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

[Micah Sweet]

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.

That doesn't seem like a fair answer to the question. Why don't you just say, "I don't like psionics"?

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

Wild talent disintegrate was legit if you coukd roll it.

I saw a few psionists in 2E either due to Darksun and the guy who owned the book always played them.

None really impressed me much.

 

[James Gasik]

When the Complete Psionic's Handbook came out, I bought it, and was very excited (as nearly as excited as I was to buy the Spelljammer boxed set). The art and powers were very evocative, and it helped that I got into a Dark Sun game not long after, where the idea that everyone gets a neat extra power was really cool.

However, the cracks started to show very quickly. First, the whole idea of Wild Talents is yet another way the game rewards players for being incredibly lucky. As if the bonuses for high ability scores isn't enough, or the amazing bonus round of Exceptional Strength to potentially triple your Strength bonuses doesn't excite your inner gambling addict, now we have a slim chance for a character to gain...a completely useless ability to gain +1 on initiative if you take an action to activate it, don't flub the roll, and pay an ongoing cost to maintain it...or a page and a half of psychic powers ranging from being able to see sound to disintegrating your enemies!

The systems behind most powers is horrible, the checks are often impossible (oh but you can give up a power choice to gain a +1 bonus, just like proficiencies...something I never saw anyone actually do. Gain a +1 to Carpentry or an entirely new ability...hm...decisions, decisions!), tracking PSP's, costs, maintenance, and recovery times over the course of a day is the most banal of bookkeeping, and the whole thing is an unbalanced mess.

Not to mention psychic combat and bewildering prerequisites for Sciences (and don't get me started on Metapsionic powers!). Then toss in the fact that most people didn't seem to realize that, yes, in fact, psionic powers allow for saving throws, which means that if you DO manage to successfully make your Disintegrate check, your 40 PSP's might do absolutely nothing, as Death Magic is the best saving throw for Monsters, and only the worst save for Wizards!

Now when I play 2e, I basically ignore the fact the book exists. I like the idea of psionics in my D&D game, but most of the implementations end up with the juice not being worth the squeeze.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

In a sense I agree with Celebrim in that the word "psionics" itself isn't entirely correct as D&D uses it, and that D&D doesn't need another magic system. However, the word sounds cool and nobody doesn't get how D&D is using it, and they couldn't care less about being accurate to its original meaning. And new kinds of magic systems are all over D&D. The game doesn't need cleric magic to be at all different than wizard magic. It doesn't need warlock magic, as opposed to wizard magic. Nor do illusions, druid magic, rune magic, spellfire, and whatall need to be DIFFERENT. ONE size fits all. Magic is magic.

So, since the game obviously IS going to play silly buggers with magic systems and all, lets set those concerns aside. 2E psionics is better implemented than 1E psionics, but that's not very f'n hard to do. 2E's approach is certainly geared to get EVERYONE deeply involved in its workings. As a DM you need to fully grok 2E psionics or you're gonna flounder. As a player, you need to BUILD your character at the start. You can't just haphazardly flitter your way through the game like a butterfly unless your characters psionics just don't matter much in the first place. There are SO many prerequisites that must be met that you have to work backwards and plan your PC's advancement from the very start. You have to look at which of the most powerful abilities you would want your psionic PC to have and then note all the prerequisites it needs, and then all the prerequisites that those prerequisites will need, and so on, and so on. If you're LUCKY you might have a couple psionic powers that you can acquire on a whim, but otherwise every power your character gains is aimed at enabling some specific future power. On the way to achieving those future powers, there were likely to be periods where, again due to prereq's, you just weren't going to be as good as you might want to be, or otherwise could be. IME, that sucked.

It left huge numbers of abilities orphaned by the need to commit to other prereq's, or finding that your psionic character is hamstrung in their power, improvement, and flexibility. I also found that psionics worked far better with the psionic PC prepared to go one-on-one with opponents, even soloing bosses, but groups of opponents were FAR more challenging for them to adequately handle. And again - they had to be built from the outset to achieve specific capacities and were then committed to those end-game goals.

In its design it also seemed to have been little concerned with coordination with non-psionics. It left me with the feel that it assumed that there really weren't any wizards, clerics, fighters, thieves, etc. That psionics NEEDED to essentially be a potential replacement for ALL OF THEM. Sometimes generalist magic is like that - trying to usurp the powers of any/all other classes, especially if you concentrated on just one particular class to out-do. Maybe it even should have been used that way and it would have worked better. I won't even get into the stupidly complicated procedures for mental combat with establishing multiple "contacts" (or whatever it was...) with opponents whose brains you wanted to break into.

Overall it had potential, and was vastly better than 1E as-written had been, and the sheer number of abilities created for it was exciting to see, but it was all just NOT satisfyingly implemented for anything like a generalist D&D game setting.

 

[nevin]

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'.

so it was balanced by not being balanced? It was a frankenstein monster of a system that should never have been. I will agree though I only had a few players ever show up with Psionics and it only took one to two psionic encounters for them to dump that character if it survived and roll a non psionic character. Sucks when you have to survive 10 psionic combat rounds per party action. It was stupid on every possible level.

 

[Celebrim]

so it was balanced by not being balanced?

It wasn't balanced at all. But that was true of many things with 1e AD&D, which was relatively unconcerned with balance and more concerned with simulating what it perceived were the genre conventions of fantasy. Psionics existed solely to do something no class system nor indeed no point buy system could accomplish. Whether you think that was a worthy goal and all is a whole different discussion. The point is you could be born gifted with strange powers, and that character was inherently better than other characters right up until it met a real psionic monster and then it got eaten and that was the story of that character.

Maybe that system was stupid, but every single attempt at psionics since then has been even more stupid. The problem is that what people really want the part of the story that is "born gifted with strange powers, and that character was inherently better than other character" without any other payment.

The game doesn't need two wholly different magic systems. You want to be born with pyschic powers? Play a sorcerer and choose your spells according to the flavor you want and not according to what is optimal.

 

[cbwjm]

The game doesn't need two wholly different magic systems. You want to be born with pyschic powers? Play a sorcerer and choose your spells according to the flavor you want and not according to what is optimal.

Boooooo!