Why should someone have to abandon D&D forever just because they want something from it that you personally don't see any value in, Ashla?
I ******* hate Dragonlance. I think it's overwrought, overhyped nonsense, almost as trite and worn out as Tolkien. The people who love it tend towards being aggressively hostile to fans of other settings. There's a lot of controversy surrounding the setting, and the authors who nominally control it, and I would not generally allow myself to be caught within fifty feet of a table of ardent Dragonlance fans.
Does that mean I want it excised from D&D and anyone who likes it forcibly evicted from the game? No. They're as entitled to get some of what they want as anybody else is. They got their new book, and I'm genuinely glad they got a bone thrown to them even if I'd never be caught dead in a Dragonlance game. What they want, what they like, has no real bearing on my own games.
You told me you'd love for Knights of Solahma to be their own class instead of a background and a set of feats. Maybe you should've gotten that. Maybe the overfocus on avoiding bloat was a mistake, and instead there should have been greater focus on providing what the people most lusting after any given Thing X want and instead making it easier and more prevalent for DMs to curate content. DDB could have much better tools for allowing DMs to say 'No' to certain books, but it does not. "PHB + Dragonlance" should be easier for a DM to lay down if they want to run a Dragonlance game.
What isn't right is constantly telling people to leave the hobby forever just because they're unsatisfied with one small piece of it. My desire for better psychic abilities in D&D is not a desire for JumpShips and Malvena Hazen in my D&D (though replacing the Tetatae in Far Country with a D&D setting and having the party show up to the adventure after a Jump malfunction stranded them would be a phenomenal take on the 'Isekai' idea, don't tell me it wouldn't). My desire for better psychic abilities is simply a desire for D&D to do better by a huge swath of character archetypes it is currently serving poorly, if at all. That is not an unreasonable ask.
Also seriously, imagine the vibes of trying to keep the Leopard working in a world where the most advanced piece of tech in it is the water wheel, burning through dwindling spares trying to keep your sole remaining UrbanMech (because of course it would be an UrbanMech) functional enough to act as a deterrent against the trolls, ogres, and dragons that menace the stranded crew. MechWarriors having to learn fast and figure out gaining them class levels because they've only got two working laser pistols left, the charge packs are running low, and half the kingdom is convinced you're all evil sorcerers and keeps sending bounty hunters and knights-errant after you.
Sure the player pool for that game would be real small, but don't tell me you're not down to watch a Phoenix Hawk duel an adult dragon.
Sure the player pool for that game would be real small, but don't tell me you're not down to watch a Phoenix Hawk duel an adult dragon.
I would watch a King Crab duel a dragon for sure.....
That said, as far as Psionics goes, I think one of the main things holding it back across the editions is that it has to compete with magic bloat for design identity and it always tends to be more of a "second or third wave" of product and is concepted for the "current" edition well after the magic system has terminally spread across all avenues of design. If the designers would intentionally carve out early on what they want Psionics to do and equally intentionally not let the Magic system do that from the beginning, then it would be easier to fit Psionics into the game. But when the spell list already has mind reading/affecting spells and telekinetic powers......
Ironically, 4th Ed was the one edition where special classes were concepted using Psionics as their "power source" and that was about the only time so far that I felt Psionics was designed in parity with the other sources of power in the game. However, that was near the end of the 4th Ed life cycle and the classes also were kinda underwhelming in the face of all the options classes from the other sources had access too.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
My desire for better psychic abilities in D&D is not a desire for JumpShips and Malvena Hazen in my D&D (though replacing the Tetatae in Far Country with a D&D setting and having the party show up to the adventure after a Jump malfunction stranded them would be a phenomenal take on the 'Isekai' idea, don't tell me it wouldn't). My desire for better psychic abilities is simply a desire for D&D to do better by a huge swath of character archetypes it is currently serving poorly, if at all. That is not an unreasonable ask.
The core problem is that, to the degree there's actually a "huge swath", that swath isn't psychic characters, it's specialist spellcasters.
Sure the player pool for that game would be real small, but don't tell me you're not down to watch a Phoenix Hawk duel an adult dragon.
If I want to do that, there's game systems that will do it out of the box, with varying degrees of competency. I recommend a superhero system (supers systems have an iffy record with respect to fantasy, because they often have resolution problems at the equivalent of low level PCs, but something like mecha vs dragons is the kind of thing they're built for).
Why should someone have to abandon D&D forever just because they want something from it that you personally don't see any value in, Ashla?
Why should they stick with a game system that doesn't have what they want when there are literally dozens of alternatives that will suit their tastes better?
Like if I want a more hard sci-fi setting that has giant robots and neo-feudal interstellar empires all backbiting each other the solution isn't to overhaul D&D, it's to go and play battletech.
I ******* hate Dragonlance. I think it's overwrought, overhyped nonsense, almost as trite and worn out as Tolkien. The people who love it tend towards being aggressively hostile to fans of other settings. There's a lot of controversy surrounding the setting, and the authors who nominally control it, and I would not generally allow myself to be caught within fifty feet of a table of ardent Dragonlance fans.
How am I not surprised you don't like the setting that doesn't have psionics.
Does that mean I want it excised from D&D and anyone who likes it forcibly evicted from the game? No. They're as entitled to get some of what they want as anybody else is. They got their new book, and I'm genuinely glad they got a bone thrown to them even if I'd never be caught dead in a Dragonlance game. What they want, what they like, has no real bearing on my own games.
What Dragonlance fans got was an incredibly mediocre product that was bereft of so much of the tone of dragonlance; Like it came across as being so utterly hollow that I could probably port the whole thing over to Forgotten realms or greyhawk or eberron and nobody would notice.
You told me you'd love for Knights of Solahma to be their own class instead of a background and a set of feats. Maybe you should've gotten that. Maybe the overfocus on avoiding bloat was a mistake, and instead there should have been greater focus on providing what the people most lusting after any given Thing X want and instead making it easier and more prevalent for DMs to curate content. DDB could have much better tools for allowing DMs to say 'No' to certain books, but it does not. "PHB + Dragonlance" should be easier for a DM to lay down if they want to run a Dragonlance game.
I mean, I think it should have been a class in it's own right because I feel that it's somewhere halfway between being a fighter and a paladin and that by making it a background you functionally ruin so much of the tone of it... but by the same coin I'm also able to look at this, acknowledge that what I got was disappointing and move on.
And that's what seperates us Yurei; I'm able to accept the disapointment of DL and get on with my life because there is still ~despite the mismanagement of WotC~ plenty of things in the game for me to enjoy and I'm able to let go of this simple desire that I had.
What isn't right is constantly telling people to leave the hobby forever just because they're unsatisfied with one small piece of it. My desire for better psychic abilities in D&D is not a desire for JumpShips and Malvena Hazen in my D&D (though replacing the Tetatae in Far Country with a D&D setting and having the party show up to the adventure after a Jump malfunction stranded them would be a phenomenal take on the 'Isekai' idea, don't tell me it wouldn't). My desire for better psychic abilities is simply a desire for D&D to do better by a huge swath of character archetypes it is currently serving poorly, if at all. That is not an unreasonable ask.
I'm not saying that people should abandon the Hobby but rather that there are other options for Role-playing beyond D&D if what they're looking for is a radical departure from what the company has to offer and where they've indicated that they want to go.
Also seriously, imagine the vibes of trying to keep the Leopard working in a world where the most advanced piece of tech in it is the water wheel, burning through dwindling spares trying to keep your sole remaining UrbanMech (because of course it would be an UrbanMech) functional enough to act as a deterrent against the trolls, ogres, and dragons that menace the stranded crew. MechWarriors having to learn fast and figure out gaining them class levels because they've only got two working laser pistols left, the charge packs are running low, and half the kingdom is convinced you're all evil sorcerers and keeps sending bounty hunters and knights-errant after you.
Sure the player pool for that game would be real small, but don't tell me you're not down to watch a Phoenix Hawk duel an adult dragon.
I mean... If I want that expirience I can have it right now and have had it for the better part of 30 years:
It's called Palladium Books and it's megaversal system which allows you to mash up different genre's and worlds; I even ran a cosmic level palladium fantasy campaign that ported over stuff from ninja's and super spies and Nightbane 24 years ago that was effectively a personalized version of baldurs gate 1.
Please stop trying to force people to play other systems with zero online play support and no hope for the future because they want better psychic characters in D&D. Again, with feeling: if mind flayers are perfectly valid in D&D, so are psychic PCs
My desire for better psychic abilities in D&D is not a desire for JumpShips and Malvena Hazen in my D&D (though replacing the Tetatae in Far Country with a D&D setting and having the party show up to the adventure after a Jump malfunction stranded them would be a phenomenal take on the 'Isekai' idea, don't tell me it wouldn't). My desire for better psychic abilities is simply a desire for D&D to do better by a huge swath of character archetypes it is currently serving poorly, if at all. That is not an unreasonable ask.
The core problem is that, to the degree there's actually a "huge swath", that swath isn't psychic characters, it's specialist spellcasters.
It's both. There are, in fact, a lot of psychic archetypes out there. There are also a lot of specialist spellcaster archetypes. D&D does both of them badly out of the box. The fact that, on a meta-level, they're kind of the same thing and could probably share a framework doesn't mean they'd be the same class. (One of the Mystic's many problems appears to be that it tries to be both the "psionic class" and the "martial-arts magic class".)
Really, D&D's spell system is downright awful at modeling any archetype except "D&D caster".
Please stop trying to force people to play other systems with zero online play support and no hope for the future because they want better psychic characters in D&D. Again, with feeling: if mind flayers are perfectly valid in D&D, so are psychic PCs
The reality is, D&D is not a generic game system, it's a system designed for a rather particular game style. Sure, you can't play a mind flayer in D&D... but that's no different from all the other monsters you can't play; if I were to make a list of "monsters players would like to play but can't without completely breaking the game", my list would probably start with the top hits of dragons, vampires, and were-creatures, migrate through some fiends, fey, and celestials, before finally reaching mind flayers. There's game systems that are designed to do that kind of thing, that work to varying degrees, but it's not realistic to expect D&D to become one of them (they made a stab at it with savage species in 3.5e; it worked poorly and got way less support than psi). If you want psi characters in D&D, there are two realistic options
Accept that you're a spellcaster variant.
Use an alternative system that is objectively inferior to spell slots, because they're not going to build a class that might outperform their core classes.
Why should someone have to abandon D&D forever just because they want something from it that you personally don't see any value in, Ashla?
Why should they stick with a game system that doesn't have what they want when there are literally dozens of alternatives that will suit their tastes better?
Like if I want a more hard sci-fi setting that has giant robots and neo-feudal interstellar empires all backbiting each other the solution isn't to overhaul D&D, it's to go and play battletech.
You ought to be able to understand that game systems can offer more than one thing that somebody wants to have at the same time. Yes, if "psychic powers" are the sum total of a person's desires, then they might be equally happy with GURPS or Star Wars. But that describes literally nobody. If Yurei is saying "I want psychic powers in D&D", she may in fact want psychic powers in D&D.
The repeated "play another game" response to "I want something that's both in genre and in scope for D&D" is really quite disrespectful. And I say this as somebody who often replies "I suggest another game" when somebody is like "I want to do Overwatch in D&D".
Please stop trying to force people to play other systems with zero online play support and no hope for the future because they want better psychic characters in D&D. Again, with feeling: if mind flayers are perfectly valid in D&D, so are psychic PCs
I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. I don't have that power. I'm just doing what you refuse to do and that's acknowledge the truth.
My desire for better psychic abilities in D&D is not a desire for JumpShips and Malvena Hazen in my D&D (though replacing the Tetatae in Far Country with a D&D setting and having the party show up to the adventure after a Jump malfunction stranded them would be a phenomenal take on the 'Isekai' idea, don't tell me it wouldn't). My desire for better psychic abilities is simply a desire for D&D to do better by a huge swath of character archetypes it is currently serving poorly, if at all. That is not an unreasonable ask.
The core problem is that, to the degree there's actually a "huge swath", that swath isn't psychic characters, it's specialist spellcasters.
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.
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.
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The issue seems to be that they want a caster that isn't subject to any of the aspects of magic as we understand it at all.
To which my response is "there are other, better systems for that".
Why should someone have to abandon D&D forever just because they want something from it that you personally don't see any value in, Ashla?
I ******* hate Dragonlance. I think it's overwrought, overhyped nonsense, almost as trite and worn out as Tolkien. The people who love it tend towards being aggressively hostile to fans of other settings. There's a lot of controversy surrounding the setting, and the authors who nominally control it, and I would not generally allow myself to be caught within fifty feet of a table of ardent Dragonlance fans.
Does that mean I want it excised from D&D and anyone who likes it forcibly evicted from the game? No. They're as entitled to get some of what they want as anybody else is. They got their new book, and I'm genuinely glad they got a bone thrown to them even if I'd never be caught dead in a Dragonlance game. What they want, what they like, has no real bearing on my own games.
You told me you'd love for Knights of Solahma to be their own class instead of a background and a set of feats. Maybe you should've gotten that. Maybe the overfocus on avoiding bloat was a mistake, and instead there should have been greater focus on providing what the people most lusting after any given Thing X want and instead making it easier and more prevalent for DMs to curate content. DDB could have much better tools for allowing DMs to say 'No' to certain books, but it does not. "PHB + Dragonlance" should be easier for a DM to lay down if they want to run a Dragonlance game.
What isn't right is constantly telling people to leave the hobby forever just because they're unsatisfied with one small piece of it. My desire for better psychic abilities in D&D is not a desire for JumpShips and Malvena Hazen in my D&D (though replacing the Tetatae in Far Country with a D&D setting and having the party show up to the adventure after a Jump malfunction stranded them would be a phenomenal take on the 'Isekai' idea, don't tell me it wouldn't). My desire for better psychic abilities is simply a desire for D&D to do better by a huge swath of character archetypes it is currently serving poorly, if at all. That is not an unreasonable ask.
Also seriously, imagine the vibes of trying to keep the Leopard working in a world where the most advanced piece of tech in it is the water wheel, burning through dwindling spares trying to keep your sole remaining UrbanMech (because of course it would be an UrbanMech) functional enough to act as a deterrent against the trolls, ogres, and dragons that menace the stranded crew. MechWarriors having to learn fast and figure out gaining them class levels because they've only got two working laser pistols left, the charge packs are running low, and half the kingdom is convinced you're all evil sorcerers and keeps sending bounty hunters and knights-errant after you.
Sure the player pool for that game would be real small, but don't tell me you're not down to watch a Phoenix Hawk duel an adult dragon.
Please do not contact or message me.
I would watch a King Crab duel a dragon for sure.....
That said, as far as Psionics goes, I think one of the main things holding it back across the editions is that it has to compete with magic bloat for design identity and it always tends to be more of a "second or third wave" of product and is concepted for the "current" edition well after the magic system has terminally spread across all avenues of design. If the designers would intentionally carve out early on what they want Psionics to do and equally intentionally not let the Magic system do that from the beginning, then it would be easier to fit Psionics into the game. But when the spell list already has mind reading/affecting spells and telekinetic powers......
Ironically, 4th Ed was the one edition where special classes were concepted using Psionics as their "power source" and that was about the only time so far that I felt Psionics was designed in parity with the other sources of power in the game. However, that was near the end of the 4th Ed life cycle and the classes also were kinda underwhelming in the face of all the options classes from the other sources had access too.
The core problem is that, to the degree there's actually a "huge swath", that swath isn't psychic characters, it's specialist spellcasters.
If I want to do that, there's game systems that will do it out of the box, with varying degrees of competency. I recommend a superhero system (supers systems have an iffy record with respect to fantasy, because they often have resolution problems at the equivalent of low level PCs, but something like mecha vs dragons is the kind of thing they're built for).
Why should they stick with a game system that doesn't have what they want when there are literally dozens of alternatives that will suit their tastes better?
Like if I want a more hard sci-fi setting that has giant robots and neo-feudal interstellar empires all backbiting each other the solution isn't to overhaul D&D, it's to go and play battletech.
How am I not surprised you don't like the setting that doesn't have psionics.
What Dragonlance fans got was an incredibly mediocre product that was bereft of so much of the tone of dragonlance; Like it came across as being so utterly hollow that I could probably port the whole thing over to Forgotten realms or greyhawk or eberron and nobody would notice.
I mean, I think it should have been a class in it's own right because I feel that it's somewhere halfway between being a fighter and a paladin and that by making it a background you functionally ruin so much of the tone of it... but by the same coin I'm also able to look at this, acknowledge that what I got was disappointing and move on.
And that's what seperates us Yurei; I'm able to accept the disapointment of DL and get on with my life because there is still ~despite the mismanagement of WotC~ plenty of things in the game for me to enjoy and I'm able to let go of this simple desire that I had.
I'm not saying that people should abandon the Hobby but rather that there are other options for Role-playing beyond D&D if what they're looking for is a radical departure from what the company has to offer and where they've indicated that they want to go.
I mean... If I want that expirience I can have it right now and have had it for the better part of 30 years:
It's called Palladium Books and it's megaversal system which allows you to mash up different genre's and worlds; I even ran a cosmic level palladium fantasy campaign that ported over stuff from ninja's and super spies and Nightbane 24 years ago that was effectively a personalized version of baldurs gate 1.
Please stop trying to force people to play other systems with zero online play support and no hope for the future because they want better psychic characters in D&D. Again, with feeling: if mind flayers are perfectly valid in D&D, so are psychic PCs
Please do not contact or message me.
It's both. There are, in fact, a lot of psychic archetypes out there. There are also a lot of specialist spellcaster archetypes. D&D does both of them badly out of the box. The fact that, on a meta-level, they're kind of the same thing and could probably share a framework doesn't mean they'd be the same class. (One of the Mystic's many problems appears to be that it tries to be both the "psionic class" and the "martial-arts magic class".)
Really, D&D's spell system is downright awful at modeling any archetype except "D&D caster".
The reality is, D&D is not a generic game system, it's a system designed for a rather particular game style. Sure, you can't play a mind flayer in D&D... but that's no different from all the other monsters you can't play; if I were to make a list of "monsters players would like to play but can't without completely breaking the game", my list would probably start with the top hits of dragons, vampires, and were-creatures, migrate through some fiends, fey, and celestials, before finally reaching mind flayers. There's game systems that are designed to do that kind of thing, that work to varying degrees, but it's not realistic to expect D&D to become one of them (they made a stab at it with savage species in 3.5e; it worked poorly and got way less support than psi). If you want psi characters in D&D, there are two realistic options
You ought to be able to understand that game systems can offer more than one thing that somebody wants to have at the same time. Yes, if "psychic powers" are the sum total of a person's desires, then they might be equally happy with GURPS or Star Wars. But that describes literally nobody. If Yurei is saying "I want psychic powers in D&D", she may in fact want psychic powers in D&D.
The repeated "play another game" response to "I want something that's both in genre and in scope for D&D" is really quite disrespectful. And I say this as somebody who often replies "I suggest another game" when somebody is like "I want to do Overwatch in D&D".
I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. I don't have that power. I'm just doing what you refuse to do and that's acknowledge the truth.
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.