Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana Revisits Psionics

The latest Unearthed Arcana from WotC revisits some psionic rules! “Shine with the power of the mind in this installment of Unearthed Arcana! Today we revisit several psi-themed options that we released in the past few months. Studying your feedback on those options, we’ve crafted this new collection of subclasses, spells, and feats, found in the PDF below.“

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[Samloyal23]

Hopelessly bland. I still have not seen a better system than the 2E psionics handbook and TW&TW. There are nice bits and pieces like the origins for sorcerers, but again that misses the whole point of having psionics, which is to have a non-magical supernatural power with its own system. Call me when they have a skill-based Psionicist...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

One thing I didn't like about the soul knife is that I see no reason that the bonus action knife attack is a d4. I'd keep it the same d6 as the initial blade since I can see people easily forgetting that the die size is different.

I think they are assuming + ability score bonus applies with the bonus action attack damage, since it isn't explicitly duel wielding. It doesn't require you have two free hands to use either.

But I agree, using the standard duel wielding rules would be better, and have both soul knives do damage equal to your current psi dice.

I quite like the idea of the knives being unavailable because your psi is burned out - it's very much a superhero trope that powers become unavailable at key times, forcing the hero to improvise, and Soul Knife is "inspired" (AKA ripped off) from a superhero.

 

[gyor]

Yeah, I would. Instantly. The abilities a Wizard in D&D has a hugely distinct from a Psionicist/Psion. Sorry this is just not a statement/claim that holds any water at all, and you've made no argument here, merely a baseless (and vaguely insulting "...you'd never...") claim. That's as much as I can engage with this. I will say even a Bard would be closer than a Wizard, under 5E rules. Considerably closer.



False logic. WotC have ditched stuff for which feedback was nearly universally positive before, and loads and loads of stuff which has had extremely positive feedback has come to absolutely nothing. That's not the only logical conclusion at all - in fact it's outright illogical - we know WotC don't operate on some simplistic "positive vs negative" system.



Your post is full of what seems to me utter hypocrisy re: strawmen, and "polite"-ness, but here at least instead of attributing an opinion to me, or claiming motives for me (as you did several times earlier in the same post), you ask a question, which is more reasonable, so I'll respond to this point.

I'm specifically not saying that. I'm saying there's disagreement, but that's no larger than other disagreements.

You say it's ok to just throw out a psionic class altogether, because in the 29 years of Psionic classes, they haven't been sufficiently identical for your standards. I find this position completely untenable, because other classes have changed as much or more - two examples I would note were Bards and Fighters. Fighters have had a consistent theme, but the mechanics by which that is implemented are nearly unrecognisable from one edition to the next after 1E-2E. Bards have entirely different mechanics and sometimes signficantly different themes from edition to edition.

So what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter if there's some disagreement - there's still a solid tradition, not a weak one as you claim (and personally for me, if there's any three-edition-in-a-row tradition of having a class, you shouldn't be chucking it, even if it's varied considerably).

There will even be some people from the 2E-4E era who don't want a Psionic class - albeit most of them will just not want Psionics period, or have a complex motivation (like they don't want any more classes in 5E, period, regardless of what they are). Hell, there are people from that era who want 1E-style. Just not many. And more to the point, plenty of people who started with 1E, don't want that style. It doesn't really matter when people started. It matters what style they want. And I don't buy that 23% of people want actual 1E-style Psionics. I don't buy that you even honestly believe that, either.

EDIT - Also your entire other post - you're the princess, and the name of the psionic class is the pea, frankly. You seem really upset with me that I don't think the pea is a big deal. The whole "expansion class" thing doesn't need to be addressed. It's a red herring.

They ditched the Stone Sorcerer, Phoenix Sorcerer, and Sea Sorcerer dispite them being popular to varying degrees and I never knew why, it was a shame they were all really cool. Instead they went with the less popular Shadow Sorcerer (which I personally love) Maybe they will pop up later in a book.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It turns sneak attack weapon damage into Psychic damage. At 9th level they're also shockingly accurate, and at 17th level they stun what they hit.

Watch out for Wizards with Mind blank cast (immunity to Psychic damage).

Bear Totem barbarians will run away from you screaming though.

None of these are killer abilities for a Rogue, though - I mean the Stun is great, sure, but that's level 17 and most campaigns finish at 8-15, if not earlier so kind of irrelevant.

Rogues strongly tend to have Advantage so further accuracy bonuses rarely benefit them a great deal - when they don't have Advantage, what they need is Advantage, not hitting but with no Advantage!

I like the style of the subclass, and I like a lot of the abilities they've given them, but it's a bit "eh".

Also the math on the all the "your die goes down a type" stuff means that those abilities are kind of tricky to use well, because when you get down to the 1d6 and 1d4 dice, your odds of rolling max are very high, so if have 1d8 or 1d10 dice, you're really going to be wanting to avoid dropping down.

If you're on a climactic battle, and you still have your reset, then it makes sense to burn down like that, but not really otherwise. It's just way too risky.

The other big issue is if you're in a campaign that uses magic items, which I hope we can agree is the vast majority of campaigns, a 1d6 damage weapon is a bit sad when you could have say, a Flaming Shortsword +1 dealing 1d6+2d6+1 or whatever and with a +1 to hit to boot.

I hope that what they're doing here is coming in low so they can pull it up to a more sensible level, but right now, this is kind of weak. Psychic damage doesn't offer any advantage that I can see - it's not something you can leverage or that significant numbers of targets are Vulnerable to (it's magic so you can hit magical things but again magic weapons allow that).

It's also really weird that you'd expect a class like this to have strong utility, but they have nothing. An Arcane Trickster has a ton of utility, but the Soulknife has virtually none (just the weird telepathy mechanic that potentially drops you die type even though you only wanted to talk to one dude). They could do with Mage Hand or something at least.

 

[Hussar]

As far as having everyone have a wild talent in Dark Sun, why not go the 2e route - all PC's start at 4th level. In 2e, all Dark Sun PC's started at 3rd level, so, starting at 4th when everyone gets their first feat seems like the way to go. Also avoids all that stuff about not being a psionic character for 2 levels before your archetype kicks in.

Seems a pretty simple thing to do no?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As far as having everyone have a wild talent in Dark Sun, why not go the 2e route - all PC's start at 4th level. In 2e, all Dark Sun PC's started at 3rd level, so, starting at 4th when everyone gets their first feat seems like the way to go. Also avoids all that stuff about not being a psionic character for 2 levels before your archetype kicks in.

Seems a pretty simple thing to do no?

Sadly that doesn't solve the problem re: Feats for two reasons:

1) The big one - WotC have repeatedly stated Feats are optional. They even massively modified Eberron's Dragonmark system (apparently at the last minute) to take out the Feats which made it a balanced and reasonable system, and instead made it a weird mess where you have to be certain classes to actually use your Dragonmark, in direct contradiction of Eberron lore.

So they've shown that they are willing to come down hard on this. Thus them doing ANYTHING which relied on Feats would be very, very surprising and unprecedented.

2) That's an ASI point, and one where most PCs will want to take an ASI over a Feat, and even if they take a Feat, they may not want Wild Talent or the like, and would, amusingly for Dark Sun, have worse stats than normal PCs (rather than better, as is traditional). So it wouldn't really solve the issue.

But point one kills anything that relies on Feats, sadly, until WotC kill that policy. I don't personally understand why they can't just say "Feats are optional for D&D, but the Dark Sun setting requires them", and just yes, give everyone the Wild Talent Feat for free. But they've shown they're really against that, and did so recently.

 

[Aldarc]

Part of the problem, @Ruin Explorer is that since its inception, the Soulknife has LONG struggled to find a niche. It's a neat concept, but it's more often than not a one-trick-pony. It's basically just a rogue/monk with a magical blade. Dreamscarred Press did a pretty decent job of trying to give it more flexibility, but it's still something of a dud class.

I did like how 4e made the Monk a psionic class since that did a good job of covering the soulknife's conceptual niche fairly well. Shame that WotC did not create a soul knife monastic tradition for the 4e monk.

 

[Hussar]

Sadly that doesn't solve the problem re: Feats for two reasons:

1) The big one - WotC have repeatedly stated Feats are optional. They even massively modified Eberron's Dragonmark system (apparently at the last minute) to take out the Feats which made it a balanced and reasonable system, and instead made it a weird mess where you have to be certain classes to actually use your Dragonmark, in direct contradiction of Eberron lore.

So they've shown that they are willing to come down hard on this. Thus them doing ANYTHING which relied on Feats would be very, very surprising and unprecedented.

2) That's an ASI point, and one where most PCs will want to take an ASI over a Feat, and even if they take a Feat, they may not want Wild Talent or the like, and would, amusingly for Dark Sun, have worse stats than normal PCs (rather than better, as is traditional). So it wouldn't really solve the issue.

But point one kills anything that relies on Feats, sadly, until WotC kill that policy. I don't personally understand why they can't just say "Feats are optional for D&D, but the Dark Sun setting requires them", and just yes, give everyone the Wild Talent Feat for free. But they've shown they're really against that, and did so recently.

Meh. Stats in 5e are nearly meaningless anyway. The differences are almost always swallowed up by proficiency and the die roll. Not having an 18 really doesn't matter in 5e. And a 20 is almost always just gilding the lilly.

I do agree though that they really seem to want to keep feats optional. Which might mean that these psionic feats will be altered if and when a Darksun setting comes out.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Part of the problem, @Ruin Explorer is that since its inception, the Soulknife has LONG struggled to find a niche. It's a neat concept, but it's more often than not a one-trick-pony. It's basically just a rogue/monk with a magical blade. Dreamscarred Press did a pretty decent job of trying to give it more flexibility, but it's still something of a dud class.

I did like how 4e made the Monk a psionic class since that did a good job of covering the soulknife's conceptual niche fairly well. Shame that WotC did not create a soul knife monastic tradition for the 4e monk.

I concur and it would have been ideal if 5E has made the Monk Psionic from the get-go (even if it was the only Psionic class for a long, long time).

However I do think the Soulknife has a strong visual image associated with it, and has shown itself to be popular with players for the concept, so I think it's worth trying to make it work. This is close. It's a bit too weak at the low end and the lack of utility is weird. It shouldn't really be challenging for WotC to find psychic stuff which jives with Rogue stuff. Fantasy fiction is stuffed to the gills with people who are "sneaky and psychic". I think the issue here is that they seem to have said to themselves "Ok wow people didn't like spells as psychic powers damn out, let's make sure these two have no spells!", but that actually wasn't a great plan, because spells and cantrips give cheap, well-packed utility.

 

[Weiley31]

Good to know. Obviously it doesn't read that way, but it's an easy fix.

So basically, if you end up burning yourself out, you can do the Psi-Replenishment to restore yourself back. Then ya just make sure you do go below D4 again.

Good to know!