Psionics: Yea or Nay?

[Tharkun]

I'm for them as long as they are mechanically sound just like any other part of a system.

 

[BryonD]

Very strong wife-veto against psionics as a concept, strong enough that my personal ambivalence toward the concept isn't enough to resist.

You are officially excused.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I enjoy my psionics.

It shows up in enough fantasy that it doesn't feel especially foreign to me, especially since D&D is such a melting pot anyway.

Brad

 

[Barastrondo]

Just out of curiosity, although it's really a whole 'nother topic altogether... are you saying the a default D&D setting is a mythical setting? Or that your game has a mythical setting? I.e., does psionics have a place in D&D but not your game, or are you claiming that it doesn't fit in D&D at all?

That my games frequently have a mythical setting, and that psionics have a place in D&D but not in my game, naturally. It's entirely personal preference.

What interests me personally most about fantasy gaming in general is that it's a neat tool for myth-building. The setting's familiar because it evokes all our old fairy tales and myths, and then it differentiates itself by coming to life. D&D hooked me back with that Erol Otus-adorned Basic set back in the day because it was full of monsters I already knew about like dragons and basilisks and minotaurs and medusae (although technically even then I was all "uh, 'Medusa' was an individual and they were Gorgons as a group"), and then there were all these weird things like carrion crawlers that weren't particularly mythical, but sort of felt like they could have been. And of course there's that whole context of "dungeon as Underworld" that some folks have embraced as the entire driving point of the game.

Naturally, D&D as a whole is a hell of a lot bigger than what I get out of it: some like to approach it like speculative fiction, some purely as a competitive/cooperative game, some as a backdrop for character drama. I'm personally kind of a style junkie, so I find more inspiration out of taking only some of the stuff from the buffet table (and reskinning some of that) than trying to use it all. If something psionic were to put on a skin that looked like something right out of the Arabian Nights, I would grab it in an instant and use it the next time I was running an Arabian-themed game.

But I wouldn't use the word "psionic" to describe it around my wife. We have a comfortable couch, but it's not that comfortable.

 

[evileeyore]

Actually, an ad hominem is when you use a personal attack to make an unfounded conclusion about a position.

He used your position to make an unfounded personal conclusion.

Just saying...

Oy, the pedantry. I think that was what a +8 Ego Whip vs my Mind Blank?

 

[BryonD]

Oy, the pedantry. I think that was what a +8 Ego Whip vs my Mind Blank?

My tongue may have been just a little in my cheek during that post.

Not that someone with your user name would know the difference.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Yes.

But only if it is sufficiently distinct from "magic" (et al). Bad: 3e Psionics. Better: Psychic's Handbook. And so on.

Option 2 for me.

 

[Raven Crowking]

They will appear in an Appendix of RCFG. I vote "Yea!"


RC

 

[Dausuul]

I honestly don't understand this.

Vancian magic is psuedo-science. It comes from a science fiction book. It has the same spells that psionics has, be it telepathy or telekinesis or charming others. It involves formulas and psuedo-scientific experimentation.

How is that less sci-fi then the magic system that has no science attached and is instead you willing the world itself to alter?

Well, first, I hate Vancian magic too. I have a bunch of issues there. But second, flavor is very important to me and names are a big part of that. As I said earlier, psionics to me is as if the fireball spell were called Rory's rocket launcher; the name "psionics," and the names of the psionic powers (ego whip, id insinuation, and so forth*) import flavor connotations that I really don't want in a setting where I try to evoke fantastic and mythological associations.

Making my players remember and use different names for every psionic power, item, and class feature is more of a hassle than I care to bother with, so I just axe the whole thing.

[size=-2]*It doesn't help that psionics takes a bunch of names from Freudian psychoanalysis, which I regard as... well, let's not get into that.[/size]

 

[Celebrim]

The same argument could be presented for "magic" in a game.

I think that that is correct. I think that the word 'magic' is used in alot of ambigious ways and I think its pretty common to use it with little thought what it means. My favorite author (Tolkien, doh) lampshades this problem in LotR when he has Galadriel question Sam what he means by the word magic, since he seems to use it to describe things which are wildly different. At least however the notion of magic as it relates to fantasy is more clearly defined than psionics. I mean magic is generally the defining trait of fantasy, whereas its tangential to or non-existant in most fantasy stories. How am I to grasp what its percieved essential element is in a fantasy setting?

I suspect that under the surface, there isn't in fact alot of agreement at EnWorld on even the topic of magic. I can tell you exactly why Vancian magic works and why it has to work like that (for my campaign), but I know that there are alot of people at EnWorld that hate Vancian magic probably because they either can't concieve of how it works or else believe that magic simply shouldn't work like that.

For my part, I notice that the word magic is used variously to mean: 'things that I don't understand', 'things that don't happen', and 'these mechanical systems I've either experienced directly or else imagined based on reading some particular fiction'. Oftimes 'things I've imagined' in my opinion doesn't when extended out to its logical conclusion create the setting or story that inspired the imagination in the first place. And almost never do I see the word 'magic' used in the way that someone who believed in magic would use it. For example, I frequently see the claim that the cleric has no mythic basis but that the D&D wizard does - which is almost the opposite of my reading of myth and history. The Wizard strikes me as almost wholly modern, and the cleric as much closer to what premodern people thought of as 'magic'. And words like 'Sorcerer' (to say nothing of Thaumaturge) are used in wholly modern ways that have little to do with the origins of the term.

And by the exact same token, there are plenty of people with a very clear idea of what psionics means to them, despite your personal ambiguity.

Perhaps there are, but I'm still waiting to here clear descriptions of that. For example, based on my reading of 1e, psionics was 'Magic not tied to D&D's level system', which was frankly the only mechanical implementation of psionics that ever to me made the slightest sense. There was the quintessential elements of a wild sport with uncanny talent that you either had or lacked without control over it or the possibility of growth. There was a true differentiation from the oridinary magic of the system. Yet, praise for that core concept has been scarce in this thread, which makes me wonder what people would praise and why.