D&D (2024) What Should a Psion Be Able To Do?

Because it protects you from being detected.
But it doesn't actually protect you from being detected. It enables you to avoid creating tracks. Like that's literally in the name: you pass without trace. Surely that should be Illusion, since its only function is to make it harder for people to observe you, or at very least Transmutation (as levitate is, since passing over ground without leaving marks is functionally a form of very weak levitation).

Like by this standard anything which provides THP should be an Abjuration spell, but you'll find that that is actually Conjuration or Necromancy--such spells protect you from being damaged, and yet aren't Abjuration.

The spell schools are 100% pure ad hoc nonsense, not even remotely trying for clean scientific categorization. (One of many reasons why D&D Wizards aren't scientists, they're hermetic philosophers.)

Edit: Hell, power word fortify is an ENCHANTMENT spell. So apparently, you can hand out THP by just making people really really confident they won't get hurt!
 

log in or register to remove this ad

:/ The world is a lot bigger than Europe.
I'm not sure how one would classify , say, Eastern mysticism as "psychic" without Victorian eroticism.

Please explain the coexisting "magic" and "psionics" in pre-Victorian, non-European parlance. Because as far as I have ever encountered, the difference between what can be called "magic" broadly and "psychic power" is purely a modern (Victorian) invention.
 

That's the point. Without the "mystique" what is the point of psions in a world that has 6 other kinds of magic already?
By not being a full caster and having a different way of accessing the power.

Magic can do anything.
Wizards cannot. They have their limits
Psion should have different limits.

Rogues and fighters deal damage, but do so differently, and feel different in play. Even if they both average out to 20 damage a turn.


IMO, I would make Psions more limited in what they can do, but let them do it more often. Closer to a Warlock, and a more focused.
 

What if they could cast slot spells at-will?
Use Magic Missile or Burning Hands as cantrips.

I e.
Telekinetic
You can cast magic missile at-will.
Your spell level increases as you gain levels on Psion.

Add some points for metamagic.
 


The entire game is "magic" by that usage. Every class and darned near every monster does impossible things. Dispel Magic should vaporize everything.
Well, yeah, the entire game is about magic. But some people want psionics to be something that works just like magic but isn't magic. shrug. But if psionics are a huge power system with monsters and items to support it, the game would need to have psionics built into the very fabric of the core game so there are built in foils for it. Otherwise anything "magic" can't interact with psionics and it just dogpiles more onto the unstoppable psionic power fantasy. Which is a big reason I'm fine with psionics being magic, but a different path/source to access and wield it.

I do not want separate unique magic/power systems for arcane, divine, primal, music, psionic, occult sources. The game would be too unwieldy and every different power system would still need to mirror most powers because most of those power sources need to be able to functionally perform the same effects as everyone else. We don't need 5 slightly different Cure Wounds powers or 5 different ranged single target fire cantrips.

And Dispel Magic only unravels spells. Sure, it says "Choose one creature, object, or magical effect within range." But the only thing it actually does is end "Any ongoing spell of level 3 or lower (scalable)." Unlike previous editions, it it no longer dispels, suppresses, or otherwise hinders magic items, magical creatures, or magical effects that aren't actual spells. It does not affect magical monster abilities or magical class/subclass abilities that aren't technically spells.
 

And Dispel Magic only unravels spells. Sure, it says "Choose one creature, object, or magical effect within range." But the only thing it actually does is end "Any ongoing spell of level 3 or lower (scalable)." Unlike previous editions, it it no longer dispels, suppresses, or otherwise hinders magic items, magical creatures, or magical effects that aren't actual spells. It does not affect magical monster abilities or magical class/subclass abilities that aren't technically spells.
Unless the traps rules have changed in the 2024 rules Dispel Magic is used to disarm magical traps.
 

I'm not sure how one would classify , say, Eastern mysticism as "psychic" without Victorian eroticism.

Please explain the coexisting "magic" and "psionics" in pre-Victorian, non-European parlance. Because as far as I have ever encountered, the difference between what can be called "magic" broadly and "psychic power" is purely a modern (Victorian) invention.
1748704418396.png


Just throwing that out there, not that I expect you to read it. But lemme try to put it another way:

In Sumerian myth, there is no "Magic". Only Power. The Gods had power, monsters had power, and some mortals had power. Inanna, Goddess of Love and War, had the power to turn men into women and women into men, to bring the storms, to encourage plants to grow. To do practically whatever she wanted because she was the Queen of Heaven. And we know this because sometime around 3,000 BCE, Enheduanna wrote a hymn syncretizing Inanna to the Assyrian goddess Ishtar when her father Sargon founded the Akkadian empire.

In the myth of her escape from the underworld ruled by her sister, Ereshkigal, she grants power to Assushumanir, the first nonbinary person to exist, to possess foresight and great fortune or luck. Is that a D&D God handing down Magic to a worshipper, or is it Inanna granting Assushunamir psionics, or is it just the goddess granting power with no special delineation as to the specific name of that power?

We can retroactively call it Magic or Psionics or Whatever term we want... but they did not consider it "Magic" because Magic as a concept wouldn't exist for another 2,000 years when the Old Persian language came around with the term "magush" which meant "To have" or "To be able to use" Power. Because, again, the Old Persian language did not have a word for "Magic".

So is "Magic" just "Power"? Power is the older word, after all. (Technically the older word is EMUQ, which we've translated as 'Power' because it's also used to describe physical strength)

Herein lies the central problem with the question: No one can provide you with what you're demanding because you're demanding a specific linguistic term (and child terms) to be applied to conceits that exist in societies without them. Hell, "Magic" didn't exist in most societies until after it was introduced as a concept to them by the Western World. And regional terms have been translated to mean or be equivalent to "Magic" independent of the actual definition of the word within a given language because it's the closest linguistic approximate when translating to English.

When Buddhist monks in Tibet describe the power they can gain through meditation it's generally referred to as "Spiritual" power. And within their language and society that doesn't mean "Magic" it just means the power of the spirit, the inner self, to perceive the world as it truly is. Is that "Magic" because it's the word we have and use for that sort of thing?

But in the modern day we comfortably say Inanna was magic because she's a supernatural mythical entity. And we comfortably say that she grants Assushunamir magic because it's a supernatural power. And what is "Supernatural" but Magic by another name, right?

And what is Magic but Psionics by an earlier, more primitive, term..? What is the "Supernatural" but the Paranormal by a less accurate moniker? After all, if it exists in the world it cannot be "Supernatural" for it is, indeed, part of the reality of that world, the foundations of Nature, itself.

And around and around and around we go.

The world is more interesting when there's more than "Just Magic". Even if the definition of magic can be stretched to cover everything.
 
Last edited:

I'm not sure how one would classify , say, Eastern mysticism as "psychic" without Victorian eroticism.

Please explain the coexisting "magic" and "psionics" in pre-Victorian, non-European parlance. Because as far as I have ever encountered, the difference between what can be called "magic" broadly and "psychic power" is purely a modern (Victorian) invention.
We're talking about psionics in D&D, not the specific "psychic" culture of the Western world which was itself also inspired by non-Western sources.

Psionics is a mish-mash of borrowed ideas that includes things from religions, philosophies, occult practices, and scammy magicians from around the world and throughout history, filtered through comic books, pulp novels, and modern occult groups. You can still find Buddhists doing "levitation", Yogi mystics who aren't just doing stretches, people who sincerely believe they can use their culture's version of Astral Projection, etc.
 

I'm not sure how one would classify , say, Eastern mysticism as "psychic" without Victorian eroticism.

Please explain the coexisting "magic" and "psionics" in pre-Victorian, non-European parlance. Because as far as I have ever encountered, the difference between what can be called "magic" broadly and "psychic power" is purely a modern (Victorian) invention.
IRL, "psychic power" is a veneer of pseudoscience over magic woo. But in fiction, there's definitely a difference – particularly from the scholarly type of magic D&D wizards do.

And as with most fictional things, the edges of the concept are kind of nebulous. It is clear that at the center of the concept of psychic power we have telepathy (primarily mental communication, but spreading out into things like empathy, projected empathy, suggestion, direct mind control, mental probes, mental illusions, etc.), telekinesis (moving things with your mind, levitation, attacks either via thrown items or direct force punches, force choke, assisted movement like superjumps, shields), and remote viewing (seeing/hearing things in distant places, psychometry, precognition, seeing and communicating with spirits). Then you get some things that are more peripheral, like biokinesis, teleportation in time and/or space, or manipulating various sorts of energies like fire/heat or electricity. At the outer edges you get things that fall into the "I guess" category, like molecular alchemy or reality warping.

One aspect I like to have in my psionics is that of psionics being actively directed by the psion. This is mostly a flavor thing, but it does affect the kind of things I think they should be able to do. Magic can often do things independently. You animate an object, you give it an order, and then the object carries that order out independently. A psion who telekinetically animates an object should have to actively puppeteer it. A cleric with a bucket of dirty water can purify it, and all the impurities will be purged. A psion doing the same thing would have to psychically sift through the water to find and identify the impurities and telekinetically lift them out. This is also why I think psionics work best with related powers: your main power is e.g. telekinesis, and you have learned to use the telekinesis to do X, Y, and Z. But you can't read minds, because that's not telekinesis. And the only way you can change someone's mind with telekinesis is through retrophrenology.
 

Remove ads

Top