I would put myself in the camp of wanting Psionics. I however could be considered in another group outside of the two pro-psionics camp GarrettKP mentions, the not caring if it uses spellcasting or a new mechanic so long as they are fun and thematic classes that give the feel of various psionic concepts. I thought the Psionic Wizard was cool, as well as the Aberrant Mind Sorcerer and the Soulknife Rogue.
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"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
GarrettKP, that is mostly correct, but not completely. If we were to assume that WotC wanted to please as many people as possible by putting psionics in TCoE, they could do two systems. If they did one simple system (psionic subclasses with spellcasting) and one unique system (psionic system and class), if executed correctly, they could appease 2 of those groups. They will never make the group that doesn't want psionics in 5e happy by publishing psionics, but they can make the other 2 groups at least satisfied with what they get. They're not going to do this, because it would take twice the amount of work, but it would be better than our current situation.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
GarrettKP, that is mostly correct, but not completely. If we were to assume that WotC wanted to please as many people as possible by putting psionics in TCoE, they could do two systems. If they did one simple system (psionic subclasses with spellcasting) and one unique system (psionic system and class), if executed correctly, they could appease 2 of those groups. They will never make the group that doesn't want psionics in 5e happy by publishing psionics, but they can make the other 2 groups at least satisfied with what they get. They're not going to do this, because it would take twice the amount of work, but it would be better than our current situation.
For what it is worth, Crawford has said that a full class is not off the table. It was never in the cards for Tasha's, but if/when they do Dark Sun finally they will basically have to add a Psion in some way. So it is possible this subclass take is being implemented because 1) it is easier to playtest and get ready for release, and 2) it will hold over a large portion of the fan base until a full class with more complexity is finally ready.
Not that we will see that anytime soon. But we may.
For example, the Psi Dice mechanic did well enough in feedback that WotC at least put them into Tasha's (albeit in a more streamlined fashion). So perhaps now that that is being added, perhaps they are working behind the scenes on a full Psion using the Psi Dice as the core mechanic. All conjecture, but fun to imagine.
For what it is worth, Crawford has said that a full class is not off the table. It was never in the cards for Tasha's, but if/when they do Dark Sun finally they will basically have to add a Psion in some way. So it is possible this subclass take is being implemented because 1) it is easier to playtest and get ready for release, and 2) it will hold over a large portion of the fan base until a full class with more complexity is finally ready.
Not that we will see that anytime soon. But we may.
For example, the Psi Dice mechanic did well enough in feedback that WotC at least put them into Tasha's (albeit in a more streamlined fashion). So perhaps now that that is being added, perhaps they are working behind the scenes on a full Psion using the Psi Dice as the core mechanic. All conjecture, but fun to imagine.
Yeah, back to what I had said before / it’s a very small level of integration into the game (a couple feats and a few simple subclasses) that a Dark Sun book could easily retcon those out and re-print a Psion class completely.
Or since feats and class features are starting to get blurry anyway, you could do both feats, subclasses, and classes all intertwined in a work like Dark Sun. Dedicated psions, and psionic dabblers, and of course some psionics will be available as lineage traits. Almost like there are levels of Mutants in Marvel's X books. You have some psionics which are basically cantrip level stuff, to full on Xavier/Magneto ... and on the monster front you have some Omega level psis that literally think of the feats and class Psions as food. Whether Dark Sun is the best place to do that or not, I don't know.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I hate to continue to take something off topic that's already been taken off topic, but if your comment is in regards to WotC trying to move away from certain races being depicted as inherently evil and concluding that they are therefore afraid to ever depict slavery/racism/anything controversial, there's a huge difference between portraying slavery and racism and declaring in the manual that one side is actually correct about the other side being inherently evil. Personally, I don't think having completely different species have different behavioral tendencies is the worst thing ever, but I can understand if some people think "elves are inherently good, orcs are inherently evil" is lazy writing.
The campaign is what the DM and players make of it. Want stereotypical evil orcs? You got them! Want orcs are people too? Poof, there it is!
I appreciate a game publisher helping establish a world setting with some specific cultures/regions - but noone has to adopt it completely literally if they don't want to.
For what it is worth, I myself have always been in the Psionic Casting crowd. I couldn't care less if Psion was a full class, but I would implement that class as a Spell Caster with unique rules similar to Warlock and Artificer. I happily await my chance to play as an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer.
For me the issue is definitely not "no psionics" but that I don't think psionics warrants a catered mechanic. I mean, Eberron introduced robots in the form or warforged, and I have no problem with that. I love them, to be honest. But look closely at what WotC did, and really what they didn't do. Warforged didn't come with a set of specialized "robot" game mechanics. There's no Gear Class, or Maintenance Points, or Lubrication Level. Warforged are presented mechanically as, well, just people, but with enough bells & whistles to give them their own flavor. They still have hit points, they get exhaustion, and they can even be very non-artificial in the sense that they can be druids.
I think WotC has been trying to do the same thing with psionics. It's magic, just perhaps presented a bit differently, but still using the same underlying mechanic. The thematic difference between a psionicist (psion?) and a wizard is as large as the thematic difference between a wizard and a cleric, or a halfling and a goliath, but these other things don't get their own subsystems.
I think WotC has been trying to do the same thing with psionics. It's magic, just perhaps presented a bit differently, but still using the same underlying mechanic. The thematic difference between a psionicist (psion?) and a wizard is as large as the thematic difference between a wizard and a cleric, or a halfling and a goliath, but these other things don't get their own subsystems.
This is the standpoint a fair number of people take, and it's generally pretty well reasoned. 'Magic' in D&D covers nearly everything that isn't purely using a sword, but there are some decidedly vocal people out there that decry any attempt to use a system that has been used for magic to represent psionic powers as some sort of sacrilege. If they don't get their own special corner, they won't ever be happy.
But ce la vie. We now have a smattering of Psi classes and I think they work well. Tasha's have delivered on something that fits within the existing framework and works quite well.
A shame the book as a whole appears to have taken a nerf bat to all the well recieved UA and, for some baffling reason, buffed the Wizard/Cleric even more. Crawford, how do you keep getting away with it?
I think WotC has been trying to do the same thing with psionics. It's magic, just perhaps presented a bit differently, but still using the same underlying mechanic. The thematic difference between a psionicist (psion?) and a wizard is as large as the thematic difference between a wizard and a cleric, or a halfling and a goliath, but these other things don't get their own subsystems.
This is the standpoint a fair number of people take, and it's generally pretty well reasoned. 'Magic' in D&D covers nearly everything that isn't purely using a sword, but there are some decidedly vocal people out there that decry any attempt to use a system that has been used for magic to represent psionic powers as some sort of sacrilege. If they don't get their own special corner, they won't ever be happy.
In fairness, there's a pretty significant difference between arcane and divine magic (all the spells you can learn vs all the spells for your class period). Divine is pretty much uniform across the different classes (casting stat notwithstanding), arcane is not. Relegating psionics to subclasses of arcane casters does give the impression it's just another arcane variant. Reskinning mechanics is a thing in 5E, but I don't think hoping psi and arcane to be as different as arcane and divine was reaching for the moon. Admittedly I only managed a glance at the leaked info, maybe I didn't get the correct impression, I'll see when the book gets here.
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I think WotC has been trying to do the same thing with psionics. It's magic, just perhaps presented a bit differently, but still using the same underlying mechanic. The thematic difference between a psionicist (psion?) and a wizard is as large as the thematic difference between a wizard and a cleric, or a halfling and a goliath, but these other things don't get their own subsystems.
This is the standpoint a fair number of people take, and it's generally pretty well reasoned. 'Magic' in D&D covers nearly everything that isn't purely using a sword, but there are some decidedly vocal people out there that decry any attempt to use a system that has been used for magic to represent psionic powers as some sort of sacrilege. If they don't get their own special corner, they won't ever be happy.
But ce la vie. We now have a smattering of Psi classes and I think they work well. Tasha's have delivered on something that fits within the existing framework and works quite well.
A shame the book as a whole appears to have taken a nerf bat to all the well recieved UA and, for some baffling reason, buffed the Wizard/Cleric even more. Crawford, how do you keep getting away with it?
He can do that because more people are not upset about the changes. Wizards/Clerics are more common than rangers, monks and sorcerers - just look at class popularity rankings.
IMO if they release a Dark Sun setting they should treat psionics along the lines of how they presented dragonmarks in Eberron -- as subraces. You pick a psionic subrace and it grants access to something like INT- and/or CHA-based psi points or dice, which can be used for a variety of effects (including modifying spellcasting). Maybe you can also convert any damage type you deal into psychic, maybe tied to some resource. Basically roll your own psionicist.
I think WotC has been trying to do the same thing with psionics. It's magic, just perhaps presented a bit differently, but still using the same underlying mechanic. The thematic difference between a psionicist (psion?) and a wizard is as large as the thematic difference between a wizard and a cleric, or a halfling and a goliath, but these other things don't get their own subsystems.
This is the standpoint a fair number of people take, and it's generally pretty well reasoned. 'Magic' in D&D covers nearly everything that isn't purely using a sword, but there are some decidedly vocal people out there that decry any attempt to use a system that has been used for magic to represent psionic powers as some sort of sacrilege. If they don't get their own special corner, they won't ever be happy.
In fairness, there's a pretty significant difference between arcane and divine magic (all the spells you can learn vs all the spells for your class period). Divine is pretty much uniform across the different classes (casting stat notwithstanding), arcane is not. Relegating psionics to subclasses of arcane casters does give the impression it's just another arcane variant. Reskinning mechanics is a thing in 5E, but I don't think hoping psi and arcane to be as different as arcane and divine was reaching for the moon. Admittedly I only managed a glance at the leaked info, maybe I didn't get the correct impression, I'll see when the book gets here.
There's a big thematic difference between arcane and divine magic. Not so much a mechanical one. If there's a mechanical separation, it's between "scholarly" spellcasters (wizard, artificer, cleric) who prepare daily spells, and "intuitive" spellcasters (bard, sorcerer, and maybe warlocks) who just kind of know their spells. I'm not sure why druid is in the former rather than the latter but that's a separate criticism.
I'd be all for a psi class/subrace that 1) used psi points or dice to "cast spells" rather than Vancian spell slots, 2) dealt psychic damage when casting damage-dealing spells (or at least had the option to), and 3) could somehow "mask" their magic as non-magic so things like dispell magic or antimagic field didn't interfere, again either some of the time like a resource or at some kind of cost in effectiveness to maintain balance. Then crank the psion's theme up to 11 and call it a day.
I think WotC has been trying to do the same thing with psionics. It's magic, just perhaps presented a bit differently, but still using the same underlying mechanic. The thematic difference between a psionicist (psion?) and a wizard is as large as the thematic difference between a wizard and a cleric, or a halfling and a goliath, but these other things don't get their own subsystems.
This is the standpoint a fair number of people take, and it's generally pretty well reasoned. 'Magic' in D&D covers nearly everything that isn't purely using a sword, but there are some decidedly vocal people out there that decry any attempt to use a system that has been used for magic to represent psionic powers as some sort of sacrilege. If they don't get their own special corner, they won't ever be happy.
In fairness, there's a pretty significant difference between arcane and divine magic (all the spells you can learn vs all the spells for your class period). Divine is pretty much uniform across the different classes (casting stat notwithstanding), arcane is not. Relegating psionics to subclasses of arcane casters does give the impression it's just another arcane variant. Reskinning mechanics is a thing in 5E, but I don't think hoping psi and arcane to be as different as arcane and divine was reaching for the moon. Admittedly I only managed a glance at the leaked info, maybe I didn't get the correct impression, I'll see when the book gets here.
There's a big thematic difference between arcane and divine magic. Not so much a mechanical one. If there's a mechanical separation, it's between "scholarly" spellcasters (wizard, artificer, cleric) who prepare daily spells, and "intuitive" spellcasters (bard, sorcerer, and maybe warlocks) who just kind of know their spells. I'm not sure why druid is in the former rather than the latter but that's a separate criticism.
I'd be all for a psi class/subrace that 1) used psi points or dice to "cast spells" rather than Vancian spell slots, 2) dealt psychic damage when casting damage-dealing spells (or at least had the option to), and 3) could somehow "mask" their magic as non-magic so things like dispell magic or antimagic field didn't interfere, again either some of the time like a resource or at some kind of cost in effectiveness to maintain balance. Then crank the psion's theme up to 11 and call it a day.
Druids are nature clerics (with wildshape instead of channeling). It kinda makes sense to me to put them on the same side of the fence.
The thematic difference has a mechanical proponent - learning a limited subset of the entire spell catalog you can browse, vs just getting the entire thing in your repertoire. Maybe it's just me, but to me that feels significant and meaningful.
I'd be perfectly happy with your suggestion, but honestly anything that sets it apart from arcane and divine in some meaningful sense would probably be good enough for me. More would be better, but I'm managing my expectations.
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The thematic difference has a mechanical proponent - learning a limited subset of the entire spell catalog you can browse, vs just getting the entire thing in your repertoire. Maybe it's just me, but to me that feels significant and meaningful.
What I mean is, the thematic difference between arcane and divine is not reflected in a mechanical difference. Wizards and clerics are both prepared-spell classes. Sorcerers and paladins are both known-spell classes. The EK uses wizard spells but is a known-spell subclass.
The thematic difference has a mechanical proponent - learning a limited subset of the entire spell catalog you can browse, vs just getting the entire thing in your repertoire. Maybe it's just me, but to me that feels significant and meaningful.
What I mean is, the thematic difference between arcane and divine is not reflected in a mechanical difference. Wizards and clerics are both prepared-spell classes. Sorcerers and paladins are both known-spell classes. The EK uses wizard spells but is a known-spell subclass.
Just like innate Sorcerer casting is not mechanically different from wizard casting. They also blurred the line with 5e, sorcerer has no longer more spell slots, wizard don't need to assign spell slots to spells. That's why I'm really surprised that they removed spell versatility for "stepping on wizard's toes".
The lack of mechanical differentiation between all these things is a problem, not a "benefit of 5e". It means player choice and decisions don't matter, either. We see this in the constant cries of sorcerers being so much weaker and less useful than wizards - this is what happens when one simply assigns half of an existing set of class mechanics to a new class and then forgets to fill in the other half.
Sorcerers are a stripped-down, mechanically anemic wizard with half the spell selection and nothing to differentiate it from Wizard Stuff save the metamagic system wizard players never stop blasting sorcerer players for ("didn't you know that in older editions WIZARDS got Metamagic?! How am I supposed to be the Ultimate Master of All Things Magical if I can't screw with my spells anymore?! What'd'ya mean that doesn't leave any design space for other magical classes, who CARES?!") and the Power Of Imagination(TM). Sorcerers are almost universally more interesting characters than wizards are if the player does any work at all, but this doesn't really matter or impact the game because sorcerers are simply worse wizards.
Thus my confusion and, yes, hostility for people who want to make all psychic characters worse sorcerers. Why? Why would this be beneficial, or even acceptable? Why would anyone play a 'psychic' character that uses the exact same rules as a sorcerer save that they have fewer spells chosen from a far smaller spell list, can cast those spells less often, and those spells are significantly less effective when the psychic character does cast them? To say nothing of the fact that the core, fundamental difference between "Psionic" and magical power is that ALL magic is derived by manipulating or modifying energies external to the caster, while psychic power is wholly derived from within the caster and is inherent to their being.
Yes, even sorcerers - sorcerers have a source of that external energy crammed into their guts and learn to live alongside it, which is why you can almost make a semi-tolerable psychic character on a sorcerer base, but even then. The sorcerer more acts as a channel for that power; it is not inherent to them, though it is bound to them. A psychic character's abilities are as much a part of them as their arm or their face, learning to control psychic abilities is more akin to learning a new form of martial art or a new way of thinking than it is learning to Touch the Ephemeral Gossamer of the Weave, and having absolutely zero mechanical differentiation between psychic power, arcane power, divine power, or any-other-power is not a benefit in any damned way whatsoever save for oversimplifying things for people who cannot be assed to learn a better system.
To be honest I'd rather metamagic had remained a feat, and then sorcerers had got the awesome playtest ability of gradually turning into their bloodline as they spent spells and lost control. But instead they scrapped that and gave us a bad wizard with a feat glued on instead. Gradually turning into a dragon lite or elemental tempest themed being would be great fun and offer something completely different to the other classes.
And yeah, I don't consider removing any mechanical uniqueness between different power sources a feature, I consider it a weakness. Arcane, primal, divine, and psionic should have remained separate with their own quirks and features.
I would put myself in the camp of wanting Psionics. I however could be considered in another group outside of the two pro-psionics camp GarrettKP mentions, the not caring if it uses spellcasting or a new mechanic so long as they are fun and thematic classes that give the feel of various psionic concepts. I thought the Psionic Wizard was cool, as well as the Aberrant Mind Sorcerer and the Soulknife Rogue.
"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Characters for Tenebris Sine Fine
RoughCoronet's Greater Wills
GarrettKP, that is mostly correct, but not completely. If we were to assume that WotC wanted to please as many people as possible by putting psionics in TCoE, they could do two systems. If they did one simple system (psionic subclasses with spellcasting) and one unique system (psionic system and class), if executed correctly, they could appease 2 of those groups. They will never make the group that doesn't want psionics in 5e happy by publishing psionics, but they can make the other 2 groups at least satisfied with what they get. They're not going to do this, because it would take twice the amount of work, but it would be better than our current situation.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
For what it is worth, Crawford has said that a full class is not off the table. It was never in the cards for Tasha's, but if/when they do Dark Sun finally they will basically have to add a Psion in some way. So it is possible this subclass take is being implemented because 1) it is easier to playtest and get ready for release, and 2) it will hold over a large portion of the fan base until a full class with more complexity is finally ready.
Not that we will see that anytime soon. But we may.
For example, the Psi Dice mechanic did well enough in feedback that WotC at least put them into Tasha's (albeit in a more streamlined fashion). So perhaps now that that is being added, perhaps they are working behind the scenes on a full Psion using the Psi Dice as the core mechanic. All conjecture, but fun to imagine.
Yeah, back to what I had said before / it’s a very small level of integration into the game (a couple feats and a few simple subclasses) that a Dark Sun book could easily retcon those out and re-print a Psion class completely.
Or since feats and class features are starting to get blurry anyway, you could do both feats, subclasses, and classes all intertwined in a work like Dark Sun. Dedicated psions, and psionic dabblers, and of course some psionics will be available as lineage traits. Almost like there are levels of Mutants in Marvel's X books. You have some psionics which are basically cantrip level stuff, to full on Xavier/Magneto ... and on the monster front you have some Omega level psis that literally think of the feats and class Psions as food. Whether Dark Sun is the best place to do that or not, I don't know.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I hate to continue to take something off topic that's already been taken off topic, but if your comment is in regards to WotC trying to move away from certain races being depicted as inherently evil and concluding that they are therefore afraid to ever depict slavery/racism/anything controversial, there's a huge difference between portraying slavery and racism and declaring in the manual that one side is actually correct about the other side being inherently evil. Personally, I don't think having completely different species have different behavioral tendencies is the worst thing ever, but I can understand if some people think "elves are inherently good, orcs are inherently evil" is lazy writing.
The campaign is what the DM and players make of it. Want stereotypical evil orcs? You got them! Want orcs are people too? Poof, there it is!
I appreciate a game publisher helping establish a world setting with some specific cultures/regions - but noone has to adopt it completely literally if they don't want to.
Whether the book says it one way or the other.
I think it is a bad idea to post copyrighted material buddy...
For me the issue is definitely not "no psionics" but that I don't think psionics warrants a catered mechanic. I mean, Eberron introduced robots in the form or warforged, and I have no problem with that. I love them, to be honest. But look closely at what WotC did, and really what they didn't do. Warforged didn't come with a set of specialized "robot" game mechanics. There's no Gear Class, or Maintenance Points, or Lubrication Level. Warforged are presented mechanically as, well, just people, but with enough bells & whistles to give them their own flavor. They still have hit points, they get exhaustion, and they can even be very non-artificial in the sense that they can be druids.
I think WotC has been trying to do the same thing with psionics. It's magic, just perhaps presented a bit differently, but still using the same underlying mechanic. The thematic difference between a psionicist (psion?) and a wizard is as large as the thematic difference between a wizard and a cleric, or a halfling and a goliath, but these other things don't get their own subsystems.
This is the standpoint a fair number of people take, and it's generally pretty well reasoned. 'Magic' in D&D covers nearly everything that isn't purely using a sword, but there are some decidedly vocal people out there that decry any attempt to use a system that has been used for magic to represent psionic powers as some sort of sacrilege. If they don't get their own special corner, they won't ever be happy.
But ce la vie. We now have a smattering of Psi classes and I think they work well. Tasha's have delivered on something that fits within the existing framework and works quite well.
A shame the book as a whole appears to have taken a nerf bat to all the well recieved UA and, for some baffling reason, buffed the Wizard/Cleric even more. Crawford, how do you keep getting away with it?
In fairness, there's a pretty significant difference between arcane and divine magic (all the spells you can learn vs all the spells for your class period). Divine is pretty much uniform across the different classes (casting stat notwithstanding), arcane is not. Relegating psionics to subclasses of arcane casters does give the impression it's just another arcane variant. Reskinning mechanics is a thing in 5E, but I don't think hoping psi and arcane to be as different as arcane and divine was reaching for the moon. Admittedly I only managed a glance at the leaked info, maybe I didn't get the correct impression, I'll see when the book gets here.
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He can do that because more people are not upset about the changes. Wizards/Clerics are more common than rangers, monks and sorcerers - just look at class popularity rankings.
IMO if they release a Dark Sun setting they should treat psionics along the lines of how they presented dragonmarks in Eberron -- as subraces. You pick a psionic subrace and it grants access to something like INT- and/or CHA-based psi points or dice, which can be used for a variety of effects (including modifying spellcasting). Maybe you can also convert any damage type you deal into psychic, maybe tied to some resource. Basically roll your own psionicist.
If psionics did end up being spells, maybe using spell points by default would help?
There's a big thematic difference between arcane and divine magic. Not so much a mechanical one. If there's a mechanical separation, it's between "scholarly" spellcasters (wizard, artificer, cleric) who prepare daily spells, and "intuitive" spellcasters (bard, sorcerer, and maybe warlocks) who just kind of know their spells. I'm not sure why druid is in the former rather than the latter but that's a separate criticism.
I'd be all for a psi class/subrace that 1) used psi points or dice to "cast spells" rather than Vancian spell slots, 2) dealt psychic damage when casting damage-dealing spells (or at least had the option to), and 3) could somehow "mask" their magic as non-magic so things like dispell magic or antimagic field didn't interfere, again either some of the time like a resource or at some kind of cost in effectiveness to maintain balance. Then crank the psion's theme up to 11 and call it a day.
Druids are nature clerics (with wildshape instead of channeling). It kinda makes sense to me to put them on the same side of the fence.
The thematic difference has a mechanical proponent - learning a limited subset of the entire spell catalog you can browse, vs just getting the entire thing in your repertoire. Maybe it's just me, but to me that feels significant and meaningful.
I'd be perfectly happy with your suggestion, but honestly anything that sets it apart from arcane and divine in some meaningful sense would probably be good enough for me. More would be better, but I'm managing my expectations.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
What I mean is, the thematic difference between arcane and divine is not reflected in a mechanical difference. Wizards and clerics are both prepared-spell classes. Sorcerers and paladins are both known-spell classes. The EK uses wizard spells but is a known-spell subclass.
Just like innate Sorcerer casting is not mechanically different from wizard casting. They also blurred the line with 5e, sorcerer has no longer more spell slots, wizard don't need to assign spell slots to spells. That's why I'm really surprised that they removed spell versatility for "stepping on wizard's toes".
The lack of mechanical differentiation between all these things is a problem, not a "benefit of 5e". It means player choice and decisions don't matter, either. We see this in the constant cries of sorcerers being so much weaker and less useful than wizards - this is what happens when one simply assigns half of an existing set of class mechanics to a new class and then forgets to fill in the other half.
Sorcerers are a stripped-down, mechanically anemic wizard with half the spell selection and nothing to differentiate it from Wizard Stuff save the metamagic system wizard players never stop blasting sorcerer players for ("didn't you know that in older editions WIZARDS got Metamagic?! How am I supposed to be the Ultimate Master of All Things Magical if I can't screw with my spells anymore?! What'd'ya mean that doesn't leave any design space for other magical classes, who CARES?!") and the Power Of Imagination(TM). Sorcerers are almost universally more interesting characters than wizards are if the player does any work at all, but this doesn't really matter or impact the game because sorcerers are simply worse wizards.
Thus my confusion and, yes, hostility for people who want to make all psychic characters worse sorcerers. Why? Why would this be beneficial, or even acceptable? Why would anyone play a 'psychic' character that uses the exact same rules as a sorcerer save that they have fewer spells chosen from a far smaller spell list, can cast those spells less often, and those spells are significantly less effective when the psychic character does cast them? To say nothing of the fact that the core, fundamental difference between "Psionic" and magical power is that ALL magic is derived by manipulating or modifying energies external to the caster, while psychic power is wholly derived from within the caster and is inherent to their being.
Yes, even sorcerers - sorcerers have a source of that external energy crammed into their guts and learn to live alongside it, which is why you can almost make a semi-tolerable psychic character on a sorcerer base, but even then. The sorcerer more acts as a channel for that power; it is not inherent to them, though it is bound to them. A psychic character's abilities are as much a part of them as their arm or their face, learning to control psychic abilities is more akin to learning a new form of martial art or a new way of thinking than it is learning to Touch the Ephemeral Gossamer of the Weave, and having absolutely zero mechanical differentiation between psychic power, arcane power, divine power, or any-other-power is not a benefit in any damned way whatsoever save for oversimplifying things for people who cannot be assed to learn a better system.
Ugh.
Please do not contact or message me.
To be honest I'd rather metamagic had remained a feat, and then sorcerers had got the awesome playtest ability of gradually turning into their bloodline as they spent spells and lost control. But instead they scrapped that and gave us a bad wizard with a feat glued on instead. Gradually turning into a dragon lite or elemental tempest themed being would be great fun and offer something completely different to the other classes.
And yeah, I don't consider removing any mechanical uniqueness between different power sources a feature, I consider it a weakness. Arcane, primal, divine, and psionic should have remained separate with their own quirks and features.