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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 3780159" data-attributes="member: 5435">One of the reasons psionics was appealing in first edition was that it felt mysterious and undeveloped. No one in the setting knew enough about it to become a psionicist, and more often than not those who had it ended up dead. Psionics gave you the sense of playing with something unusual and exotic, in a way that magic-users could not.Second edition psionics had a lot of great ideas for new powers, but whoever had the idea of adopting proficiency mechanics should get a boot to the head.  Magic can be chaotic and random if you're working with powers that have that character, but psionics are all about self-control and their powers should be reliable. The scale of power points was also quite reasonable, I think--useful powers had a reasonably high minimum cost, and always represented a significant percentage of the psion's pool.Third edition psionics is just another kind of magic. Again, cool power ideas--but so many of them have so little to do with our cultural expectation of what the human mind can do (or what we wish it could do). The psion's power set is different from a wizard's, but no more different than that of Arcana Unearthed's Magister. On the other hand, it did give the psion an impressive degree of control and flexibility.Can fourth edition take the best of all three approaches? I think it's possible. My ideal psionics system would have the following features:*A smaller set of powers, most of which match our cultural expectations. Body control does not mean polymorph, and pyrokinesis does not imply ectoplasmic acid balls of doom.*The stronger powers should be quite flexible, rather than limited to one or two well-defined mechanical benefits. Precognition does not mean +1 to hit.  It should be possible to enhance most powers by spending more resources on them.*Since there would be fewer powers, it's OK for them to be organized into fewer "levels". Maybe they're feats and talents, maybe they're devotions and sciences, or maybe each one is just given a minimum character level without trying to organize them at all.*A power point scale that encourages psionics of all levels to husband their resources. *Psionic combat should be decoupled from the use of powers. There's no need to penalize psionics for expending their points--just introduce an analogy to the regular combat system that takes place between two psionics.I think that three new classes, fifty powers, and any new rules required could easily slim down to one-third of a book.</blockquote>

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