Working on a psionics system that reflects the original conceptual categories of psionics, though there is for sure room for innovation and creativity. In trying to map out the territory for psychoportation I’ve come up against a problem that was never really well addressed. There is a real lack of low level psionic powers for the psychoportation discipline. In 3.5 they dealt with this issue by giving the discipline a bunch of stuff that just involved movement in some way, basically porting over low level spell directly. My problem is that they weren’t framed in a way where it seemed like the powers were a manipulation of space and time and also that several of them seemed to be more appropriate to the psychokinetic discipline.
I was wondering if anyone has or can come up with any good ideas for low level psychoportative effects. Ones that seem appropriate for 1-3 level spell equivalence?
I can also see a place for simply reworking the concepts of some more basic movement related abilities if it can be done in a way that makes sense and feel appropriate. For instance, perhaps there is a way to conceptualize a bonus movement power as a dialation of time or compression of space effect. Any specific ideas on how to name and describe things like that would also be greatly appreciated.
Whether magic or psionics, the various schools or disciplines are only vaguely connected to the spells or powers to which they are connected. I think you’ll find if you took this approach to all of the disciplines, that you’ll end up with many powers that don’t fit in any discipline.
This is true of magic schools, which were so nebulous D&D could get away with switching healing spells from necromancy in 1e/2e to a new school called “healing” in 3e.
From what I’ve seen at least of the 2e and 2e revised power lists, this is a lot less true of psionics than it was of magic. Psionics has been reinvented with each edition. In 3e and likely later, you did end up getting a few of these tenuously linked powers.
Cure spells got moved to the Conjuration school in 3.Xe. Healing is a sub-school, just like Charm or Teleportation. Inflict spells are still in Necromancy.
There are still lots of people that think that healing spells should remain in necromancy school. One objection is that the change destroyed the D&D “white necromancer” concept in 3E in a single stroke.
Precisely. I’m one of those guys who believed in the good necromancy concept. And IMO Conjuration is a terrible fit for life magic in general, unless we’re growing living things out of thin air with that magic.
Indeed, there were a handful of necromancy spells from Dragon magazine which were as close as wizards came to healing magic (Arvid’s Unseen Limb and such), and I liked those.
But we’re digressing from the original topic.
I don’t have any problem with going tangent to disciplines in the name of versatility.
I would treat psychoportation as anything that messes with time and space.
Maybe even consider a damage reflection power, or a power which changes the concept of distance itself (making rooms much bigger inside than they appear on the outside), etc.
I would like to politely disagree with this statement. Having been just reviewing all of the versions of psionics from 3.5 back to the beginning for the last month and more as part of the Unseen Ways project… I can say with some confidence that all the versions of psionics are surprisingly similar, and share many congruencies. Psionics really hasn’t changed very much over editions from a meta perspective, even if a few of the details have.
