D&D 5E Is "Mystic" a bad class name?

[Tony Vargas]

my resistance to labeling it magic is that when you do, you start to imply a lot of magic-rules onto it. If its magical, can you detect or dispel it?

Yes.

Does it work in anti-magic, dead magic, or wild magic zones?

no, no, unpredictably.

Does Magic Resistance apply?

Yes.

What about a raksasha's magic immunity?

Yes.

Can you use it to make magic items?

You can barely use spells to make magic items, 5e items are very much the DM's domain.

What if I get a wand of the war mage (which adds +1 to my spell attacks) does it work with psionics?

No, because "spell."

Can a psionic character use scrolls?

Not if they require spellcasting ability.

Can he attune to a wand of polymorph or a wand of paralysis (prereq: Any spellcaster)?

No.

Could a mystic/sorcerer use metamagic with psionics? Can a bard learn psionics with Magical Secrets?

Depends on the Multi-classing rules that they come up with. I'd like to see MC'ing work as well for psionics as it does for casters.

The advantage of the above is that it doesn't make the psionic character invincible or screwed. He generally gets to benefit when there are opportunities to augment magic. He doesn't bypass major plot points that are meant to keep magic in check.

 

[garnuk]

That approach raises all kinds of balance issues which I believe is the main reason 3E used "psionics = magic" as the default.

It's a great advantage to the psionicist if their abilities are not countered, hampered or even detected by abilities that stymie magic. You can wail away at a spellcaster in an antimagic field without your target being able to cast anything back at you. If some of these "vs. magic" abilities work against psionics and others do it can quickly get burdensome in play remembering which is which.

If the rules had some clear distinction between "magic" that includes psionics and "spells" that exclude psionics it might be playable. Then a creature with "magic resistance" would have it protect against psionic attacks. Under such a rule, a creature with a "counter-spell" ability would not be able to use it to disrupt a psionicist's discipline-weaving, but one with dispel magic could.

That seems doable.

I might have missed part of the conversation, but in the UA article, it says that pisonics is NOT magic and is not affected by dispel magic etc, EXCEPT when the psionic ability directly copies a spell, or the psionic ability allows one to cast a spell.

Seems like a good compromise to me.

 

[Cleon]

I might have missed part of the conversation, but in the UA article, it says that pisonics is NOT magic and is not affected by dispel magic etc, EXCEPT when the psionic ability directly copies a spell, or the psionic ability allows one to cast a spell.

Seems like a good compromise to me.

That's approaching the psionics/magic/spells categorisation solution from another direction. Instead of "psionics is magic but is not spellcasting", it's basically "psionics in NOT magic but is sometimes spellcasting".

It could work, but it seems a lot less elegant to me. Apart from the balance issue of it meaning psionics work fine in places magic doesn't, the spell comparison involved makes it a lot more fiddly. Every psionics power has to be clearly deliminated as a "spell-equivalent" or "not a spell-equivalent" to indicate how dispelling and the like interacts with it, and this list has to be updated whenever a new bunch of spells or powers is introduced to the game, in case one of the new spells is equivalent to an already existing psionic power (or vica versa). If there isn't a clear list there'll be a lot of arguments as to whether a psionic power is enough like a particular spell for it to be counted as the same for the sake of counter-magic. If there is a clear list I suspect there'll be similar arguments about a psionic power working fine when a spell that is very similar is nullified by magic countermeasures.

Furthermore, it implies that the psionic powers that are "equivalent" to a spell fundamentally work in the same way (else how else would a counter-spell ability work against them?) and I'm not sure I like that very much.

Overall, I think a "psionics is magic but not spellcasting" approach would work better.

 

[garnuk]

That's approaching the psionics/magic/spells categorisation solution from another direction. Instead of "psionics is magic but is not spellcasting", it's basically "psionics in NOT magic but is sometimes spellcasting".

It could work, but it seems a lot less elegant to me. Apart from the balance issue of it meaning psionics work fine in places magic doesn't, the spell comparison involved makes it a lot more fiddly. Every psionics power has to be clearly deliminated as a "spell-equivalent" or "not a spell-equivalent" to indicate how dispelling and the like interacts with it, and this list has to be updated whenever a new bunch of spells or powers is introduced to the game, in case one of the new spells is equivalent to an already existing psionic power (or vica versa). If there isn't a clear list there'll be a lot of arguments as to whether a psionic power is enough like a particular spell for it to be counted as the same for the sake of counter-magic. If there is a clear list I suspect there'll be similar arguments about a psionic power working fine when a spell that is very similar is nullified by magic countermeasures.

Furthermore, it implies that the psionic powers that are "equivalent" to a spell fundamentally work in the same way (else how else would a counter-spell ability work against them?) and I'm not sure I like that very much.

Overall, I think a "psionics is magic but not spellcasting" approach would work better.

Nothing has to be marked as "spell equivalent" or not. If the psionic ability allows you to cast a spell from the prexisting spell lists, then it counts as magic, even if it was created with psionic abilities.

Its how the class is currently set up to work.

 

[GreenTengu]

Yes. no, no, unpredictably. Yes. Yes. You can barely use spells to make magic items, 5e items are very much the DM's domain. No, because "spell." Not if they require spellcasting ability. No. Depends on the Multi-classing rules that they come up with. I'd like to see MC'ing work as well for psionics as it does for casters.

The advantage of the above is that it doesn't make the psionic character invincible or screwed. He generally gets to benefit when there are opportunities to augment magic. He doesn't bypass major plot points that are meant to keep magic in check.

Pretty much exactly how I would have answered them.

The problem with Psionics has always been that adding them later always made they got a free ride on a lot of things. Because magic is what the designers had in mind, when they wanted to nullify miraculous effects they nullify "magic". To say that something can do everything magic can do but is not technically magic in order to side-step everything in the game designed to resist, stop, nullify or otherwise prevent miraculous things that could potentially be auto-wins regardless of other game mechanics ("I teleport him into the middle of the wall! I open a rift in space under his feet! I turn him to stone!" "I take over her mind and force her to jump into the lava.") or otherwise defeat puzzles with one easy cheat ("I teleport out of the dungeon!" "I put the giant statue in my pocket dimension!" "I shrink the bolder in the way to a pebble and kick it out of the way.") and when those blockers are there to prevent that sort of stuff from being done, saying "well, technically what I am doing isn't magic so because you didn't specifically mention stopping psionics and force powers and glamor and every other imaginable synonym for magic, you can still do all those things.

 

[Remathilis]

Yes. no, no, unpredictably. Yes. Yes. You can barely use spells to make magic items, 5e items are very much the DM's domain. No, because "spell." Not if they require spellcasting ability. No. Depends on the Multi-classing rules that they come up with. I'd like to see MC'ing work as well for psionics as it does for casters.

The advantage of the above is that it doesn't make the psionic character invincible or screwed. He generally gets to benefit when there are opportunities to augment magic. He doesn't bypass major plot points that are meant to keep magic in check.

Problem with some of those answers: psionics has no "level", therefore a raksasha's immunity to effects under 6th level doesn't apply. So are they immune to all psionic effects or none of them?

So we keep creating corner cases to corner cases. How is it easier to call it magic?

 

[GreenTengu]

Problem with some of those answers: psionics has no "level", therefore a raksasha's immunity to effects under 6th level doesn't apply. So are they immune to all psionic effects or none of them?

So we keep creating corner cases to corner cases. How is it easier to call it magic?

You make a chart. Just one chart.

Using how many power points equate to what level spell.
If something is immune to spells lower than level 6, then you must use a number of power points equating to a level 7 spell or higher.

If Psionic powers were actually balanced, then the designers should know well at what point a Psionic power equates to the same sort of spell level. They had to figure that out so that a same level Psion and same level Warlock would have equivalent damage potential.

 

[garnuk]

Is the point of the conversation to say that the UA article does it wrong, or just to ignore the UA article? I must have skipped a crucial page that would clarify that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Problem with some of those answers: psionics has no "level", therefore a raksasha's immunity to effects under 6th level doesn't apply. So are they immune to all psionic effects or none of them?

That sounds like a problem with one of them. But, it'd depend on exactly how the raksasha's immunity is phrased. If it's "immunity to magic," so be it. If it's Immunity to spells under 6th level, then it's not immune to things that aren't spells, if it's based on the level of the slot used to cast the spell...

If it's immunity to 'effects' under a 'level' then it depends on null-handling, then the DM is going to have to rule on what 'effects' means and how to handle null values of level.

So we keep creating corner cases to corner cases. How is it easier to call it magic?

Such corner cases are inevitably common under 5e's design philosophies, and it's up to the DM to rule on them. It's easier if you pin psionics to existing ideas, like magic, then to make them totally new, and thus call into question how they interact with all prior material. It'd be /much/ easier if the psionic cast spells with slots, and had no new mechanics, at all. It'd be even easier to not add psionics, at all.

'Easier,' obviously, isn't the only consideration.

Psionics = magic would be the option that'd tend to break the game into fewer, larger pieces, while the 'not magic' option would be for those who don't mind picking up many smaller pieces of their campaign and re-assembling them in a totally different shape.

Regardless, I still say the best (for 5e) course is to present the DM with the choice of either option, rather than a default and alternate - because Psionics already isn't part of the Standard game, so there's no need to worry about which is the default, the default is no psionics.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Personally, I have no objection to the Far Realms becoming part of the core D&D setting, but I really dislike the idea of Psionics being from the Far Realms or a response to the Far Realms' intrusion.

If it was up to me, I'd do something like this:

Psionics is the power of thought manifesting into reality. It is literally mind over matter. In the most potent cases, mind becomes matter.

The Far Realms is impossible and insane. A place that cannot exist in D&D reality according to its natural and magical laws. However the idea of the Far Realms can exist. That's no different from someone in the real world imagining a perpetual motion machine, despite them violating fundamental physics. They just can't build one.

However, in the D&D universe the power of psionics allows an idea to become real, and that's the route by which the Far Realms "encroached" into the Prime Material. The actual details of the encroachment could be left unsaid or speculative. Maybe a lot of latent psionicists dreamed of the Far Realms at the same time and it got a toehold? Maybe the universe's most powerful psychics went exploring and tried to astral travel to a plane that couldn't actually exist and their combined mental abilities were so potent that what the created or linked to a dimension they thought might be there?

That's an interesting take. Rather than the Far Realm created psionics, psionics created the Far Realm. I'd find that more palatable personally.