(D&D) Would you bail if the DM says, "This setting replaces wizards and clerics with psions."

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Would you bail on this D&D campaign pitch: "This setting replaces wizards and clerics with psions."

  • Total voters
    82
Shipyard Locked said:
Imagine a DM is pitching a campaign idea and says something to the effect of, "Instead of arcane and divine magic, this setting only has psionics."

Would you immediately lose interest? Why or why not?

Note that this isn't Dark Sun, because that setting has powers outside of psionics.
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I voted yes I'd give it a try, but... No Dark Sun? WTF? I'm outtie!
 
I'd absolutely give it a go. But, you gotta tell me more about the setting. How common are psionic powers? Can anyone develop them? Are they feared or respected? Are they flashy or subtle? How powerful can they get vis a vis traditional (A)D&D spellcasting? What are the mechanics like?

I MUST HAVE ANSWERS!
 
One of the many very cool things about Palladium Fantasy, I’m mostly familiar with 1E, the that psionics are very common in the world, as is cannibalism :hehe:
PF 1E is basically very heavily houseruled 1E anyhow.
 
which edition of D&D would be a bigger issue for me, as some versions have good psi rules and others don't.

if we are talking 3rd ed, original psionics rules I'm in, but 3.5? pass.
 
The other question is how long a game are we talking? One session? A 3-4 session adventure? A year long campaign? How long we are committing to is very important here, I’ll try anything for a few sessions but am pickier for a long term game.
 
K_Peterson said:
Your spell-caster must look like this. Male or female.

View attachment 77992
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That was literally one of my first thoughts. But I don't think that's entirely fair: that should be after you've levelled up significantly.

I also think you should have to choose to get skinnier or shorter as you level up as well.

Whether your eyes change color, or you can begin to fold time and space, is entirely optional.
 
Shipyard Locked said:
What's the product?
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I'm not Voros Voros, but I think it might be Basic Psionics Handbook.

91Zi4vp7M3L.jpg


DriveThruRPG

preview.drivethrurpg.com preview.drivethrurpg.com
 
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If I am not running the game, then I don't really care much what rules are being used, especially if it is being run by someone in my group. The people you game with are more important than the rules or setting conceits in my experience.
 
I said I'd give it a go, because the idea is somewhat interesting to me. However, if my interested survived past the campaign pitch would depend on which D&D psionic system was being floated. 1e's - nah. 2e's - only if the GM's house rules looked good (and no house rules, means no interest). 3.x, sure. 4e - did it even get psions, and how were they different from other classes in play? 5e - well, I'm not a great fan of the rules, and I've not heard anything great about the psionic rules, so the GM better have a great pitch. And why aren't we using GURPS or the like anyway?
 
Sharrow said:
And why aren't we using GURPS or the like anyway?
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Good point. I think psionics have always felt shoe-horned into D&D. It's like somebody put a big-ass spoiler on the back of a 1984 boxy Volvo and yelled out "It's cool now!"

Gurps would be a good choice for this kind of setup. Hardcore DiY GMs could use EABA for truly custom powers. If nobody's interested in that level of detail, you could get away with Savage Worlds.
 
It depends.

Which psionics rules? AD&D 1e would be a hard pass (been there, done that, hit the crappy t-shirt). D&D 3E would be a system I’d try.

It also depends on the setting. Classical Middke Earthish high fantasy? Not interesting. Weird sorcery & super science? Count me in!
 
One thing that attracts me to role playing is that every campaign does NOT need to be exactly like the others. In the 70's I would often tinker with OD&D rules saying, "okay, for this campaign we're trying X and Y rules" and just go with it. I'm not sure how or when we as a hobby reached a point where there was only one way to play and it had to be by the book.

Now if the guy had said, "we're ditching wizards and clerics forever and will only use psionics from here on out" I might try a game or so and then bow out. I like my fantasy somewhat traditional most of the time.
 
finarvyn said:
One thing that attracts me to role playing is that every campaign does NOT need to be exactly like the others. In the 70's I would often tinker with OD&D rules saying, "okay, for this campaign we're trying X and Y rules" and just go with it. I'm not sure how or when we as a hobby reached a point where there was only one way to play and it had to be by the book.

Now if the guy had said, "we're ditching wizards and clerics forever and will only use psionics from here on out" I might try a game or so and then bow out. I like my fantasy somewhat traditional most of the time.
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I don’t think we are at that point, as the OSR and NSR clearly shows, but I do think that is the mindset of a subset of the hobby. Honestly I like to play by the book normally because the rules are the least interesting part of the game and it is just easier to onboard people and look things up if we play RAW. That said I have houseruled games as well so I’m not locked into that stance.
 
And to my amusement, my weekend game is switching GMs (giving me a break from eternal GMship), we're doing a short D&D3.5 game and I'm going to be playing a psychic warrior (which looks like it mostly means either 'fighter with limited staying power and good alpha strike' or 'fighter with decent staying power and crap everything else', but as the others aren't going with high-tier classes I'm not too bothered.
 
Shipyard Locked said:
Imagine a DM is pitching a campaign idea and says something to the effect of, "Instead of arcane and divine magic, this setting only has psionics."

Would you immediately lose interest? Why or why not?

Note that this isn't Dark Sun, because that setting has powers outside of psionics.
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Yes.

You'll take my gods from my cold dead hands.

*swings mace*
 
Sharrow said:
And to my amusement, my weekend game is switching GMs (giving me a break from eternal GMship), we're doing a short D&D3.5 game and I'm going to be playing a psychic warrior (which looks like it mostly means either 'fighter with limited staying power and good alpha strike' or 'fighter with decent staying power and crap everything else', but as the others aren't going with high-tier classes I'm not too bothered.
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I was reading psychic warrior very closely recently, and it's actually a lot stronger than it initially appears. While they do have powers, and should pick a couple of favorites, the real meat of the class is in feat selection and maintaining your psionic focus. Psionic Weapon hits hard and can be set up multiple times.
 
Davies said:
We did. Eberron, specifically the continent of Sarlona.
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I love Eberron.
sharps54 said:
One of the many very cool things about Palladium Fantasy, I’m mostly familiar with 1E, the that psionics are very common in the world, as is cannibalism :hehe:
PF 1E is basically very heavily houseruled 1E anyhow.
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Palladium Fantasy 2E was my fantasy game of choice in highschool. In part, I appreciated that any character had the potential to be a minor or major psionic, even without selecting an appropriate class.

I liked the D&D 3.X psychic rules and 4E did some neat things. I found the 5E rules disappointing. Honestly, as others have said, I'd be more opposed to it being D&D than replacing magic & faith with psychic powers.

I really like the new Trinity Continuum psychic rules. You could use these rules for a great campaign.
 
Shipyard Locked said:
It's interesting how some of you interpreted "psionics instead of clerics" as "no religion in the setting". Why is that a given?

Do gods have to grant magical powers? How about a little faith. :wink:
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Well, I was reacting to the post by CT_Phipps CT_Phipps immediately above mine. Given the nature of D&D settings and rules, I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that in such a campaign there would be no gods, all the gods would be dead, etc. It's not a logical necessity; gods could run sushi joints and sell cell-phone contracts. Or whatever.

Also, no gods =/= no religion.
 
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Shipyard Locked said:
It's interesting how some of you interpreted "psionics instead of clerics" as "no religion in the setting". Why is that a given?

Do gods have to grant magical powers? How about a little faith. :wink:
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I agree it's not a given. Psionics might well be learned as part of a heavily-religious training reserved only for the priests. Or it might even require faith in something, or it might be made easier by deep faith...:thumbsup:

And yes, people obviously don't require miracles to believe, just look through your windows:grin:!
 
On the psionics implies no actual gods front:

One thing that inclines me in this direction is that psionics and similar things began as a way to fit paranormal powers into a materialist worldview where there are no supernatural entities, as such. So while you could certainly use psi-powers or an existing psionics system in a theistic setting, it would be rather clashing, IMO. YMMV, of course.

In a bigger-picture sense, I’m struck by how much the idea of psionics—special paranormal powers that are explicitly not supernatural—recapitulates some elements of thinking about the occult in Early Modern Europe. On the one hand, you have theologians (both Catholic and Protestant) who insisted that any magic was actually done by demons—but in performing it they used only the powers natural to them as spiritual entities, married to their vast knowledge of the universe. No magic was literally supernatural, in the sense of breaking the laws of nature—only miracles, done by God, could achieve that. On the other hand, you have would-be practitioners of learned magic who wanted to provide an explanation for it that does not involve demons or other spiritual beings. So they came up with theories about how a magician’s own soul and spirits (in the medical sense) could affect others or the world around them. Or they insisted on purely natural, but occult, connections within the created cosmos.

In other words, the attempt to create a non-supernatural version of magic has deep roots.
 
The idea that the presence of psionics implies no gods is pretty odd. I get that there is an "instead of clerics" part, but it still seems like a pretty narrow and specific D&D-tinted take on fantasy settings. The idea of Clerics, as represented in D&D (and in that specifically set opposite wizards), isn't really something that I find commonly represented in fantasy fiction. Honestly I find the whole idea of Clerics (as a specific and separate class and type of magic user) kind of silly.
 
Fenris-77 said:
The idea that the presence of psionics implies no gods is pretty odd. I get that there is an "instead of clerics" part, but it still seems like a pretty narrow and specific D&D-tinted take on fantasy settings. The idea of Clerics, as represented in D&D (and in that specifically set opposite wizards), isn't really something that I find commonly represented in fantasy fiction. Honestly I find the whole idea of Clerics (as a specific and separate class and type of magic user) kind of silly.
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I’ll have to disagree with you there. As I noted before, the whole concept of psionics (outside of RPGs, of course) was created as a way to talk about or conceptualize paranormal powers within a materialist framework where there are no real spiritual beings or gods. The core assumption is that religion is wrong, magic is impossible—but there are these special paranormal powers that people have.

Once you have psionics systems as part of RPGs, I suppose you can bolt them into wherever you like. But using them in a setting where there are gods is sort of like wearing a space helmet within a breathable atmosphere. Fine if you want to, but the thing was created to make up for the lack of a breathable atmosphere.

On the divine magic as separate from other magic, I really think it depends on the setting. It does fit with a very deep distinction in European societies (and some others) from the time of the Ancient Greeks onward: there is good supernatural power, which we will call religion, and there is unacceptable supernatural power, which we will call magic. Given that distinction, collapsing all of it into a single magic system (while intellectually tidy) seems a bit off, to me anyway.
 
Lofgeornost said:
I’ll have to disagree with you there. As I noted before, the whole concept of psionics (outside of RPGs, of course) was created as a way to talk about or conceptualize paranormal powers within a materialist framework where there are no real spiritual beings or gods. The core assumption is that religion is wrong, magic is impossible—but there are these special paranormal powers that people have.

Once you have psionics systems as part of RPGs, I suppose you can bolt them into wherever you like. But using them in a setting where there are gods is sort of like wearing a space helmet within a breathable atmosphere. Fine if you want to, but the thing was created to make up for the lack of a breathable atmosphere.

On the divine magic as separate from other magic, I really think it depends on the setting. It does fit with a very deep distinction in European societies (and some others) from the time of the Ancient Greeks onward: there is good supernatural power, which we will call religion, and there is unacceptable supernatural power, which we will call magic. Given that distinction, collapsing all of it into a single magic system (while intellectually tidy) seems a bit off, to me anyway.
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Yeah, I'll disagree back. What you have there is certainly one way to describe things, but I wouldn't agree that it covers all the bases. I think that psionics are, or at least were, much more set opposite to magic than to specifically clerical magic. I'm talking about fantasy more broadly here rather than specifically D&D. So psionics versus magic, not psionics versus gods. There are lots of fantasy settings that have no connection between the gods and the ability to perform magic and where those gods are not in any way manifested in the setting. It's also not the case that religion and magic cohabit the same conceptual space in fantasy either, and are , in fact, quite often set opposite one another with magic painted as 'evil' or whatever by the religions in the settings.

It's also the case that the idea of psionics is much more common in sci fi than it is in fantasy. Sci fi as a genre doesn't engage with the ideas of gods or magic all that commonly, certainly not like fantasy does anyway.

I reject the notion that 'real' history has much to add to this discussion. I don't disagree with your cliff notes there, I just don't think they have much to say about fantasy settings and how magic is conceptualized. You certainly get bad and good magic in all manner of settings but I challenge the idea that this is in any particular way tied to historical ideas instead of being tied to the black and white ethical shading so common to fantasy fiction.
 
Fenris-77 said:
The idea that the presence of psionics implies no gods is pretty odd. I get that there is an "instead of clerics" part, but it still seems like a pretty narrow and specific D&D-tinted take on fantasy settings. The idea of Clerics, as represented in D&D (and in that specifically set opposite wizards), isn't really something that I find commonly represented in fantasy fiction. Honestly I find the whole idea of Clerics (as a specific and separate class and type of magic user) kind of silly.
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I'd agree with this, merely for the fact that you don't have to have Theurgic power to have gods- look at our own. And those gods could just be ascended psi-users.
 
Lofgeornost said:
I’ll have to disagree with you there. As I noted before, the whole concept of psionics (outside of RPGs, of course) was created as a way to talk about or conceptualize paranormal powers within a materialist framework where there are no real spiritual beings or gods. The core assumption is that religion is wrong, magic is impossible—but there are these special paranormal powers that people have.
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I don't think that was the case. Psionics arises from the same Victorian world view that made so much of spirit mediums, etc. Many of those people absolutely believed in spirits and God, if not gods. They just also believed that humans (or at least some humans) could cultivate abilities that might seem 'supernatural', but which were actually part of the natural world (just as the ghosts and spirits were natural).

This was, of course, in the same theme as those earlier thinkers who held that magic was the use of occult (as in 'hidden') natural laws to create effects in the real world that appeared miraculous or supernatural, but which were really just the proper use of specialist knowledge. Most of these people also didn't deny the existence of God, or of spirits, and some might have claimed to be using occult knowledge to compel non-demonic spirits, or bargain with spirits, so that those spirits would do things for them. There was quite a bit of debate in the early medieval church about whether doing such a thing was contrary to God's will or not, and the general conclusion was that while it might not be, as there was no way to tell whether the spirits you were dealing with were demonic or not, and deal with demons/the devil was clearly wrong, all magic was suspect and unsafe.
 
A) Psionics, as presented, is awfully close to many postulates of Tibetan Buddhism, which certainly has gods and demons. And yet, power of the mind...to the point where many "psionic" characters, like The Shadow, studied in Tibet:grin:!

B) You could as well state that "this is no longer fantasy", since psionic has replaced wizards as well::honkhonk:!

C) Many RPG systems don't even have separate clerical magic, and the Cleric class outright sucks at presenting actual, you know, religion. So I fail to see how replacing it implies anything about the setting. It might be replaced in order to substitute something that presents more persuading clerics, for all we know:gooselove:!

D) I fail to see how someone who looks at you and makes a sword fly in the air and attack you of its own is not a wizard:tongue:.

E) The goal of establishing psionics, as a way to do magic without involving demons and gods, was to avoid being seen as a D&D character sees Evil Clerics, and to be seen as a Wizard instead. So it's basically not rejecting gods, it's stipulating that those exist, we just aren't concerned with them, but with the arcane forces of the universe. If they didn't exist, there would be no reason not to use them as mere mental images, to facilitate the activation of powers the old way:tongue:!

F) Seriously, people, we have religion without clerical magic working, AFAIK...:angel:
 
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