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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mirrorrorrim" data-source="post: 9070224" data-attributes="member: 7040132">Not directed to me, but my answer would be no. I am one of the people who has a problem with psionics for the entire life of the game. And I've played them in every edition because we thought they would be fixed every time a new edition were released. They weren't. Almost every time, it didn't work out like we had hoped. 4E was the only edition we didn't have a mechanical problem, but we had a preference problem.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I played in 1E when another player rolled randomly and got a broken wild talent. Even they became unhappy because they felt awkward about being so much more powerful than the rest of us.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I played in 2E in a Dark Sun game. We had hope because it was a full system for everyone to participate in! But it had terrrrible mechanics that leaned into mindscape battles on completely different initiative than the rest of combat. The Contact system and pretty much everything leaned into unnecessary complexity. The sci-fi flavor was so discordant too.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I DM'd in 3E in and the power point system was BUSTED. In just one Eberron campaign, one player would use all kinds of RAW broken combos to great effect that made everyone else feel small (like creating copies of himself who could each manifest two primary powers, to overwhelm enemies with crazy alpha strikes). He said "It's balanced because all the PPs come out of my pool." When he alpha striked one BBEG and it just released something worse (it was a cascading 3-tier encounter), he got so pissssed. While that was the worst, I never had a good experience in 3E. Psionics was used as a way to subvert power and expectations and surprise people (but never did it in a good way).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I DM'd in 4E. To be honest, power-wise, it wasn't bad to me because classes were so similar. But it was never picked up and played in a long-term campaign because the one guy who considered it said it didn't feel different enough, and psionics had to be different.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">For 5E, no one in my groups wanted to playtest the UA Mystic, so I did some white-room play. It was different. But it didn't seem like it was going to make the majority of psionics fans happy.</li> </ol>Anecdotally, most people who seem to LOVE psionics seem do so because they want a full alternative to magic. It seems they prefer the way psionics works (or more accurately, they prefer how they think psionics should work) over the way that D&D magic works. Subtle, powerful magics that alter reality without V,S,M components, and fit neatly into Discipline themes that make better sense than magic schools (some like the way 3E tied them to ability scores too.)  More like the Force in some Star Wars RPGs. Some want it to not count as magic at all, and ignore magic resistance.But that vision doesn't fit alongside D&D magic. Psionics is its OWN way of presenting an entire replacement system for Magic. Psionics deserves to be the primary way "magic" works in a game, and needs inherent rules and monsters that follows those rules so they interact well. It's too big to be an alternative that is shoe-horned into balancing against the D&D magic system. Not one edition has done it well.Looking at the history of D&D, there is enough Psionic design space to dedicate a large sourcebook to it. They literally did that in 3E. But it still didn't work for our tables. Now if Wizards creates a sourcebook and campaign setting that leans into Psionics, maybe they can get it right. And if they got it right, I might play around with it for a campaign. But the concept itself is too big to shoehorn in to the base rules. I don't have faith that it can be done right.</blockquote>

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