Thoughts on Mind Stuff: Who's your Psychic?

[Eltab]

Reading: Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series defined 'mind powers' for me. When I look at new rule systems I still compare them to her novels' descriptions.

Gaming: Gamma World earlier editions (especially 1980s and 1990s publishing dates). The Mental Mutations were psionics under a different name.

 

[zarionofarabel]

I would totally Google it if I could even come up with the basics of the title but I don't remember it at all. Anyway, there's these high school kids that find a deep hole in the ground. They go in an a glowing rock zaps them, then they discover they got TK powers. Then the one kid goes psycho and the other kid gets killed, then the other kid saves the day. Anyway I doubt it won any awards but I loved the overtones in the story and the way it was presented. naughty word! Now that I think about it it was a superhero origin story!!! Yeah, awesome show!

Also, most systems just handle psionics like it's magic and I don't like that. Same as how Star Wars changed The Force from being limited PSI powers in the original trilogy to full blown magic with lightning storms and resurrection and other epic magic stuff. I really liked it when it was just limited TK and Telepathy and the trick with the Jedi was how they used it.

Keep it limited I guess is what I like, anyway, that's probably alot more than you were looking for but I typed it all so...

 

[DammitVictor]

I don't know how to make this sound more like praise than complaints... but I actually think that WotC has the right idea with the psychic subclasses in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

Use the standard spell slots, use the standard spells (as much as possible), the Knack dice... and focus the more iconic powers through your class and subclass abilities than through the spells. It's gorgeous, the design principles are genuinely elegant, and everything negative I have to say about it is... merely more of my general complaints about the entire game.

I wish we'd gotten a dedicated psychic class with its own spell list. I wish the psychic subclasses had been thirds-casters. I wish their subclass abilities had been designed better. But the actual underlying concept of the psychic magic system in 5e is the best that D&D's ever had and could be massively improved with a relatively small amount of work.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

The Saga of the Exiles by Julian May, for god-tier mental powers.