the aberrant mind just sucks as the sorcerer sucks
This is in dispute. More accurately I'd have said that the
pre-Tasha's sorcerers suck, but the Abberant Mind and Clockwork Soul and Lunar Sorcerer don't because they've fixed what made the sorcerer suck. And the 5.24 sorcerer doesn't look as if it's going to suck. We are on the second or third attempt at a balanced sorcerer class in 5e.
and I want something other than sorcerer?
You've an entire buffet of psychic options in D&D 5e:
- Aberrant Mind Sorcerer
- GOOlock (my first ever 5e character was a GOOlock Psion - and the 3.24 one looks pretty good)
- Whispers Bard. Also Eloquence or Glamour
- Soulknife Rogue
- Psi Warrior Fighter
- Astral Self Monk
You already have plenty of other psychic options. Aberrant Mind isn't
my first choice for a psychic character. Depending on the character for me that would be either a 5.24 GOOlock or a Soulknife. Where they can do things - but the major thing about them isn't rationing power points and counting the number of spells.
But the Aberrant Mind hits just about all the mechanical beats that made the psion distinct from a wizard; it's a powerpoint class with fungible power points that doesn't use V, S, or M components when using its psychic spells, and can upcast. There are only a few major mechanical differences between an Aberrant Mind and a 2e or 3.5 Psion:
- It doesn't get 70 pages worth of extruded spells paid for by the page and frequently called things like Levitation, Psionic. Instead it gets a psychic spin on existing spells without bothering to rename the spells.
- It has a whiff of calamari - and most fictional psychics who are primary casters are explicitly creepy and outsiders
- It calls itself a subclass not a class.
- It is forced to use Charisma not intelligence. (I'd argue (a) psychics should default to charisma and (b) there should be more flexibility for a lot of classes in casting stat - when I'm not outright Death To Ability Scores).
why on earth possess people too think like that it seems pointless. do they hate the idea or would they rather the design team work on something else?
Yes. Yes I think the idea of the psion sucks like an industrial strength hoover and the implementations have sucked like Charybdis in every edition they have been in (even 4e but that was for different resasons). And I think that the design team has produced the best psionics D&D has ever had - and I would rather they worked on something else.
Now why,
conceptually do I think the psion sucks as a representation of psychic characters? (As I believe I've made clear I am a fan of psionics - just not the psion).
- Psychic characters are not D&D spellcasters. D&D spellcasters are all about throwing around a huge variety of spells. Psychics in fiction tend to just have a tiny handful of fundamental abilities that they have to build off.
- Particularly for the "big" psionic characters (Prof X, Jean Grey, Carrie, Mewtoo, Emperor Palpatine) psychics have an otherness or creepiness about them, and psions from the design brief feel a lot more antiseptic than wizards. Tying them to the Far Realm adds that in - and as well as being a thematic match mechanically matches a significant portion of fiction including Warhammer 40k and Babylon 5.
- Having one core psychic class sucks up all the air in the room and says that "Psionics work this way", leaving actually good implementations of various types of psychic (like the Soulknife or even the OneD&D GOOlock) looking odd.
And this is
before we get into the implementation costs like 70 pages of spells.
