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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6481486" data-attributes="member: 2067">If powers aren't spells, then they're not limited to just discrete 1/day effects. A psionic feat could let someone read minds at will, or gain a force-field like AC, or manifest blades of psychic energy, or allow them to heighten their speed. There's no reason these effects need to be small or crappy. Having psionics from level 1 is a more critical problem of handling them via feats, but not an insurmountable one. A "psionic character" option might let you swap out a race's +2 to an ability score (or +1 to two) for a psychic feat (since they're they roughly balanced with that swap anyway). A little variant on what has come before, but not totally alien to the system, and it has the virtue of being independent of the straightjacket of a class.Adding additional subclasses adds precisely bupkiss to an individual character's versatility. An Evoker isn't going to be able to grab what a Kineticist can get.That's a trait of Dark Sun, of course, not a trait of psionics and magic in general. As far as 5e in general is concerned, there's not even a real difference between arcane and divine magic (following 4e's "everything is a power" motif), so Hypothetical Dark Sun 5e is already going to have to specify how a cure wounds spell cast by a bard is different from one cast by a cleric (if it is?). Most simply, that would be by giving a Defiling ability to certain classes/subclasses/as a feat/etc., rather than proscribing what can be a class or subclass. Debatable. You could also say if a warlord and an assassin and an eldritch knight and a skald and an arcane trickster are all subclasses, why shouldn't "I use psychic magic" be a subclass? What makes a class isn't an objective threshold of merit, but rather a consideration of what character archetypes the game wants to support. There is a case to be made that "I hone my mind to focus psychic energy" and "I train my mind to hold arcane formula" (or "I focus my body and mind on the arts of combat" and "I focus my body and mind on the control of psychic energy") aren't greatly distinct character archetypes. The difference needs to be deeper than aesthetics. The goal here isn't utter simplification, of course, it's rather to only add the complexity necessary for the realization of the archetype, and not just splurge on a half-dozen new classes just because people want to write a new synonym for "magic-user" down on their character sheets. You'll have to be more than "I use points and call my spells powers!" to achieve subclass escape velocity. They deserve it much more? Lets show that. What's the mechanical distinction in a normal campaign between a wizard using spell points and a psionicist class?</blockquote>

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