To summarize the summary of the summary: not everyone agrees that the foundations are solid for this purpose.
Yeah, we get that there's disagreement, but the point of a debate is to figure out why and what could be changed to arrive at something both sides can agree on.
No one has refuted or even rebutted the problems prior iterations of psionics have run into, the additional testing and pagespace that "separate but equal" psionics would require, nor explained what it is that makes the current foundations insufficient for their purposes. It's just been a lot of yelling that everything is spellcasting so this should be different for novelty's sake, which to comes across to me like people saying "Man, all these submarines people keep making out of metal are boring, we need something new! I'm going to make MY submarine out of bread!" Yeah that's certainly novel, but maybe it's worth examining why the designers have gravitated toward certain common foundations over time - because they work.
A good example of anime where there's no overt supernatural stuff in play but the MC's are clearly performing superhuman feats is Rurouni Kenshin; there's a bit of talk about things like chi, but it's just a few passing mentions not given emphasis as a power source like in Dragon Ball. It's pretty well spelled out that what makes the MCs so dangerous is training, experience, and natural aptitude.
Rurouni Kenshin is the same problem as Conan: sure, people are doing impressive stuff on a human scale, but no-one is fighting fifty foot dragons.
I seem to recall Conan climbing the equivalent of Olympus to take on his god, Crom, directly. I seem to recall at least one dragon sized snake and that Lovecraftian elder who shows up later in Doctor Strange, Shuma-Gorath? Conan, with Crom, took him on.
So no actual dragons that I remember, but beings of comparable size
At this point in the discussion, I’d give my eye teeth to just be told clearly and concisely what makes the aberrant mind so sucktacular of a pasión.
2 things.
1. It uses magic
2. Yurei thinks it's icky.
That seems to be the whole damn thing. Oh sure there are some other arbitrary arguments that they've made about how they aren't kinetesistic enough for them and how you are "punished" for hyperspecialization, but those two points are the only ones that consistently crop up.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here just thinking to myself that If I wanted to I could argue that literally any character class could be described as "psionic" if you put enough spin on it.
I seem to recall Conan climbing the equivalent of Olympus to take on his god, Crom, directly. I seem to recall at least one dragon sized snake and that Lovecraftian elder who shows up later in Doctor Strange, Shuma-Gorath? Conan, with Crom, took him on.
So no actual dragons that I remember, but beings of comparable size
A bit of Google says he was dead / in spirit form for that encounter, and that fighting Crom earned him his life back along with some Cursed With Awesome. So not exactly human at the time, and possibly not even since.
At this point in the discussion, I’d give my eye teeth to just be told clearly and concisely what makes the aberrant mind so sucktacular of a pasión.
Your mind is 'aberrant' rather than 'superior' or any actual positive describer
Powers are alien/Lovecraftian in nature, at least RAW
Telepathy for only Sorcerer level minutes per bonus action
Your 'psychic abilities' are still spellcasting.
14th and 18th level abilities common to all such sorcerers
Also:
It's a sorcerer, and they're actually pretty bad
In order to pretend to be a psychic character instead of just another wizard-type, you need to chew through the one resource that sorcerers have, that's supposed to make up for their teeny-tiny spell selection.
The "psychic" spells are an extremely limited set of abilities. Even if they're actually enough to make something that passes for a psychic caster, there's pretty much only one to be made.
To summarize the summary of the summary: not everyone agrees that the foundations are solid for this purpose.
Yeah, we get that there's disagreement, but the point of a debate is to figure out why and what could be changed to arrive at something both sides can agree on.
No one has refuted or even rebutted the problems prior iterations of psionics have run into, the additional testing and pagespace that "separate but equal" psionics would require, nor explained what it is that makes the current foundations insufficient for their purposes.
I have literally done those very things, and I'm not the only one.
You just don't agree. Which you're allowed to do.
This is mostly now an argument over personal taste, and those are not resolvable by logic and reason.
Also: "it would need testing and pages" is not a bloody counterargument. You don't think they're worth doing, but that's, just, like, your opinion.
It's just been a lot of yelling that everything is spellcasting so this should be different for novelty's sake, which to comes across to me like people saying "Man, all these submarines people keep making out of metal are boring, we need something new! I'm going to make MY submarine out of bread!" Yeah that's certainly novel, but maybe it's worth examining why the designers have gravitated toward certain common foundations over time - because they work.
If you are seriously arguing that the D&D magic system is the result of a considered design process, I... don't know what to say.
It was not a good design to start with, it's been gradually made less bad over time, but it's a core trope of the game, and replacing it outright will get all the yelling and screaming again.
But there's no good reason that it has to be the only flexible power system in the game, shoehorning every class concept into spell slots. Classes are self-contained, which makes it easy to give them different subsystems. Both the Warlock and the Artificer are already doing it, and the warlock's problems are more from a failure to fully commit and a design assumption that fails to match how actual play happens than an inherent weakness in the idea of a different power system.
And I'll say this again: I don't even think D&D needs psychic characters. (I also don't think it doesn't need them. They're just not my thing. Kind of like gnomes.)
But I do find the arguments why the current systems don't support a psychic class well persuasive.
But there's no good reason that it has to be the only flexible power system in the game, shoehorning every class concept into spell slots.
Actually, there is a good reason: to avoid unnecessary multiplicity. I don't particularly like the spell slot system, but it's still better than having multiple independent systems.
But there's no good reason that it has to be the only flexible power system in the game, shoehorning every class concept into spell slots.
Actually, there is a good reason: to avoid unnecessary multiplicity. I don't particularly like the spell slot system, but it's still better than having multiple independent systems.
Matter of opinion.
Anyway, that ship has sailed. We have at least two or three already, not counting various subclass debris.
But, sure, let's look at it from that lens. What makes for "unnecessary multiplicity" when considering this sort of thing?
In this case, I'd say:
Can the potential new system be adequately implemented within the current subsystem?
Is the new system worth it? Does the game benefit from it existing more than it loses from the complexity added?
How much complexity are we adding, anyway? Can we use the new system to collapse existing complexity into it?
And I'd answer:
No.
Totally subjective.
Depends on the specifics, which don't exist, but likely relatively little. A power system built upon the basis of artificer infusions or warlock invocations both gets to subsume those systems into a new general mechanic if we want, and just isn't likely to be that complex, anyway. Certainly less so than, I don't know, the entire current spellcasting system.
Your mind is 'aberrant' rather than 'superior' or any actual positive describer
Powers are alien/Lovecraftian in nature, at least RAW
Telepathy for only Sorcerer level minutes per bonus action
Your 'psychic abilities' are still spellcasting.
14th and 18th level abilities common to all such sorcerers
Going through points in order
If you can't ignore the name of a class or subclass, lots of things are hard to do.
Not in any meaningful way. Flavor is free.
Um... plenty of fictional telepaths are worse at telepathy than that.
Spell slots are just the resource pool you use for your powers.
In the unlikely event of a campaign reaching those levels, talk to your DM.
2: Have you looked at the Aberrant Mind spells? About half of them are just straight up from the Warlock's "creepy lovecraftean stuff" spells. Flavor may be free, but there's only so much you can do to reflavor Hunger of Hadar before you're just homebrewing a totally different spell.
3: How many fictional telepaths, who specialize in psychic powers, in high-powered genres, fit that bill?
5: That's just saying "yeah, I got nothing". If you have to get the GM on board to fix your subclass's capstone powers, the argument that it totally just works out of the box for psychic characters falls flat. The best you can actually say is that it just works from levels 6 to 13, and even for those levels you're burning extra sorcery points and pessimizing your spell list.
2: Have you looked at the Aberrant Mind spells? About half of them are just straight up from the Warlock's "creepy lovecraftean stuff" spells. Flavor may be free, but there's only so much you can do to reflavor Hunger of Hadar before you're just homebrewing a totally different spell.
Or you can just replace the spell (interesting interaction: the order of gaining new spells and replacing spells is undefined; can you replace a spell the same level you get it?).
I don't intend to suggest that his psychology was in some way aberrant or neurotic …—Michael Chabon
2
: straying from the right or normal way
So, if you don’t want psions to be aberrant, then you want everyone to have psionic powers, like Dark Sun?
As per spell slotts, it is just a mechanic for the meta-game, but if it really bothers you.
Psionic Sorcery (6th level): When you cast any of your Psionic Spells of 1st level or higher, you can cast it using sorcery points instead of spell slots. When you do, the spell doesn't require verbal or somatic components, nor does it require material components unless they would be consumed by the casting. Psionic Sorcery effectively sidesteps enemy counterspells, and allows you to surreptitiously cast spells mid-conversation. In addition, casting a 4th-level spell for 4 sorcery points is more economical than creating a 4th-level slot for 6 sorcery points using Flexible Casting.
The example in your cited definition has a clear context of abnormally bad. Even the second definition is "straying from the 'right or normal' way" rather than merely straying from normal, so again, abnormally wrong. And unless sorcerers are a particularly common flavor of caster, wouldn't they all be 'deviating from usual,' if those connotations do not apply?
Psionic sorcery is not gained until the sorcerer is 6th, so they are still casting normally until then and every sorcerer can choose Subtle Spell, which can just as easily avoid counterspells. So then... you are merely a normal sorcerer with limited telepathy until 6th and then suddenly become 'fully psionic?'
2: Have you looked at the Aberrant Mind spells? About half of them are just straight up from the Warlock's "creepy lovecraftean stuff" spells. Flavor may be free, but there's only so much you can do to reflavor Hunger of Hadar before you're just homebrewing a totally different spell.
Or you can just replace the spell (interesting interaction: the order of gaining new spells and replacing spells is undefined; can you replace a spell the same level you get it?).
The number of resources you have to burn to make AM work, even at the most basic level, as the psychic class says to me that it might perhaps not be a good fit, merely the least bad.
Your mind is 'aberrant' rather than 'superior' or any actual positive describer
Powers are alien/Lovecraftian in nature, at least RAW
Telepathy for only Sorcerer level minutes per bonus action
Your 'psychic abilities' are still spellcasting.
14th and 18th level abilities common to all such sorcerers
Going through points in order
If you can't ignore the name of a class or subclass, lots of things are hard to do.
Not in any meaningful way. Flavor is free.
Um... plenty of fictional telepaths are worse at telepathy than that.
Spell slots are just the resource pool you use for your powers.
In the unlikely event of a campaign reaching those levels, talk to your DM.
1 and 2) Sort of? When the spell lists and abilities lend themselves more to the stated flavor than to the desired flavor, it detracts from the desired flavor.
3) Name one fictional psionic who is supposed to be a psionic primary character (rather than something else with some psi abilities on the side) who has such limited telepathy? (Edit: With respect to the "Those fictional characters are not level 1," response, the ability only increases 1 minute per level, never expands beyond one person at a time and never has an initial contact range of more than 30')
4) They are still called spells, still interact with the rules the same as any other spells. Even at 6th, when you can cast a couple things using sorcery points, you still have your spell slots and any spell you cast conventionally still functions completely like the same spell coming from any other caster.
5) It doesn't count unless you get there is saying that, if it does get there, a DM has to homebrew the upper levels to come up with something that actually fits the desired flavor after all.
You realize that D&D is at it's core a game where we pretend to be these characters right? Like you don't actually have to be a huge burly survivalist with anger management issues to be a barbarian?
Cuz if so: how is it such a stretch to internalize The sorcerer as a Psion?
You realize that D&D is at it's core a game where we pretend to be these characters right? Like you don't actually have to be a huge burly survivalist with anger management issues to be a barbarian?
Cuz if so: how is it such a stretch to internalize The sorcerer as a Psion?
One can pretend a sorcerer is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Imagination is powerful. However it does not make eating one a good idea.
If you define psionics as no different from normal magic, are they really what someone wants when they want to play a psion?
You realize that D&D is at it's core a game where we pretend to be these characters right? Like you don't actually have to be a huge burly survivalist with anger management issues to be a barbarian?
Cuz if so: how is it such a stretch to internalize The sorcerer as a Psion?
One can pretend a sorcerer is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Imagination is powerful. However it does not make eating one a good idea.
If you define psionics as no different from normal magic, are they really what someone wants when they want to play a psion?
Which again comes around to the question of "Why do we need psionics to be developed beyond what they officially have been at this juncture?"
Because so far beyond a niche community who can't really articulate what they are (aside from "not magic") I haven't really gotten a straight answer and some of the ones that have been inferred (IE magic and psionics not being able to impede each other) just sounds like it would make the game as a whole so much worse.
Edit: Also, I know that this comes across as reductive to the argument at hand but their are other RPG systems that exist and fascilitate being a psychic character far better then D&D ever has.
You realize that D&D is at it's core a game where we pretend to be these characters right? Like you don't actually have to be a huge burly survivalist with anger management issues to be a barbarian?
Cuz if so: how is it such a stretch to internalize The sorcerer as a Psion?
One can pretend a sorcerer is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Imagination is powerful. However it does not make eating one a good idea.
If you define psionics as no different from normal magic, are they really what someone wants when they want to play a psion?
I think it is weird that a fireball can go through a wall of force (cast psionically) as if it wasn't there, but a person can't walk through it. But, I acknowledge that different people have different ideas as to what psionics should be. I think it will get hopelessly complicated (e.g. should that armor's +1 bonus to AC apply against that psion's soul sword?)
You are making my point. Where does it say that anything an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer casts does not count as magic for things like walls of force, anti-magic fields, etc?
It's also worth noting that If psionics and magic don't interact this doesn't make the game better by having a counter to magic, it makes the game worse for everyone who isn't psionic or magic since they can't hard counter (which seems to be the point of psionics... I think?) either.
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Yeah, we get that there's disagreement, but the point of a debate is to figure out why and what could be changed to arrive at something both sides can agree on.
No one has refuted or even rebutted the problems prior iterations of psionics have run into, the additional testing and pagespace that "separate but equal" psionics would require, nor explained what it is that makes the current foundations insufficient for their purposes. It's just been a lot of yelling that everything is spellcasting so this should be different for novelty's sake, which to comes across to me like people saying "Man, all these submarines people keep making out of metal are boring, we need something new! I'm going to make MY submarine out of bread!" Yeah that's certainly novel, but maybe it's worth examining why the designers have gravitated toward certain common foundations over time - because they work.
I seem to recall Conan climbing the equivalent of Olympus to take on his god, Crom, directly. I seem to recall at least one dragon sized snake and that Lovecraftian elder who shows up later in Doctor Strange, Shuma-Gorath? Conan, with Crom, took him on.
So no actual dragons that I remember, but beings of comparable size
2 things.
1. It uses magic
2. Yurei thinks it's icky.
That seems to be the whole damn thing. Oh sure there are some other arbitrary arguments that they've made about how they aren't kinetesistic enough for them and how you are "punished" for hyperspecialization, but those two points are the only ones that consistently crop up.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here just thinking to myself that If I wanted to I could argue that literally any character class could be described as "psionic" if you put enough spin on it.
A bit of Google says he was dead / in spirit form for that encounter, and that fighting Crom earned him his life back along with some Cursed With Awesome. So not exactly human at the time, and possibly not even since.
Well, it has the word "spellcasting" in its features, and spells suck, you see. Also a few of its potential origins are icky or something.
Also:
Going through points in order
I have literally done those very things, and I'm not the only one.
You just don't agree. Which you're allowed to do.
This is mostly now an argument over personal taste, and those are not resolvable by logic and reason.
Also: "it would need testing and pages" is not a bloody counterargument. You don't think they're worth doing, but that's, just, like, your opinion.
If you are seriously arguing that the D&D magic system is the result of a considered design process, I... don't know what to say.
It was not a good design to start with, it's been gradually made less bad over time, but it's a core trope of the game, and replacing it outright will get all the yelling and screaming again.
But there's no good reason that it has to be the only flexible power system in the game, shoehorning every class concept into spell slots. Classes are self-contained, which makes it easy to give them different subsystems. Both the Warlock and the Artificer are already doing it, and the warlock's problems are more from a failure to fully commit and a design assumption that fails to match how actual play happens than an inherent weakness in the idea of a different power system.
And I'll say this again: I don't even think D&D needs psychic characters. (I also don't think it doesn't need them. They're just not my thing. Kind of like gnomes.)
But I do find the arguments why the current systems don't support a psychic class well persuasive.
Actually, there is a good reason: to avoid unnecessary multiplicity. I don't particularly like the spell slot system, but it's still better than having multiple independent systems.
Matter of opinion.
Anyway, that ship has sailed. We have at least two or three already, not counting various subclass debris.
But, sure, let's look at it from that lens. What makes for "unnecessary multiplicity" when considering this sort of thing?
In this case, I'd say:
And I'd answer:
2: Have you looked at the Aberrant Mind spells? About half of them are just straight up from the Warlock's "creepy lovecraftean stuff" spells. Flavor may be free, but there's only so much you can do to reflavor Hunger of Hadar before you're just homebrewing a totally different spell.
3: How many fictional telepaths, who specialize in psychic powers, in high-powered genres, fit that bill?
5: That's just saying "yeah, I got nothing". If you have to get the GM on board to fix your subclass's capstone powers, the argument that it totally just works out of the box for psychic characters falls flat. The best you can actually say is that it just works from levels 6 to 13, and even for those levels you're burning extra sorcery points and pessimizing your spell list.
Or you can just replace the spell (interesting interaction: the order of gaining new spells and replacing spells is undefined; can you replace a spell the same level you get it?).
The example in your cited definition has a clear context of abnormally bad. Even the second definition is "straying from the 'right or normal' way" rather than merely straying from normal, so again, abnormally wrong. And unless sorcerers are a particularly common flavor of caster, wouldn't they all be 'deviating from usual,' if those connotations do not apply?
Psionic sorcery is not gained until the sorcerer is 6th, so they are still casting normally until then and every sorcerer can choose Subtle Spell, which can just as easily avoid counterspells. So then... you are merely a normal sorcerer with limited telepathy until 6th and then suddenly become 'fully psionic?'
The number of resources you have to burn to make AM work, even at the most basic level, as the psychic class says to me that it might perhaps not be a good fit, merely the least bad.
1 and 2) Sort of? When the spell lists and abilities lend themselves more to the stated flavor than to the desired flavor, it detracts from the desired flavor.
3) Name one fictional psionic who is supposed to be a psionic primary character (rather than something else with some psi abilities on the side) who has such limited telepathy? (Edit: With respect to the "Those fictional characters are not level 1," response, the ability only increases 1 minute per level, never expands beyond one person at a time and never has an initial contact range of more than 30')
4) They are still called spells, still interact with the rules the same as any other spells. Even at 6th, when you can cast a couple things using sorcery points, you still have your spell slots and any spell you cast conventionally still functions completely like the same spell coming from any other caster.
5) It doesn't count unless you get there is saying that, if it does get there, a DM has to homebrew the upper levels to come up with something that actually fits the desired flavor after all.
You realize that D&D is at it's core a game where we pretend to be these characters right? Like you don't actually have to be a huge burly survivalist with anger management issues to be a barbarian?
Cuz if so: how is it such a stretch to internalize The sorcerer as a Psion?
One can pretend a sorcerer is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Imagination is powerful. However it does not make eating one a good idea.
If you define psionics as no different from normal magic, are they really what someone wants when they want to play a psion?
Depends why they want to play a psion? If your goal is "does what a psion does", it's fine. If your goal is "not magic", it's obviously not fine.
Which again comes around to the question of "Why do we need psionics to be developed beyond what they officially have been at this juncture?"
Because so far beyond a niche community who can't really articulate what they are (aside from "not magic") I haven't really gotten a straight answer and some of the ones that have been inferred (IE magic and psionics not being able to impede each other) just sounds like it would make the game as a whole so much worse.
Edit: Also, I know that this comes across as reductive to the argument at hand but their are other RPG systems that exist and fascilitate being a psychic character far better then D&D ever has.
You are making my point. Where does it say that anything an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer casts does not count as magic for things like walls of force, anti-magic fields, etc?
It's also worth noting that If psionics and magic don't interact this doesn't make the game better by having a counter to magic, it makes the game worse for everyone who isn't psionic or magic since they can't hard counter (which seems to be the point of psionics... I think?) either.