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<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 7672008" data-attributes="member: 907">I agree that you could reskin a few spells and use a sorcerer or wizard and call it a psionicist for... let's call them limited purposes. Like when Keith Baker played a warforged &quot;artificer&quot; for a charity game, the artificer was a reskinned cleric. In the same way, if you were doing a Dark Sun one-shot, you could &quot;fake&quot; a psionicist fairly easily by reskinning a sorcerer. But I don't think that method has enough &quot;meat&quot; to it to support a setting like Dark Sun, or the more psionics-heavy areas of Eberron (you could use it for an occasional Inspired villain, but not for a Sarlona campaign).But you also touch on something that's been one of my beefs with D&amp;D since... I think I reached the conclusion back when the Expanded Psionics Handbook was released for 3.5: Wizards do everything. Wizards throw fireballs. Wizards summon demons. Wizards craft illusions. Wizards make undead. Wizards teleport. Wizards move things with magic. Wizards read minds.That makes it very hard to add a magic class that actually does things a wizard can't do, because the wizard does everything. So your only options are (a) to change the way they do it (e.g. power points, or the weird Truenamer mechanics), and (b) to specialize them. But the last bit is also difficult, because the game was originally designed with the idea that the wizard did everything, so they get all the supernatural abilities at as low a level as possible. Pretty much the only way it was OK for the XPH to give specialize psions in ways wizards couldn't was by giving them &quot;intermediate&quot; access to various abilities - for example, both wizards and psions can charm humanoids at level 1, and charm almost everything else at level 7, but psions get intermediate charms at level 3 and 5 that can charm some, but not all, non-humanoid creatures.That's sort of what they did in 3.5e: there was a common list of psion powers that any psion could take, but the more powerful powers were found in discipline-exclusive lists. It was sort of like any wizard being able to cast ice storm, but only evokers getting fireball.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 7672008, member: 907"] I agree that you could reskin a few spells and use a sorcerer or wizard and call it a psionicist for... let's call them limited purposes. Like when Keith Baker played a warforged "artificer" for a charity game, the artificer was a reskinned cleric. In the same way, if you were doing a Dark Sun one-shot, you could "fake" a psionicist fairly easily by reskinning a sorcerer. But I don't think that method has enough "meat" to it to support a setting like Dark Sun, or the more psionics-heavy areas of Eberron (you could use it for an occasional Inspired villain, but not for a Sarlona campaign). But you also touch on something that's been one of my beefs with D&D since... I think I reached the conclusion back when the Expanded Psionics Handbook was released for 3.5: [I]Wizards do everything[/I]. Wizards throw fireballs. Wizards summon demons. Wizards craft illusions. Wizards make undead. Wizards teleport. Wizards move things with magic. Wizards read minds. That makes it very hard to add a magic class that actually does things a wizard can't do, because the wizard does [I]everything[/I]. So your only options are (a) to change the way they do it (e.g. power points, or the weird Truenamer mechanics), and (b) to specialize them. But the last bit is also difficult, because the game was originally designed with the idea that the wizard did everything, so they get all the supernatural abilities at as low a level as possible. Pretty much the only way it was OK for the XPH to give specialize psions in ways wizards couldn't was by giving them "intermediate" access to various abilities - for example, both wizards and psions can charm humanoids at level 1, and charm almost everything else at level 7, but psions get intermediate charms at level 3 and 5 that can charm some, but not all, non-humanoid creatures. That's sort of what they did in 3.5e: there was a common list of psion powers that any psion could take, but the more powerful powers were found in discipline-exclusive lists. It was sort of like any wizard being able to cast [I]ice storm[/I], but only evokers getting [I]fireball[/I]. [/QUOTE]

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