Okay. Let me make this unambiguously crystal clear to everybody, so I stop having to field this dumb response.
My issue with the whole "psychic powers should just beconsidered MAGIC because 5e!" thing is that currently, the Venn diagram of "Magic" vs "Psychic Abilities" looks like this:
Got it?
Good.
Now, tell me - who in their right mind would voluntarily play a psychic character given that the above diagram is true? You're giving up the vast majority of what makes a spellcaster fun, and in return you get to play...a strictly worse spellcaster. With absolutely nothing to show for taking ninety percent of your class's spell list and chucking it in the garbage. yes, sure, some people will still do it because They Wanna(C) and they don't care if their character is any good, simply that it's sticking to a theme. Not all of us are so blessed that we can tolerate intentionally making actively terrible characters just to try and live up to cool ideas in our head.
Tell me. Why would anyone play a psychic character in the above diagram. Why would you play one?
I have to admit, this argument isn't particularly compelling to me. It feels like you're inventing a problem because you don't want to compromise on this concept.
Sticking to Aberrant Mind Sorcerer... if you choose to play that class, you're still a sorcerer. You have access to the entire sorcerer spell list. You're only a "strictly worse spellcaster" if you voluntarily limit yourself to the spells that fit the feel of psychic powers, whatever that is to you. If you play as a Psi Warrior Fighter you get a bunch of nifty psychic-inspired abilities while also being a fighter, same for Soulknife for Rogues. None of the Psychic options in 5e right now support your argument of being worse versions of spellcasters... if anything Aberrant Mind is one of the better Sorcerer options... crazy useful class features, a number of very good spells known in addition to the spells you choose, and the ability to cast from Sorcery Points in a way that gives the benefit of Subtle Spell while also enabling you to cast high level spells multiple times a day. A 17th level Aberrant Mind Sorcerer can cast Wish 9 times in a day if they want, all while staring someone right in the face and giving no outward sign that they're doing it.
If your argument was that none of the psychic options really capture the flavor of being a psychic I would agree with you. Although I'm defending Aberrant Mind, it's still a Sorcerer First and a psychic second. But even with that caveat, if a new class existed and psychic abilities weren't as versatile as spellcasting, I feel like that's a natural consequence. Why would psychic powers be 1-to-1 with magic? At that point, just play a Wizard and flavor all your abilities as psychic powers. How would game balance work if the psychic character had resource-free abilities that give no outward sign that they're doing anything?
Yes, if you play an Aberrant Mind sorcerer, then you're still a sorcerer. You're a sorcerer. You don't have any psychic powers, you're not an awakened mind - you're a magic user masquerading as an awakened mind because of a brain parasite. Yes, you totally have access to the entire sorcerer spell list - because you're not a psychic character. You're a mage. A magic user. A Magic Guy doing magic things with his magic face, having absolutely nothing to do with psychic abilities or the awesome psychic-character tropes someone might want to play with because the character is a magician instead. * Side tangent: Psionic Sorcery, outside of being an oxymoron in the first place, only works with spells "From your Psionic Spells feature". You don't get to cast nine Wishes in a day, you get to cast the spells the feature grants or spells of first through fifth level of the divination and enchantment schools from the arcane spellcasters' spell lists. Since Wish is Conjuration and also ninth level, while Psionic Spells only allows a one-to-one, level-to-level replacement of its spells, Wish can never qualify for Psionic Sorcery. * My argument is exactly that none of the psychic options capture the flavor of being an awakened mind. Because people keep punching out anything that does and insisting that awakened minds be shoehorned into being Shitty Magic Users instead. Psychic characters are never, ever ever ever, allowed to have anything neat and cool that they can do but the Magic Guy can't. Anything the awakened mind can do, the Magic Guy gets to do faster, cheaper, and easier. it bloody sucks and I'm sick of people telling me there's no other way it could be.
You know what'd be a really cool trick for an awakened mind, an awesome hook to hang a psychic character on? Being able to cast Telekinesis at will, from level 1. They don't need to provide material components for it, and when they do so the spell acts differently for them. Instead of 1000lbs, they can lift a number of pounds equal to their proficiency bonus *100. They can also use their telekinesis to make attacks by manipulating a weapon, using it to make an attack roll using Intelligence within the range of the Telekinesis effect. If they use a nonweapon object, i.e. a random chunk of scenery, they treat it as an improvised weapon with which they are proficient. As they level up, they learn other neat tricks they can use with their telekinetic abilities - perhaps a Catapult-like ranged strike, or the ability to lift themselves while their Telekinesis is active without taking up the interaction they would normally get - but they do not learn seventy-three other things completely and utterly unrelated to their telekinesis. Because their talent as an awakened mind is psychokinetic movement.
That would be cool to see developed more fully. But we'll never get there, because people hear "A FIFTH-LEVEL SPELL AT WILL? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!" and assume it'll be broken beyond comprehension without ever even thinking about it.
Which means we'll never have awakened minds that are anything but crapass, low-rent spellcasters.
I think that using Telekinesis as a base for a unique ability sounds reasonable, but I think describing it as overtly the Telekinesis Spell... for one, it kind of defeats the purpose of making psionics separate from spellcasters, if their defining trait is being able to cast a spell. And for two, just to keep it balanced, you need to modify the spell pretty heavily anyway, so you might as well make the theoretical class's ability its own thing.
I think the Telekinetic feat fits a lot of that concept fairly well... you can functionally pick up stuff with your mind (although it just gives you the Mage Hand cantrip), and can shove creatures psychically... not as much as the Telekinesis spell, but if it's something you can do at level one I think it's fair.
I like the idea of a class that focuses on telekinesis, to the point that attacks can be made with a weapon held psychically. Getting more features that play into this as you level up feels natural as well... at level 1 you can basically do what the Telekinetic feat does, then gradually you gain the ability to move larger objects, attack with weapons, etc. I feel like there'd be a good opportunity for subclasses in this... maybe there's a social-focused subclass that gets more mind-control and memory alteration abilities, or a warrior-focused subclass that can animate multiple weapons at once during combat.
It seems like one of the biggest problems with the Mystic Class that was being tested was the attempts to have it replicate the Mystic Class from previous editions. However, this theoretical Psychic class seems much more fun and interesting without just being, "Sorcerer, but with more paperwork".
Also, thanks for pointing out the limits of Aberrant Mind spellcasting. I didn't read the class feature thoroughly enough and thought it applied to all their spellcasting.
Abberent mind is first and foremost a sorcerer of course but as a subclass it was never going to be anything else. A subclass is still the base class at its core.
All in all, the subclass feels like a blend of two ideas. Psionics, and abberations. The telepthy and psionic spell casting are clearly meant to evoke psionics. As well as some of the psionic spell list like dissonant whispers, detect thoughts etc. Being able to cast these spells without components (save consumed ones for balancing purposes) is clearly meant to evoke casting them psionically.
But there's also something else here. An abberation, borderline eldritch horror theme, seen in the tentacle spells and sumon abberation etc. As well as the Revelation in Flesh class feature where you transform your body.
So it is a psionic subclass...but it's pulling double duty with two overlapping themes. Where psi warrior and soul knife feel like they're adding on psionic abilities to fighter and rogue, abberrant mind is like 'half psionic half abberation' themed with the two overlapping. It is 'psionic' but it isn't 'just' psionic. And I can see why this would be disappointing as a psionic option. Though I do think harping on 'brain parasites' is a bit reductive, I can see why this isn't a satisfying option for people.
Ok, I get Yurei’s argument that as is in 5e now psychic/psionic characters and their “psychic” powers are a small and limited subset of the entire realm of “magic”. I suppose in some ways that’s better than before since there was no psionics in 5e before (except for simply reskinned magic wielders as using psionics).
I also get that 5e did away with psionics after 3 failed attempts (2e, 3e, 4e) in the effort to simplify and streamline the game to make it more appealing to a broader audience. You could convert extant psions to sorcerors (and I did) but it doesn’t really have quite the same feel.
I don’t know about others but I did play psions in 2&3e (see signature) and despite the very wonky mechanics I enjoyed them. They did have their own (wonky) mechanics, their own abilities not covered by what mages could do and an overlap of abilities with mages in some areas. With 4 e I made them sorcerors. With 5e I mashed together a quick set of rules since 5e didn’t have them and hoped that WOTC would eventually get around to it. With Tasha they sort of did but as a full psionics player it’s unsatisfactory as Yurei points out. With a deeper understanding of 5e now I doubt that they will ever do more than add a few more “psychic” subclasses so I’ve started the process of creating my own (hopefully balanced) rules as you’ve seen in a couple of previous posts.
If the OP doesn’t object ( if he does obviously ignore this) I would like to suggest that we stop complaining about how bad psionics are right now, how wonky they were in the past, how we don’t “need them- just reskin what you have” and start trying to figure out what a good, balanced, non wonky set of rules and basic subclasses not already done) would look like.
That's always been my goal/desire with psychic/psionic characters and/or awakened minds - the awakened mind has one primary talent, perhaps a smattering of lesser secondary talents, but they carry that primary talent much further than an ordinary Magic Guy does. Telekinesis is a good example because there's so many fascinating ways to use the base power that the 5e spell as written just automatically shuts down. A character using Telekinesis-the-spell can't attack with it, they can't split their focus, they can't shove or strike, they can't do any-goddamn-thing but move one thing thirty feet or hold one creature still.
A character that can do ever so much more than that, but can't cast any of the wizard's other 400+ spells is an interesting trade-off to me. The awakened mind hones a single talent to its zenith, or hones a handful of talents to high competence, in exchange for not having over four hundred individual wildly different 'talents' it can call upon. That is a Psychic Character to me. Not "oh, just cast spells the same way everybody else casts spells with absolutely no edge or practice, except flavor them as being more pruple than normal magic and also ignore anything that isn't brain-y." This is not a "just reflavor it" solution, no matter how many times skeptics dismiss the idea because they don't understand the fundamental differences between "Magic" and "Psychic".
I think they should go back to the 1e/2e model where psionics wasn't a class, it was just a thing some characters could do. Making it into its own class has always felt kind of like a wizard/sorcerer with the serial numbers filed off. Psionicists do functionally the same things, but they just do it by staring at someone intensely instead of waving their hands around and saying abracadabra. In 1e psionics was random (you rolled percentile dice at character creation, and if you got 00, you had psionics), which wouldn't work now, and really didn't work then. But now that Wizard's is opening up to the idea of feat trees, you could easily make a psionic feat tree. First feat gives you legally distinct mage hand, and something like mind spike or mind sliver (which were the names of old school psionic powers, iirc). Then if you want more, you have a couple other feats that let you take certain spells like intellect fortress, mind whip (two more 1e psionic powers) or most anything that does psychic damage, maybe throw in some illusion stuff, and eventually something like full-on telekinesis. Maybe you do the non-cantrip level stuff something like PB/day (not each, all together, a shared pool of a few uses of psionic abilities). Let players who want to invest feats in the abilities, it gives them 2-3 toys to play with, and then let the action economy takes care of it not getting too OP.
A character that can do ever so much more than that, but can't cast any of the wizard's other 400+ spells is an interesting trade-off to me.
There's nothing about specialized casters that's uniquely 'psionic' (sorcerers are usually specialized). The problem is that wizards are the borg that assimilates everything else, and therefore any attempt to have a specialized class becomes similar to a sorcerer: "It's like a wizard, only worse".
The problem here isn't psionics. The problem is wizards.
Nobody playing a psychic character wants to do it by casting spells. People do that because they have to, not because it's a great and splendid way to make the character. Transmorpher went even further than I did and I love it - don't even call the Kineticist's abilities the Telekinesis spell. They have telekinetic powers beyond and above what that one spell can provide, but they don't get to also cast Fireball, or Speak with Plants, or Resurrection, or Polymorph, or whatever else of its 400+ options a wizard decides to haul along that day.
This theoretical Kineticist is not a spellcaster. It's closer to a monk than it is to a sorcerer, and also closer to a warlock than it is to a sorcerer. A Morlock, if you will. Except no, bad, don't do that.
Nobody playing a psychic character wants to do it by casting spells.
I couldn't care less whether the psion uses the scaffolding of the spell mechanics to use their powers. I still haven't seen a compelling reason to abandon that framework that isn't 100% your opinion. The closest we've come is that people don't like spell components for psions, to which I say just give them a feature that does away with them.
Yes, Juyom, we know - you don't want psychic characters in the game. That is well established.
The "compelling reason" to avoid using the Spellcaster framework is if your "psychic" character uses spell slots and spell mechanics to cast spells, they're a spellcaster. They don't feel any different to play than a bog-standard Magic Guy, they don't bring anything new and unique to the table, and they don't do anything to be worth including in an adventuring party. If what you want is to use spell slots to cast spells, play a f@#$ing spellcaster. There's a thousand flavors of them and they're well estalished. If what you want is to play an awakened mind, currently the answer is "Find a new system because not only does 5e not have anything for you, but most everybody who plays 5e will kick you in the delicates rather than help you do what you want."
It's not like psychic abilities are alien to the system; illithids have been Mind Blasting folks for decades, the game has a long and storied history of psychically active monsters. PCs are just not allowed to be psychically active for some unfathomable reason unless they accomplish it by being f@#$ing spellcasters. At which point the character does not FEEL like an awakened mind. It does not PLAY like an awakened mind. It does not ACT like an awakened mind, It feels, plays, and acts like a basic boring bog-standard spellcaster.
Reflavoring is insufficient. It will never not be insufficient. I've played Aberrant sorcerers before a few times, and they do not even slightly feel like playing an awakened mind. I've done that too, if not in 5e. I know the difference between Magic Guy and Awakened Mind, I know how the play experience differs. Aberrant sorcerers are as close as 5e currently gets, and I'm telling you: it's not even remotely close. Not even slightly. Not even the littlest bit. There is no way to "reflavor" an Aberrant sorcerer into an awakened mind. You're far better off leaning into the Brain Parasite bit, having your abilities come from some warped, awful seed within the character that twists their magic out of true, because that is what the Aberrant sorc plays like. That's what its mechanics suggest, what the feel and play experience of running an Aberrant sorcerer are.
Yes, Juyom, we know - you don't want psychic characters in the game. That is well established.
Can you stop misrepresentating what people say? He didn't say 'no psychic characters', he said that there's no reason to give them a brand new scaffolding.
And he's right. If you don't like using spell slots to activate powers, rename them. There are already multiple non-spell mechanics that use spell slots (e.g. artificers producing additional experimental elixirs, ranger primeval awareness, paladins using smite), they're just "generic resource to power exotic abilities". If anything, I'd be tempted to do away with a lot of current secondary resources (chi points, superiority dice, etc) and have them all cost spell slots; balancing is a lot easier if you have fewer special snowflake mechanics.
Yes, Juyom, we know - you don't want psychic characters in the game. That is well established.
Can you stop misrepresentating what people say? He didn't say 'no psychic characters', he said that there's no reason to give them a brand new scaffolding.
And he's right. If you don't like using spell slots to activate powers, rename them. There are already multiple non-spell mechanics that use spell slots (e.g. artificers producing additional experimental elixirs, ranger primeval awareness, paladins using smite), they're just "generic resource to power exotic abilities". If anything, I'd be tempted to do away with a lot of current secondary resources (chi points, superiority dice, etc) and have them all cost spell slots; balancing is a lot easier if you have fewer special snowflake mechanics.
So literally everything is a spellcaster. Cool. Great. Awesome.
Why not just eliminate every other class in the game while we're at it? Have "Non-Magic Guy" for swordswingers and "Magic Guy" for spellflingers. Would be ever so much easier to balance, and all anyone would need to do to make whatever their mind desired in that system is Reflavor More Harder(C).
When the mechanics have absolutely nothing to do with the narrative - when the Fluff and the Crunch egregiously mismatch - the game feels bad. It simply does. I cannot provide an objective example of it, but I know everybody's had that moment. Where you do something mechanically to try and hit a specific narrative point and say "wow, that just didn't feel right at all, that felt bad." Why is it so hard to buy that using spell slots to cast spells feels bad when one is trying to play an awakened mind, instead?
Closer to a monk yes, a warlock - no. A warlock gets its powers from its patron, A monk gets it’s Ki powers from its training and focus . A psion it’s gets its psionic powers from its awakened mind, training and focus. It doesn’t manipulate mana/weave to have that manipulate the world (spellcasting), they reach out into the world and manipulate it directly. In 2e there were 6 “psionic devotions: Clairsentience, Telepathy, Psychometabolism, Psychokinesis, Psychoportation and meta psionics. At L1 you selected one devotion as your primary and worked on developing abilities within that devotion. At selected points in your progression you had the opportunity to select additional devotions and work on refining and expanding etch’s arrays of talents.
the 2e methods of devotions, sciences etc won’t work given 5e’s leveling structure but those same abilities could be reorganized into levels with some abilities always available and others only available a limited number of times or doing more if powered at higher than base levels. The meta psionic abilities as well as psionic attack and defense modes could be turned into the class features and gained in some sort of progression through the levels along with Psionic Power Points allowing for meta psionics or additional activations of powers or extensions of powers for longer durations.
The end result would be a range of characters separate from mages, sorcerors and their derivatives but with equal power and balanced against the rest of 5e.
Why is it so hard to buy that using spell slots to cast spells feels bad when one is trying to play an awakened mind, instead?
Then use the spell point system. For that matter, use it for everyone; spell slots are a kind of cruddy mechanic, their only real justification is that it forces people to mix up their tactics instead of spamming the same spell again and again.
The "compelling reason" to avoid using the Spellcaster framework is if your "psychic" character uses spell slots and spell mechanics to cast spells, they're a spellcaster.
This is an arbitrary association. Call them psi slots if you'd like. The name doesn't matter. Spell slots are just a useful way to promote balance by placing quantitative limits on the power of a character. They do not dictate the narrative of a character. Create a feat or subclass for psionic characters that allows them to ignore spell components and we're good.
If what you want is to play an awakened mind, currently the answer is "Find a new system because not only does 5e not have anything for you, but most everybody who plays 5e will kick you in the delicates rather than help you do what you want."
This is a textbook straw man argument that I have not made. In fact, if I had time I'd much rather comment constructively on a slate of psi-inspired mechanics than scream into the void by participating in this thread the nth-to-the-nth-power time. In fact I've seen many attempts, but those that have a pathological aversion to spell slots either suffer from being overpowered or duplicative. Please somebody prove me wrong on this and I'd be happy to change my mind. Please.
It's not like psychic abilities are alien to the system; illithids have been Mind Blasting folks for decades, the game has a long and storied history of psychically active monsters. PCs are just not allowed to be psychically active for some unfathomable reason unless they accomplish it by being f@#$ing spellcasters. At which point the character does not FEEL like an awakened mind. It does not PLAY like an awakened mind. It does not ACT like an awakened mind, It feels, plays, and acts like a basic boring bog-standard spellcaster.
I just want to emphasize that this is your opinion, and not by any means a universally shared one. I could make the argument that warlocks don't feel like they borrow power from a patron because they use the same spell slot system as wizards. The original 3e warlock used powers (read copy-and-pasted spells) called invocations, and did not have spell slots. Should I be mad that warlocks get spell slots in 5e like the spellcasters? Well I don't feel mad at all because the mechanic is useful, promotes balance, and can be divorced from the narrative quite easily. If I really find it troubling, I can strike off the "Spell Slots" section of my character sheet and call it an "Invocation Inventory".
Reflavoring is insufficient. It will never not be insufficient. I've played Aberrant sorcerers before a few times, and they do not even slightly feel like playing an awakened mind. I've done that too, if not in 5e. I know the difference between Magic Guy and Awakened Mind, I know how the play experience differs. Aberrant sorcerers are as close as 5e currently gets, and I'm telling you: it's not even remotely close. Not even slightly. Not even the littlest bit. There is no way to "reflavor" an Aberrant sorcerer into an awakened mind. You're far better off leaning into the Brain Parasite bit, having your abilities come from some warped, awful seed within the character that twists their magic out of true, because that is what the Aberrant sorc plays like. That's what its mechanics suggest, what the feel and play experience of running an Aberrant sorcerer are.
I want new mechanics when they are appropriate, Yurei. Indeed I thought the psi dice was moving in the right direction. I'd like to see more done with the psionic focus mechanic. I just don't see any evidence a priori that these new mechanics I'd like to see are incompatible with a) spell slots and b) a psionics narrative. There's not much point arguing this further. When you play a psion and are faced with having to tick off a box under the "spell slots" section of your character sheet, you've stated that you feel a narrative dissonance. I've played a soulknife, aberrant mind, and psi knight and felt no such thing. I'm sorry you feel that way.
Monte Cooke wrote a psychic system you might enjoy adapting that was published in d20 Dark Matter. WoC never adapted it to D&D for some reason.
That's bizarre. Were Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell not simultaneously developing the psionics system from 3e-3.5e (see the Expanded Psionics Handbook) when this supplement came out?
If you're not a slave to the flavor text, you can indeed build any kind of psionic-themed character you want.
It will be strictly and categorically inferior to all existing competitive options, be deeply unsatisfying to play, drag its party down and get the rest of your table upset with you. But you can still totally do it.
Example Abbie is a "psychic" Aberrant Mind sorcerer. Example Abbie is pretty much the absolutye best I can possibly do whilst sticking to the theme of "telekinetic awakened mind". I didn't f@#$ with replacing Psionic Spells because that shit's annoying and also it doesn't matter much, but every single leveled spell this character took with the sole exception of Mind Whip is related in some way to telekinetic ability. The cantrips are looser, but that's because there's exactly ONE cantrip that qualifies as "telekinetic power", and that is Mage Hand. Yes, I used Keith Baker's Force Blast as a stand-in for a basic telekinetic punch, sue me. Elsewise, everything on the sheet is oriented at being Vaguely Awakened-y.
Now. here's the kicker: would any of you ever let this into your party? No Fireballs, no Counterspells or Dispel Magics, no Invisibility, no Hypnotic Pattern - nada. None of the sorcerer staples are there, and it doesn't even take an ASI at 4th. Instead it doubles down on minor telekinetic stunts with the TK feat. Who here would ever be willing to adventure alongside a character set up like this, or DM for one?
I've played an essentially identical character a few different times in short-lived games, if with rolled stats and a very different overall background set-up. It felt bad. I wasn't able to contribute as effectively as I knew I should have been, and only the fact that the people around me for those games were complete and total ignoramuses and the DM scaled accordingly kept me from being a drag on the team.
Look at that character and tell me "Yep, that's a perfectly splendid example of an awakened mind". I heckin' dare you. Try it. See if you can get it out with a straight face.
I'll wait.
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I have to admit, this argument isn't particularly compelling to me. It feels like you're inventing a problem because you don't want to compromise on this concept.
Sticking to Aberrant Mind Sorcerer... if you choose to play that class, you're still a sorcerer. You have access to the entire sorcerer spell list. You're only a "strictly worse spellcaster" if you voluntarily limit yourself to the spells that fit the feel of psychic powers, whatever that is to you. If you play as a Psi Warrior Fighter you get a bunch of nifty psychic-inspired abilities while also being a fighter, same for Soulknife for Rogues. None of the Psychic options in 5e right now support your argument of being worse versions of spellcasters... if anything Aberrant Mind is one of the better Sorcerer options... crazy useful class features, a number of very good spells known in addition to the spells you choose, and the ability to cast from Sorcery Points in a way that gives the benefit of Subtle Spell while also enabling you to cast high level spells multiple times a day. A 17th level Aberrant Mind Sorcerer can cast Wish 9 times in a day if they want, all while staring someone right in the face and giving no outward sign that they're doing it.
If your argument was that none of the psychic options really capture the flavor of being a psychic I would agree with you. Although I'm defending Aberrant Mind, it's still a Sorcerer First and a psychic second. But even with that caveat, if a new class existed and psychic abilities weren't as versatile as spellcasting, I feel like that's a natural consequence. Why would psychic powers be 1-to-1 with magic? At that point, just play a Wizard and flavor all your abilities as psychic powers. How would game balance work if the psychic character had resource-free abilities that give no outward sign that they're doing anything?
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Yes, if you play an Aberrant Mind sorcerer, then you're still a sorcerer. You're a sorcerer. You don't have any psychic powers, you're not an awakened mind - you're a magic user masquerading as an awakened mind because of a brain parasite. Yes, you totally have access to the entire sorcerer spell list - because you're not a psychic character. You're a mage. A magic user. A Magic Guy doing magic things with his magic face, having absolutely nothing to do with psychic abilities or the awesome psychic-character tropes someone might want to play with because the character is a magician instead.
*
Side tangent: Psionic Sorcery, outside of being an oxymoron in the first place, only works with spells "From your Psionic Spells feature". You don't get to cast nine Wishes in a day, you get to cast the spells the feature grants or spells of first through fifth level of the divination and enchantment schools from the arcane spellcasters' spell lists. Since Wish is Conjuration and also ninth level, while Psionic Spells only allows a one-to-one, level-to-level replacement of its spells, Wish can never qualify for Psionic Sorcery.
*
My argument is exactly that none of the psychic options capture the flavor of being an awakened mind. Because people keep punching out anything that does and insisting that awakened minds be shoehorned into being Shitty Magic Users instead. Psychic characters are never, ever ever ever, allowed to have anything neat and cool that they can do but the Magic Guy can't. Anything the awakened mind can do, the Magic Guy gets to do faster, cheaper, and easier. it bloody sucks and I'm sick of people telling me there's no other way it could be.
You know what'd be a really cool trick for an awakened mind, an awesome hook to hang a psychic character on? Being able to cast Telekinesis at will, from level 1. They don't need to provide material components for it, and when they do so the spell acts differently for them. Instead of 1000lbs, they can lift a number of pounds equal to their proficiency bonus *100. They can also use their telekinesis to make attacks by manipulating a weapon, using it to make an attack roll using Intelligence within the range of the Telekinesis effect. If they use a nonweapon object, i.e. a random chunk of scenery, they treat it as an improvised weapon with which they are proficient. As they level up, they learn other neat tricks they can use with their telekinetic abilities - perhaps a Catapult-like ranged strike, or the ability to lift themselves while their Telekinesis is active without taking up the interaction they would normally get - but they do not learn seventy-three other things completely and utterly unrelated to their telekinesis. Because their talent as an awakened mind is psychokinetic movement.
That would be cool to see developed more fully. But we'll never get there, because people hear "A FIFTH-LEVEL SPELL AT WILL? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!" and assume it'll be broken beyond comprehension without ever even thinking about it.
Which means we'll never have awakened minds that are anything but crapass, low-rent spellcasters.
Blegh.
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So Mage Hand, Shillelagh, Catapult, Floating Disk, and Levitate ?
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I think that using Telekinesis as a base for a unique ability sounds reasonable, but I think describing it as overtly the Telekinesis Spell... for one, it kind of defeats the purpose of making psionics separate from spellcasters, if their defining trait is being able to cast a spell. And for two, just to keep it balanced, you need to modify the spell pretty heavily anyway, so you might as well make the theoretical class's ability its own thing.
I think the Telekinetic feat fits a lot of that concept fairly well... you can functionally pick up stuff with your mind (although it just gives you the Mage Hand cantrip), and can shove creatures psychically... not as much as the Telekinesis spell, but if it's something you can do at level one I think it's fair.
I like the idea of a class that focuses on telekinesis, to the point that attacks can be made with a weapon held psychically. Getting more features that play into this as you level up feels natural as well... at level 1 you can basically do what the Telekinetic feat does, then gradually you gain the ability to move larger objects, attack with weapons, etc. I feel like there'd be a good opportunity for subclasses in this... maybe there's a social-focused subclass that gets more mind-control and memory alteration abilities, or a warrior-focused subclass that can animate multiple weapons at once during combat.
It seems like one of the biggest problems with the Mystic Class that was being tested was the attempts to have it replicate the Mystic Class from previous editions. However, this theoretical Psychic class seems much more fun and interesting without just being, "Sorcerer, but with more paperwork".
Also, thanks for pointing out the limits of Aberrant Mind spellcasting. I didn't read the class feature thoroughly enough and thought it applied to all their spellcasting.
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Abberent mind is first and foremost a sorcerer of course but as a subclass it was never going to be anything else. A subclass is still the base class at its core.
All in all, the subclass feels like a blend of two ideas. Psionics, and abberations. The telepthy and psionic spell casting are clearly meant to evoke psionics. As well as some of the psionic spell list like dissonant whispers, detect thoughts etc. Being able to cast these spells without components (save consumed ones for balancing purposes) is clearly meant to evoke casting them psionically.
But there's also something else here. An abberation, borderline eldritch horror theme, seen in the tentacle spells and sumon abberation etc. As well as the Revelation in Flesh class feature where you transform your body.
So it is a psionic subclass...but it's pulling double duty with two overlapping themes. Where psi warrior and soul knife feel like they're adding on psionic abilities to fighter and rogue, abberrant mind is like 'half psionic half abberation' themed with the two overlapping. It is 'psionic' but it isn't 'just' psionic. And I can see why this would be disappointing as a psionic option. Though I do think harping on 'brain parasites' is a bit reductive, I can see why this isn't a satisfying option for people.
Ok, I get Yurei’s argument that as is in 5e now psychic/psionic characters and their “psychic” powers are a small and limited subset of the entire realm of “magic”. I suppose in some ways that’s better than before since there was no psionics in 5e before (except for simply reskinned magic wielders as using psionics).
I also get that 5e did away with psionics after 3 failed attempts (2e, 3e, 4e) in the effort to simplify and streamline the game to make it more appealing to a broader audience. You could convert extant psions to sorcerors (and I did) but it doesn’t really have quite the same feel.
I don’t know about others but I did play psions in 2&3e (see signature) and despite the very wonky mechanics I enjoyed them. They did have their own (wonky) mechanics, their own abilities not covered by what mages could do and an overlap of abilities with mages in some areas. With 4 e I made them sorcerors. With 5e I mashed together a quick set of rules since 5e didn’t have them and hoped that WOTC would eventually get around to it. With Tasha they sort of did but as a full psionics player it’s unsatisfactory as Yurei points out. With a deeper understanding of 5e now I doubt that they will ever do more than add a few more “psychic” subclasses so I’ve started the process of creating my own (hopefully balanced) rules as you’ve seen in a couple of previous posts.
If the OP doesn’t object ( if he does obviously ignore this) I would like to suggest that we stop complaining about how bad psionics are right now, how wonky they were in the past, how we don’t “need them- just reskin what you have” and start trying to figure out what a good, balanced, non wonky set of rules and basic subclasses not already done) would look like.
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That's always been my goal/desire with psychic/psionic characters and/or awakened minds - the awakened mind has one primary talent, perhaps a smattering of lesser secondary talents, but they carry that primary talent much further than an ordinary Magic Guy does. Telekinesis is a good example because there's so many fascinating ways to use the base power that the 5e spell as written just automatically shuts down. A character using Telekinesis-the-spell can't attack with it, they can't split their focus, they can't shove or strike, they can't do any-goddamn-thing but move one thing thirty feet or hold one creature still.
A character that can do ever so much more than that, but can't cast any of the wizard's other 400+ spells is an interesting trade-off to me. The awakened mind hones a single talent to its zenith, or hones a handful of talents to high competence, in exchange for not having over four hundred individual wildly different 'talents' it can call upon. That is a Psychic Character to me. Not "oh, just cast spells the same way everybody else casts spells with absolutely no edge or practice, except flavor them as being more pruple than normal magic and also ignore anything that isn't brain-y." This is not a "just reflavor it" solution, no matter how many times skeptics dismiss the idea because they don't understand the fundamental differences between "Magic" and "Psychic".
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I think they should go back to the 1e/2e model where psionics wasn't a class, it was just a thing some characters could do. Making it into its own class has always felt kind of like a wizard/sorcerer with the serial numbers filed off. Psionicists do functionally the same things, but they just do it by staring at someone intensely instead of waving their hands around and saying abracadabra. In 1e psionics was random (you rolled percentile dice at character creation, and if you got 00, you had psionics), which wouldn't work now, and really didn't work then. But now that Wizard's is opening up to the idea of feat trees, you could easily make a psionic feat tree. First feat gives you legally distinct mage hand, and something like mind spike or mind sliver (which were the names of old school psionic powers, iirc). Then if you want more, you have a couple other feats that let you take certain spells like intellect fortress, mind whip (two more 1e psionic powers) or most anything that does psychic damage, maybe throw in some illusion stuff, and eventually something like full-on telekinesis. Maybe you do the non-cantrip level stuff something like PB/day (not each, all together, a shared pool of a few uses of psionic abilities). Let players who want to invest feats in the abilities, it gives them 2-3 toys to play with, and then let the action economy takes care of it not getting too OP.
There's nothing about specialized casters that's uniquely 'psionic' (sorcerers are usually specialized). The problem is that wizards are the borg that assimilates everything else, and therefore any attempt to have a specialized class becomes similar to a sorcerer: "It's like a wizard, only worse".
The problem here isn't psionics. The problem is wizards.
Again - awakened minds aren't spellcasters.
Nobody playing a psychic character wants to do it by casting spells. People do that because they have to, not because it's a great and splendid way to make the character. Transmorpher went even further than I did and I love it - don't even call the Kineticist's abilities the Telekinesis spell. They have telekinetic powers beyond and above what that one spell can provide, but they don't get to also cast Fireball, or Speak with Plants, or Resurrection, or Polymorph, or whatever else of its 400+ options a wizard decides to haul along that day.
This theoretical Kineticist is not a spellcaster. It's closer to a monk than it is to a sorcerer, and also closer to a warlock than it is to a sorcerer. A Morlock, if you will. Except no, bad, don't do that.
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I couldn't care less whether the psion uses the scaffolding of the spell mechanics to use their powers. I still haven't seen a compelling reason to abandon that framework that isn't 100% your opinion. The closest we've come is that people don't like spell components for psions, to which I say just give them a feature that does away with them.
Yes, Juyom, we know - you don't want psychic characters in the game. That is well established.
The "compelling reason" to avoid using the Spellcaster framework is if your "psychic" character uses spell slots and spell mechanics to cast spells, they're a spellcaster. They don't feel any different to play than a bog-standard Magic Guy, they don't bring anything new and unique to the table, and they don't do anything to be worth including in an adventuring party. If what you want is to use spell slots to cast spells, play a f@#$ing spellcaster. There's a thousand flavors of them and they're well estalished. If what you want is to play an awakened mind, currently the answer is "Find a new system because not only does 5e not have anything for you, but most everybody who plays 5e will kick you in the delicates rather than help you do what you want."
It's not like psychic abilities are alien to the system; illithids have been Mind Blasting folks for decades, the game has a long and storied history of psychically active monsters. PCs are just not allowed to be psychically active for some unfathomable reason unless they accomplish it by being f@#$ing spellcasters. At which point the character does not FEEL like an awakened mind. It does not PLAY like an awakened mind. It does not ACT like an awakened mind, It feels, plays, and acts like a basic boring bog-standard spellcaster.
Reflavoring is insufficient. It will never not be insufficient. I've played Aberrant sorcerers before a few times, and they do not even slightly feel like playing an awakened mind. I've done that too, if not in 5e. I know the difference between Magic Guy and Awakened Mind, I know how the play experience differs. Aberrant sorcerers are as close as 5e currently gets, and I'm telling you: it's not even remotely close. Not even slightly. Not even the littlest bit. There is no way to "reflavor" an Aberrant sorcerer into an awakened mind. You're far better off leaning into the Brain Parasite bit, having your abilities come from some warped, awful seed within the character that twists their magic out of true, because that is what the Aberrant sorc plays like. That's what its mechanics suggest, what the feel and play experience of running an Aberrant sorcerer are.
Certainly not an awakened f@#$ing mind.
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Can you stop misrepresentating what people say? He didn't say 'no psychic characters', he said that there's no reason to give them a brand new scaffolding.
And he's right. If you don't like using spell slots to activate powers, rename them. There are already multiple non-spell mechanics that use spell slots (e.g. artificers producing additional experimental elixirs, ranger primeval awareness, paladins using smite), they're just "generic resource to power exotic abilities". If anything, I'd be tempted to do away with a lot of current secondary resources (chi points, superiority dice, etc) and have them all cost spell slots; balancing is a lot easier if you have fewer special snowflake mechanics.
So literally everything is a spellcaster. Cool. Great. Awesome.
Why not just eliminate every other class in the game while we're at it? Have "Non-Magic Guy" for swordswingers and "Magic Guy" for spellflingers. Would be ever so much easier to balance, and all anyone would need to do to make whatever their mind desired in that system is Reflavor More Harder(C).
When the mechanics have absolutely nothing to do with the narrative - when the Fluff and the Crunch egregiously mismatch - the game feels bad. It simply does. I cannot provide an objective example of it, but I know everybody's had that moment. Where you do something mechanically to try and hit a specific narrative point and say "wow, that just didn't feel right at all, that felt bad." Why is it so hard to buy that using spell slots to cast spells feels bad when one is trying to play an awakened mind, instead?
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Monte Cooke wrote a psychic system you might enjoy adapting that was published in d20 Dark Matter. WoC never adapted it to D&D for some reason.
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Closer to a monk yes, a warlock - no. A warlock gets its powers from its patron, A monk gets it’s Ki powers from its training and focus . A psion it’s gets its psionic powers from its awakened mind, training and focus. It doesn’t manipulate mana/weave to have that manipulate the world (spellcasting), they reach out into the world and manipulate it directly.
In 2e there were 6 “psionic devotions: Clairsentience, Telepathy, Psychometabolism, Psychokinesis, Psychoportation and meta psionics. At L1 you selected one devotion as your primary and worked on developing abilities within that devotion. At selected points in your progression you had the opportunity to select additional devotions and work on refining and expanding etch’s arrays of talents.
the 2e methods of devotions, sciences etc won’t work given 5e’s leveling structure but those same abilities could be reorganized into levels with some abilities always available and others only available a limited number of times or doing more if powered at higher than base levels. The meta psionic abilities as well as psionic attack and defense modes could be turned into the class features and gained in some sort of progression through the levels along with Psionic Power Points allowing for meta psionics or additional activations of powers or extensions of powers for longer durations.
The end result would be a range of characters separate from mages, sorcerors and their derivatives but with equal power and balanced against the rest of 5e.
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Then use the spell point system. For that matter, use it for everyone; spell slots are a kind of cruddy mechanic, their only real justification is that it forces people to mix up their tactics instead of spamming the same spell again and again.
There's just a few points I'd like to make before I leave this thread for good. I'll make them brief.
Lol yes. I hate fun, don't get it twisted.
This is an arbitrary association. Call them psi slots if you'd like. The name doesn't matter. Spell slots are just a useful way to promote balance by placing quantitative limits on the power of a character. They do not dictate the narrative of a character. Create a feat or subclass for psionic characters that allows them to ignore spell components and we're good.
This is a textbook straw man argument that I have not made. In fact, if I had time I'd much rather comment constructively on a slate of psi-inspired mechanics than scream into the void by participating in this thread the nth-to-the-nth-power time. In fact I've seen many attempts, but those that have a
pathologicalaversion to spell slots either suffer from being overpowered or duplicative. Please somebody prove me wrong on this and I'd be happy to change my mind. Please.I just want to emphasize that this is your opinion, and not by any means a universally shared one. I could make the argument that warlocks don't feel like they borrow power from a patron because they use the same spell slot system as wizards. The original 3e warlock used powers (read copy-and-pasted spells) called invocations, and did not have spell slots. Should I be mad that warlocks get spell slots in 5e like the spellcasters? Well I don't feel mad at all because the mechanic is useful, promotes balance, and can be divorced from the narrative quite easily. If I really find it troubling, I can strike off the "Spell Slots" section of my character sheet and call it an "Invocation Inventory".
I want new mechanics when they are appropriate, Yurei. Indeed I thought the psi dice was moving in the right direction. I'd like to see more done with the psionic focus mechanic. I just don't see any evidence a priori that these new mechanics I'd like to see are incompatible with a) spell slots and b) a psionics narrative. There's not much point arguing this further. When you play a psion and are faced with having to tick off a box under the "spell slots" section of your character sheet, you've stated that you feel a narrative dissonance. I've played a soulknife, aberrant mind, and psi knight and felt no such thing. I'm sorry you feel that way.
That's bizarre. Were Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell not simultaneously developing the psionics system from 3e-3.5e (see the Expanded Psionics Handbook) when this supplement came out?
If you're not a slave to the flavor text, you can indeed build any kind of psionic-themed character you want.
It will be strictly and categorically inferior to all existing competitive options, be deeply unsatisfying to play, drag its party down and get the rest of your table upset with you. But you can still totally do it.
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Here, lemme do this > Example Abbie
Example Abbie is a "psychic" Aberrant Mind sorcerer. Example Abbie is pretty much the absolutye best I can possibly do whilst sticking to the theme of "telekinetic awakened mind". I didn't f@#$ with replacing Psionic Spells because that shit's annoying and also it doesn't matter much, but every single leveled spell this character took with the sole exception of Mind Whip is related in some way to telekinetic ability. The cantrips are looser, but that's because there's exactly ONE cantrip that qualifies as "telekinetic power", and that is Mage Hand. Yes, I used Keith Baker's Force Blast as a stand-in for a basic telekinetic punch, sue me. Elsewise, everything on the sheet is oriented at being Vaguely Awakened-y.
Now. here's the kicker: would any of you ever let this into your party? No Fireballs, no Counterspells or Dispel Magics, no Invisibility, no Hypnotic Pattern - nada. None of the sorcerer staples are there, and it doesn't even take an ASI at 4th. Instead it doubles down on minor telekinetic stunts with the TK feat. Who here would ever be willing to adventure alongside a character set up like this, or DM for one?
I've played an essentially identical character a few different times in short-lived games, if with rolled stats and a very different overall background set-up. It felt bad. I wasn't able to contribute as effectively as I knew I should have been, and only the fact that the people around me for those games were complete and total ignoramuses and the DM scaled accordingly kept me from being a drag on the team.
Look at that character and tell me "Yep, that's a perfectly splendid example of an awakened mind". I heckin' dare you. Try it. See if you can get it out with a straight face.
I'll wait.
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