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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorhook" data-source="post: 7677135" data-attributes="member: 58401">See, I definitely agree with KM's assessment of UA Psionics, but to me (at least flavour-wise) his suggestions are committing the same sins that the playtest did: it's an unnecessary reinvention that ignores past expressions of the concept of psionics and tries to lump unrelated things together. For example, the whole "dream-plane" psionics thing is an explicitly racial concept in Eberron, but this didn't have any bearing on the type of psionics that, say, a dwarf might have used against the horrors of Xoriat. Would most fans of previous-editions psionics be satisfied if 5E's single psionic class had only setting-specific subclasses? Alternatively, would fans of those settings be satisfied if psionics was pared down to a single narrow subclass?I guess I don't see the need to reinvent the proverbial wheel with psionics. Psionics would be well-served by a single class, the psion, with six different subclasses based on the six psionic disciplines: egoist, kineticist, nomad, seer, shaper, and telepath. (If six subclasses seems unreasonable, why? Clerics have seven and wizards have eight.) Further, make a new martial archetype (a.k.a.: subclass) for fighters called "psychic warrior", with a limited selection of psionic abilities from a couple of the psionic disciplines. Ditto for the soulknife, except make it a subclass of either monk or rogue. Finally, create a bunch of psionic powers--what were called "disciplines" in the playtest--and divvy them into the six disciplines, then put them on a list. Why re-conceptualize psionics in the same edition that was deliberately trying to roll back the re-conceptualizations of other classes that 4E brought?Reading the UA Psionics playtest, I'm reminded of one of the wizard previews that was released in the months prior to 4E: instead of having the traditional schools of magic, the designers had thought fans would like wizards to have specializations like, "Golden Wyvern initiate" and "Serpent Eye cabalist" and "Stormwalker theurge". As soon as WotC gauged the fan reaction, they changed all that in a hurry. There's nothing wrong with those concepts, but they sure as hell didn't represent what the previous incarnations of the D&D brand had said wizards were supposed to be. "Order of the Awakened" and "Order of the Immortal" feel like exactly that same mess all over again.</blockquote>

Verification