Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Al'Kelhar" data-source="post: 2327301" data-attributes="member: 7884">The point is that the core rules are the baseline against which everything else is compared.  This is not a dispute about whether the core rules are wimpy or certain "character concepts" or "builds" are "non-viable" in the core rules.  I think what a number of people are stating is that taking the core rules as the base line of what character classes, skills, feats and powers are available with which to kill things and take their stuff, psionics is over-powered.  Whether the game designers realise, post-design, that the core rules leave arcane spellcasters under-powered is not the what is at issue here.  There are many feats and spells, in particular, in supplements like Complete Arcane and Complete Divine which are also over-powered in comparison to the core rules.  This and XPH indicate, to my mind, that the game designers may well be thinking that spellcasters are under-powered in the core rules.I think what you're saying is that psionics is an elegant magic system which is balanced against the challenges to be faced by D&D characters (killing things and taking their stuff) - and if that means that arcane spellcasters are too weak to face those challenges, then that's a problem for the arcane spellcasters, not psions and psionics generally.That's an entirely valid viewpoint.  But it does seem to fly in the face of the opinion of many that the arcane spellcasters, particularly the wizard, are amongst the most powerful of the core character classes.  And in any analysis of whether any extra rules are balanced or not, the core character classes, skills, feats and power must be used as a baseline.I agree that my analysis of the XPH that you critique is done at a very superficial level.  That's a consequence of limits on my time and overall interest in the subject.  Nevertheless, I still consider it demonstrates that, as a magic system, psionics as presented in the XPH is more powerful than the spellcasting systems presented in the core rules.  The caution that I advocate is that psionics cannot be simply "plonked down" into a campaign otherwise predicated on core rules without some adjustments, in particular, to the arcane magic system.Cheers, Al'Kelhar</blockquote>

Verification