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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 3248293" data-attributes="member: 38357">I've been working on an upcoming campaign set in the DCC 35 Known World Gazeteer. And there's a bit in there that's based on Psionics (I won't spoil things by saying any more...). My first impulse was simply to ignore that (small) portion of the setting, because I don't use Psionics in my games. However, I thought it might be interesting to post here and see if there was some reason I should take a second (well, third, really) look at 3.5 Psionics.OK, AD&D Psionics was this weird thing in the back of the Player's Handbook. We tried it out once or twice, and the few players who rolled well enough to gain psychic powerz where complete jerks about it (like the ten-year-olds we where) to everyone who didn't right up until those same powerz resulted in some weird monstrosity crawling out of the random encounter charts to eat their brain-meats and wipe the party in the process.Second edition Psionics had it's own book that I never actually bothered to buy or read because I was too busy running Cyberpunk and Mekton. Oh, and they turned me off to Dark Sun when that setting came out.Third (and 3.5) Psionics have their own books as well... And I've looked at the stuff, but it just hasn't grabbed me enough to get that deep into it, despite the fact that the rules seem good, possibly better than the normal 3.5 magic rules. This seems to stem mostly from three things:1) K.I.S.S. ~ This is the reason I have to append a qualifier above when I say that the Psionics system might be better than the normal spell-slots D&D magic system. In practice I haven't really seen that the system behind casting spells or using powers really has so much impact on the overall fun of the game that it overwhelms the disadvantage of having to keep track of power point expenditures. (And I do consider the math and record-keeping involved to be a very small step up from keeping track of a Wizard's spells. It's just that the gain is, for me, very limited as well.)2) Magic - Psychic Transparency ~ It seems to me that one of the key reasons to bother having another "magic" system is that it be different from the existing systems. If it's "just like magic", then why bother? I know that there where some optional rules in the 3.0 Psionics Handbook at least for dealing with non-transparent Psionics, but they seemed rather slim, and the base assumption these rules where built on is transparency... So, again, it didn't seem worth the bother.3) Flavor ~ It seems like every time I go browsing through the Psionics SRD, I come across any number of powers that, while being fine from a mechanical standpoint, just seem downright silly from an in-character perspective. I understand that the powers list is attempting to not copy the extensive Arcane and Divine spell lists where possible. However, the effect, to me, is something that doesn't seem to really make me think of the powers of the mind. It's just another type of magic, and one with more "goofy" effects. And I don't need more silliness in my D&D, my players bring more than enough to the table already...So, any thoughts?</blockquote>

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