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For Nail - The Psion
- Thread starter Caeleddin
- Start date
Thanee
First Post
What I also think, and which also matches my experiences playing arcane spellcasters, is, that the bulk of a spellcasters overall power lies within the top two or maybe three spell levels. Everything below is certainly nice and still useful, but doesn't affect the overall total as much as the higher level spells.
Bye
Thanee
Bye
Thanee
DreamChaser
Explorer
I actually don't agree with the "minimum encounters" idea; not as it seems others are using it. Seems like most people are saying encounters when they mean combats.
Everything in D&D is an encounter. A psion who wants to be useful should have powers that will be useful in encounters with traps, with social situations, with puzzles, with combat etc. I run very few traditional combats but I have never had a game with fewer than 10 encounters on a meaninful day.
If your game is purely combat driven, then you should have minimum combats otherwise, what else are you doing. If you run a mixed game, make sure that psionic characters will regret only taking combat powers. If you never give a psionic character a reason to use their powers until the single fight agaisnt the BBEG at the end of the day, then it is your own fault that they have 100% of their PP left.
Two solutions are:
keep in mind that there are other things psionics can be used for (perhaps require players to choose some powers that are non-combat oriented)
or
make the BBEG stronger.
DC
Everything in D&D is an encounter. A psion who wants to be useful should have powers that will be useful in encounters with traps, with social situations, with puzzles, with combat etc. I run very few traditional combats but I have never had a game with fewer than 10 encounters on a meaninful day.
If your game is purely combat driven, then you should have minimum combats otherwise, what else are you doing. If you run a mixed game, make sure that psionic characters will regret only taking combat powers. If you never give a psionic character a reason to use their powers until the single fight agaisnt the BBEG at the end of the day, then it is your own fault that they have 100% of their PP left.
Two solutions are:
keep in mind that there are other things psionics can be used for (perhaps require players to choose some powers that are non-combat oriented)
or
make the BBEG stronger.
DC
Empathic Transfer and Body Adjustment ensures that the Psion can heal as well if need be. They can be team players, if the player plays them that way.
Now, for Thanee's assertion that Sorcerors are only slightly more powerful than a Psion. A 20 level Psion has 343 PPs. A Sorceror has the equivalent of 486 PPs from spell slots alone. This does not take into account the Sorceror's 0 level slots or the fact that the Sorceror's spells auto-scale.
For example, the level 20 Psion has to expend 20 PP to do 20d6 damage. This is the equivalent of a level 10 spell. The level 20 Sorceror can do the same with an augmented 9th level power for the equivalent of 17 PP. This is even more evident for 3 level spells like Fireball (which the Psion only get as a level 4 spell). To get 10d6 damage, the Psion has to expend 10 PP. The Sorceror expends the equivalent of 5.
As you can see, the Sorceror has a LOT more power than the "slight" edge that Thanee asserts.
Now, if you do the same maths with a Wizard, then you get the equivalent of 324 for the Wizard. Disadvantaged by the Wizard's inability to spontaneous cast but advantaged by the fact that his spells autoscale and he has 0 level spell slots, the Psion is more like the Wizard than the Sorceror in terms of power.
For those of you that insist on DMs being forced to run a certain style of campaign, you are wrong. You only have to threaten the players with a day with a lot of encounters. Keeping things uncertain and interesting is the DMs job. What you are advocating is that the DM only have 1 or 2 encounters a day. Anything more is "unrealistic". That's boring. Sorry. In my experience, you get long days and you get short days. Sometimes, nothing happens, and at others, you get snowed under. The very threat of being snowed under will keep most casters in line. The others that don't usually gets eliminated fairly quickly.
Last but not least, because of augmentation, Globes of Invulnerability will hose the Psion fair effectively. You may augment it to the nines, but at the end of the day, Energy Ball is still a level 4 power.
Now, for Thanee's assertion that Sorcerors are only slightly more powerful than a Psion. A 20 level Psion has 343 PPs. A Sorceror has the equivalent of 486 PPs from spell slots alone. This does not take into account the Sorceror's 0 level slots or the fact that the Sorceror's spells auto-scale.
For example, the level 20 Psion has to expend 20 PP to do 20d6 damage. This is the equivalent of a level 10 spell. The level 20 Sorceror can do the same with an augmented 9th level power for the equivalent of 17 PP. This is even more evident for 3 level spells like Fireball (which the Psion only get as a level 4 spell). To get 10d6 damage, the Psion has to expend 10 PP. The Sorceror expends the equivalent of 5.
As you can see, the Sorceror has a LOT more power than the "slight" edge that Thanee asserts.
Now, if you do the same maths with a Wizard, then you get the equivalent of 324 for the Wizard. Disadvantaged by the Wizard's inability to spontaneous cast but advantaged by the fact that his spells autoscale and he has 0 level spell slots, the Psion is more like the Wizard than the Sorceror in terms of power.
For those of you that insist on DMs being forced to run a certain style of campaign, you are wrong. You only have to threaten the players with a day with a lot of encounters. Keeping things uncertain and interesting is the DMs job. What you are advocating is that the DM only have 1 or 2 encounters a day. Anything more is "unrealistic". That's boring. Sorry. In my experience, you get long days and you get short days. Sometimes, nothing happens, and at others, you get snowed under. The very threat of being snowed under will keep most casters in line. The others that don't usually gets eliminated fairly quickly.
Last but not least, because of augmentation, Globes of Invulnerability will hose the Psion fair effectively. You may augment it to the nines, but at the end of the day, Energy Ball is still a level 4 power.
Thanee
First Post
Caeleddin said:
This number is what you get to, if you do not take spell levels into account.
Saying that a 3rd level spell at caster level 10th is equivalent to 10 PP is simply wrong.
It is not. It's a lot weaker than 10 PP, because 10 PP give you a 5th level "spell" at 10th "caster level".
A psion is completely unable to produce the effect of a 3rd "level spell" at 10th "caster level", as spell level scales automatically, when a power gets augmented.
That's why I compare it with both spell level and caster level in mind, not just one, because otherwise you are not comparing the same thing!
Bye
Thanee
Thanee
First Post
To turn this into some numbers, a 20th level sorcerer has 6 slots of every level.
With a reasonable caster ability of 30 that's 3/3/2/2/2/2/1/1/1 bonus slots.
Counting 0th level as ½, the total power (SL x capped CL x slots) is:
½ x 5 x 6 + 1 x 5 x 9 + ... + 9 x 20 x 7 = 5,380.5
For the 20th level psion there are 343 PP plus 100 PP. 443 / 20 = 22 (3 left).
2 x 3 x 1 + 10 x 20 x 22 = 4,406
That's about 20% more total effect for the 20th-level sorcerer in a day (above example is at 10th level, where numbers are a bit different, of course), but to take advantage of that, the sorcerer has to cast the whole 77 spells! How often would that happen? Almost never, I suppose.
On the flip side, at this level, the psion can manifest 22 powers of a 10th spell level equivalent!
The sorcerer has 7 spells of 9th level, 7 spells of 8th level and 7 spells of 7th level only to compare with those.
And to get to the same 4,406 total effect, the sorcerer will also need all the 6th level and most 5th level spells in addition to that; not to forget the extra actions needed to cast them.
Sure, there are still quite a few 0th thru 4th (and even some 5th) level spells left then, but what good are they, if you almost never get to use them?
The psion's speed advantage, however, is always there, and even moreso at high levels, where this is about the most important quality.
Bye
Thanee
With a reasonable caster ability of 30 that's 3/3/2/2/2/2/1/1/1 bonus slots.
Counting 0th level as ½, the total power (SL x capped CL x slots) is:
½ x 5 x 6 + 1 x 5 x 9 + ... + 9 x 20 x 7 = 5,380.5
For the 20th level psion there are 343 PP plus 100 PP. 443 / 20 = 22 (3 left).
2 x 3 x 1 + 10 x 20 x 22 = 4,406
That's about 20% more total effect for the 20th-level sorcerer in a day (above example is at 10th level, where numbers are a bit different, of course), but to take advantage of that, the sorcerer has to cast the whole 77 spells! How often would that happen? Almost never, I suppose.
On the flip side, at this level, the psion can manifest 22 powers of a 10th spell level equivalent!
The sorcerer has 7 spells of 9th level, 7 spells of 8th level and 7 spells of 7th level only to compare with those.
And to get to the same 4,406 total effect, the sorcerer will also need all the 6th level and most 5th level spells in addition to that; not to forget the extra actions needed to cast them.
Sure, there are still quite a few 0th thru 4th (and even some 5th) level spells left then, but what good are they, if you almost never get to use them?
The psion's speed advantage, however, is always there, and even moreso at high levels, where this is about the most important quality.
Bye
Thanee
Corlon
First Post
Thanee said:
That's true, but the arcane casters still have the really annoying (well, speaking from the DM point of view) utility spells like invisibility and such which can make or break encounters if used strategically, and fireballs are always a nice damaging spell even after the levels scale. It seems that the psions are good at one and pretty much one (well maybe three) things, and other than that they can't really do much. They also aren't the greatest at aiding groups (as someone else pointed out I think).
Then again, I'm not really the biggest expert on psionics, so if I'm wrong somewhere please tell me.
But on the other side of the things, many of the arguments about 3.0 haste and such was that it allowed a character to unload spells MUCH faster than normal, and it seems that that's what the psion is being able to do...in a less powerful way mayhaps.
The psions don't seems overpowered to me, but they do change the way a DM has to look at their campaign.
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