D&D 5E (2014) In your Years of Gaming, How many Psionic Characters did you See played

[Ashrym]

It's low enough to be statistically insignificant. I saw 4 characters in 1e who had rolled psionics (2 at the same table, oddly enough), maybe 2 that I recall in 2e. 3.x I saw two. I never saw any in 4e but I didn't play that edition much.

That's outside of campaign settings where psionics are a prominent feature. In a typical campaign it was almost non-existent.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Small critique on the poll: There should have been an option for "As frequently as all the other noncore classes" which fits between regularly and rarely and was the case at my table.

In my experience....I've played a psionic character in every edition that had one...except maybe 1e because I never played in a 1e campaign.

In 2e I had the Psionics Handbook and enjoyed incorporating it as a different path than the spells everyone else had. I also played in a strong Homebrew campaign loosely based on Wheel of Time that heavily featured Psionics.

In 3.x I think someone in my group played every base psionic class. I know I had a Psychic Warrior.

In 4e psionics stood out less distinctly so I don't recall all the classes that were played.

 

[Fenris447]

I started playing in 5e, which has yet to have any official psionic stuff. So I'm hesitant to vote, assuming the poll is focused on other editions. I can say, though, that nobody in the 30+ people I've played D&D with have ever expressed interest in psionic characters.

Likewise, nobody had any interest in the Artificer while it was still UA. Now that it's official, there's interest. I'm prepping one as my next backup, as is a player in the game I DM. I suspect the same would happen with Psionics.

 

[Ristamar]

The only psionic character I ever saw at the table was one I played for a single session during 2e right after our DM bought The Complete Psionics Handbook. I owned the original 3e supplement but it was never used in a game.

 

[akr71]

Just thinking about the Jeremy Crawford quote that basically says the reason they didn't want to go with a new class for psions in 5e is because the previous versions, while they have their fans, just didn't get enough traction. And I can certainly see his point. 1e we saw quite a few psionic characters, but, that's because we cheated. Once psionics became a "class" in 2e and beyond, I almost never saw one played.

In fact, many of the DM's I played with flat out banned psionics for any number of reasons. So, I'm just tossing up a poll here to see how often people played in groups that had psionic characters. It's not meant to be exact, just a gut feeling.

This mirror's my experience exactly.

 

[Nebulous]

Very rare. In 2e we had a guy play a psychic character from the handbook, but it was too overpowered and we ended up killing off the character. In 3e, there was a psionic character, at least 12th level or higher, in Return to the Tomb of Horrors. I don't recall it being unbalanced, it might have been, but he was very very powerful. That's the only two I've ever seen played.

 

[Zaukrie]

About ten percent of the groups I played in. More often, we used the psionic rules for monsters to make them feel different.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Since starting D&D back in the early 80's I have seen 0 PC and 1 NPC as a psionicst. That NPC sucked as it was the DM's "stand in" so he could play too.

 

[Celebrim]

I didn't cheat in 1e AD&D, so I never had a psionic character. The one group of power gamers I played with who would have cheated had long ago figured out that being psionic was a quick way to a sure death in the long run, and that despite the advantages it actually gimped an otherwise powerful character, so they didn't run psionics either (they probably cheated to not be psionic or simply elected not to make the check). Psionics therefore only came up a couple of times when interacting with monsters like Mind Flayers for whom their psionic ability was critical to making them challenging foes. Otherwise, psionics were ignored.

I haven't seen them again since then. No one l knew liked the 2e psionics as a class concept, and when the sorcerer appeared in the design of 3e I immediately latched on to it as the rightful more flexible successor to the concept of 'psionics'. So I ended up banning them in my game and making them a type of sorcerer, and supporting that with a couple of non-draconic bloodlines.

I do support psionics in settings like Dark Sun where magic has had a major overhaul and basically everyone is essentially a gestalt psionic, or using something like the 3e Psion as the sole magic-user in a setting that dispenses with wizards, clerics, druids, and the like. But I've just never had the time to play a game like that.

 

[Parmandur]

It is interesting that even in the microcosm that is EN World that less than 20% of respondents (small sample size still I know) use/play with psionics or have done, with any frequency.

If this community bears out Crawford's words, then it has to be true of the broader community. Probably also supported by their own past sales data.

Yeah, I would wager Psionic usage is overrepresented here compared to the population at large.