Why is preventing psioninc DC augmenting bad?

[Sejs]

It would be an artificial increase in cost.

Like Aaron pointed out, it would be akin to requiring a wizard to take a feat in order for his fireballs and lightning bolts to ever do more than 5d6 damage.

Ultimately if you're not comfortable with psionics, just don't use 'em. Saves yourself from having to worry over potential balance issues like this.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'll echo some others, here.

#1: +1 DC/2 PP...the higher rate in XPH isn't nessecarily horrible, but it's egregious enough to request this CP nerf.

#2: Talk with the player instead of overhauling the system

#3: Toss more encounters, if you can, which will stop them from being so concerned about powering up their 1-5 mega-blasts, and more with spreading out usefulness.

 

[wildstarsreach]

I have played a Psion/Wizard/Cerebremancer from 1-20. The Psionics alone made the character. Wizard spells enhanced this. The wizard free scaling is well balanced vs the DC scaling that Psions have to pay for. The problem is I could go nova and inside 3 rounds burn 1/2 of my PP's. That is the problem with being a Psion. You can use your resources so fast that as a Psion alone you become ineffective.

I'm currently playing a psiforged that will be a Psion only and I have to judiciously save my points. I am playing a shaper which uses astral constructs to fight for it.

Raising the DC's keeps the Psion competative vs a Wizard but at a cost.

 

[blargney the second]

The DC jacking a player has attempted in the past with psionics, largely since at the time I was ignorant of how the system worked (and may still be).

Once bitten, twice shy? Totally understandable.

I don't think the problem lies with the psionics rules - they're really quite elegant and well-balanced for pretty much the first time in D&D. (The only exception to that statement are the two Energy powers that have +1 DC/pp, which deserve to be house-ruled back to +1 DC/2 pp.)

The most important thing is to remember the caps that Particle_Man mentioned above. If you've got a player that breaks those limits, then that's the real source of the problem. When you're DMing a player with a psi character in 3.5, you really need to understand those caps inside and out and enforce them when the player ignores them. If you can run a few encounters with psi NPCs it will go a long way to helping you understand how the hard caps in psionics work.

-blarg

 

[Storyteller01]

What would be wrong with having spellcasters take a feat to automatically scale damage dice on their spells?

Some OGL sources have those feats. But still, the spellcasters do need feats to increase saves.

 

[Storyteller01]

Alright, guess I'm sold. I'll take a look again and see what else I can do. Thanks for the input.

 

[maggot]

I can see the reasoning: A sorcerer has only a few high-level spells that have the highest of DCs, why is it that psions have all their powers available at the highest of DCs?

But what really irks me is that some powers have DC scaling and some don't (stomp). They should have made a universal rule (perhaps that the DC was 10+half pp+Ability mod) instead of doing each power individually. This would have also fixed the +1DC/pp problem fixed in CP.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I let it be known that I houseruled psionics so that you couldn't raise the save DC's of a power via the power points. Several responses were along the lines of 'HOLY NERF BAT DICE MAN!!'.


Why is preventing this bad?


My apologies if this is in the wrong forum.

There's no Heighten Power feat. If there was such a feat, things would be happier. Psions would then be on a roughly equal footing with mages.

Overchannel, Wild Surge and a few broken powers (eg Energy Missile, even post-nerf) make that a risky house rule to use. My suggestion is to fix Overchannel, Wild Surge and the hyper-scaling powers.

 

[Storyteller01]

There's no Heighten Power feat. If there was such a feat, things would be happier. Psions would then be on a roughly equal footing with mages.

Overchannel, Wild Surge and a few broken powers (eg Energy Missile, even post-nerf) make that a risky house rule to use. My suggestion is to fix Overchannel, Wild Surge and the hyper-scaling powers.

My original plan was to re-instate the Heighten Power feat from 3.0.

 

[Cabral]

As an aside, I like the psionics system, augmentation in particular, so much that I have been trying to adapt it to all spellcasting.