D&D 5E In your Years of Gaming, How many Psionic Characters did you See played

[Arnwolf666]

we banned psionics in 1E because if you rolled for it and got lucky you could potentially become game breakingly powerful. In 2E we allowed wild talents and psionics. We kind of forgot about wild talents and stop using them. We had a couple players play the psion class. Even when we played dark sun we generally did not use the wild talents. Most players just weren’t interested in it. To this day I think the 2E psionocist was the best. I loved the way it worked. But in 35 years of playing I bet I never saw half a dozen people play with psionics.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

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[Salthorae]

After reading up on them back in 1e, we made it a house rule to never allow psi into our games. Neither PC's not NPC's nor creatures with such were allowed. They were always replaced with something if a module had one in them.

If we wanted to RP with such abilities, we would have picked up HP Lovecraft or other such themed game.

Did you play with Mind Flayers, etc? Just curious as those are genuinely Lovecraftian and Psionic, but also kind of "core" D&D.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

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[PsyzhranV2]

After reading up on them back in 1e, we made it a house rule to never allow psi into our games. Neither PC's not NPC's nor creatures with such were allowed. They were always replaced with something if a module had one in them.

If we wanted to RP with such abilities, we would have picked up HP Lovecraft or other such themed game.

Angry gith and quori noises

 

[Eltab]

I have only seen psionic characters in 4e Dark Sun. I created one as a backup character for the Ashes of Athas campaign, but gave my only copy to another player whose original PC died.

 

[Lanefan]

I didn't cheat in 1e AD&D, so I never had a psionic character.

Even without cheating I've still had a couple over the years - one rather weak and one quite powerful.

Never mind that the powerful one is also probably the most evil character I've ever played. Fortunately perhaps, her nastiness is usually directed at certain foreign empires rather than at her own party.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Even without cheating I've still had a couple over the years - one rather weak and one quite powerful.

Never mind that the powerful one is also probably the most evil character I've ever played. Fortunately perhaps, her nastiness is usually directed at certain foreign empires rather than at her own party.

I had a legit half elf fighter where I rolled 00 for strength, then 00 for psionics. Only time it’s ever happened where I rolled 4 tens in a row in any context.
And I never ended up playing him lol. Go figure.
Now that I think about it, we hated psionics in 1e so much we converted creatures like mind layers to just cast regular spells. Psionics in 1e were...messy

 

[Lanefan]

I had a legit half elf fighter where I rolled 00 for strength, then 00 for psionics. Only time it’s ever happened where I rolled 4 tens in a row in any context.
And I never ended up playing him lol. Go figure.

Crying shame, that.

Now that I think about it, we hated psionics in 1e so much we converted creatures like mind layers to just cast regular spells. Psionics in 1e were...messy

I've taken psyonics out of my current game* as a PC thing, but gleefully left them in for some key monsters - Mind Flayers, Aboleths, and other tentacly things; Demons; one or two others - just to make them more of a threat.

* - other than a few minor abilities that now show up on our "attributes and quirks" (A+Q) table - it's optional whether you roll on it or not during char-gen but if you do you're stuck with whatever you get - about a third are bad, about a third are good (including the quasi-psyonic ones e.g. innate short-range detect magic), and the rest are more or less neutral.

A+Q can include having an extra finger or toe, being a particularly heavy (or light) sleeper, having a high (or low) tolerance for alcohol, having particularly good or bad eyesight or hearing for your race, and so forth.

 

[Hussar]

This point

It is interesting that even in the microcosm that is EN World that less than 20% of respondents (small sample size still I know) use/play with psionics or have done, with any frequency.

If this community bears out Crawford's words, then it has to be true of the broader community. Probably also supported by their own past sales data.

leads me to the same thought as

Remember how Mearls or Crawford talked about how 4e alienated people who played Gnomes even though they were played so rarely because of how it affected the tables where there were people who played Gnomes? Psionics is similar.

I really only started playing D&D (and its variants) with 3e. I have played 3-4 psionic characters, depending on how one counts it. I played a Psychic Warrior in 3e; a Psionic Sniper (whatever it was called) in d20 Modern; a Battlemind in 4e; and a Cryptic in Pathfinder/Dreamscarred Press.

There have also been a number of my players who have played psionic characters. So it's fairly frequent in my experience.

So, yeah, while even in this poll, we're only talking about a quarter of respondents who saw psionics on any regular basis, that does mean that a lot of tables probably saw it. Or, to put it another way, it's complicated.

But, they are doing a psionic class -so it's not like they're not having psionics at all. Which, I guess at the end of the day, mirrors the gnome pretty well - you get a playable psionic class ... eventually. And, it probably won't mirror the class you played in an earlier edition since they aren't going to go ahead and make completely new classes for that small segment of the gaming population. They need to thread the needle again - make something that is "good enough" for psionic fans but, not so different from mainline D&D that it needs its own ruleset.