind up with a bunch of low-value slots that you still have to track but aren't doing a lot for you. There's a reason they're shifting away from spell slots for monsters.
The lifespan of monsters is measured in rounds, not sessions. Why get too complex with something that isn't going to last long enough to go through even a short spell list?
A few notes: UA Mystic : https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UAMystic3.pdf Give it a read, keep a copy, lots of DMs my self included will allow UA material at the table. Although I have a hard rule only one Mystic. Not because it's OP, but because it's a Jack of All trades, and it's good at them all. Which is why it got broken up into subclasses for other classes, and the Mystic was retooled into another Jack of Most trade classes, only weaker and not so goo at things.
UA Mystic 2017, Tasha's and Artificer 2020.
Yurei1453 pinches forehead. You realize there is only one unique thing about a psionicist in D&D that affects the rules and mechanics right? Instead of material components, they have to have a mental focus, and most often they need to be able to see the target.
As such any affect that nullifies magic, speech or the ability to take an action would not work on a Psionicist. Which is one of the major sticky points in game balance. It's fine for a monster to be able to cast big spells in a null magic zone, not so good if a player can. WotC made the right choice, All the major Psionic schools are covered in 5th edition already, and there are several directly stated subclasses and two classes built around Psionic abilities.
I've listed them multiple times in this thread, ALL of them are plain as day Good Psionic options. Hell Bells, My Roommate who is a player at my table That I am DMing, is playing a psionicist.
Soul Knife/Way of the Astral Self and their character is perfect.
You control your destiny in D&D, it's how you RP your character that sells you background and story, being a Psion is a background, a RP point, because at the end of the day everything in all past Psychic Classes in table top they were an RP with some mechanics. In D&D all the Mechanics are already in the game Bar the one thing that actually breaks the balance.
((BTW soul knife and Way of the Astral Self are unaffected by silence and nul magic, only the full time psionic casters are stopped by these as per game balance.))
Yurei, you keep poking and poking and saying what we have isn't enough, I disagree, we have it all already. You think only battle master is a good Fighter, that is on you I have to say some of the best character build and role players I have ever seen played Fighters, and not battle master. So of the most fun gameplay is a soul knife rogue (on of the few times I did play I make a soul knife plasmoid)
Please for the love of anything what the hell do you want? Because at this point it makes not a lick of sense.
Also, don't forget the ease of use aspect. The more elements you toss in that people have to track, the slower combat will be and the more you'll put off people who don't want to memorize a five step process to cast a fireball.
Spell slots are terrible for that, you wind up with a bunch of low-value slots that you still have to track but aren't doing a lot for you. There's a reason they're shifting away from spell slots for monsters.
Right, because when would you ever want to Detect Evil and Good, Locate Object, Charm Person, Pass Without Trace, Levitate, Misty Step, etc. after 1st tier? And checking off a box is not a particularly onerous bit of tracking.
Even if it's true that other power structures aren't going to be as powerful as standard-issue spellcasters, there's plenty of room for "just fine" before you get to "atrocious". WotC aren't going to make an alternate power system deliberately bad just to prove some kind of point.
Imo spell slots are better than most anything else that's practical for the general combat format. Mana pools or similar resource systems either encourage throwing the biggest punches you can or make those big punches so inefficient that they'd basically be traps in turn based combat.
Spell slots already work that way, so that's not really a change. If you really want combat not to amount to "throw your biggest alpha strike in turn 1", you need to do one or more of
Make the big spells bad.
Add a lot of uncertainty to combat so you don't really know what to do.
Add setup powers (rather than starting with a fireball, start with a debuff vs fire resistance, then use fireball)
Add a power accumulation system (you build up energy with cantrips, then expend it to throw bigger spells)
Add a randomization system so your big abilities might not be available at the start of combat.
However, the only difference between spell slots and spell points is that you're forced to mix up your spells because you may not have the slots to keep casting the same spell over and over again, and there are other methods of doing that, many of which work better than spell slots.
Or.... just have opposition for the party who are aware of such magic. This covers both the uncertainty and 'make the big spells bad.' So you want to open with a fireball, great! You took down a bunch of cannon fodder dressed up to look tough but who could have been taken out by, say, burning hands.
Enemies who actually have cover, possibly even built cover and use it wisely.
The tricky part is not weakening magic. The tricky part is weakening magic in such a way that you are not going too far in the other direction and nerfing casters into oblivion.
I didn't even get to the list of actual psi powers before my WTF-meter went off the scale. This is badly designed. Just its resource economy alone is... a choice. The level-by-level point gains are all over the map. There's a special ability where you can take an action to get extra points to spend on some of your powers, but not others. (And it spends four level ups on this ability.) You can instead eat hit points to power stuff, but it also eats your max hit points. As a non-melee class, it gets free bonus action healing and bonus weapon damage.
Although I have a hard rule only one Mystic. Not because it's OP, but because it's a Jack of All trades, and it's good at them all.
Even if it's true that other power structures aren't going to be as powerful as standard-issue spellcasters, there's plenty of room for "just fine" before you get to "atrocious". WotC aren't going to make an alternate power system deliberately bad just to prove some kind of point.
May I point out the five elements monk?
You're arguing they deliberately made the four elements monk bad?
The monk's problems in general stem from ki being a scarcer resource than they seem to have designed for. The four elements monk, as the most power-hungry of the original subclasses, suffers the most.
The other thing with Mystic as I mentioned in the past is that as a class it appears to be be built in reverse; like they started with a plethora of sub-classes that have just about nothing in common with each other beyond MIND POWAHZ!!!1! all being funneled into a poorly defined root class. Which... that's not how you make classes guys, you start with a core idea and then offer diverging options so that you can maintain some sort of consistency and balance across the class.
It's honestly the single most embarrassingly bad thing I've seen put out on UA because even when there were creative decisions that were being pushed through that irritated me (IE the complete revision of goblins and hobgoblins) those at least felt like they had been subject to some sort of editorial review whereas the mystic just felt like a disorganized series or rough notes were uploaded to the internet out of spite.
They've stated they want a caster that is effectively wholly removed from any of the mechanics of being a caster in D&D.
To which I would ask why aren't they just playing one of the million star wars rpgs or shadowrun or rogue trader or exalted or frikkin rifts...
Because that's not D&D? "I want to be able to play this fantasy archetype in D&D" is a completely different desire from "I want any game where I can play this fantasy archetype". D&D is a genre unto itself. If you want to play a cyberpunk game, D&D is not the place to be. But if you want to play D&D, shadowrun ain't gonna scratch that itch.
D&D's class structure pushes character concepts into specific boxes, and if the concept doesn't fit the boxes available, you need a new box. The specialist caster, who has abilities that build on top of earlier abilities, really doesn't fit the boxes available. Psion is one particular type of specialist caster, with chrome that makes it easier to argue that it should be disassociated from D&D's "generic spellcaster" box.
They've stated they want a caster that is effectively wholly removed from any of the mechanics of being a caster in D&D.
To which I would ask why aren't they just playing one of the million star wars rpgs or shadowrun or rogue trader or exalted or frikkin rifts...
Because that's not D&D? "I want to be able to play this fantasy archetype in D&D" is a completely different desire from "I want any game where I can play this fantasy archetype". D&D is a genre unto itself. If you want to play a cyberpunk game, D&D is not the place to be. But if you want to play D&D, shadowrun ain't gonna scratch that itch.
D&D's class structure pushes character concepts into specific boxes, and if the concept doesn't fit the boxes available, you need a new box. The specialist caster, who has abilities that build on top of earlier abilities, really doesn't fit the boxes available. Psion is one particular type of specialist caster, with chrome that makes it easier to argue that it should be disassociated from D&D's "generic spellcaster" box.
To which I would respond that people should make a choice: to play the class/archetype that they want or to play the ones that exist within D&D.
Like, I adore Rifts; I think it's zany and weird and never, ever boring but I would never want a glitter boy to be added to a game of D&D as a playable character class despite the fact that it would very much be it's own niche due to being a man wearing a 10 foot tall suit of laser resistant nuke proof power armor with a shoulder mounted rail gun that creates a sonic boom everytime it fires.
Battletech is another good setting with a marianas trench level of depth to it's lore and well established "hard sci-fi" aesthetic, but I don't think there is a need for a comstar HPG technician despite how there is no class or background that really handles interstellar communication.
... Yurei, you keep poking and poking and saying what we have isn't enough, I disagree, we have it all already. You think only battle master is a good Fighter, that is on you I have to say some of the best character build and role players I have ever seen played Fighters, and not battle master. So of the most fun gameplay is a soul knife rogue (on of the few times I did play I make a soul knife plasmoid)
Please for the love of anything what the hell do you want? Because at this point it makes not a lick of sense.
I mean, it's simple really.
I want psychic abilities to be entirely divorced from spellcasting.
For my entire life, the triumverate of character pillars - disciplines/ability sets you can base a character on - has been Martial, Magic, Mental. Psychic abilities are as different from MaJiK as MaJiK is from swordsmanship. Saying "just use spellcasting to cast spells that act like psychic abilities and call that psychic powers!" to me is precisely and exactly equivalent to saying "just use spellcasting to cast spells that mimic martial techniques and call that swordsmanship!" It's incongruous, weird, vaguely offensive in a strange way, and makes me wonder why it's even being floated as a serious suggestion.
Yes, the Psi Warrior and Soulknife have psychic powers independent of spellcasting. I believe I've acknowledged, more than once, that those two get closest to doing it right and that the Psi Die and Psionic Energy Pool are both mechanics that might work if given more time in the oven to cook. I prefer the Psi Die from earlier psychic UA myself, but eh. However, both are also, effectively, "one-third psychic" the way Trickster and Eldritch Knight are one-third caster. Their psychic abilities are weak and their ability to employ them freely is nonexistent. This is especially bad on the Psi Warrior, whose sharp and unforgiving usage limitations on its abilities can result in a player going several full sessions without once using their psychic character's psychic abilities.
The Aberrant Mind, meanwhile, is saddled with frankly disgusting 'flavor' (which is hard-baked into its 'Revelation in Flesh' ability, mind), and does not have one single ability beyond basic short-range one-minute telepathy links that does not require them to MaJiK to make it work. It is a spellcaster who casts spells using the spellcasting rules, and yet you're just supposed to ignore this completely and treat it like a psychic character. Treat a miserable subclass of a base class nobody likes as "the full psychic character" and just ignore the fact that this makes no gods damned sense. It's never made sense, it can't make sense, and I won't let it make sense. Even if all I can do about it is dog the dumb decision Wizards made in threads like this one.
Daily reminder @yurei: if you want a "psychic" character in the veign that you seem obsessed with you are better served with any of a half dozen other RPGs.
They've stated they want a caster that is effectively wholly removed from any of the mechanics of being a caster in D&D.
To which I would ask why aren't they just playing one of the million star wars rpgs or shadowrun or rogue trader or exalted or frikkin rifts...
Because that's not D&D? "I want to be able to play this fantasy archetype in D&D" is a completely different desire from "I want any game where I can play this fantasy archetype". D&D is a genre unto itself. If you want to play a cyberpunk game, D&D is not the place to be. But if you want to play D&D, shadowrun ain't gonna scratch that itch.
D&D's class structure pushes character concepts into specific boxes, and if the concept doesn't fit the boxes available, you need a new box. The specialist caster, who has abilities that build on top of earlier abilities, really doesn't fit the boxes available. Psion is one particular type of specialist caster, with chrome that makes it easier to argue that it should be disassociated from D&D's "generic spellcaster" box.
To which I would respond that people should make a choice: to play the class/archetype that they want or to play the ones that exist within D&D.
Like, I adore Rifts; I think it's zany and weird and never, ever boring but I would never want a glitter boy to be added to a game of D&D as a playable character class despite the fact that it would very much be it's own niche due to being a man wearing a 10 foot tall suit of laser resistant nuke proof power armor with a shoulder mounted rail gun that creates a sonic boom everytime it fires.
Battletech is another good setting with a marianas trench level of depth to it's lore and well established "hard sci-fi" aesthetic, but I don't think there is a need for a comstar HPG technician despite how there is no class or background that really handles interstellar communication.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
Well, yes, but it's based on the flawed premise that, if an archetype is not in D&D, it inherently does not fit in D&D.
This is demonstrably flawed, since the archetypes present in D&D change from edition to edition, and even within editions.
Or perhaps your argument is based on the premise that the specialty caster, in general, or the psionic specialist, in specific, do not fit.
That one's an argument that could be attempted, but I don't find the reasons presented to date at all persuasive. The flavor argument against psionics fails due to all the psionics. The mechanical arguments are... thin.
I want psychic abilities to be entirely divorced from spellcasting.
For my entire life, the triumverate of character pillars - disciplines/ability sets you can base a character on - has been Martial, Magic, Mental. Psychic abilities are as different from MaJiK as MaJiK is from swordsmanship. Saying "just use spellcasting to cast spells that act like psychic abilities and call that psychic powers!" to me is precisely and exactly equivalent to saying "just use spellcasting to cast spells that mimic martial techniques and call that swordsmanship!" It's incongruous, weird, vaguely offensive in a strange way, and makes me wonder why it's even being floated as a serious suggestion.
Because the triumvirate is Martial, Magic, and (non-martial) Skill, and Psi is Magic with a new age paint job.
It's true, there have been psionics in the past in D&D.
It's also been true that it's been something of a fiasco more often then not to the point where people who extol the virtues of pre 3rd D&D get reeeel quiet when you bring up psionics.
During third I have less of a frame of reference for it but I imagine it fit in well enough due to how 3rd was the "break the game as much as possible" edition and 4th made it functionally the same as the other classes for the most part even acounting for the floaty ness of psi points.
Which brings us to 5e where it's been homgenized into the other classes.
Yurei, have you tried your hand at homebrewing a psionic class? The elements you've listed are a bit disparate, though I admit I haven't been following this thread and your arguments closely. I'm just curious to see if there's more to what you're saying. It's one thing to say psionics should have ability X and not have ability Y. It's another to make it a cohesive idea. I too was a fan of the psi die as presented in UA, and would be curious to see it or the energy dice expanded.
Yurei - I'm sorry that you find a subclass with aberration flavor so "disgusting" but it's not at all difficult to reflavor the AM if that's truly the main sticking point. The sole ability they get that has that flavor baked in is Revelation in Flesh - and when you boil it down, all it's giving you mechanically is:
See invisibility
A flying speed + hover
A swim speed + water breathing
Slip through tiny spaces and out of grapples/restraints
You could refluff all 4 of those things as your body becoming partially astral, or augmenting your biology with psionic energy (similar to a 3.5 Egoist), and get the same results.
Now, as far as psionics being their own subsystem separate from spellcasting; we saw the results of that in 3.5. We got the initial round of powers and classes in XPH, one more round a few years later in Complete Psionic, and then extremely sparse dribs and drabs until the edition slowly ground to a halt. And that was in an edition with a vastly more prolific release schedule than 5e has ever had. It was more support than other subsystems like Incarnum, Maneuvers, and Binding got, but it ended up being all sizzle and no steak all the same. For me, just having an alternate system for the novelty of saying "it's not spell slots!" isn't worth relegating that system to the back burner, which is exactly what would end up happening.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
May I point out the five elements monk?
Spell slots already work that way, so that's not really a change. If you really want combat not to amount to "throw your biggest alpha strike in turn 1", you need to do one or more of
However, the only difference between spell slots and spell points is that you're forced to mix up your spells because you may not have the slots to keep casting the same spell over and over again, and there are other methods of doing that, many of which work better than spell slots.
There's a difference between "always open big" and "only ever use your highest level spell"; with spell slots your big moves are very limited until you're into tier 4, plus with LR's people rarely open with their biggest move since they are pretty much guaranteed not to get most of the punch from it. But if you can repeat the move for 5+ turns, suddenly it works as simple attrition.
Also, don't forget the ease of use aspect. The more elements you toss in that people have to track, the slower combat will be and the more you'll put off people who don't want to memorize a five step process to cast a fireball.
Spell slots are terrible for that, you wind up with a bunch of low-value slots that you still have to track but aren't doing a lot for you. There's a reason they're shifting away from spell slots for monsters.
The lifespan of monsters is measured in rounds, not sessions. Why get too complex with something that isn't going to last long enough to go through even a short spell list?
Almost thought this thread was dead... But no.
A few notes: UA Mystic : https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UAMystic3.pdf Give it a read, keep a copy, lots of DMs my self included will allow UA material at the table. Although I have a hard rule only one Mystic. Not because it's OP, but because it's a Jack of All trades, and it's good at them all. Which is why it got broken up into subclasses for other classes, and the Mystic was retooled into another Jack of Most trade classes, only weaker and not so goo at things.
UA Mystic 2017, Tasha's and Artificer 2020.
Yurei1453 pinches forehead. You realize there is only one unique thing about a psionicist in D&D that affects the rules and mechanics right? Instead of material components, they have to have a mental focus, and most often they need to be able to see the target.
As such any affect that nullifies magic, speech or the ability to take an action would not work on a Psionicist. Which is one of the major sticky points in game balance. It's fine for a monster to be able to cast big spells in a null magic zone, not so good if a player can. WotC made the right choice, All the major Psionic schools are covered in 5th edition already, and there are several directly stated subclasses and two classes built around Psionic abilities.
I've listed them multiple times in this thread, ALL of them are plain as day Good Psionic options. Hell Bells, My Roommate who is a player at my table That I am DMing, is playing a psionicist.
Soul Knife/Way of the Astral Self and their character is perfect.
You control your destiny in D&D, it's how you RP your character that sells you background and story, being a Psion is a background, a RP point, because at the end of the day everything in all past Psychic Classes in table top they were an RP with some mechanics. In D&D all the Mechanics are already in the game Bar the one thing that actually breaks the balance.
((BTW soul knife and Way of the Astral Self are unaffected by silence and nul magic, only the full time psionic casters are stopped by these as per game balance.))
Yurei, you keep poking and poking and saying what we have isn't enough, I disagree, we have it all already. You think only battle master is a good Fighter, that is on you I have to say some of the best character build and role players I have ever seen played Fighters, and not battle master. So of the most fun gameplay is a soul knife rogue (on of the few times I did play I make a soul knife plasmoid)
Please for the love of anything what the hell do you want? Because at this point it makes not a lick of sense.
They've stated they want a caster that is effectively wholly removed from any of the mechanics of being a caster in D&D.
To which I would ask why aren't they just playing one of the million star wars rpgs or shadowrun or rogue trader or exalted or frikkin rifts...
Right, because when would you ever want to Detect Evil and Good, Locate Object, Charm Person, Pass Without Trace, Levitate, Misty Step, etc. after 1st tier? And checking off a box is not a particularly onerous bit of tracking.
Or.... just have opposition for the party who are aware of such magic. This covers both the uncertainty and 'make the big spells bad.' So you want to open with a fireball, great! You took down a bunch of cannon fodder dressed up to look tough but who could have been taken out by, say, burning hands.
Enemies who actually have cover, possibly even built cover and use it wisely.
The tricky part is not weakening magic. The tricky part is weakening magic in such a way that you are not going too far in the other direction and nerfing casters into oblivion.
Just brainstorming here, but I’m going to throw it out and see if it sticks
You could have marginal powers levels cost more at the top end and have no power be save for 1/2.
This would create a motivation to not make big spends manifesting high level powers.
I didn't even get to the list of actual psi powers before my WTF-meter went off the scale. This is badly designed. Just its resource economy alone is... a choice. The level-by-level point gains are all over the map. There's a special ability where you can take an action to get extra points to spend on some of your powers, but not others. (And it spends four level ups on this ability.) You can instead eat hit points to power stuff, but it also eats your max hit points. As a non-melee class, it gets free bonus action healing and bonus weapon damage.
This is another sign that it's a bad design.
You're arguing they deliberately made the four elements monk bad?
The monk's problems in general stem from ki being a scarcer resource than they seem to have designed for. The four elements monk, as the most power-hungry of the original subclasses, suffers the most.
The other thing with Mystic as I mentioned in the past is that as a class it appears to be be built in reverse; like they started with a plethora of sub-classes that have just about nothing in common with each other beyond MIND POWAHZ!!!1! all being funneled into a poorly defined root class. Which... that's not how you make classes guys, you start with a core idea and then offer diverging options so that you can maintain some sort of consistency and balance across the class.
It's honestly the single most embarrassingly bad thing I've seen put out on UA because even when there were creative decisions that were being pushed through that irritated me (IE the complete revision of goblins and hobgoblins) those at least felt like they had been subject to some sort of editorial review whereas the mystic just felt like a disorganized series or rough notes were uploaded to the internet out of spite.
Because that's not D&D? "I want to be able to play this fantasy archetype in D&D" is a completely different desire from "I want any game where I can play this fantasy archetype". D&D is a genre unto itself. If you want to play a cyberpunk game, D&D is not the place to be. But if you want to play D&D, shadowrun ain't gonna scratch that itch.
D&D's class structure pushes character concepts into specific boxes, and if the concept doesn't fit the boxes available, you need a new box. The specialist caster, who has abilities that build on top of earlier abilities, really doesn't fit the boxes available. Psion is one particular type of specialist caster, with chrome that makes it easier to argue that it should be disassociated from D&D's "generic spellcaster" box.
To which I would respond that people should make a choice: to play the class/archetype that they want or to play the ones that exist within D&D.
Like, I adore Rifts; I think it's zany and weird and never, ever boring but I would never want a glitter boy to be added to a game of D&D as a playable character class despite the fact that it would very much be it's own niche due to being a man wearing a 10 foot tall suit of laser resistant nuke proof power armor with a shoulder mounted rail gun that creates a sonic boom everytime it fires.
Battletech is another good setting with a marianas trench level of depth to it's lore and well established "hard sci-fi" aesthetic, but I don't think there is a need for a comstar HPG technician despite how there is no class or background that really handles interstellar communication.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
I mean, it's simple really.
I want psychic abilities to be entirely divorced from spellcasting.
For my entire life, the triumverate of character pillars - disciplines/ability sets you can base a character on - has been Martial, Magic, Mental. Psychic abilities are as different from MaJiK as MaJiK is from swordsmanship. Saying "just use spellcasting to cast spells that act like psychic abilities and call that psychic powers!" to me is precisely and exactly equivalent to saying "just use spellcasting to cast spells that mimic martial techniques and call that swordsmanship!" It's incongruous, weird, vaguely offensive in a strange way, and makes me wonder why it's even being floated as a serious suggestion.
Yes, the Psi Warrior and Soulknife have psychic powers independent of spellcasting. I believe I've acknowledged, more than once, that those two get closest to doing it right and that the Psi Die and Psionic Energy Pool are both mechanics that might work if given more time in the oven to cook. I prefer the Psi Die from earlier psychic UA myself, but eh. However, both are also, effectively, "one-third psychic" the way Trickster and Eldritch Knight are one-third caster. Their psychic abilities are weak and their ability to employ them freely is nonexistent. This is especially bad on the Psi Warrior, whose sharp and unforgiving usage limitations on its abilities can result in a player going several full sessions without once using their psychic character's psychic abilities.
The Aberrant Mind, meanwhile, is saddled with frankly disgusting 'flavor' (which is hard-baked into its 'Revelation in Flesh' ability, mind), and does not have one single ability beyond basic short-range one-minute telepathy links that does not require them to MaJiK to make it work. It is a spellcaster who casts spells using the spellcasting rules, and yet you're just supposed to ignore this completely and treat it like a psychic character. Treat a miserable subclass of a base class nobody likes as "the full psychic character" and just ignore the fact that this makes no gods damned sense. It's never made sense, it can't make sense, and I won't let it make sense. Even if all I can do about it is dog the dumb decision Wizards made in threads like this one.
Please do not contact or message me.
Daily reminder @yurei: if you want a "psychic" character in the veign that you seem obsessed with you are better served with any of a half dozen other RPGs.
Well, yes, but it's based on the flawed premise that, if an archetype is not in D&D, it inherently does not fit in D&D.
This is demonstrably flawed, since the archetypes present in D&D change from edition to edition, and even within editions.
Or perhaps your argument is based on the premise that the specialty caster, in general, or the psionic specialist, in specific, do not fit.
That one's an argument that could be attempted, but I don't find the reasons presented to date at all persuasive. The flavor argument against psionics fails due to all the psionics. The mechanical arguments are... thin.
Because the triumvirate is Martial, Magic, and (non-martial) Skill, and Psi is Magic with a new age paint job.
It's true, there have been psionics in the past in D&D.
It's also been true that it's been something of a fiasco more often then not to the point where people who extol the virtues of pre 3rd D&D get reeeel quiet when you bring up psionics.
During third I have less of a frame of reference for it but I imagine it fit in well enough due to how 3rd was the "break the game as much as possible" edition and 4th made it functionally the same as the other classes for the most part even acounting for the floaty ness of psi points.
Which brings us to 5e where it's been homgenized into the other classes.
Yurei, have you tried your hand at homebrewing a psionic class? The elements you've listed are a bit disparate, though I admit I haven't been following this thread and your arguments closely. I'm just curious to see if there's more to what you're saying. It's one thing to say psionics should have ability X and not have ability Y. It's another to make it a cohesive idea. I too was a fan of the psi die as presented in UA, and would be curious to see it or the energy dice expanded.
Yurei - I'm sorry that you find a subclass with aberration flavor so "disgusting" but it's not at all difficult to reflavor the AM if that's truly the main sticking point. The sole ability they get that has that flavor baked in is Revelation in Flesh - and when you boil it down, all it's giving you mechanically is:
You could refluff all 4 of those things as your body becoming partially astral, or augmenting your biology with psionic energy (similar to a 3.5 Egoist), and get the same results.
Now, as far as psionics being their own subsystem separate from spellcasting; we saw the results of that in 3.5. We got the initial round of powers and classes in XPH, one more round a few years later in Complete Psionic, and then extremely sparse dribs and drabs until the edition slowly ground to a halt. And that was in an edition with a vastly more prolific release schedule than 5e has ever had. It was more support than other subsystems like Incarnum, Maneuvers, and Binding got, but it ended up being all sizzle and no steak all the same. For me, just having an alternate system for the novelty of saying "it's not spell slots!" isn't worth relegating that system to the back burner, which is exactly what would end up happening.