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There’s been a lot of discussion/noise/fervor raised over the DDI sneak peek of the Psion. It introduces a radically different system from what we’ve seen thus far, which has people a bit worried. I’m one of them. I see a few potential problems down the line with the Psion, but before I get there…has anyone played this class yet?
I bring this up because as gamers, we clamour for new things but tend to cut it down the second it arrives. 4th edition has been released.
It’s the end of the world!
It’s not D&D!
And so on. But not that many people decrying the game had actually, err, you know…played it. Now, I don’t believe that you have to play every game before you decide it’s not for you, but let’s face it –whether you like or hate 4e (I hope you like it if you’re here), people have been, shall we say, hasty in their assessment of 4th edition.
When people actually play the game, many see that it’s actually not so bad! Others remain unconvinced. Fair enough, you tried a game and based on actual play gathered that it wasn’t for you. But it didn’t end the world. Is it D&D? I say yes, but you’re obviously entitled to your opinion if you feel otherwise. If you don’t like 4e, game stores are full of other games that you could go play. You can even play another version of D&D! Life is full of options.
Back to the Psion. The world is ending! It’s not D&D (4th ed this time)! But maybe it is D&D? Maybe we have options if it doesn’t work out?
I have no idea how typical I am, but I’ve GMed for or played with each class in the game with the exceptions of the swordmage, the monk, the psion, and the shaman (they don’t call me the gamefiend because I knit, surely, and I am rectifying that unsightly omission this weekend). When I have reservations about something, I like to go out and see what’s going on. Call me a WotC apologist if you like, but I think these guys actually play-test the classes! The impression I get is that they play more D&D than you or I. They certainly don’t catch everything –there’d be little need for errata if they did– but I think that play-testing establishes a baseline of viability. By the time a class is released, they’ve played enough to prove that something in the class works.
When something new comes to us as the consumers, the knee-jerk reaction is to see only the obvious bits, dismissing the new element without taking the time to explore and sight the non-obvious. It’s worth your time as a gamer sometimes to prod your own assumptions and see what something really is. But first…
What’s wrong with the Psion?
(wherein the author becomes a hypocritical jerk)
So I’ll give my knee-jerk reactions. New sub-systems make me nervous. If you read my rant on fighters vs casters in the last In-Play, you know that I hate when one class is playing a completely different game than another class. It’s just impossible to keep balance in that environment when you must release products at the steady rate that a major game publisher must release at. Like I said, play-testing doesn’t catch everything. But when something powerful make a successful stealth check and gets released in a multi-subsystem play environment, the results can be disastrous. The weaker subsystems become subservient to the subsystems with the goodies. The fighter collects feats like a Pokemon master while the wizard rips holes in reality’s thin walls with his spells.
What else I don’t like: Multiple at-wills. If you haven’t seen the Psion yet, her’s the skinny: the class gets multiple at-wills and no encounter powers. A Psion augments the at-wills he gets with power points. Augmenting raises an at-will to the power level of an encounter power, or to the nebulous zone between an at-will and an encounter power. The power points I don’t have a problem with. It actually preserves the traditional flavor of D&D psionics and maintains a design elegance.
Psions can still “go nova” and spend all their power points in a single encounter, or use them judiciously throughout the day, which neatly preserves the power of the class without leaving them neutered. They still have things to do because they have at-wills. But multiple at-wills requires constant vigilance on power creep. A normal encounter power is balanced by nature with it’s one-shot use. You get one use that encounter and you’re done. Even if it’s a strong encounter power the game is OK. But what if you got to use that strong power multiple times, “spamming” it 2-3 times in one encounter? How does that disturb or disrupt game balance? Now, nothing in the preview is balance disturbing, but there will be more powers coming, and I am a fretful man…
The other problems with many at-wills is analysis paralysis. Have you noticed the increased player delay at the beginning of encounters? Everyone has a full range of powers at his/her disposal, and players just love agonizing over choices. Do I use power a or power B? Maybe power A then power B? Nononono. Give me power C, then A, then B. Wait, what about C, then B?
As the fight dwindles down, this delay naturally diminishes –you’ve got less options. I envision a scenario where the PC manning the Psion has just mindblasted himself (save ends) while choosing his powers. It’s like those KGB commercials where someone gets stuck mid-sentence trying to recall some obscure trivia bit. Your poor PC has got several at-wills. He can augment them or not augment them. Barring utilities and dailies, he’s got the same options each turn, so choices never become simpler for him.
I know you can force players to speed up, and that skilled players won’t have this problem…but it’s a concern. See above RE: my state of fretfulness.
So I have a few gripes. But I also have a simple way to address those concerns –I’ve assembled a crack team of game playing ninjas (known to you as the At-Will staff) and will be testing it this weekend!
I’ll let you know how it goes…In the meantime, share your gripes or actual play with us.
Similar Posts:
- DDI In-Play: The Psion
- Everything I know about the Psion I learned on the Internet
- Multiclass Mondays #14 – Psionic Power
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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Minor quibble – Power points refresh after a short rest, so they’re pretty much designed to be burned through on an encounter basis, not a daily basis. This is actually a good thing, since it encourages them to use them and dodges the bullet of using a day-sized budget in a single fight.
-Rob D.
Doesn’t the Psion max itself at 3 at-wills (4 if human)? They should only still have a few to pick from.
I haven’t played the Psion. I won’t be playing a Psion. Psionics have no place in D&D. Call me a hypocritical jerk, but that’s where I stand. If you want to play a character with psionics play a superhero RPG.
@rdonoghue –which is exactly why I need to read as well as playtest things. For me getting the power points back each short rest compounds the potent
@robert –welcome! Yeah, it’s my “concern”, but that’s why I want to see it in action. I’m probably blowing it way out of proportion, so I try to work it out to put myself at peace or confirm my mother-hen worrying.
@ameron –hypocritical jerk. I rarely get a chance to say that when I’m not involved in politics, so I thought I’d take that opportunity.
But on a serious note, if you’re not into some elements for aesthetic reasons, I think that’s valid. When a game element interferes with one’s vision or views on the genre, vision wins. My main point of contention is that when the complaint is mechanical, sometimes you really need to see it in play before you can truly judge it.
Interesting article.
I always tend to think of the supplements as optional so I don’t worry about power creep too much. I think there are some game-balance breaking things in the original PHB so I tend not to worry about it. Adding a sub-system may disturb the balance, but I’m not sure it would disturb it any more than some of the things we’ve seen before (orb wizards with sleep, paladins with hospitaler’s blessing).
I do think your analysis paralysis thoughts are interesting and probably worthy of further analysis. How do we, with RAW, speed up those first rounds of the first few battles so they’re as fast as the final rounds where everyone starts spamming at-wills.
Or is that simply the pace we should expect?
Interesting thoughts. I need to take a closer look at the psion.
I think you make some good points, and I for one was also nervous about not having encounter powers, because of sub-system creep. One of the other things that kind of makes me nervous is that without Encounter powers, multi-classing is kind of odd — what do you get when you take the power swap feats for encounter powers? And you can’t paragon multi-class without all three feats, etc…
Honestly though, I look forward to trying it. Since power points refresh after a short rest, you basically use your power points to turn at-wills into encounter level powers. I’ll be trying it out this weekend, hopefully, so we’ll see how it goes.
I’m thinking of giving the class a try, but I certainly like the change with it and WotC pushing the envelope. It is very clearly not a class for everyone (but then again, psionics has always been that way), but in bringing in new resource mechanics I was very glad to see it.
I was one of those who knee-jerk reacted to 4e lamenting that all classes resource managed the same way (high marks for balance, low marks in variety in my opinion). But in actual play the powers were varied enough that resource management was hardly noticeable. But with the psion I’m happy to see some variety put back in but still balanced out.
As for the larger number of at-wills, I like the idea. For one thing it’ll help a bit with combats that turn into drawn out grinds. On many occasions I’ve used up my encounters and dailies (or held onto a daily in prep for an obvious upcoming boss fight), and been left with re-use the same at-will (especially if I have a “multi-target” AW and a “single target” AW) over and over and over until the fight is over.
Having more choices is a good thing, and maybe I’ve been lucky enough with my group to not have major problems with the beginning of combats taking too long due to too many choices. Our players are good about seeing what they want to do and diving in. Usually the only delays are mid-combat when a player has a multi-round plan of attack that fails and he/she needs to rethink it.
But, of course, every group varies and you can never tell how it will actually play without actually playing it.
After doing a quick playtest of a psion, I would hazard that any concerns of either analysis paralysis or overpoweredness are baseless.
First off you don’t get a huge variety of abilities. I was excited on first looking the psion over at the idea of a class that gets additional at-will powers instead of encounter powers. Yay variety! Except that’s not actually how it works. Whereas a normal character will have 2-3 at-wills and 4 encounter powers (not counting racials, etc) by the time they max out, a psion gets one extra at-will power and no encounters. There’s far less choice involved in playing a psion. Instead of having additional tactical options above and beyond your at-will powers, you just have stronger versions of them. Which brings us to..
Power level. Not an issue, from what I can see. As noted above, your power points are refreshed by a short rest. The rate at which you get power points and the cost of augmenting powers increases means that you’ll always have enough points to pull off as many encounter level powers as anybody else. You can also spend fewer points to boost a power to about the level a feat would grant, but it costs you one of those encounter level powerups to do it, since you have an even number of PP. You can, in theory, stick with the heroic tier at-wills and boost them more often since they cost 2 instead of 4, but that seems about equivalent to another class never taking any of their paragon or epic tier encounter powers.
In the end you’re getting 4-5 powers with + and ++ versions available that almost all use the same attack and damage (Int vs. Will, psychic damage). As I told someone on Twitter after first giving it a run, it’s a bit like playing a fighter who took Cleave, Great Cleave, Super Cleave and OMGWTFBBQCleave as his power set. YMMV, but to me the lack of seperate encounter powers really made the character feel kind of dull, like he was permanently stuck in that end-of-combat at-will spam doldrum.
We play tested last night and I played the Psion. I actually had a good time with it. Its fun to imagine and describe from a conceptual level and it has some good striking and good controlling, so you always feel useful. Many of the attacks and power point buffs are situational, so its also fun trying to nail the perfect power use each turn. Even if you can’t though you have some always useful powers so you never feel left out. Not having encounters wasn’t at all bad because the power points really do give you some slightly different benefits which can be pretty useful depending on the circumstances.
@Ameron: I feel a similar way about machines in D&D. I was never a fan of gnomes in the old editions because all they did was end up bringing gunpowder and technology into the fantasy game. Bleh. It’s easy enough to ignore them though. I think that the Psion has some skins that aren’t too bad though, AKA mind flayers!
Hi i recently playtested a lvl 14 genasi psion, I had consentrated his skillz around locking down opponents with Daze effects and it seemed to be slightly overpowered. The at-wills are simple, the 3 i have are memory hole, mind blast,betrayel. To tell the truth almost every encounter i would augment betrayel by 2 points and have NPC1 run over to NPC2 and attack/daze him for two turns, On boss encounters i could technically lock him down with Daze effects and have him prone due to genasi earthshock for 6 turns, which i think is scary for any dm. however i find it a fun class to play that suits my playstyle.