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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vurt" data-source="post: 2316648" data-attributes="member: 1547">I can only agree to that!That said, one of my players and I share DM'ing responsibilities, and both our games are high-powered. We're using gestalt rules from Unearthed Arcana along with the XPH, and I think the combination acts well to smooth over power inequalities in the psionic/magic spectrum. For example, last session's encounter had the party (avg level 7) pitted against a gestalt troll Barbarian 5/Shaper 5 and his misc orc underlings. (EL 10) The most effective character in the fight was the Paladin/Cleric, who simply kept smiting. Second most effective had to be the Warmage/Rogue, who when it became clear the troll was resistant to fire, effortlessly switched to lesser acid orbs. The least effective turned out to be the Monk/Psywar (who couldn't hit the thing), and the Urban Ranger/Telepath. After the troll successfully saved against two fully augmented mind thrusts from the Telepath, the character was forced to spend the rest of the encounter trying to dispel the thing's buffs (specified energy adaption, concealing amorpha, force shield).On the other hand, I think the DM was psychologically scarred when the Telepath almost single-handedly neutered his random encounter with 4 dire lions. One succumbed to crisis of breath, and two more were psionic charmed for 7 days. (There were no more random encounters that week, nor did anything accost them while the party was sleeping. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )My point is simply that it isn't terribly hard to challenge the psionically inclined characters, or to provide encounters that allow the non-psionic types to shine. Maybe psionics are overpowered, but in my games they haven't been overwhelmingly so. (And hence why Your Milage May Vary.) Traditional magic types still see plenty of use and viability, both as PC class options and as opponents. I personally feel that debating the issue here is somewhat masturbatory, in the sense that we can't go back in time and revise our copies of the XPH. What we can do is freely share our experiences, good and bad, and our solutions to problems that have commonly arisen in our own games. If we can get past the heated antagonism and misgivings this topic seems to regularly invoke, all our games can benefit from it. Even if it could be proven once and for all that the psion was overpowered, we would still be left with what to do about it. I simply recommend we skip the middle step.Cheers,Vurt</blockquote>

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