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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinneus" data-source="post: 5571040" data-attributes="member: 48215">I actually agree with this, to an extent. "Psychic damage" for any class other than possibly a wizard or psion is sort of my personal immersion-breaking bugbear. While Vicious Mockery gets a pass for sheer novelty ("You say something so vile about that orc's mother that his HEAD EXPLODES!"), the whole "mind-rending songs" shtick feels rather stale after a while. Psychic damage feels like the designer saying, "Well, I see no way in reality while this power would actually damage somebody, but it needs to do some damage for balance reasons, so... yeah. Psychic damage!" I remember when first flipping through PHB1 and coming to the Confusion power, and thinking to myself, "Does this power really need damage? Can't they just make it like the classic Confusion effect, somehow?" Thankfully, they seemed to have learned their lesson with Essentials. Enchantment Mages have lots of fun, effective powers that deal no psychic damage at all. This becomes an even bigger issue with monster powers, I think, especially higher-level monsters. Some of the MM3 monsters, while really well-designed, have really, really abstract powers. I'm thinking of the Pact Hag, Star Spawn, and those various vice-themed devils and its minions, in particular. Corrupted, I think they're called? All these minions have awesome pictures showing them looking all scary and wielding giant axes and swords, but when you actually get to their powers (with the notable exception of the glutton) they just have a bunch of highly abstract "Touch of Blank" powers. I mean, Corrupted Lecher has "Touch of Lust" that makes the target marked by one of the lecher's allies. What the crap does that have to do with lust? "The lecher diddles you with his middle finger, and you're filled with inconsolate rage against the archer over there! Weird, lusty rage! Also you feel kind of horny, I guess." While this sort of weirdness is okay on a micro level, it's very easy to create an entire encounter made up of nothing more than corruption devils and corrupted, and that's when things get weird from a narrative perspective. You get a bunch of horny, angry, fearful heroes acting like schizophrenics, while the big scary monsters bristling with teeth and claws and horns and swords just walk up to you and "bad-touch" you to death.</blockquote>

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