Unearthed Arcana Why UA Psionics are never going to work in 5e.

[MechaTarrasque]

Every class (except maybe the fighter and no one can agree on the ranger) has both an idea of how you get power and why others don't. That poor goblin cannon fodder the PC's just killed: He wasn't a wizard because he didn't study to be a wizard. Ditto why he wasn't a monk. He wasn't a sorcerer because no cosmic event happened to him or one of his relatives. He swore an oath, and no one cared, so he wasn't a paladin. Etc.

But he had a mind, and that's all you need to be a psion right? That is all the story we are allowed before it gets "too icky" or whatever was complained about the mystic's origin. Form follows function or in this case, class follows story.

While I agree with the points you made, I feel like it's less of a problem of comparing the sorcerer with the psionicist, and more of an indication of the problems with the sorcerer class design.

As noted, the sorcerer feels like it should be able to slot in a psionicist origin quite neatly, as long as you don't actually look at the mechanics of the sorcerer class. And it's one of the reasons that it always feels like I'm banging my head against the wall when trying to create a sorcerer character — the mechanics always feel entirely disconnected from the 'fluff' of the class. I would happily strip out all metamagic, if I could just get a sorcerer class that felt like what the sorcerer class looks like it's supposed to be.

Personally, I don't see sorcerers as about magic, per se, but rather about innate and intrinsic power. The fact that they're using magic is simply because that's the only tool that has been available til now. Swapping that out for psionics should be a trivial issue. The problem is in metamagic, which is a hardcoded binding to magic in a way that fails spectacularly to work with any of the other sorcerer thematic concepts.


As for the issue of how to implement psionics? I 100% agree with the current approach of implementing it as subclass features and feats. "Psionics" is a tool, like "magic". It's not a "character concept", at least not within the scope of a fantasy setting. (It might be, in a cyberpunk or sci-fi setting, but that setting would also ditch the wizard, so there would be a conceptual hole to fill.)

I heavily favor the "you are turning into a dragon/angel/elemental/etc." approach myself. But there are people who favor "you are just naturally good with magic" and I think it might have been better from a design perspective to split the two things apart. I figure the "you are turning" one might have been better as a half caster (arguably in 5e, looking at the capstone, you could argue paladins are just taking a long time to turn into something else).

Of course, I would argue that once you take out the "dragon/angel/elemental/etc.", the rationale for it to be a charisma caster pretty much vanishes. If you look at fiction, characters who are "just good" at magic tend to have a feel for the flow of magic, which seems much more wisdom-based character.

I doubt 5e will change the sorcerer in any big way. 6e (if it ever comes) will probably start with them trying to push the "turn into a dragon/angel/elemental/etc" idea again (like in the 5e playtest), because there are only so many ways to "just naturally good at magic" and a lot of things you can turn into.

 

[TwoSix]

That makes sense then. I was like woooah, I missed some serious errata.

I think it was a 6th edition Freudian slip.

 

[Weiley31]

How about we just turn this argument in the opposite direction? There is no Arcane magic. It is all really just Psionics, with the people thinking it is magic having to use the crutches of verbal, somatic, and material components or a focus, to make it work. Arcane casters use and manipulate the power within themselves and within the environment around them. Take away the components and it is all just done with the mind. So maybe in a fantasy setting, everything is really Psionic and Divine, instead of Arcane and Divine.

What if I told you that none of it was Arcane, Divine, Spontaneous, or Psionics, but instead the power of one, single dice?

 

[Weiley31]

That makes sense then. I was like woooah, I missed some serious errata.

I would've been SUPER sad if that happened.

 

[TwoSix]

I would've been SUPER sad if that happened.

I was sad they dropped the Warlord. We adapt.

 

[Fenris-77]

I would've been SUPER sad if that happened.

Me too, the Warlock is one of my favorite things about 5e. Love the class and love the chassis. It was the thing that jumped out at me on my first read through the PHB.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

What if I told you that none of it was Arcane, Divine, Spontaneous, or Psionics, but instead the power of one single dice?

There are no dice. It is all in your mind.

 

[Chaosmancer]

But they are together and magics/psionics do coexist. Saying that it's only because of its piecemeal development kinda moves the goal posts of the question.

As I said, I'm fine with making psionics magic, but it's still a separate magical tradition in Savage Worlds than both divine and arcane supernatural powers. This is largely the point. I think that there is a hidden argument in the "is psionics magic?" debate. I sometimes get the feeling that the real question is not so much "is psionics magical?" but rather "if psionics is magic, why not just play a wizard?" It feels like the actual debate centers around the wizard class wanting to gobble up everything magical as part of its purview, including psionics. I don't like that, and I would prefer that psionics was treated as a separate tradition of magic or supernatural powers.

Go the Pathfinder 2 route and call it "Occult" magic rather than psionics. Boom. Pseudo-science flavor is gone. But then you can put a lot of the weird mind/body/spirit magic/spells into Occult that covers what is typically regarded as psionic.

I don't want to argue about what you want, but I do want to point out that you are putting a lot of emphasis on the difference in Savage Worlds that doesn't exist.

All powers in Savage Worlds use the exact same mechanics. They are nearly identical. I looked up the rules in my book, and it seems there is a minor difference. Between Psionics and Magic it is literally just that a crit fail is worse for a Psionic because it affects others. Otherwise they are identical.

To do Psionics like they do it in Savage Worlds would quite literally just be taking the wizard class, completely as written, and calling it a psion.

That is the "different tradition" as done by Savage worlds. And that isn't what anybody wants. They want actual mechanical differences between the Wizard and the Psionics.

How about we just turn this argument in the opposite direction? There is no Arcane magic. It is all really just Psionics, with the people thinking it is magic having to use the crutches of verbal, somatic, and material components or a focus, to make it work. Arcane casters use and manipulate the power within themselves and within the environment around them. Take away the components and it is all just done with the mind. So maybe in a fantasy setting, everything is really Psionic and Divine, instead of Arcane and Divine.

Let me ask you a question, does this change how anything works?

If not, then sure. A lot of settings use this idea. The problem though is that DnD called it magic first, and kept calling it magic for 50 years. And they can't change that at this point.

Every class (except maybe the fighter and no one can agree on the ranger) has both an idea of how you get power and why others don't. That poor goblin cannon fodder the PC's just killed: He wasn't a wizard because he didn't study to be a wizard. Ditto why he wasn't a monk. He wasn't a sorcerer because no cosmic event happened to him or one of his relatives. He swore an oath, and no one cared, so he wasn't a paladin. Etc.

But he had a mind, and that's all you need to be a psion right? That is all the story we are allowed before it gets "too icky" or whatever was complained about the mystic's origin. Form follows function or in this case, class follows story.

You also need either a seed for your psionic powers. or training to implement them.

I prefer to picture Psionics as similiar to monks, it requires extreme training and discipline, along with a dash of natural talent, to become a psion. Everyone has a mind, not everyone can use it as a weapon.

I heavily favor the "you are turning into a dragon/angel/elemental/etc." approach myself. But there are people who favor "you are just naturally good with magic" and I think it might have been better from a design perspective to split the two things apart. I figure the "you are turning" one might have been better as a half caster (arguably in 5e, looking at the capstone, you could argue paladins are just taking a long time to turn into something else).

Of course, I would argue that once you take out the "dragon/angel/elemental/etc.", the rationale for it to be a charisma caster pretty much vanishes. If you look at fiction, characters who are "just good" at magic tend to have a feel for the flow of magic, which seems much more wisdom-based character.

I doubt 5e will change the sorcerer in any big way. 6e (if it ever comes) will probably start with them trying to push the "turn into a dragon/angel/elemental/etc" idea again (like in the 5e playtest), because there are only so many ways to "just naturally good at magic" and a lot of things you can turn into.

This is my preference for sorcerers as well, just feels right to me.

 

[jayoungr]

6e (if it ever comes) will probably start with them trying to push the "turn into a dragon/angel/elemental/etc" idea again (like in the 5e playtest), because there are only so many ways to "just naturally good at magic" and a lot of things you can turn into.

I don't see a big difference between the two. "Just naturally good at magic" is simply moving the thing that influences your magic from your future to your past, or so it seems to me.

 

[Weiley31]

To do Psionics like they do it in Savage Worlds would quite literally just be taking the wizard class, completely as written, and calling it a psion

And NOBODY was happy when the last Psionic UA did that.