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DaidojiTaidoru wrote:

Is it still being argued that "I blow things up with my mind!" is more scientific then "I research formulas and laws for days in order to piece together an elaborate equation that causes an explosion?" I just want to see if anythings changed.

Perfect summation! The perfect argument to the closed minded anti-psi crowd. Take a bow, my friend.

This thread has been an amusing read. What really sticks is how much baggage there is to the whole thing.

First of all, the entire "based on literature" aspect of things feels like it has been pulled from 15 years ago or longer. The divide of Psychics on space ships vs. Wizards fighting dragons just isn't as prevalent as it once was. Particularly in modern fantasy you'll either see young untrained mages spontaneously generating traditionally psionic effects before they can be found and educated or you'll see psychics and wizards working together. Not to mention the fact that psionics and magic serve the same literary function.. to do the impossible.

That doesn't even take into account that in D&D the whole Psionics vs. Magic arguement makes no sense. There is no 'Magic' in D&D. There are Divine abilities and there are Arcane abilities.. not to mention Incarnum and Pact abilities. Psionics is just another set of abilities.. ALL of which would fall under the term 'Magic' as they allow the PCs (or monsters) to do the impossible.

None of this addresses that ultimately, these rules are to help the DM in conjunction with the players to create the sort of world they want to run. This can go from very simple with Martial and Divine being the only powers sources for PCs a classical Tolkien inspired setting to complex.. for instance imagine Eberron where each of the planes represented a different power source that various users could call on. I believe in that sort of divide, you would even break Psionics out into Dreaming and Madness.

As a set of rules with only an implied setting, D&D's job is to define a set of rules that are as close to middle of the road as possible that can such that the DM can make the descissions he or she needs to to build the setting they want to see. I think this is one of the really nice things about just having a Warlord class so that you can remove the need for the divine power source if you want to take the Gods out of the equation.

Evilholyguy wrote:

yay that means my friends won't get to be cheap bum munches off the bat! but i do hope they make it not broken because seriously I had to ban Psionics from my game thanks to the PP system

most likely you dont know well the rules of psionic and your player took advantage of that if at 1st level.

Bacris]The single most important rule in the Expanded Psionics Handbook is that you cannot spend more power points on a power than you have manifester levels in the class the power belongs to. This is absolutely essential to understand. What this means is that a 9th level psion can only spend 9 power points on any one manifestation.

For more go here: [url]http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=33125 wrote:

To those who complain that there is too much overlap between Mages and Psions, try this.
For all damage-inflicting powers (Energy Ball, etc.), replace the descriptors concerning energy types Electricity with Force and Sonic with 'Psychic' (which is a new damage type for 4E.) Force effects would act as normal, while 'Psychic' effects would be similar to 'subdual damage'.
This leaves room for attack powers that are more 'psychic' in feel while effectively halving the overlap, since pyrokinesis and cryokinesis are more common psionic tropes than electrokinesis (at least, in non-modern settings) and , er, "audiokinesis"?

Would that help any?