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.
DDB's character sheet is utterly incapable of handling Spell Points, or I doubt anyone would ever use anything else again. Especially on sorcerers. And no, do not say "just use a physical paper character sheet then!" No. My play group is scattered across the entire continental United States, telling me to just ignore the digital toolset that is the only reason I get to play at all is a nonstarter.
The Aberrant Mind has a hard-coded, baked-in, largely unavoidable requirement to be a Disgusting Far-Planar Snot Monster. Can people say "you don't have to be gross!"? Yes. Would any of the people protesting the existence of psychic abilities in this thread accept a non-gross "reflavor" of the Aberrant Mind at their table? No. They would not. All the class features talk about the disgusting mutations the sorcerer is supposed to be suffering, no DM in the "psychic abilities are just a stupid sci-fi paint job on Proper Fantasy Magic" camp would ever allow a psychic character to be Not Gross.
Even presuming one is somehow fortunate enough to exist in a space where they don't have to be indistinguishable from beholder vomit, challenge: give me a spell list for a fifth level Aberrant Mind that comprises kineticist abilities. That is, the remote manipulation of physical entities. G'head. Do your best. Show me.
The first problem you'll encounter is that there are no cantrips which fit this ability designation. ALL damaging cantrips are Elemental Magic Spew, and the only utility cantrip that even approaches the goal is Mage Hand. So you end up with only one of your five cantrips selected.
Then you get six spells: three first, two second, and one third. Show me a six spell list that allows "remote manipulation of physical entities" to be the power on display. Again, there's ONE - Catapult. You can BS first level by calling Jump and Feather Fall "remote manipulation of your own personal physical entity", but that's a stretch and everyone knows it. Second level is completely devoid of psychokinetic abilities, and third gives you ONE, in the vein of Jump/Feather Fall - Fly.
Cool. You are now a fifth-level sorcerer with one cantrip, four leveled spells, and a Psionic Spells list you're not allowed to use. Now, carry the same philosophy to just tenth level, let alone twentieth.
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.
The issue, Gnomarchy, is that I do not have the months needed to rigorously develop and test a robust "Psionicist" homebrew class, especially as such a venture would prove impossible to use in the digital tool.
I could do a napkin-notrs spitballing, yes. Then everyone would rip that notion to shreds because I have not had time or ability to test and refine it, and then say "see?! Your idea sucked, therefore ALL possible implementations of psychic abilities other than Strictly Worse Spellcasters are also inevitably guaranteed to suck!", and I will have gone through the effort of building the homebrew only for people to take it from me and stab me in the eye with it.
I am not a professional game designer. I'm not going to be able to produce a robust Psionicist homebrew class on a dime,on my phone, with no testing. And I refuse to hand people the ammunition if there's no good that could come from the attempt.
Also to be clear with my opposition to the expansion of Psionics I'm going to toss out a few oppininions to clarify why I have the stance that I do.
1. Balance. Historically, Psionics has had serious problems being implemented into D&D due to how it operates under it's own wierd rules that don't play well with other classes and systems (IE magic) and was infamous for ruining campaigns in early eras. This hasn't always been the case and in point of fact at least one setting (dark sun) was built with it specifically in mind but the issue with balancing it so that it remains useful while not invalidating other classes or straight up breaking the game is very much a concern.
2. Magic is already there. Most of the powers that people think of when it comes to psionics are already in the game and available to players either with class powers (IE great old one pact giving telepathy), feats (you can get telekinesis as a feat) or with various spells (Detect emotions, mage hand, telekinesis) so it does lead into question why you'd need to build an entire class for this when you already have so many options for already doing it.
3. Actual construction. WotC at present is... subpar with their D&D team. ignoring how the mystic was an utterly garbled mess, there is basically nothing that the team has done in the last 2 years that suggests to me that they could actually build a psionic class in the veign that Yurei seems to want.
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.
The issue, Gnomarchy, is that I do not have the months needed to rigorously develop and test a robust "Psionicist" homebrew class, especially as such a venture would prove impossible to use in the digital tool.
I could do a napkin-notrs spitballing, yes. Then everyone would rip that notion to shreds because I have not had time or ability to test and refine it, and then say "see?! Your idea sucked, therefore ALL possible implementations of psychic abilities other than Strictly Worse Spellcasters are also inevitably guaranteed to suck!", and I will have gone through the effort of building the homebrew only for people to take it from me and stab me in the eye with it.
I am not a professional game designer. I'm not going to be able to produce a robust Psionicist homebrew class on a dime,on my phone, with no testing. And I refuse to hand people the ammunition if there's no good that could come from the attempt.
I mean, without an outline you're already giving people plenty of ammunition to say that no psionic class can work because its proponents can't form a coherent vision. Nobody is asking you to make a perfect product. Would you be able to point to an existing homebrew or third-party product then? Maybe MCDM's talent, even? I can't speak for anybody else, but I'm perfectly willing to be constructive. I'm not out to get you.
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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.
DDB's character sheet is utterly incapable of handling Spell Points, or I doubt anyone would ever use anything else again. Especially on sorcerers. And no, do not say "just use a physical paper character sheet then!" No. My play group is scattered across the entire continental United States, telling me to just ignore the digital toolset that is the only reason I get to play at all is a nonstarter.
The Aberrant Mind has a hard-coded, baked-in, largely unavoidable requirement to be a Disgusting Far-Planar Snot Monster. Can people say "you don't have to be gross!"? Yes. Would any of the people protesting the existence of psychic abilities in this thread accept a non-gross "reflavor" of the Aberrant Mind at their table? No. They would not. All the class features talk about the disgusting mutations the sorcerer is supposed to be suffering, no DM in the "psychic abilities are just a stupid sci-fi paint job on Proper Fantasy Magic" camp would ever allow a psychic character to be Not Gross.
Even presuming one is somehow fortunate enough to exist in a space where they don't have to be indistinguishable from beholder vomit, challenge: give me a spell list for a fifth level Aberrant Mind that comprises kineticist abilities. That is, the remote manipulation of physical entities. G'head. Do your best. Show me.
The first problem you'll encounter is that there are no cantrips which fit this ability designation. ALL damaging cantrips are Elemental Magic Spew, and the only utility cantrip that even approaches the goal is Mage Hand. So you end up with only one of your five cantrips selected.
Then you get six spells: three first, two second, and one third. Show me a six spell list that allows "remote manipulation of physical entities" to be the power on display. Again, there's ONE - Catapult. You can BS first level by calling Jump and Feather Fall "remote manipulation of your own personal physical entity", but that's a stretch and everyone knows it. Second level is completely devoid of psychokinetic abilities, and third gives you ONE, in the vein of Jump/Feather Fall - Fly.
Cool. You are now a fifth-level sorcerer with one cantrip, four leveled spells, and a Psionic Spells list you're not allowed to use. Now, carry the same philosophy to just tenth level, let alone twentieth.
Explain to me why this is acceptable.
Please do not contact or message me.
The issue, Gnomarchy, is that I do not have the months needed to rigorously develop and test a robust "Psionicist" homebrew class, especially as such a venture would prove impossible to use in the digital tool.
I could do a napkin-notrs spitballing, yes. Then everyone would rip that notion to shreds because I have not had time or ability to test and refine it, and then say "see?! Your idea sucked, therefore ALL possible implementations of psychic abilities other than Strictly Worse Spellcasters are also inevitably guaranteed to suck!", and I will have gone through the effort of building the homebrew only for people to take it from me and stab me in the eye with it.
I am not a professional game designer. I'm not going to be able to produce a robust Psionicist homebrew class on a dime,on my phone, with no testing. And I refuse to hand people the ammunition if there's no good that could come from the attempt.
Please do not contact or message me.
Also to be clear with my opposition to the expansion of Psionics I'm going to toss out a few oppininions to clarify why I have the stance that I do.
1. Balance. Historically, Psionics has had serious problems being implemented into D&D due to how it operates under it's own wierd rules that don't play well with other classes and systems (IE magic) and was infamous for ruining campaigns in early eras. This hasn't always been the case and in point of fact at least one setting (dark sun) was built with it specifically in mind but the issue with balancing it so that it remains useful while not invalidating other classes or straight up breaking the game is very much a concern.
2. Magic is already there. Most of the powers that people think of when it comes to psionics are already in the game and available to players either with class powers (IE great old one pact giving telepathy), feats (you can get telekinesis as a feat) or with various spells (Detect emotions, mage hand, telekinesis) so it does lead into question why you'd need to build an entire class for this when you already have so many options for already doing it.
3. Actual construction. WotC at present is... subpar with their D&D team. ignoring how the mystic was an utterly garbled mess, there is basically nothing that the team has done in the last 2 years that suggests to me that they could actually build a psionic class in the veign that Yurei seems to want.
I mean, without an outline you're already giving people plenty of ammunition to say that no psionic class can work because its proponents can't form a coherent vision. Nobody is asking you to make a perfect product. Would you be able to point to an existing homebrew or third-party product then? Maybe MCDM's talent, even? I can't speak for anybody else, but I'm perfectly willing to be constructive. I'm not out to get you.