Psychic FocusĮach of those psionic disciplines has a static bonus called a “psychic focus”. They’re also divided into categories similar to magic schools, which matter for bonus disciplines you can pick up from your order. These disciplines are going to be some of your main features and the source of a lot of your customization. Each discipline is a set of features, including a psychic focus which is a “static” bonus, and a slew of both low and high tier abilities you can activate by spending psi points. You pick out one discipline to start and get another one every two levels, and you’ll also get one or more bonus disciplines based on your mystic order. You regain all your spent psi points on a long rest. You get more points as you go up in level in honestly bizarre increments, starting with very few to tons of the things at later levels. This is the resource that you’ll be spending to use most of your abilities. We’ll go into them further but for now treat these as powered-up cantrips. You start with 1 and gain a few more as you level up. These are halfway between cantrips and invocations and they’ll likely be your primary source of damage in the early levels. With that established, let’s get into all the many things that start with “psi” that you get with psionics: Your powers will use a lot of spell terminology like duration or areas of effect, all that stuff works exactly the same.Your psionic abilities are Intelligence based for your “not-spell” attack bonuses and “not-spell” saving DCs.While you’ll do a lot of things that look and function like spellcasting, they’re not technically spells for things like counterspell or anti-magic fields.To start with, the class spends a lot of time explaining that your psionic abilities aren’t spells, but then proceeds to reiterate a ton of the parts of spellcasting as if they were spellcasting. I find that their structure and wording can be very confusing and difficult to parse with a half-dozen different parts each somehow starting with “psi”. PsionicsĪ TON of features get wrapped up in this core feature you gain at 1st level. This makes you a bit less squishy than a wizard and most pure casters, but you’ll need some work to do anything on the front line. To start with the mystic has a d8 hit die, and proficiency with light armor and simple weapons. Here we’ll go into each unique feature gained by the mystic and how best to utilize them. To take your adventure of the mind you’ll first need to understand the fundamentals of the class and how its features function. This means that most DMs will take a heck of a lot of convincing to allow them. It’s important though to reiterate though that mystics have only been published in unearthed arcana, which is meant as a testing ground, and it seems that WotC has largely abandoned them to the cutting room floor. They can function as magic (ok psychic) damage dealers, party buffers, or with a bit of work can even be tanks and frontline fighters. Mechanically they are hard to fully describe as they are very customizable but tend to play almost like a mixture of sorcerer and warlock, with numerous selectable features and a pool of points that power your better abilities. They constitute their own unique class of adventurers, unraveling mysteries through telepathy, smashing foes through telekinesis, and solving problems through old fashioned wit. They form secretive orders or isolate themselves as hermits, travelling an inner journey of the mind. Psychics, wisemen, mentalists, mystics are masters of mental disciplines that distort and control reality through sheer force of intellect and will. So, center yourself and clear your mind as we go through everything you need to know. Still, they exist now in 5e as an unearthed arcana, and if your DM is game you’ve still got the opportunity to adventure using the power of your mind as the enigmatic mystic. Since that bad impression countless failed attempts to bring psionics into the game have been made, and mystics well… didn’t end up working out either. The end result was like trying to add a new engine part to a car by firing it out of a cannon at the engine block. Psychic powers were a cool idea but they were built as a sort of separate thing that got dropped into an existing finely tuned machine. Ever since their early introductions to the game, psionics have been something of a dirty word in D&D.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |