D&D 5E In your Years of Gaming, How many Psionic Characters did you See played

[Sacrosanct]

Yeah and I don't think that's a good reason to try to turn it into a wizard tradition. In fact it seems like a lazy cop-out and should be called out exactly on those grounds.

If they are unwilling to do it right, they need to just leave it for homebrew

This may come to a surprise to you, but your idea of what's right isn't objectively what actually is right.

They have a scope for D&D design. It seems that a requirement in that scope is to be appealing to the most number of people. So taking a design approach that would be used by the most people would be what is right. Not your personal opinion on how it should be done. If you don't like it, you have the tools to create your own. So before you call people lazy, how many games have you designed?

 

[Einlanzer0]

This may come to a surprise to you, but your idea of what's right isn't objectively what actually is right.

They have a scope for D&D design. It seems that a requirement in that scope is to be appealing to the most number of people. So taking a design approach that would be used by the most people would be what is right. Not your personal opinion on how it should be done. If you don't like it, you have the tools to create your own. So before you call people lazy, how many games have you designed?

Yeah, except there's a pretty strong consensus psion should be its own class because that's the only thing that makes any god damn sense.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Yeah, except there's a pretty strong consensus psion should be its own class because that's the only thing that makes any snip profanity sense.

What consensus? Do you have data the WotC team doesn't have? You and your friends or some people on a forum isn't consensus.

 

[Perun]

The only option that seems applicable in this poll is lemon curry... We've had less than 10 psionic characters since I started playing (back in '94), but that's way more than some of the PHB classes (rangers, generic clerics (2e), bards, druids, most specialist wizards, monks, and barbarians; probably paladins, too).

Back in 2e we had a pretty high turnover rate of characters at low levels, as the game was pretty deadly back then. Or it seemed deadly... I'm not sure, we were younger and probably played it differently than we do today... Oddly enough, I was happy when we switched to 3e back in 2000, but now, looking back, 2e is the system I enjoyed most, and, after a decade of hiatus, I still remember a lot of 2e rules, where I've forgotten most of 3/3.5e era...

I remember a half-elf psionicist inspired by the Bene Gesserit from Dune, created under the revised 2e psionic rules in, IIRC, PO: Skills & Powers (with MTHAC0 and MAC). I've had the Complete Psionicist's Handbook, but I don't remember if I played any psionicists using those rules. In 3/3.5e, we've had at least two psions and at least one psychic warrior that I can remember.

The Skills & Powers version of the psionic rules is my personal favourite, to be honest. It was more streamlined than the Complete Psionicist's, and the I hated THAC0 (and MTHAC0) with the burning passion of ten thousand suns, but the system felt good. It was completely different from magic, but flavourfull, and complete.

The 3/3.5e version was different. Magic by a different name, and generally too much focused on crystals, and I thought psychic manifestations (was that what they were called? those sensory bursts people felt/saw when you manifested a power) were a bit too much (I was OK with the taste and smell ones, but lights and sounds felt weird).

I barely remember 4e (barely played it), and I don't remember any psionic characters.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, almost 95% of the D&D campaigns I've played in were set in the Forgotten Realms. I think we played a session or two in Dark Sun under 4e, but I'm not sure (that's about the entirety of my 4e experience).

 

[Deset Gled]

I often got the impression psionics were used as a kind of experimental class or test area for D&D designers. They seem to get a major revision in every edition (including a complete overhaul between 3.0 and 3.5). And adding psionics tends to include completely new mechanics not seen before. In 2e it introduced gradual replenishing of the power pool. It 3e it introduced casting with every stat and a power point pool instead of spells/level. 3.5 psionics were the first introduction of swift an immediate actions (which later made it into the complete ruleset in the Rules Compendium).

And I absolutely hated that Monk was considered a psionic class in 4e. I love monks. That would have been the first time I used psionics in a D&D game, if I hadn't quit 4e before the PHB3 came out.

 

[Quartz]

Not in at least 20 years.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've personally played Psionic characters in every edition from AD&D-4Ed. Besides me, though? Maybe another 5.

But, as has been mentioned before, a good number of the DMs I’ve played under banned Psionics from their campaigns.

 

[Perun]

And I absolutely hated that Monk was considered a psionic class in 4e. I love monks. That would have been the first time I used psionics in a D&D game, if I hadn't quit 4e before the PHB3 came out.

Funnily enough, I thought of monks as a sort of entry-level psionic class since 2e days. I remember discussing about it on the old ADND-L messageboards.

And now that I think of it, all monks I've seen in actual play were my characters... and I'm not a fan of the wuxia/martial arts genre. When I was first introduced to AD&D by a friend of mine, he told me of the monk, and in my mind I had this image of a western monk wielding the falchion sword (IIRC, Unearthed Arcana expanded monk weapon list to include the falchion sword), and it kind of stuck. Doesn't make much sense, franciscans are not really known for running and jumping about and hitting people with lightning speed, but it stuck nonetheless

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well, in 1e, I saw more characters with psionics than I saw Bards, Monks, Druids (that I wasn't playing, myself) or Assassins. Also, more psionics than Gnomes.

I didn't get out so much in 2e, mostly DMing, and, ironically, I banned the Psionicist and introduced a Wizard School of Mysticism to take the place of psionics.

In 3e & 4e I saw plenty of psionics, once they were introduced, but it wasn't until fairly late in the 4e run that I actually stopped begrudging them for "being science fiction" so much.

 

[Charlaquin]

I’ve seen a fair number of them, but that’s in no small part due to the monk having been a Psionic class in 4e. Other than that though, I’ve only seen one outside of Darksun.