D&D General What’s The Big Deal About Psionics?

[Azzy]

Ok not to start a fight, but I LOATHE how people point to Pun-Pun as an "example" of 3.x's balance. Pun-Pun was not a thing anyone could do easily. It required several factors.

Frst, it required the complete buy-in and approval of the DM—without which, it wouldn't be remotely possible to make the leaps of illogic that the pun pun "build" requires.

1) that a certain sourcebook was in use in the campaign.
2) that "scaled ones", which is not a type or subtype of creatures in 3.x is being applied to any creatures, let alone kobolds in the campaign.
3) that a method of acquiring the special ability of a monster is allowed in the game (I think originally Pun-Pun was "achieved" by using a Psion with a Feat that allowed you to assume a supernatural ability when polymorphing).
4) that the player has sufficient knowledge to transform into a Sarrukh, a practically extinct ancient race that most players would never encounter even IN a Forgotten Realms campaign.
5) alternately, that a DM is perfectly fine with someone making a Kobold Paladin with the specific goal of falling to gain a Wish for a Candle of Invocation from Pazuzu (knowledge of Sarrukh's is still required).

I think that's enough to show that "theoretically possible if your DM allows every step of this process" is the only way to look at Pun-Pun. The existence of any powerful build, from an Ubercharger to an Omnificer, to the "Cheater of Mystra", has these criteria attached.

Compare and contrast the Coffeelock, which originally only required the core rules* to accomplish, rather than the truly arcane steps of getting a Wish from a Demon Prince at stupidly low level.

*Core Rules-ish, I should say, since there was quite a debate on how Elven resting worked.

EDIT: forgot to clarify that Pun-Pun the Kobold started life as a Paladin.

 

[see]

Anything that is new that is unbalanced could have been designed balanced.

If something is unbalanced, that's the designer's fault for not putting things in the parameters accepted as balanced.

Only in the same sense that any new software could have been designed and implemented without bugs, and it's the programmers' fault that it isn't bug-free. Superhuman game rule designers able to see all the implications of their designs in advance are no more readily available than superhuman programmers able to see all implications of their code in advance.

(Seriously, consider all the time and effort that went into the design and playtesting of 3rd edition, and then look at the mess that its magic system was proved to be the moment people stopped using the play style that had formed under 2nd edition and exploited the rules to the fullest. Cook, Tweet, and Williams were not incompetents, and neither were all the many, many playtesters.)

D&D spell magic as eventually embodied in 5th edition is the product of many cycles of design, testing, patching, and adaptation undertaken over four decades. Unless a not-based-on-spells psionic system is explicitly made narrow and limited (and thus disappoints psionics fans), it will be more broken than 5e spell magic.

But that doesn't matter, because if the new psionics were, by a miracle, only as complicated and broken as 5e spell magic, it would be rejected by most tables. People have already learned spell magic, and already are inured to its broken bits. Most groups as a collective will not want to learn an additional system as complicated as spell magic, and when the others try it out, every time they stumble across a broken bit it will irritate because it is a new issue.

Thus, from the perspective of a publisher, a not-based-on-leveled-spells, non-trivial psionics system that works as well as spell magic would take a massive investment of resources into developing and testing something that would be widely rejected. As an economic proposition, that's inherently losing.

 

[Maxperson]

Augmentation is heightening that is balanced. When 5e requires a higher level slot for Fireball to deal more damage, it has the augmentation cost in mind.


The Warlock already has incompatibility issues with how its slots cant combine with the spell slots of other caster classes. And so on.

The more a mechanic separates from the gaming engine, the more the gaming engine shuts it out and fails to support it.

The biggest problem of the Monk too is ... weird mechanics.

We aren't going to see eye to eye here. I find different mechanics to be a strength and large selling point. I LIKE classes to be functionally different. Moving to similar class structure was the single biggest issue that I had with 4e. The more similarities between classes, the less I like them.

 

[Yaarel]

We aren't going to see eye to eye here. I find different mechanics to be a strength and large selling point. I LIKE classes to be functionally different. Moving to similar class structure was the single biggest issue that I had with 4e. The more similarities between classes, the less I like them.

I want one normal psionic class that works normally.

If there is a separate class that has experimental mechanics that other players want, that is ok with me, except, heh, I predict, I will have to ban it when it turns out to be overpowered or underpowered.

As long as my normal caster Psion class works normally, I wont need to worry about the other class failing.

 

[Yaarel]

For what it is worth, it seems Pun-Pun is what killed 3e. The designers themselves gave up on trying to make the 3e gratuitous complexity work.

 

[Azzy]

For what it is worth, it seems Pun-Pun is what killed 3e.

No it wasn't. Pun pun was a bad thought experient that actively required the DM to agree to a lot of illogic. CoDzilla and wizards killed 3e.

 

[James Gasik]

No it wasn't that at all. What killed 3e wasn't it's complexity, as it was as complex as any group allowed it to be. You weren't meant to use all the books at once, they were optional. In fact, as any long time 3e player could tell you, nothing in the game was more broken than what you could find in the core books when you came down to it. Sure, there were supplements that pushed the envelope, like fleshraker dinosaurs and spells like venomfire, but at the end of the day, DM's could certainly veto using the books they came in for their own games (so no adding FR and Eberron content together unless the group is ok with it). What happened to 3e was that the developers decided it's overall framework was untenable. People weren't happy with resource allocation over a whole day, and they began tinkering with at will powers (the Warlock) and per encounter resources (The Tome of Battle) and said "THIS will be a better framework to build the game around. We can get rid of class imbalance and create better rules for combat!".

And so they did. But unfortunately, they got carried away and realized too late that not all of the player base was ready for this.

And we know this is true because of how Paizo took the opportunity to build onto 3e and extend it's lifespan (albeit in a mutated form) by another what, a decade and a half?

 

[Yaarel]

No it wasn't. Pun pun was a bad thought experient that actively required the DM to agree to a lot of illogic. CoDzilla and wizards killed 3e.

Pun-Pun was a symbol, a battlecry, of the failure of 3e mechanics. Look at 4e, an extreme reaction by the designers of systematization against the random complexity and imbalance of 3e. And look at the "slow pace" of 5e publications. The designers have been pulling the breaks because they have been terrified of D&D ever becoming 3e again.

The 3e "system bloat" is its disparate mechanical complexity, often with tens of different ways to do the same thing.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I want one normal psionic class that works normally.

If there is a separate class that has experimental mechanics that other players want, that is ok with me, except, heh, I predict, I will have to ban it when it turns out to be overpowered or underpowered.

As long as my normal caster Psion class works normally, I wont need to worry about the other class failing.

If you just want a dressed up spellcaster called a Psion you already have that in a sorcerer that is reskinned with a thematic choice of spells.

But that is, at the end of the day, a reskinned sorcerer and not worthy of being called a different base class

 

[teitan]

Short and simple: no, properly done psionics aren't just "spells with a different name". You can get away with a system that uses spells/spell points to replicate psionics, but to really invoke the feels of say, Dark Sun, psionics are not just spells.

Yeah but arguably they have never been properly done. 1e was wonky, 2e was straight broken, 3.x was also bad, 4e was samey as everyone else. 5e is the first time I have been like, ok, I like where they went with them this time. It's unified and sure the Psionicist is essentially a Sorceror but they flavored the Aberrant Mind enough that it's interesting enough and different enough to be fun.