Deep Psi

Side note first:  I fixed a problem that might have been keeping comments from working correctly, so if you’ve tried to leave one lately and failed, you should be able to now.

On to the main post.  Recently, I decided I’d try a subscription to Insider.  Although I didn’t see a lot of purpose to it when I first got the core books, and I’m not terribly moved by promises of exclusive content, I figured it would be worth a try, and if nothing else there might be some interesting stuff in Dungeon that I could lift for my game.  Plus, I’d get access to stuff like the Swordmage, a class printed in a book I have no intention of ever buying.  And the Monk, in which I have something of an interest, if you hadn’t noticed…

I haven’t played around with Insider enough to really comment on it yet.  I can say that I find the character builder fun to tinker with, and probably pretty useful (although I’ve never had problems with creating characters in 4e using pen and paper, either).  Dungeon and Dragon look promising enough that the subscription might be justified, although the Dungeon content looks a little lighter than I’d like.

But the main thing that’s caught my attention is the Psion class, recently revealed.

Accurate depiction of 2e psionics

Several other blogs have commented on the Psion playtest.  I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the class itself; take a look at those reviews for that.  The main thing about the Psion is this:  The Psion has no encounter attack powers.  Instead, he has more at-will powers.  Many of these at-wills are augmentable by spending a “power point” resource unique (as of now) to Psions.  Most of the ones I looked at have three distinct levels:  unaugmented, augmented by a point or two, and fully augmented (which costs anywhere from two to six points).

In short, the Psion can decide to turn his at-will powers into encounter powers, and he can do it when and to the extent that he wants to, limited only by his store of power points and the necessity of the new Augment keyword.

This is interesting, though probably not as powerful as it might first sound.  It does make Psions pretty flexible, at the cost of a little power.

The really intriguing part, though, isn’t just that they’ve broken the “mold” of class powers.  They’ve done that before — with the druid and Wild Shape, for instance — if never in quite so broad a way.  Still, the PHB2 was enough to suggest that the designers were looking for new things to do with the system, so this isn’t a complete surprise.

The really intriguing part is the way in which they’ve chosen to implement psionics.  It would have been easy for the Psion to function much like any other class.  Instead, they kept elements like power points and augmentation, the former of which goes back all the way to the threadbare first-edition psionics rules.  The “mana point” system was meant to limit the use of psychic powers while allowing them to be more flexible in their use than Vancian spells were.  And it did — but it also made psionics pretty unbalanced, especially in those editions in which magic and psionics didn’t interact.

What 4e has done is retain the power point system while also balancing it against the power available to members of other classes.  It maintains the traditional feel, while getting rid of the traditional drawback.  I haven’t played with the new rules yet, so I can’t say just how well the balance holds up, but just from the look of things, I’m pretty confident that it beats out the older systems already.

I’m impressed that the designers were able to show this sort of respect toward the older incarnations while still making the class, presumably, something more on-par with the already-existing classes.  I noticed this sort of thing with legacy elements revisited in Manual of the Planes, too — but that was mostly fluff, and this is pretty complex crunch, at least by 4e standards.

The build they’ve given us to play with is telepath, by the way.  As a controller, it might be a bit light on area-effect powers, but the Psion does get access to an awful lot of good status effects.  Dominate is downright common, relative to other classes.  Of course, this makes sense for a telepath, as does the prominence of Psychic damage.

The second build is apparently going to be a psychokineticist, focusing on forced movement and Force effects.  I’m guessing they’ll have more area-effect than the telepath.

I’ve always been a little ambivalent about psionics in D&D (aside from Dark Sun, that is — but they fit well on Athas because the setting was specifically designed for them).  This rendition of the Psion looks like it’ll prove fun, though.  From both sides of the screen.

The PHB3 is looking pretty promising.

Related posts:

1. Wizards’ Monk Playtest
2. Developing Roles
3. 4e Mystic project
4. Barbarians at the Gates
5. Skybreaker session 2: Deep as a…