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they get their start in Supplement III Eldritch Wizardry
by the time they saw print in 1edADnD they were already mixed up
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Poorly designed - but we still rolled to see if our PC had them (wasn't it like a 5% chance or something? Will now have to crack out the 1e DMG - the best archaic tomb ever!).
The stat requirements were too high and the percentage roll was slim. There was no way to keep the players with psionics from dominating the other non psionic characters.
Being Psionic was too random. The power level once you were Psionic was too random. The whole system just seemed tacked on. I don't think even Gygax was a fan of 1E Psionics.
They were not well designed and IIRC Gary said as much at a later date, or at the least he admitted it was a mistake to have included them as they were not properly developed.
There are a number of problems inherent in the system and its presentation:
Very high stat requirements
Very low chance of getting psionics
Insanely imbalanced chances of having a ton of psionic points or too little to even be useful
Powers themselves able to place an excess of power in a 1st level character (though if you read the system carefully this aspect is not as bad as many wound up playing it)
How psionic combat works is badly explained
How psionic combat mixes with normal combat also badly explained
Method of selecting psionic disciplines is completely random, both in the amount the PC gets and what the disciplines actually are
Combat is "blind mans bluff" which is a Great Wall of China in the path of any real strategy or tactics usage
Combat chart is nigh impenetrable making it even more difficult to employ strategy/tactics
Practical result of combat in ANY case is that the combatant who starts with more points wins almost every time - so if your PC has fewer points than the opponent your psionics is a DEATH SENTENCE, not an advantage.
Psionic combat, at 10 exchanges per round at the start of every round, is nigh instantaneous unless participants have enormous amounts of points. So combats including psionic exchanges typically start with one or more psionic participants dropping dead/incapacitated prior to the first sword swing or spellcasting
Some of these issues can be fixed. Others can be overlooked. There are elements of what might have eventually been an adequate system in there. The system as a whole presented as-is, however, is hopelessy f'd up and only someone completely ignorant of any of the above issues would try to run it as-is. There are people who apparantly DO, which amazes me, but clearly those campaigns are quite unique and the DM takes a heavy hand in determining what the PC's go up against in the matter of psionics.
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I liked the 1e psionic system. Or at least, I loved what it tried to do.
The basics were that it grafted a class-less spell point magic system onto the mainframe of AD&D. With that extra power came horrible vulnerability to some really awesome monsters.
The basic campaign arc of a character with psionics was that he was the most powerful character in the party until he met up with a psionic monster, at which point his brain would be turned to goo. A classic live fast, die young paradigm and a wonderful exemplar of AD&D's "balance schmalance" attitude (which I share).
If the DM ran the rules as written and a quarter of all wandering monster rolls after psionics or related powers were used were done on the psionic table, walking around with a psionic character was like having a "GOOD FOOD HERE" neon sign pointed directly at the Abyss.
It painted a nice, grim Cthuloid picture of the D&D world, and also did a lot to explain why there weren't magic factories, magic hospitals, etc. due to the fact that so many magical spells attracted so many foul creatures.
To me, it was just part of the whole kooky fabric of 1e. Sometimes I use it, some times I don't. But I always find it interesting and imaginative. I liken all the peripheral sub-systems in the 1e core to the Beatles song catalog. I like pretty much every song the Beatles recorded, but I'm not going to try to sit down and listen to every song in one sitting.
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Well designed
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1) This is often overlooked, but they are the only D&D psionic system that doesn't feel like a variant magic system. The flavor is spot on and its very difficult to recapture it.
2) They are much better balanced than is generally understood. Not having psionic ability gave you inherent protection from psionic attack. A psionic character gained (or didn't) some nifty abilities, but they opened themselves to getting pwned hard by powerful psionic monsters.
Poorly designed
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1) While some of the powers scale appropriately with level, a few of the powers (energy control) are just outright broken and allow the psionist to do things that just have no parallel anywhere else in the rules.
2) The psionic powers were massively random. By design, virtually no characters would be psionic, and those that were psionic began the game with something between a severe handicap (few points, weak powers, utterly pwned by any monster with psionics) and earthshattering power (many points, many useful powers).
3) Psionic combat is ultimately boring, not only for the participant, but for the party as a whole. While it feels right, in practice what feels right translates to is a subsystem where everyone else stands around doing nothing where the psionic with more points (usually, a monster) destroys his ultimately helpless foe. As someone else pointed out, often having psionics amounts to little more than a death sentense the first time a psionic monster is encountered.
I've often half-wanted to have a psionic subsystem in later editions just for the wacky bizarre arcaneness of it, even though I personally detest psionics even as a concept. Even though I never had a psionic character in 1e, I always dutifully rolled for my chances, hoping to get lucky twice and have some sort of demigod character.
There is something enherently cool about its complete lack of balance and about there existing rare random people with bizarre talents that are not dependent on class or experience or any of D&D's metagame concepts. Of course, with that coolness though comes all sorts of problems.
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We still roll for them in my 1e game, but the system is frankly a mess. It wasn't just the part in the PHB - the rules for psionic combat in the DMG were barely comprehensible and a bit insane, and the amount of space spent on them was staggering for a subsystem most groups would never use.
They were fine at the time. Like everything else in the game they were clunky and hard to use. But if we judge them by today's standards which is a little silly to do they obviously won't stand up.
I don't believe they were Gary's in the first place. The Eldritch Wizardry rules were stripped from a proposed yogi/mystic sort of class proposed by Steve Marsh, and their revamp and inclusion in 1e was championed by one of the Blume brothers. But then, the psionic combat rules descended from Gary's original Mind Flayer article in the first issue of The Strategic Review.
I think we forget sometimes how organic and collaborative the creation of AD&D really was.
__________________ <exasperated DM> "Underlying what? ... motivation? Do you want to play Dungeons & Dragons or not?"
<drama obsessed player> "How can I narrate my character's co-mingled sense of alienation and ennui towards modern society in this second-rate dungeon hack? My character returns to the surface and uses his remaining gold to start up an organic coffee shop that caters to left-wing revolutionaries... and hot elvish chicks."
I would call them evocative and flavorful, but not well designed.
Well, yes, but I would argue that if it isn't evocative and flavorful, then it's not well designed either. Which means that I think that 'evocative and flavorful' are attributes of good design.
I honestly don't think they are any worse than the psionic systems in 2e, 3e, or 4e. Partly though, I think that's because people want the impossible from their psionic system.
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Well, yes, but I would argue that if it isn't evocative and flavorful, then it's not well designed either. Which means that I think that 'evocative and flavorful' are attributes of good design.
"Necessary but not sufficient" is a phrase that comes to mind.
Quote:
I honestly don't think they are any worse than the psionic systems in 2e, 3e, or 4e. Partly though, I think that's because people want the impossible from their psionic system.
I honestly think 2e and 3e and 3.5 are superiorly designed psionics systems. I have not seen the 4e one.
Partially for the reasons you mention above about aspects of 1e psionics that reflect poor design.
I particularly like that there are psionic classes that can slot well in a normal D&D party.
There is that appeal of the random mutant psionic power roll in 1e and 2e, but ultimately I think it is outweighed by the drawbacks of that type of random system.
I liked it once I finally figured out that the psionic combat system actually worked. That took me a long while, so I think the system could seriously use a good rewrite to have it be easier to comprehend from the beginning.
Did this get covered in OSRIC? I don't remember seeing it in there.
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