Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana Revisits Psionics

The latest Unearthed Arcana from WotC revisits some psionic rules! “Shine with the power of the mind in this installment of Unearthed Arcana! Today we revisit several psi-themed options that we released in the past few months. Studying your feedback on those options, we’ve crafted this new collection of subclasses, spells, and feats, found in the PDF below.“

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[Flamestrike]

They need a Psion class, and until they have one, I'm going to be pretty frowny-face about all their psionics stuff. What's particularly ridiculous is, they HAD a perfectly good one with the Mystic, it just needed tweaking, but they threw it in the trash due to what appears to be internal WotC infighting. The excuses they give here are trash, frankly. The Artificer is a bigger problem in terms of "encroaching" yet apparently that's not a concern? Come off it.

That said, this is a considerable improvement on what they had, if largely because they're clearer on what they think Psionics is (not exactly the same as what I think it is, Psionics doesn't "cast spells" guys, but any clarity is helpful).

Ditching the Psionics Wizard is great, even if I say RIP to Id Insinuation, a spell I'd been using to great effect on my Bard in an Eberron campaign (there's always Dissonant Whispers).

The die size changing thing is completely silly. How could anyone even write that down? You get lucky twice in a row, even when you don't want to be lucky, and basically all your subclass abilities become unusable? What on earth?

If it shrunk to a minimum of d4, and could come back up, that'd be fine, if unnecessary and fiddly. You have can reset it 1/long rest, which is awful, because you could literally get a total of 4 rolls out of it (until it upgrades, then it's 6, then 8, and so on), and they might not even be necessary (i.e. you roll a six on the long jump when you didn't need to jump that far, just longer than before). They should either remove the mechanic entirely, bottom out at d4 (keeping the reset mechanic), or let you roll a smaller die intentionally, and have that not count towards either increase or exhaustion.

Some of the roll-based abilities are pretty awful because you as a player have to assume you're going to get 1, and you can't count on anything else, and there's not even necessarily any benefit on getting a higher number (Psionic Discovery being a prime example - you're not going to do that unless you need the spell in the next hour, and having it for longer probably isn't going to help you).

On a personal note, it seems really weird Mind Sliver gets removed from the Bard spell list, but stays on all other Arcane casters. It's more appropriate on a Bard than a Wizard, by miles.

Feats seem solid. Telepathic Feat would solve a lot of problems and be cool for a lot of characters.

But if WotC really aren't going to give us a Psion-type class, that's clearly internal politics, not "the players have spoken", and it's completely ridiculous. If they do Athas without doing that, it's vandalism.

Any reason you cant do Psion with the Enchanter Wizard as a base? Fluff the spellbook as a Crystal, and select divination, enchantment and non flashy spells like telekinesis, expeditious retreat, blade ward, friends, false life, jump, longstrider, puppet, sense emotion, crown of madness, suggestion, phantasmal force, clairvoyance, enemies abound, sending, confusion, mage hand, charm person, dominate person, hold person, psychic scream, synaptic static, mind thrust, mage armor, shield, modify memory, telepathic bond, magic jar, mass suggestion, ottos irresistable dance, true seeing, reverse gravity, antipathy/ sympathy, feeblemind, mindblank, telepathy, astral projection, foresight, levitate, animate objects etc and so forth?

It's a Psion in all but name.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Let's say I show up to the car dealer with my nice honda civic because I also wanted to buy a jeep to give me a different driving experience. When I ask the salesman to see a jeep, he shows me a honda civic like the one I own with a lift-kit and asks me if that 's what I'm looking for.

"No, thanks. I want something MORE different than what I have."

He goes off and pulls around the corner with another honda civic, painted jeep-green, and asks me if this is the jeep I was looking for.

"No, thanks. I'm looking for something different than the car I own."

The salesman finally drives over in a civic with a cloth top. "Is this the jeep you're looking for?"

I don't want a sorcerer with the SAME spells, progression, and the same foundation with a few psionic flavored things tacked on. I don't want a fighter who is vanilla until I've played him for a month and gets a die for damage and a defender ability that turns off if you roll too well, too often. I just want a dedicated psion class and a psionic warrior that encompasses the ardent, soulknife, psychic warrior, battlemind, etc.

This would be less of an issue if subclasses were more robust, but that ship has sailed. You cannot make a real swordmage out of a fighter with a subclass. There isn't enough room to make a battlemind out of fighter with a few limited tricks. There isn't enough designs space to make a sorcerer with a the same spell list as every other caster at the table into a psion that's meaningfully different. They should include these optional subclasses, by all means, but they really, really need to just make full classes too.

And your concerns echo my own. The problem with the subclass system in general is that it intrinsically prohibits making characters that are different from Day One. Everybody has to be the same for a level or two and then get different stuff, which just does not work conceptually with a lot of ideas.

The subclasses, especially wizard/caster subclasses, suffer from the dual disadvantage of being too different without being different enough. I can understand WotC's reluctance to add more base classes, but I really feel they could have thought this one through a bit better from the outset.

 

[gyor]

I haven't really done a deep dive into here yet, but it appears to be a distinct improvement over the previous version. Sorcerer mechanics are a much better fit for how i envision a psion working than wizard spellbooks etc.

However ... one thing I'm a little wary of is having ANOTHER caster archetype (especially if we get something like Athas where psions are a major and common feature of the setting and should probably be at least as common as all other sorcerers put together) based around charisma. I ran into this problem when i was trying to stat out my very first 5e PC, a warlock. I wanted to play a distrusted, socially-inept oddball of a dwarf who'd been trapped in a mine cave-in and made his warlock pact in desperation. But if he's going to be a useful warlock, he has to be charismatic?

I could certainly see the same difficulty with 'psionic soul' sorcerors. Absent-minded, smelly and vague seers, taciturn and inward-focused psychometabolists? There's psionic archetypes that really don't fit the high-Cha mold. I really hope that WotC just for once in the case of the 'psionic soul' breaks the standard sorcerer template and lets the player choose whether int, wis, or cha is their casting stat at level 1.

Also, I really hope they actually give psion/sorcerers a separate spell list. There's just some sorcerer spells that really don't fit. In fact, I'd be in favour of brutally trimming the sorcerer spell list (and adding a few appropriate spells from other lists like Divination, Geas, Sending, Locate Object, Astral Projection, etc etc) and maybe even giving the class some extra sorcery points or something to compensate...

Remember the intimidation skill is also charisma based, so play up the Charisma as a very intimidation based, and maybe not completely natural charisma, but a reflection of your Patron's presence seeming out of the character.

 

[dave2008]

I wanna Psion.

I don't want psionics at all!

Sorry, I just couldn't hold back anymore. I've never liked psionics in my D&D. That being said I don't mind other people getting what they want. It doesn't affect my game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Any reason you cant do Psion with the Enchanter Wizard as a base? Fluff the spellbook as a Crystal, and select divination, enchantment and non flashy spells like telekinesis, expeditious retreat, blade ward, friends, false life, jump, longstrider, puppet, sense emotion, crown of madness, suggestion, phantasmal force, clairvoyance, enemies abound, sending, confusion, mage hand, charm person, dominate person, hold person, psychic scream, synaptic static, mind thrust, mage armor, shield, modify memory, telepathic bond, magic jar, mass suggestion, ottos irresistable dance, true seeing, reverse gravity, antipathy/ sympathy, feeblemind, mindblank, telepathy, astral projection, foresight, levitate, animate objects etc and so forth?

It's a Psion in all but name.

No. This is the sort of thing that lead to the idiocy that was the Psionic Wizard, and it shows you literally don't have the foggiest clue what a Psion is. You think they're just a Wizard? No. The Mystic was close to the right place.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I'm becoming less and less enthused by WotC's designs over time. I'm going to stick with Kibblestasty's Psion instead.

If only more people realized there is absolutely nothing wrong with using 3PP stuff in their games. Most of the complaints would waft away because people were already happily using what they actually wanted, rather than hanging their hopes that WotC designed the exact specific thing in the exact specific format they wanted something to be.

I thought Kibbletasty's Artificer was absolutely fabulous, and made that available to my players for my Eberron games. And as a result, I never once bothered caring what WotC did with their Artificer playtest work. And by the same token if people want a Psion as a class for their game... they have the old Mystic they can use and or re-balance, or they can use Kibbeltasty's Psion, which has I think four subclasses for it? There are options out there for people to use right now, they just have to be willing to do so.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No. This is the sort of thing that lead to the idiocy that was the Psionic Wizard, and it shows you literally don't have the foggiest clue what a Psion is. You think they're just a Wizard? No. The Mystic was close to the right place.

Heh... well, I suspect it's really about whatever particular bugaboo someone has about what is or isn't a psionic character. For one person like @Flamestrike, it's having 30 different psychic abilities available that would instill the feeling of having a psion... but then for someone else, all they'd need to see is the phrase "spell components" still connected to them to instantly throw the entire blanking system out. All that particular player needs is to see "No components" and "can't be dispelled/counterspelled and works in an anti-magic field" and the class could have just like 2 abilities and everything would still be hunky-dory.

People are going to get hung up on whatever they get hung up about. But at the end of the day WotC ain't gonna please everyone with whatever they come up with... so everyone is just fighting tooth and nail for the scraps that are out there so that they are the ones who end up with the closest approximation of what they want once WotC gets through.

 

[DammitVictor]

Why is that?

Because if it's optional, there's an almost overwhelming probability that people aren't going to take something that doesn't improve their main concept-- the game is designed to actively discourage this,.

Also, would simply giving DS characters bonus feats they can apply to psionic feats only do the trick?

Yeah, it would. That would be fine. It will probably be a great house rule if DS ever comes out.

 

[Umbran]

... the idiocy...
... don't have the foggiest clue...

Mod Note:
Dude. How about you continue in this thread with about 90% less insulting of people's intelligence in your posts. Embrace the idea that folks can have working brains, but like things that aren't your cup of tea.

 

[ZeshinX]

...or they can use Kibbeltasty's Psion...

Whereabouts might I find this? (wouldn't mind having a looksee). Couldn't find anything on DM's Guild (so wondering if it might be on this site or somewhere else).