Should Psionics be part of the core in 4th edition?

[drothgery]

Point-based casters should be core. If WotC wants to call them 'psionics', that's fine.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

I voted yes, but I would agree with the people above that say to give them their own book. Personally, I'd really like to see the books restructured to the following:

CORE:
Player's Handbook: Classes/skills/feats/equipment
Dungeon Master's Guide: No need to change the outline of the current DMG, just update it to a new edition
Book of Magic: Include sections on arcane/divine/invocations/psionics. Each section is optional and the game can function without it (although creating magic items w/o arcane or divine magic might be tough....)

I don't really see any need to consider the monster books core. To me CORE should be the rules of the game and the character generation stuff. Let the monster books (cause we all know there'll be more than one) just be monster books.

Anyway, there you go.

 

[frankthedm]

Wow. That's some weird logic.

I'd assume that if you can assert your spirit and will against magic, then you can pit your mind against the psionicist.

If he was trying to control your mind through telepathy, yes. The telekinetisist is not attaking your will, he is doing a needle's worth of damage to your grey matter or some other critically vulnerable part of your body. In psoinic's natural habitat of Sci Fi fiction, only the plot bubble protect the protagonist from a demise of this nature. In fantasy, outright kill spells are usually considered black magic, require a lot of power to do and have a threat of backfiring.

In fantasy, the laws of magic may prevent an item from being offensively teleported into someone. In sci fi it is a great way to kill someone by meshing their atoms with an object and effort wise it is not often any harder than teleporting something in an open space.

Magic is often a "deal" you make with the cosmos, for tat. Cast a defensive spell and magic watches your back in exchange for what you traded for it. A Psionic barrier last as long as your own mind can hold it up.

Psionics is often a technological weapon, shoot first or have the right defense.

 

[RavenSinger]

I gotta respectfully disagree with you, Nonlethal. I like the way the core is setup because if you are a player, then you only have to buy one book. If you want to make a larger investment to be a DM then you can. I can see a comprimise, in putting your Book of Magic into the Player's Handbook, and jacking up the page count and price by about $10-15. I said 'yes' to the poll, because I want all the info there in the core. It is up to me as a DM to use the material or not. I am very much with Frank's first post on this one.

--RS

 

[DarkKestral]

Psionics hail from Sci-fi fiction where as spells and magic hail from fantasy. Psionics often tries to explain itself, usually saying science might understand someday how the mind can harness such energies and work with the laws of reality. Magic says science can’t understand it because magic changes the laws of reality

The pyrokineticist agitates your molecules till you burst into flames or tells your mitochondria to fatally overheat, the Pyromancer just summons up fire from god’s know where to roast you with a few magic words and gestures.

The Dimension drive bends space-time with a controlled singularity, creating a wormhole between two points. Teleport spells pops you to the chosen location by picturing it.

Aliens communicate telepathically, from the Vulcan Mind Meld to the Xenomorph Queen’s telepathy magnifying head crest. Wizards send messages with familiars or compells an air elemental to carry his words over the countryside.

Odd, because I've seen a lot of archetypical fantasy where wizards made flaming fireballs by tweaking forces with magic to heat air till it caught fire... and did so by using a few oddball gestures and some probably unintelligible words. By the way, not a few fantasy RPG systems have the flavor say things like that... Ars Magica (which is designed to be rather faithful to the way mages are represented in fantasy and in mythos from the middle ages-late renaissance eras) is a good example, as is Mage: the Awakening (though it's WoD.. and 'horror'...)

I've seen teleporation represented as using arcane formulae to magically dissove the body, then reconstitute it. (Teleporation Circle..)

I've seen fantasy represent wizards whose ability to read minds was EXPLICITLY called 'telepathy' and represented direct mental contact and thought reading... and meant he could read thoughts (and PHB magic supports this in the form of the spells Telepathic Bond and.. Detect Thoughts, so it's not like that one's ONLY found in non-"D&D" campaigns...)

EDIT: Ultimately, I think it's a good idea to integrate psionics into the core. It doesn't have to be some large effort, just a sort of recognition that the Psionic classes exist, and have for a long time.

 

[Drowbane]

If he was trying to control your mind through telepathy, yes. The telekinetisist is not attaking your will, he is doing a needle's worth of damage to your grey matter or some other critically vulnerable part of your body. In psoinic's natural habitat of Sci Fi fiction, only the plot bubble protect the protagonist from a demise of this nature. In fantasy, outright kill spells are usually considered black magic, require a lot of power to do and have a threat of backfiring.

In fantasy, the laws of magic may prevent an item from being offensively teleported into someone. In sci fi it is a great way to kill someone by meshing their atoms with an object and effort wise it is not often any harder than teleporting something in an open space.

Magic is often a "deal" you make with the cosmos, for tat. Cast a defensive spell and magic watches your back in exchange for what you traded for it. A Psionic barrier last as long as your own mind can hold it up.

Psionics is often a technological weapon, shoot first or have the right defense.

Sure, that is one way to spin it.

In most campaigns I've seen that allow both, magic is Magic... and psionics is too.

 

[Cadfan]

I don't care if psionics exists in a supplement.

But lets be honest here. The current psionics system is absolutely horrible in terms of mechanics. It needs remade from the ground up to be something more than a particularly bad spell point system. The current system seems to be created with the assumption that you can start with a bunch of psionic powers that are essentially spells changed just enough to feel different, and then just kind of slap on a spell point system to use those psionic powers, and everything will fall together. Clearly this hasn't worked. A new mechanic is needed.

So, I vote, lets have psionics in a supplement. But lets drop this legacy baggage that makes the current system so bad.

 

[Lanefan]

I'd like to see psyonics be a quasi-random talent rather than a structured class - yes, the hell with balance - somewhat similar to the Deryni (Kurtz) or channelers (Jordan), but maybe with just the more subtle abilities e.g. telepathy, suggestion, mental defense, etc.

Lanefan

 

[takasi]

Personally I'd like to see Psionics as just mana based spellcasting and that's it.

So a psion would have power points, and the spells they cast could be considered "different' as far as dispel and anti-magic fields are concerned, but I would rather see one list of spells rather than one list for spells and one for powers. Make psions draw from the same spell list the wizard and sorcerer draw from. If they could do this I would love to see psionics in 4th edition.

 

[Sunderstone]

I love Psionics and the XPH. That said............



NO!

Only because the core books should be kept as simple as possible for new players learning the game. Some folks also want to keep things simple too.