Unearthed Arcana Why UA Psionics are never going to work in 5e.

[MechaTarrasque]

Sword and sorcery fantasy often champions unconventional moralities, but they are moralities none the less. REH's Conan stories are about the hypocrisy of civilization (it would be hard to be more blatant about it than Red Nails). How often does Conan have to deal with a socially respectable dirtbag whose word is worth less than that of mangiest cut purse?

Urban fantasy, the romantic triangle cluttered descendant of sword and sorcery, almost always pushes the morality of "to thyself be true, the heck with what society says" which is attractive to teenagers.

Even pro wrestling manages to slip (an admittedly dubious) morality into most of the matches or characters. Look at the last Wrestlemania, thee of the biggest matches were straight up morality tales: Don't stab your best friend in the back (Edge vs. Randy Orton), If you steal an other guy's dream girl, don't rub it in his face (Otis vs. Dolph Ziggler), and Don't bad mouth somebody's wife or he will toss you off a building and throw you into a shallow grave (Undertaker vs. AJ Styles).

 

[Chaosmancer]

I'm confused as to why it's useful to restrict the sample set to novels.

Let's suppose that if we do that (no short stories, films, plays, oral tales, poems, comics, video games, etc.) the distinction Hussar is describing is not only prevalent, but absolute. That is, every single fantasy novel is obviously about morality, and every single science fiction novel is obviously about what it means to be human.

What does that actually get us, other than an interesting and curious correlation? All those other media are still valid examples of genre...why exclude them?

I agree with most all of this (excepting that the distinction is absolute) but mostly I wonder what is served by limiting the discussion of Genre to a single medium.

And @Hussar while you may have only ever been talking about "novels" you did not in fact dismiss other forms of medium until it was mentioned that Fantasy as a genre is much older than even the existence of most novels.

And, I do not know why you think you need to start throwing around charges of "anti-intellectualism" when the discussion has always been far broader than novels and has been a discussion of genre. My own posts have included examples of Movies and Television Shows. I do not think anyone could legitimately claim that movies cannot fall into either the Fantasy or Science Fiction genre, and if we are defining the genre and how it is different, then those media must be either included, or we must declare that the medium of a story can utterly change the genre of a story, which I think is false.

If you want to be done with the conversation, that is fine, but I would say that getting angry at us for continuing in the broad vein that we have been discussing this entire time, and for calling you out that the genre is larger than simply "novels" seems to be unreasonable.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

Dunno how much this will add to the conversation, but I think it's a neat little fact that has relevance to the current conversation:

One of the earliest agreed depictions of Science Fiction is The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter which, to quote the Wikipedia article "is a 10th-century Japanese monogatari (fictional prose narrative) containing Japanese folklore. It is considered the oldest extant Japanese prose narrative although the oldest manuscript dates to 1592."

In addition, if could also be considered one of the earliest novels in the world, considering it, supposedly, came out around the same time as The Tale of Genji, which, depending on who you ask, is one of the first novels ever made, though, again, this is a matter of perception.

 

[Aldarc]

So to tie-in this past nonsense to the thread topic: psionics can never happen in 5e because science fiction novels have maybe half-a-century longer compositional history in Euro-America than fantasy novels. Is that about right?

All of this seems silly to me. Why does it matter if psionics is sci-fi or fantasy? Debating genre obfuscates the issue. What matters is that psionics are an established part of the D&D mythos and fantasy. The question we should ask is "how would that look like for player-facing options?" and "what flavor text would work that could incorporate psionics in the present fabric of 5e?" I will say at the outset to this last question that the particular Far Realms explanation that Mearls pushed for the Mystic received negative feedback from testers.

 

[Guest 6801328]

So to tie-in this past nonsense to the thread topic: psionics can never happen in 5e because science fiction novels have maybe half-a-century longer compositional history in Euro-America than fantasy novels. Is that about right?

All of this seems silly to me. Why does it matter if psionics is sci-fi or fantasy? Debating genre obfuscates the issue.

Glad you think the opinions of some of us are silly.

 

[Aldarc]

Glad you think the opinions of some of us are silly.

It's not the people or opinions that I find silly, but the line of discussion. I don't think that this tangential red herring discussion is particularly relevant because I don't think that it answers anything useful regarding our discussion on psionics in D&D or 5e D&D.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Glad you think the opinions of some of us are silly.

I think the opinions of a lot of us are silly, especially those who claim to want psionics but are not prepared to compromise and accept the WotC's vision is the only vision on offer (apart from 3PP).

 

[Guest 6801328]

I think the opinions of a lot of us are silly, especially those who claim to want psionics but are not prepared to compromise and accept the WotC's vision is the only vision on offer (apart from 3PP).

I don’t know if I would use “silly”, but futile, yes.

I love brainstorming about mechanics, and there are lots of things I wish WotC...and really every publisher...had done differently, but I do tire of hearing armchair designers disparage not just game rules, but the competence, intelligence, and motives of the humans behind those rules.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So to tie-in this past nonsense to the thread topic: psionics can never happen in 5e because science fiction novels have maybe half-a-century longer compositional history in Euro-America than fantasy novels. Is that about right?

All of this seems silly to me. Why does it matter if psionics is sci-fi or fantasy? Debating genre obfuscates the issue. What matters is that psionics are an established part of the D&D mythos and fantasy. The question we should ask is "how would that look like for player-facing options?" and "what flavor text would work that could incorporate psionics in the present fabric of 5e?" I will say at the outset to this last question that the particular Far Realms explanation that Mearls pushed for the Mystic received negative feedback from testers.

I think it matters because there seems to be an easy solution to part of the problem.

Say Psionics is a form of magic, and a lot of things stop being issues. There is no question about how Psionics and spells interact, there is no reason not to use spells to represent psionic effects that they mirror, and we can balance them around existing spellcasters and existing systems. Even if they work slightly differently we don't have the issue of trying to find a way balance a system that doesn't interact with the existing systems.

But, people wish to keep insisting that Psionics isn't magic, that it has nothing to do with magic, that it works entirely different from magic, that it's very existence is different from magic. But, that just doesn't seem to be true, and trying to explore that difference is what led us into Fantasy versus Science Fiction.

 

[Aldarc]

I think it matters because there seems to be an easy solution to part of the problem.

Say Psionics is a form of magic, and a lot of things stop being issues. There is no question about how Psionics and spells interact, there is no reason not to use spells to represent psionic effects that they mirror, and we can balance them around existing spellcasters and existing systems. Even if they work slightly differently we don't have the issue of trying to find a way balance a system that doesn't interact with the existing systems.

But, people wish to keep insisting that Psionics isn't magic, that it has nothing to do with magic, that it works entirely different from magic, that it's very existence is different from magic. But, that just doesn't seem to be true, and trying to explore that difference is what led us into Fantasy versus Science Fiction.

I'm still not sure that this conversation matters for the purposes of answering this genre question. If we want to discuss whether psionics in D&D is magic, then this just goes back to what @DEFCON 1 said: it depends on what is meant by magic.

It's odd to me, for example, that divine "magic" constitutes magic considering that there is a long pattern in history of saying that supernatural effects performed by the faithful are "miracles" and explicitly not magical, since "magic" is something performed by the non-faithful, charlatans, pagans, etc. But by D&D standards, the "magic" of wizards and the "miracles" of clerics are one and the same: magic.

I don't mind psionics being a form of magic, as per 3e and 4e D&D, BUT this is again where I take issue: the attempt by people to advocate that the wizard subsume all things magical. So I would argue that psionics, psychics, and the "occult" (to borrow the Pathfinder 2 term) do have a sufficiently different set of class fantasy and aesthetics from the wizard, warlock, and sorcerer to justify its own identity as a class or form of magic (e.g., divine, arcane, etc.). I would also say that this form of magic may even have its own advantages (and disadvantages) and that a lack of material components would be part of that, since that fits the aesthetics. I did like the earlier suggested idea that a Psion gradually learns to remove the need of the various spell components or can play with concentration mechanics for their spells/powers, but that it's not necessarily automatic.