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.
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.
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.
As I previously said, Gust of Wind can functionally be a telekinetic shove. There’s also the telekinetic feat for bonus action at-will forced movement. No, you can’t do the full Jedi Grip before 9th level, but that’s clearly by design as something they’re not giving anyone sooner because they feel that degree of forced movement is a late tier 2 feature.
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.
Opinion not justified by facts. I'd certainly allow it. I somewhat feel that your existing play group is toxic, because a lot of the things that you complain about (not limited to psi)... simply don't match my experiences about how people actually play the game.
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?
The psionic-ish spells each do one thing, and there are gaps in the sort of things you ought to be able to do if they didn't think to make a spell. And yes, you can add more spells, but then Fred the Wizard can come along, learn Awesome TK Capstone, and do the thing you've been working toward your whole career, while he can't even pick up a pencil. And he throws Meteor Storms, summons demons, etc. If all psi abilities are spells, they must be balanced on the assumption that wizards will get to use them along with all their other stuff. If they are not spells, they can be more powerful while not upsetting the balance of the game.
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.
It seems fairly clear to me.
Imagine a class. We'll call it Psi. It gets two powers from a list at level one, and another one every two levels or something. It also gets some other abilities. It has a pool of points, dice, or something that lets it power the abilities. How much? Who knows? Who cares?
The meat of the class is those powers. Some of them are free to use. Some always cost. Some cost to juice their effects.
A few examples:
Telepathy: duh
TK: move stuff with your mind, kind of like mage hand. As you level, you can move more stuff, or manage multiple objects. Maybe you can juice it to move extra stuff
TK Strike: basic damage cantrip. Punch people in the face. With Your Brain!!!!
TK push: move people back and forth Probably always costs.
TK armor: requires TK shield. Gives you duration armor class. Probably better than mage armor, or you can juice it.
TK lift: requires TK push. levitation stuff
TK hold: requires level 5 and two TK powers. Stop somebody from moving. Maybe also from acting. dunno
...
Explode: requires level 15, six TK powers, including Crush: Target takes 15d8 force damage, con save for half. If they hit 0 hp, their body explodes, killing them and doing an additional 5d8 force to everyone within ten feet. It's also very gross.
And so on, and so forth. The other types of power get similar trees. Probably there are powers that you can get even if you cross trees. Maybe there are some you have to. Some powers are flexible utility, some are very specific. A lot are combat, because it's still D&D.
There. It's not a wizard. It gets to do cool stuff. It has coherent theme. It's even easier to play than a wizard.
And I'm pretty sure it would fit the bill of the sort of thing Yurei is asking for.
And it would be a colossal headache to actually balance, and that’s before we address the point that it would be trivial to just make psion only spells. It’s not some innate rule of the game that a Wizard can grab everything- and there are some significant holes in point of fact- it’s a deliberate design choice, and one they could simply choose not to exercise if they wanted to make psionic spells.
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.
Opinion not justified by facts. I'd certainly allow it. I somewhat feel that your existing play group is toxic, because a lot of the things that you complain about (not limited to psi)... simply don't match my experiences about how people actually play the game.
A lot of this goes back into a mounting suspicion that I have about Yurei based on questions and comments that they've made over the last few days: I don't know that they've actually had that much expierience with 5th edition and how it is played in a real world sense; Like they were inferring that subclasses don't actually change or impact the core class that they come from at one point.
Also the Abberant mind is not typically some hideous mutant as they seem convinced which they would have learned if they actually read the material instead of looking for all the ways it isn't their precious psion.
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.
You may not be. Most everybody else very much is. The objective is "abolish psychic abilities from D&D entirely forever" and convincing me I'm a dogshit human being for wanting alternatives to spellcasting is Step 1.
I don't keep up with other people's Psionics homebrew because they invariably try and recreate Old Edition Junk and I have absolutely zero interest in how 2e did psychic abilities. Also because almost all third-party homebrew is wildly incompatible with the digital toolset and so my ability to adopt it is sharply limited. But frankly I consider it telling that people feel like the Telekinetic feat is "the ultimate in PK". Being able to move five whole pounds so long as they're within thirty feet of you and only so long as you don't do damage with it and nobody else is ever within five feet of them is the absolute zenith of kineticist abilities to these folks. Everything else is just too damn powerful to ever allow to happen. Wizards can get at-will Fireball, but fuggoff with being able to use psychokinetic abilities in a way that's actually beneficial or meaningful beyond "I open the door with Mage Hand because Trap Memes."
Pantagruel: my play group is fine. One of our frequent DMs is quite fond of futuristic settings that often lean much harder on psi than Faerun. In one of their games "True Magic" was vanishingly rare and a sure sign ****ery Was Afoot. You want to talk Ohh Pee, talk about a ranger with the Archery fighting style, Sharpshooter, and a +3 laser pistol. Taiko was, quietly and without fanfare, an absolute freaking monstrosity. You want to talk about too-powerful at-will turns, busting 60+ radiant damage at will every round by tenth level will do it. Stuff Was Learned that game.
Ask any of the people in THIS forum, though? If it didn't show up in Tolkien, it has no business in THEIR D&D, and thus it has no business in anyone else's either. Most people in this thread frankly would just ban Aberrant Mind altogether, regardless of flavor, and then gleefully run the dozens and dozens of psychic monsters in the books without a hint of their own hypocrisy.
Wren: mobile means I can't go down your list, but most of those are gross overreaches and you know it. Why would a psykinetic have special abilities to manipulate water but nothing else? Thunder damage is thunder damage, not psykinetic strikes. You've got fire damage and earthbending as well. Great for you if that fits your idea of how PK works, but most of it has very little to do with the common perception of kineticist talents.
But fine. Whatever. I keep forgetting people aren't allowed to have desires in this place, they HAVE to toe the line and play the exact same D&D all the olds have been playing for forty years now. Just... forget it. Let's all go Bear a Ring one more time. Surely the eighty thousandth will be the charm, right?
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.
But why do they need to be completely different? That's what I'm not getting. Even in 3.5, arguably the closest we've gotten to a functioning psionic subsystem, a bunch of psionic powers were just "take a spell, give it Greek roots instead of Latin." Or "use the exact same name as the original and stick 'Psionic' in front of it." So it's not like psionics and spellcasting having a bunch of overlap is anything new. Moreover, magic-psionics- transparency was the default rule too, because making it so that psions could ignore magic resistance, AMF and dispel magic resulted in a balance nightmare.
The only real differences between the two in practice were: (a) points instead of slots as the default, and (b) psionics being particularly bad at emulating certain schools like necromancy and illusion, and also pretty bad at buffing allies, but in exchange you got to do things like self-heal.
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.
The burden of proof is on you to explain what makes what you want "better." I've already given multiple reasons why it's worse - D&D's long history of non-spellcasting subsystems being underbaked and undersupported, needing convoluted transparency rules so that psionicists can't end-run around the few checks and balances spellcasting even has, and alternative resources being more flash than substance. A point you yourself proved when you noted how even the one alternative resource 5e has, spell points, still hasn't been implemented properly on DDB 10 years after it debuted. How can you look at all that and conclude that what we need are more subsystems?
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
As I previously said, Gust of Wind can functionally be a telekinetic shove. There’s also the telekinetic feat for bonus action at-will forced movement. No, you can’t do the full Jedi Grip before 9th level, but that’s clearly by design as something they’re not giving anyone sooner because they feel that degree of forced movement is a late tier 2 feature.
Opinion not justified by facts. I'd certainly allow it. I somewhat feel that your existing play group is toxic, because a lot of the things that you complain about (not limited to psi)... simply don't match my experiences about how people actually play the game.
The psionic-ish spells each do one thing, and there are gaps in the sort of things you ought to be able to do if they didn't think to make a spell. And yes, you can add more spells, but then Fred the Wizard can come along, learn Awesome TK Capstone, and do the thing you've been working toward your whole career, while he can't even pick up a pencil. And he throws Meteor Storms, summons demons, etc. If all psi abilities are spells, they must be balanced on the assumption that wizards will get to use them along with all their other stuff. If they are not spells, they can be more powerful while not upsetting the balance of the game.
It seems fairly clear to me.
Imagine a class. We'll call it Psi. It gets two powers from a list at level one, and another one every two levels or something. It also gets some other abilities. It has a pool of points, dice, or something that lets it power the abilities. How much? Who knows? Who cares?
The meat of the class is those powers. Some of them are free to use. Some always cost. Some cost to juice their effects.
A few examples:
Telepathy: duh
TK: move stuff with your mind, kind of like mage hand. As you level, you can move more stuff, or manage multiple objects. Maybe you can juice it to move extra stuff
TK Strike: basic damage cantrip. Punch people in the face. With Your Brain!!!!
TK push: move people back and forth Probably always costs.
TK shield: requires TK. Pay power to get shield
TK armor: requires TK shield. Gives you duration armor class. Probably better than mage armor, or you can juice it.
TK lift: requires TK push. levitation stuff
TK hold: requires level 5 and two TK powers. Stop somebody from moving. Maybe also from acting. dunno
...
Explode: requires level 15, six TK powers, including Crush: Target takes 15d8 force damage, con save for half. If they hit 0 hp, their body explodes, killing them and doing an additional 5d8 force to everyone within ten feet. It's also very gross.
And so on, and so forth. The other types of power get similar trees. Probably there are powers that you can get even if you cross trees. Maybe there are some you have to. Some powers are flexible utility, some are very specific. A lot are combat, because it's still D&D.
There. It's not a wizard. It gets to do cool stuff. It has coherent theme. It's even easier to play than a wizard.
And I'm pretty sure it would fit the bill of the sort of thing Yurei is asking for.
And it would be a colossal headache to actually balance, and that’s before we address the point that it would be trivial to just make psion only spells. It’s not some innate rule of the game that a Wizard can grab everything- and there are some significant holes in point of fact- it’s a deliberate design choice, and one they could simply choose not to exercise if they wanted to make psionic spells.
A lot of this goes back into a mounting suspicion that I have about Yurei based on questions and comments that they've made over the last few days: I don't know that they've actually had that much expierience with 5th edition and how it is played in a real world sense; Like they were inferring that subclasses don't actually change or impact the core class that they come from at one point.
Also the Abberant mind is not typically some hideous mutant as they seem convinced which they would have learned if they actually read the material instead of looking for all the ways it isn't their precious psion.
Quote from Gnomarchy >>
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.
You may not be. Most everybody else very much is. The objective is "abolish psychic abilities from D&D entirely forever" and convincing me I'm a dogshit human being for wanting alternatives to spellcasting is Step 1.
I don't keep up with other people's Psionics homebrew because they invariably try and recreate Old Edition Junk and I have absolutely zero interest in how 2e did psychic abilities. Also because almost all third-party homebrew is wildly incompatible with the digital toolset and so my ability to adopt it is sharply limited. But frankly I consider it telling that people feel like the Telekinetic feat is "the ultimate in PK". Being able to move five whole pounds so long as they're within thirty feet of you and only so long as you don't do damage with it and nobody else is ever within five feet of them is the absolute zenith of kineticist abilities to these folks. Everything else is just too damn powerful to ever allow to happen. Wizards can get at-will Fireball, but fuggoff with being able to use psychokinetic abilities in a way that's actually beneficial or meaningful beyond "I open the door with Mage Hand because Trap Memes."
Pantagruel: my play group is fine. One of our frequent DMs is quite fond of futuristic settings that often lean much harder on psi than Faerun. In one of their games "True Magic" was vanishingly rare and a sure sign ****ery Was Afoot. You want to talk Ohh Pee, talk about a ranger with the Archery fighting style, Sharpshooter, and a +3 laser pistol. Taiko was, quietly and without fanfare, an absolute freaking monstrosity. You want to talk about too-powerful at-will turns, busting 60+ radiant damage at will every round by tenth level will do it. Stuff Was Learned that game.
Ask any of the people in THIS forum, though? If it didn't show up in Tolkien, it has no business in THEIR D&D, and thus it has no business in anyone else's either. Most people in this thread frankly would just ban Aberrant Mind altogether, regardless of flavor, and then gleefully run the dozens and dozens of psychic monsters in the books without a hint of their own hypocrisy.
Wren: mobile means I can't go down your list, but most of those are gross overreaches and you know it. Why would a psykinetic have special abilities to manipulate water but nothing else? Thunder damage is thunder damage, not psykinetic strikes. You've got fire damage and earthbending as well. Great for you if that fits your idea of how PK works, but most of it has very little to do with the common perception of kineticist talents.
But fine. Whatever. I keep forgetting people aren't allowed to have desires in this place, they HAVE to toe the line and play the exact same D&D all the olds have been playing for forty years now. Just... forget it. Let's all go Bear a Ring one more time. Surely the eighty thousandth will be the charm, right?
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But why do they need to be completely different? That's what I'm not getting. Even in 3.5, arguably the closest we've gotten to a functioning psionic subsystem, a bunch of psionic powers were just "take a spell, give it Greek roots instead of Latin." Or "use the exact same name as the original and stick 'Psionic' in front of it." So it's not like psionics and spellcasting having a bunch of overlap is anything new. Moreover, magic-psionics- transparency was the default rule too, because making it so that psions could ignore magic resistance, AMF and dispel magic resulted in a balance nightmare.
The only real differences between the two in practice were: (a) points instead of slots as the default, and (b) psionics being particularly bad at emulating certain schools like necromancy and illusion, and also pretty bad at buffing allies, but in exchange you got to do things like self-heal.
The burden of proof is on you to explain what makes what you want "better." I've already given multiple reasons why it's worse - D&D's long history of non-spellcasting subsystems being underbaked and undersupported, needing convoluted transparency rules so that psionicists can't end-run around the few checks and balances spellcasting even has, and alternative resources being more flash than substance. A point you yourself proved when you noted how even the one alternative resource 5e has, spell points, still hasn't been implemented properly on DDB 10 years after it debuted. How can you look at all that and conclude that what we need are more subsystems?