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

Incenjucar said:

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.

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And this honestly isnt even that difficult to find.

When I was working on my Shadowdark Psion in early April, I was doing a bunch of reading, tracing it all back.

There is practically a direct line from the psion as D&D implemented, to Eastern roots.

I mean look at the era folks, its all there.

Staffan said:

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.

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I mean, most supernatural abilities are essentially forms of magic with different explanations. A shaman going on a spirit journey isn't all that different than a Saint visiting heaven, a witch throwing their spirit, or a psychic astral projecting. They all share enough similarities to use a similar mechanic to represent them.

Remathilis said:

I mean, most supernatural abilities are essentially forms of magic with different explanations. A shaman going on a spirit journey isn't all that different than a Saint visiting heaven, a witch throwing their spirit, or a psychic astral projecting. They all share enough similarities to use a similar mechanic to represent them.

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It's more the other way around. Everything was just a normal part of the world until we started dividing it up and figuring out some of it was wrong. Aspirin is a Relieve Pain potion etc.

Steampunkette said:

"Magic" covers everything supernatural or not-normal to our world for some folks.

And that's okay. In most stories and settings, that's all there is.

It doesn't mean, however, you cannot have a setting with multiple types of power.

Superhero Comics, for example, have weird science, impossible technology, mutation, psychic powers, magic, alien physiology, and more all existing alongside one another.

For some readers, it could easily all be classified as magic. It's reductive of the narrative, but it's what they prefer, clearly.

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I agree that it's all magic. Those more specific classifications still make a narrative difference for me - psionics in D&D annoys the heck out of me because in my head it is conflated with all the pseudoscientific psychic woo that some folks take seriously IRL.

Similarly, one of my very religious cousins got annoyed with me when I conflated "miraculous" with "magical."

Incenjucar said:

It's more the other way around. Everything was just a normal part of the world until we started dividing it up and figuring out some of it was wrong. Aspirin is a Relieve Pain potion etc.

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There was still a divide between the material world and the spirit world (whatever that looks like to each group). And magic was the work of that spirit realm. Aspirin might be a good example of low magic/alchemy, but seeing the elder for faith medicine was something different.

Remathilis said:

I mean, most supernatural abilities are essentially forms of magic with different explanations. A shaman going on a spirit journey isn't all that different than a Saint visiting heaven, a witch throwing their spirit, or a psychic astral projecting. They all share enough similarities to use a similar mechanic to represent them.

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Sure. My point is more that since there are no real psychic powers, anymore than there are real wizards or miracleworkers, there's no firm ground to stand on to say what psionics are. It all depends on which fiction you'd like them to be. My idea is very much colored by the 2e Complete Psionics Handbook – even if the mechanics could be better, that's the kind of things I want psionics to be.

Remathilis said:

There was still a divide between the material world and the spirit world (whatever that looks like to each group). And magic was the work of that spirit realm. Aspirin might be a good example of low magic/alchemy, but seeing the elder for faith medicine was something different.

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Depends on the culture. The world is very, very big, and humanity has come up with pretty much any variation you could hope to imagine. Journey to the West alone is a bunch of different belief systems directly interacting and sometimes punching each other.

Remathilis said:

There was still a divide between the material world and the spirit world (whatever that looks like to each group). And magic was the work of that spirit realm. Aspirin might be a good example of low magic/alchemy, but seeing the elder for faith medicine was something different.

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This divide was nowhere near as firm as you are implying. It was porous as hell (sometimes literally, as in, literally places analogous to the Underworld were porous and ordinary people could visit them simply by finding the physical entrances here on Earth. Consider the myth of Cupid and Psyche.)

I literally did a paper (and presentation) on this in my Latin studies. The Ancient perspective (and to a great extent the Medieval perspective as well) simply, flatly, did not separate things cleanly along such lines.

Literally the exact same practice could be religious worship, witchcraft, or (natural) philosophy (which is the term that closest corresponds to what we would call "science" today), simply depending on the context in which it occurred. We have recovered curse tablets written by perfectly ordinary Roman citizens hoping the gods would bring about their wishes. Kings and emperors routinely expected things we call "supernatural" to be just...part of the world. E.g. we have correspondence from Grand Duke Cosimo I ordering his advisors to ask their unicorn horn vendor to send a replacement because the one they have isn't working. And that's from the Renaissance!

So...yeah. This idea that there was the purely supernatural on one side and the purely natural on the other side and they only met in specific ways? Completely a modern invention. To the Ancient and Medieval mind, there was...the world. It had powers in it. Some of those powers were directly perceivable. Others weren't. The riddle of steel was as much "supernatural" as a curse tablet, especially because it turns out that, coincidentally, using the bones of powerful prey as part of the fuel for the furnace adds trace minerals that do in fact strengthen steel, and may even accidentally create carbon nanotubes, so some "magical" thinking actually did produce entirely natural benefits.

It's genuinely very hard to get into the mind of someone from 2000 years ago, not because they were any different from us cognitively, but because they genuinely believed that gods and spirits and Powers etc. were also part of the natural world, just an esoteric, complex part. Hence why even (what we might call) "scientific" works would talk heavily about gods and spirits and Powers! De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things") was, for its time, functionally a "scientific" text, and talks about many things we would call supernatural.

Reynard said:

But I really don't see the draw in a world with a bunch of other kinds of magic already.

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Its a big, wide world with at least 15 types of dragons, owlbears, 6 different types of giant murderous sea urchin, and all of those centaur variants back in 2E

Plenty of room for weirder magic stuff like psionics to be around (plus, y'know, psionics being in every edition and tied to very iconic creatures like illithids)

Reynard said:

Just to be clear: psionics is a perfectly valid magic system on its own. And it is a good choice if you want to hard juxtapose it against some other form of magic. But I really don't see the draw in a world with a bunch of other kinds of magic already.

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Well, three things.

1. Genre fiction. That's pretty much what D&D is built on. Further, it's one of the reasons why both Eberron and Dark Sun were functionally instant classics. Eberron contains several types of genre fiction which are closely adjacent to the pervasive tropes of the usual D&D genre fiction, but not quite reachable because it required dipping just a little into modernity: train heists, noir (whether detective or otherwise), any fiction set in the IRL "Interbellum" period between the two World Wars, specifically archaeological pulp fiction (e.g. Alan Quatermain, Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, etc.), the whole 19th century Spiritualism "movement", the Egyptomania that swelled and ebbed from basically 1800 all the way to WWII and was thus the foundation of a HUGE set of modern thriller/horror/occult fiction, etc. Likewise, Dark Sun captures a different "side", if you will, of some of the genre fiction D&D is built on, while also capturing a different, distinct set of adjacent genre fiction elements compared to what Eberron does: sword-and-sandal, sword-and-planet, the gritty-survivalist side of Conan, the "Dying Earth" notion, various dystopias, what Pratchett would have termed "a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset" where it actually is in question whether or not we "live in vain", etc.
2. As noted above, occultism, 19th century Spiritualism, and descendants thereof are a popular and interesting field. We of course have to be careful when working with it, as those things grew from kinda crappy soil, full of Orientalist nonsense and built on the back of flagrant cultural appropriation. (And I really do mean appropriation, as in, LITERALLY stealing the cultural heritage of Egypt/North Africa, Greece, and South and Central America to cart off to museums thousands of miles away for white people to look at...or destroy...or eat....) But that doesn't mean we cannot ever touch such things. We just have to go in eyes open and recognizing what we're doing, and try to handle it better than our ancestors did. Though, surprisingly, even some of these stories are less racist than one might expect--certainly not great by modern standards, but including things like "maybe disturbing the long-dead of a different culture is a BAD thing that people just SHOULD NOT DO??? I dunno, could be smart". Then, postmodern remakes like 1999's The Mummy show how there are ways to be respectful of the local culture without completely jettisoning the cool stories we love. In that case, splitting Ardath Bay from Imhotep, making the former a guardian of the tomb and an ally to the lead characters once the titular mummy has already been released, who simply wanted to prevent said mummy from being released.
3. Using mechanical distinctiveness to reinforce thematic distinctiveness. While I am a fan of fundamental mechanics being streamlined (e.g. I think all things which have a chance to inflict damage presuming the effect is successful should be attack rolls, not a mix of attack rolls and saving throws), I actually think it is a very good thing to back up strong thematic distinctions with some degree of mechanical distinction as well. This helps make it feel different to use Power Source A instead of Power Source B. Sometimes those differences can be quite subtle (e.g. in 4e, most Divine AoE powers were "friendly", meaning they only affected enemies, while most Arcane AoE powers were "unfriendly", meaning they hit all creatures indiscriminately--that's a mechanical distinction, albeit a soft and subtle one.

Naturally, these are all Doylist reasons, not Watsonian ones. If you were hoping for Watsonian reasons, I'm not sure there can be a non-contextual answer to the question.

Separately: Does D&D really have that many truly distinct forms of supernatural power? The overwhelming majority of supernatural power is not just "magic", it is very specifically "spellcasting", which has a ton of thematic baggage that comes with it and which often needs to be awkwardly nixed or rewritten to fit with other sorts of things. E.g. the playtest Psion has to have a blanket rule deleting components...except costly material components...because psionics implicitly should not have that thematic element, but spellcasting inherently does.

The overwhelming majority of supernatural power accessible to characters is spells. It'd be cool to have at least one class option which is supposed to be an equal match for a Wizard, but who genuinely never casts spells despite caling on great supernatural power.