Character Concept: The Voice of the Stars

I love aberrants–especially when I get to unleash them on my players–as well as things generally associated with them, such as the star pact and psionics. I figure, why not have both?

This character could have been a survivor from an illithid colony, a failed ceremorphosis candidate, got too close to the Far Realm, read a tome she should not have (if you want to tap H.P. Lovecraft), or was otherwise exposed to some aberrant force. Perhaps her psionic talents attracted the attention of an otherworldly entity, or perhaps psionics were part of the package deal.

At any rate, you start with a hybrid psion/warlock, with the telepathy focus and star pact respectively. The theme is kind of iffy; if you have a background for what your character was all about before this went down, you could go with that (like guttersnipe or outlaw if you nabbed the book-that-should-not-have-been-opened), though seer is good if you want to focus on the whole fate aspect.

Powers are pretty easy to juggle, you will just want to make sure that your Intelligence and Charisma are both set to 16. The telepathy focus works out well, as it is linked to Charisma. I think the only real flaw here is that some star-pact spells are dependent on Constitution, which might be a problem if your DM won’t let you just pen in “charisma” over the power description.

You will probably want to dump your first feat on Hybrid Talent so you can pick up something extra. After that just nab a rod or orb and you are good to go, though if your DM is cool with it you might want to ask about re-skinning a few more things:

• Tentacle Lash: I like the idea of a servant (or slave?) of the stars being mutated by her “gifts”. The tentacle might always be present, or extend from her hand or even mouth. You could even go so far as to have the character have an entire face of tentacles, complete with a lamprey-like mouth or beak ala the mind flayer. This is just a re-skinned basic melee attack, or even eldritch strike. I would have it otherwise function as a short- or longsword.
• Maddening Drone: More of a warlock power, you have lots of little mouths that whisper secrets and prophecies. This would just deal psychic damage within a close burst. Might not be “balanced”, but is thematic and cool. Could have a push effect. If you went with this as a daily I could see it dazing or even stunning.
• Mind Blast: You could simply reskin thunderwave to deal psychic damage and swap out of the push effect for something like a defense or attack penalty, or prevent targets from making opportunity attacks for a turn. Alternatively, save kickers for the augmented versions, up to and including a one-turn daze effect.
• Thought Shackles: The dominated condition does not start until 5th level, and even then it is for one turn. Still you could deal psychic damage, then have the target make a melee basic attack. Or you could have it so that you can make the target use one until they shake the effect off with a save. Like, they get to take their turn, but on your turn you can take control briefly. Something that seems quasi-mind flayery.

As a fan of homebrew content and sticking to a concept, I would consider my patron star’s goals and theme when picking, altering, or creating new spells, as well as how the character’s psionic powers develop. 

I guess the only bad part about this character is that it is seemingly more suited to a villain, though you could go the route of a kind of grim-dark hero. Depending on the complexity of the star’s machinations, the character’s actions could coincide with the rest of the party. Hell, one star might have the character move against the other one.

Delve Night: Cairn of the Winter King

Not really a delve, but the adventure taken from Monster Vault. I wanted to try something really weird, and ended up with a shardmind shaper psion. Shardminds are an annoying race in that I can’t really think of a working character concept outside of, “you’re in the natural world, trying to kill aberrants.” Great if you’re running a campaign frought with aberrant baddies, but…not so good in any other circumstance. Also, they’re very alien looking, falling outside what the arbitrary acceptable non-human traits of other races (glowing eyes, horns, tails, and/or fur).

Since it was a delve I wasn’t surprised that the party and townsfolk never questioned my existence or purpose. I’d elected to go with the shaper class feature, because I enjoyed forging astral constructs in 3rd Edition, and while I knew I couldn’t do it so easily in 4th Edition wanted to see if it was still enjoyable creating more bizarre, temporary things as even at level 4, none of the at-will Conjurations were humanoid in shape. Instead, I could create shards of force, static motes, and…whatever the hell a psychic anomaly is.

The first encounter in the adventure consists of a cliched viking boat dropping out of the sky and unloading more undead that what could fit into it. Thankfully, a lot are minions, but since our DM wouldn’t indicate which I decided to reserve power points and throw out a static mote. Initially, it only slows things that start their turns next to it, and on the following round explodes into a Close burst 3 attack. Anything next to it has to basically double move (or teleport) to get far enough away to avoid it. This, combined with the fact that it targets creatures, made it somewhat annoying to use.

The Most Useful Power award went to psychic anomaly. This thing is awesome, and aside from the occasional force shard I used it exclusively throughout the session. You drop it on your turn, and anything that starts next to it gets hammered by an attack. The best part is, that if you burn a power point then allies can flank with it, but if you spend two it also dazes them. This, coupled with our skirmishing warlord’s knock-back attacks, helped us keep the heat off of our gnome paladin, who unfortunately still got dropped about five or so times throughout the session.

After we dispatched the undead, we talked with the boat, which allowed anyone on that affirmed having the ice scepter, whether or not they actually did. Figuring we’d need it later, we bothered to dig around and found someone that happened to have just the scepter we were looking for. After that we got on the boat, and were subjected to a lengthy and annoying skill challenge. There weren’t a lot of skills that we were allowed to use, and thankfully the DM was kind enough to ignore the fact that we’d accrued a good deal more than three failures by its conclusion (though we were a healing surge worse for wear).

The entrance to the dungeon is indicated by a massive pile of skulls encased in ice. We didn’t spend time checking it out after the DM mentioned as an aside that it had some form of attack. On the other hand, the first room was warm and inviting, with an old man claiming to be the Winter King and swearing that he’d drop the curse if we handed over the ice scepter. Beth’s gnome, being fey and all, outright refuses any kind of “free gift”. Good advice. None of us trusted this guy, especially since the NPC that nabbed the scepter in the first place described an ice-filled cavern with people frozen inside.

So combat starts, everything’s revealed to be an illusion, and we get our asses handed to us a second time. Now, the DM claimed to have yanked a dire wolf from the mix, but the fact that we had to go through Action Points, healing potions, two inspiring words, one lay on hands, and multiple daily powers tells me that either this encounter is not balanced at all, or that we were doing something very wrong. On one hand, Beth and I were playing classes that we weren’t familiar with, but on the other hand we were pretty damned optimized.

Many rounds and healing surges later, we decided to make camp for the night in a storeroom, and were awoken when someone heard a patrol outside. The patrol consisted of a bunch of tiefling minions, some guards, and a gnome. Things went easier because we propped the gnome in front of the door and just blasted them from the safety of the room while our halfling assassin zipped about outside murdering stragglers. The gnome got away, and we came out having used our dailies only under the pretense that A) this was a one-shot, and B) we were calling it for the night.

Did I like the adventure? Well, when I read it, it looked really cool. Not sure if I’d fault the DM, luck, or the encounter composition, but something was definitely awry.

Did I like the psion? Yes. I think I’d swap out static mote for something a little more direct. Perhaps something with forced movement so that I could use an action point to drop a psychic anomaly next to more critters (or to just have something that doesn’t require monsters to start next to it). I’d certainly try it again, but probably not as a shardmind unless its something more central to the plot.

Delve Night: Psion Playtest

Josh came over at random today, and so it was declared after much Taco Bell that he run a delve for one of our neighbors (since apparently my neighbors are a collective of like-minded geeks) and myself. We ran Orc Fortress, the level 3 delve out of Dungeon Delve. The party consisted of a dwarf great weapon fighter, tiefling psion, and longtooth shifter beastmaster ranger, all level 4.

The first encounter was kind of shaky, and served as a portent of things to come. I’d taken an artificer multiclass feat since no one was a leader, and that barely saw us through the delve. Honestly, we only won because Josh was juggling stats and shit around to account for the fact that we had a smaller party than normal, new people, and no leader. That, and the ranger kept forgetting basic ranger-stuff like designating quarry, using encounter attacks, and sometimes attacking period. Even by removing monsters to adjust the XP value there was simply no fucking way we stood a chance without some hardcore fudging and outright removal of monster powers.

But, thats really not the overall point of this. I want to talk about my brief experience with the psion. I really like the psion. Before, the power point system was really just a more flexible spontaneous spellcaster that required more bookwork and headaches for the DM that didnt have a shitload of time to prep/didnt own the book. Plenty of potential for abuse, and also if you made it so that magic and psionics were “different”, well, that was just another thing you had to worry about accounting for in your adventures. Bleh.

Not any more. Power points give it a different feel, as well as a nifty resource management mechanic that doesnt require a lot of paperwork to manage. It adds flexibility, but not all the abuse that could come with it.
Its a lot of fun having a huge bundle of at-wills that I can boost in power as the situation calls for it. Against one critter, I could just roll out mind thrust or memory hole. Oh, a bunch of minions clusterd up? Fine then, lets boost up memory hole with a couple points and explode all their heads. Big bad brute has a pretty powerful attack, so I’ll roll a few more points on to betrayal and let him maul his own commander to death. Shit like that. I love it. I normally hate complicated subsystems, but this really isnt. Its simple, easy to figure out, and pretty damned easy to use.

Josh is going to run another delve on Monday. I’m going to give the monk a shot and see how it works. That, or a tiefling avenger. We’ll see.

Angra, Tiefling Psion

A tiefling character that has been trained by cultists of the Dragon Below. Nothing too fancy with the concept, just playing with CB to see some of the options, and I really like tieflings.

====== Created Using Wizards of the Coast D&D Character Builder ======
Angra, level 1
Tiefling, Psion
Discipline Focus: Telepathy Focus
Background: Khyber (+2 to Dungeoneering)

FINAL ABILITY SCORES
Str 10, Con 12, Dex 12, Int 18, Wis 8, Cha 18.

STARTING ABILITY SCORES
Str 10, Con 12, Dex 12, Int 16, Wis 8, Cha 16.

AC: 14 Fort: 11 Reflex: 14 Will: 16
HP: 24 Surges: 7 Surge Value: 6

TRAINED SKILLS
Arcana +9, Insight +4, Dungeoneering +6, Bluff +11

UNTRAINED SKILLS
Acrobatics +1, Diplomacy +4, Endurance +1, Heal -1, History +4, Intimidate +4, Nature -1, Perception -1, Religion +4, Stealth +3, Streetwise +4, Thievery +1, Athletics

FEATS
Psion: Ritual Caster
Level 1: Precise Mind

POWERS
Psion at-will 1: Mind Thrust
Psion at-will 1: Memory Hole
Psion daily 1: Ravening Thought

ITEMS
Adventurer’s Kit, Cloth Armor (Basic Clothing), Spiked gauntlet, Dagger
====== Copy to Clipboard and Press the Import Button on the Summary Tab ======

Debut: Meet the Psion

Now that I’m back from my foray into the sun, I’ve been able to kick back and take a gander at the psion class. Its a psionic controller that can mess with enemy perceptions, alter memories, and in general do some of the crazy shit that Tetsuo could (screaming optional). I’ve been a fan of psionics since 2nd Edition, but was never able to use them since every DM I had utterly despised the system because they either didnt own the book, or didnt think that psionics, “had any place in a fantasy game.”

I had a bit better luck in 3rd Edition, after convincing one DM that psioncs wasnt overpowered anymore, and got to try out the psychic warrior with some very underwhelming results. I let another player try out a psion that preferred using baleful teleport after locking enemies down in an ectoplasmic wall, since psychic effects could pierce it without any problem. That made it very, very hard to make difficult encounters.

As with clerics and bards, 4th Edition makes the psion a very interesting, balanced, useful class choice. Its definitely more complicated than classes from Player’s Handbook, since you have to track power points, but more on that in a bit. As expected, they get to run around in cloth armor, and can use staffs and orbs as implements. I was kinda hoping for some kind of crystal-type implement, like a dorje or whatever, but thats a very simple reskin (and the commentary article supports this notion).

The powers are called disciplines, and they maintain a lot of the older names from previous psion/psionicist incarnations (mind thrust, id insinuation, intellect fortress, etc). Psionic focus seems to be out, but power points are still in, just not used to fuel everything that the class can do (including power-scaling). Instead, you can burn one-or-more power points in order to augment a power, but you can only trigger on augment at a time.

Augmenting your powers is important, because the psion does not get encounter attacks outside of your discipline focus and paragon path: they are all at-will powers that can be augmented to get better effects out of them. For example, id insinuation is a level 3 at-will, ranged 10 burst 1 that deals 1d8 damage and imposes a Fort penalty to the affected creatures. You can dump a power point on this ahead of time in order to increase the Fort penalty, or you can dump two in order to double the damage in addition to tacking on bonus damage if someone nails it with a Fort attack.

Since power points refresh during a short rest, what ends up happening is that your psion has a massive array of at-will attacks that can be boosted up to “encounter-grade” on a limited basis. This is a very interesting way to make them feel different from the rest of the power sources, without overpowering them or making them play by different rules (players of 3rd Edition should remember the “Magic and Psionics is/isnt Different” optional rules). They’re definitely not going to play anything like wizards, but arent going to break the game in the process.

Aside from 40+ powers and one build, the debut article also features six feats and a couple paragon paths to go with the whole package. Its not the entire thing, as they are leaving out the “force blasting” build, more paragon paths, and epic destinies, so it feels more like we’re getting most of one-half of a entire class. Its technically playable, to be sure, but I think that some magic items and at least one epic destiny would go a long way to making this glass feel half-full.
That being said, its cool, and I’m going to have some fun making a couple psionic characters that I’ll never get to play because no one in my group besides me ever runs this show.