So what do you guys think of 2nd edition psionics?

While I owned the books, it wasn't until 3rd edition D&D that I actually began playing. Nonetheless, I owned several books and one of my favorites was the Psionics Handbook. It's the only version of the psionicist that I have seen that actually felt like it's own thing: PSPs instead of spell slots. Six disciplines instead of Eight schools of magic. Power checks. The contact subsystem. Attack and defense modes. Some very strange powers...

But I have never actually seen the psionicist in play. The books will tell you that they are no better or worse than any other class but putting that conceit aside for a moment, what were the psionicists actually like in play? Did they outshine other classes? Were they a poor man's wizard? did anyone actually bother with contact powers? Did power checks add or subtract from the experience?

I need to ask, which version of 2nd Edition psionics? The first printing or the remake after the revised Dark Sun setting?

As someone who had Dark Sun, I had to use a little of the psionics rules. Probably the "best" power was "Synaptic Static": turn off all psionics in a given range for a time, including yours. I did play both of the SSI Dark Sun AD&D games, and while I didn't like some of the outer planar stuff those added, "Synaptic Static" saved me a lot of trouble in the final battle of the first game.

Nimblegrund said:

While I owned the books, it wasn't until 3rd edition D&D that I actually began playing. Nonetheless, I owned several books and one of my favorites was the Psionics Handbook. It's the only version of the psionicist that I have seen that actually felt like it's own thing: PSPs instead of spell slots. Six disciplines instead of Eight schools of magic. Power checks. The contact subsystem. Attack and defense modes. Some very strange powers...

But I have never actually seen the psionicist in play. The books will tell you that they are no better or worse than any other class but putting that conceit aside for a moment, what were the psionicists actually like in play? Did they outshine other classes? Were they a poor man's wizard? did anyone actually bother with contact powers? Did power checks add or subtract from the experience?

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Terrible. AD&D 2nd Edition didn't make balance a key concern. It's pretty hard to do that when you have die-rolled stats. But 2e did have some balancing tools. For instance, wizards had very few spells at 1st-level, but at the same time those spells (eg Sleep) were really strong, because everything you were likely to face had terrible saves. As you got more spells, enemies got stronger saves so you needed to cast more spells. It wasn't really balanced, but you could see where the game went with that.

Psionicists were the opposite. Your powers were less likely to succeed than spells at low levels, but because few allowed saving throws, enemies never got stronger against them... and you were getting more PSPs with levels. You could not really challenge a psionicist by using a more powerful creature, such as a dragon. Using lots of creatures worked really well though, again, the opposite of a wizard, who would rather Fireball or Sleep a bunch of weak kobolds than risk seeing a spell sizzle against a powerful dragon. (I had a psionicist that could daze any creature not immune to psionics 60% of the time. Didn't work so well against kobolds. Psionicists had terrible AoE powers. Worked ridiculously effectively against dragons.)

Even worse was Disintegrate. I understand you would only have enough PSPs to use it once at 3rd-level (or at 1st-level, if you rolled the right wild talent, and I'm not entirely sure if that was legal...) but you shouldn't be able to instantly kill a far more powerful opponent at 1st-level. The risk of accidentally Disintegrating yourself did not frighten those with a decent knowledge of statistics. You had a 5% chance of having to make your easiest saving throw with a +4 bonus to it. (Well I recall that save being the easiest.) Unlike Id Insinuation (the "dazing" power I used a lot) you only needed to hit with it once. There's a reason the equivalent spell couldn't be taken until you had reached 12th-level or so.

Psionics was often too complicated. This was especially the case with Telepathy and even worse with psionic combat. You had to establish contact, or use attack modes to force contact, and contact had various modifiers depending on how different the target creature was from you. The power often cost more PSPs against more powerful creatures and often gave them a saving throw too. Double jeopardy, triple jeopardy? And then there powers that made the creature think it had lost 80% of its hit points. A simpler power like Ballistic Attack requires a power score roll and then an attack roll.

I'm sure there's a lot of powers that weren't overpowered, but no one knew how to use or counter them.

There were a lot of really weak powers in there. Animated Objects (or something similar), allowed you to animate an object (gasp!) that attacked "as a club" with THAC0 20, rather than your own. No stat mods either. After you succeeded at a power score roll, of course. That's such terrible design, I have no idea what it was doing in a gamebook. Or take Project Force, from a flavor perspective a really fun power. It did damage of 1d6 + target AC (or something similar), so as you faced more powerful creatures, it became weaker. I wonder what the playtesting feedback on that power said.

Psionicist power selection was too chance-based. Animal Affinity was one of those crazy powers that could give you something overpowered or something underpowered. It's been so long since I've played 2e I don't recall how powers were selected. I think you had to roll to start and then pick them, and while I thought that was terrible, I think wizards having to roll for their initial spells was also terrible.

Rolling an expensive power simply meant you got more PSPs to start. That's a bit like rolling your caster level when playing a wizard, when everyone else has to start at 1st-level. Even if you got nothing but the spells, a 1st-level wizard with the ability to cast Fireball is blatantly more powerful than a 1st-level wizard who can only cast Burning Hands.

It was fun though. It had great flavor. I loved the Detonate power! And Wormhole! I never got to use Dream Travel but think that would be fantastic (and ridiculously hard on the DM). I wish more 2nd Ed powers got converted to 3rd and 4th edition... just in a way that was sane and balanced.

I'm not concerned with combat balance, as most parties in literature and movies are not balanced. At the same time, I have to say I preferred the revised 2e psionics that came out because of the revised Dark Sun setting. Mental Armor Class and Mental THAC0 smoothed some of the ideas from the original 2E psionics handbooks. PSPs stayed.

I think I have both the updated psionics from revised Dark Sun and the revised Psionics handbook, and I need to double check. There may be some redundancy if I do.

In general, no edition after 1e has ever had any need for psionics at all. As such, my thoughts regarding 2e psionics was simply, "They really don't get it, do they?"

First of all, a mini-rant here but psionic is a complete misnomer. Psionic doesn't actually mean 'psychic powers', though that is how D&D uses the term. Psionic is related to the term 'bionic'. A psionic character taken literally has a lot in common with 'The Six Million Dollar Man'. Psionics are computers or machines which are embedded in a persons mind to enhance their mental powers or to approximate psychic powers through technical means - for example a radio embedded in a person's mind giving them the ability to 'telepathically' communicate with other persons that are so modified. The Telepathy Corp in David Gerrold's 'War Against the Chtorr' series are actual psionics. The psionics in D&D are actually psychics, and as such are just sorcerers of some sort.

Psionics in 1e allowed for a way to give creatures magical power that wasn't tied to level or class. It was inherently unbalanced, and kept in check by inherently unbalanced and unfair rules that basically ensured that any psionic PC would die horribly if confronted by a psionic monster. It had lots of flavor though, representing a person born with inherent psychic or magical abilities that weren't owed to their study of the arcane as a 'magic-user'.

It's not clear why D&D would need two magical systems, except if one was tied to level and one wasn't. GURPS for example has both 'magic' and 'psionics', but differentiates the two on the basis of balance. GURPS 'magic' is meant to be balanced with the ability to swing a sword. GURPS 'psionics' are meant to be balanced with guns and high tech weaponry. This is in keeping with the typical labeling of magic in science fiction as something other than magic - 'the force', 'psychics', etc. - even when it's pretty blatantly just regular old magic with a different name. D&D doesn't need to support both a fantasy game and a science fiction game with a single system, so the after Psionics are divorced from its roots and made into just another class based power, I never saw the point.

So once you do that, you basically get into the problem that its not easy to balance to completely separate and distinct magic systems with different mythic expectations against each other. You also get into problems of, "There is more than one way to do something", as each system for example handles the exact same thing - telepathy, ESP, telekinesis, etc. - in two completely different ways. At the very least that's rules bloat. But it also tends to be balance wreaking, particularly if you don't assume psionics are just magic (and so are effected by dispel magic or spell resistance).

Second edition has all of that in spades.

I used to be on the side of "Magic and 'Psionics'" are different. The beginning of your "rant" reminds me of how I think "bionics" was misused in Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman: their cybernetic implants are entirely mechanical and don't rely on their biological functions.

As much as I dislike the term, these are "FX" that come from different power sources: Arcane magic comes from study or blood lines, Divine from the gods, and psychic abilities are from your mind.

Alternity did a decent thing with "psionics", but that's not 2E AD&D.

I was mostly fine with them. Disintegrate was a high psp cost for a save or die you could get at 1st level, I believe and I did not like save or dies. But it had lots of weird powers, neat flavor and was a decent option for something different. Not something I particularly wanted to play but they were a neat part of the game. I remember thinking the later MTHACO and MAC were good optional developments.

I particularly enjoyed DMing a psionicist in Ravenloft where there was lots of stuff that could be done with the telepathy contact system.

Celebrim said:

First of all, a mini-rant here but psionic is a complete misnomer. Psionic doesn't actually mean 'psychic powers', though that is how D&D uses the term. Psionic is related to the term 'bionic'. A psionic character taken literally has a lot in common with 'The Six Million Dollar Man'.

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As I understand it, the word is a portmanteau of 'psychic' and 'electronic'. It's not that you implant a radio into your head, and that's your telepathy, so much as you can make your brain work as though it was a radio (or other scientifically-engineered device).

At least, that's the only derivation I've ever heard, and it seems to jive well enough with popular usage (though it would make the name ridiculously out-of-place in most fantasy settings). I've never heard your usage anywhere before.

Saelorn said:

As I understand it, the word is a portmanteau of 'psychic' and 'electronic'. It's not that you implant a radio into your head, and that's your telepathy, so much as you can make your brain work as though it was a radio (or other scientifically-engineered device).

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When psionics became a term psuedo-science was under assault by more rigorous scientific methodology. If 'psionics' were to exist, the people advocating for them had to find gaps in the science into which they could fit. Many of the advocates were smart enough to realize that psychic powers - which they assumed were real - would obey things like conservation of energy. They assumed therefore that the psychic powers of the brain were grounded in physics but accessed technology that was presently poorly understood. The idea behind psionics is that once they figured out how psychic powers worked they would develop some sort of 'amplifiers' that would allow the weak powers of the mind to work more reliably and with greater effect or would actually replicate them with electronics - not minds that worked like electronics, but electronics that worked like minds. If you were to go to fringe occult places in the internet, you'd find discussions of just how to build such supposed devices.

That minds can accept and transmit radio waves are reasonable explanations for telepathic powers, assuming you believe such things exist. A psionic device would just amplify or augment these natural powers. You see this sort of explanation used in harder forms of science fiction such as for the telepathic dogs in 'A Fire Upon the Deep' (although in that story, it's ultrasound that is the telepathic medium) or the aforementioned telepathy corp in Gerrald's 'War against the Chtorr' books.

Early use of the term in science fiction tended to match this description. Gradually though, it just became a catch all term for 'magic' in a science fiction setting, usually with only the slightest grounding in any sort of technobabble (usually, if it has any explanation at all, it runs on Unobtanium).

There are a couple of things to keep in mind though. First, this is all just a theory to explain magic created by people who believed in magic and were trying to justify their belief. Mind reading, remote sensing, and moving things with your mind is just run of the mill traditional magic powers. Heck, even the thing with 'crystals as amplifiers' isn't really differentiation - what do you think a crystal ball is for?

Assuming that the magic of a wizard works, the question becomes, how does it work? Ancient magical traditions often assumed that magic was impossible for humans to perform - because well, people back then weren't stupid and this is pretty self-evidently true - and therefore that wizards worked magic by invoking or commanding helpful spirits who actually could do things people couldn't - for examples in literature, see Prospero in 'The Tempest'. That's a pretty reasonable and believable theory provided you believe in fairies. As scientific knowledge increased and science increased in stature, more and more magical traditions appear that give a different gloss to magic - as advanced science of some sort. D&D's wizards are actually of this later tradition. They don't rely on bound spirits or pacts with demons to influence the world. Instead, they have techniques for using mental discipline and focusing their will into specific acts of altering reality, which are mentally stored until ready to use. This is basically magic as 'sufficiently advanced technology'. Among other things, Vancian magic is explicitly magic of the far removed future.

There is therefore no real practical distinction from "magic that comes from study" and "magic that comes from your mind". Sure, you studied, but where is the power actually? Sure, it's from your mind, but what is the power actually? And this is particularly true when 'psion' becomes not something that you are born with, but another class that progresses and grows in power through experience, study, and repetition. The tropes of D&D psionics are largely drawn from the very same source material in late 19th century pseudo-science and magical traditions that are the source material for the D&D wizard.

Deprived of the idea of technological enablement, a psion is just a wizard and draws on the same power source(s) - a disciplined mind, esoteric lore, willpower, etc.

Or put it this way, if a psion uses the 'power of his mind', what exactly is the nature of this power? What substance does it have? It's magic.

I suppose, etymologically speaking, psionics and bionics have one other thing in common, in that the popular definition of each has changed radically from their initial usages. Where the textbook definition varies from actual usage, I think most languages put legitimacy with what people actually say.

Which is why I'm fine using the modern, incorrect, usages of those words.