The Awakened Psion

To my recollection, this is the second Unearthed Arcana article that’s been posted, which is a way for Dragon writers to pitch various houserules. Despite being in the magazine, they aren’t “official”, and as such cannot be used in RPGA events, nor will they be included in Character Builder. If you want to use them, you’re instructed to take it up with your DM.

This time we get psychic support, giving psionic characters the option to “delve” into a target’s mind as they make an attack. Delving can only be used with disciplines that target Will, and you must declare that you are doing so before the roll. If you hit, the discipline has all the normal effects, but also gives you an additional benefit that you can change each time. They range from being able to see what the target can, to the most likely actions that the target is going to take, to getting bits of information for the targets mind. You can also opt to perform “dangerous delving”, which nets you better benefits–gaining bonus damage, imposing an attack penalty, or preventing shifting–but at greater risk.

Since delving doesn’t cost a feat or power selection, it comes at a cost. When you delve and roll a natural 1 or 20, or get an odd number on a dangerous delve, you suffer from mental contamination and have to roll on a table of consequences. You might just be slightly dizzy and suffer no other ill effects, or be dazed and allow the target to see through your eyes, or (in the worst case scenario) have some of your own memories overwritten by the target’s in addition to briefly sharing the target’s goals, forfeiting control of your character to the DM for a turn (but the overwritten memories are permanent).

These acquired memories and personality traits lead to what is called dissonance, which causes you to take an assload of psychic damage whenever you act in accordance to a memory that you lost or against a personality trait that you’ve gained. To make matters worse they are cumulative, so if you end up acting against two or more memories and/or traits you’d take twice as much damage. This leads to the likely outcome that delve-abusers explode at some point when pause to consider menu items.

It’s good for players that like psionic characters and gambling their character’s sanity, but not so mkuch for players that get attached to characters or groups that constantly have long-term campaigns.

The Mind’s Eye Opened

This is one of the best articles on Dungeon I’ve seen in a long time. Its divided into three parts, providing advice on injecting psionic elements into your game and an entire psionic monster theme so that you can swap out powers on existing monsters to represent being fucked with by psionics and/or the Far Realm. It works out well even if you dont like psionics, as most games will still use aberrants and the monster theme is pretty damned extensive.

The first part focuses on various ways to introduce psionic stuff into your game, from running a one-shot to see how your players like it to saying fuck-all to continuity and allowing immediate retraining of MC powers. Personally, I would probably have players retrain feats or let them pick up “psionic talents”. Talents are just a flavor-word for boons, and using legendary boons is an excellent way to give characters access to psionic powers without being too overt, and can easily be threaded into the narrative by writing it off as exposure to reality warping energies. Kind of like mutations, just psionic instead of radioactive. There are five featured in the article, with a broad level range and encounter item power built into each that can only be used with un-augmented at-will attacks.

The lion’s share of the article, however, is the Far Realm Mutant Theme. It works off of rules presented in DMG2, which does a good job of allowing you to reflavor monsters somewhat without making entire monsters from scratch that are just other monsters with a twist. There are eleven individual powers, divided into attack and utility powers.

• Grasping tentacle is a given. The monster can grab a target and each turn they remain grabbed they take automatic damage. It deals no damage by itself, but there’s a penalty to escape attempts. Very nice.
• Secret face causes a monster to peel apart when bloodied, pushing enemies back and causing them to grant combat advantage. The idea is similar in effect to all those latest Resident Evil games, when after you riddle a zombie with a shit-ton of bullets, causing a bunch of crazy shit to bust out of it and make your day a lot worse. I endorse this idea.
• Unpredictable mind causes a kind of psychic backlash whenever you hit it with something that deals psychic damage. In past editions I would fucking HATE this, so I’m really happy that psychic damage isnt relegated to just disciplines: it gives it a nice, wide blanket effect on classes.

Great article if you like psionic or aberrant shit. If you like both, then hey, bonus.

Battlemind Debut

Long post, because I like to go in-depth on debuts.

We can finally see a preview of the battlemind, a Con-based psionic defender. They remind of psychic warriors: you get to tour around in heavy armor (up to scale), use shields, and get a nice spread of weapons. Is the name better or worse? Eh…thats up to you. I personally didnt mind it much when they used the name in D20 Modern. Naming conventions aside, this class looks fucking awesome. I think that it will do very nicely in letting me play something close to a fury-crafting knight from the Codex Alera series…

Like psions, they get power points and can burn them to crank it up to 11 when they feel the need to. This means that what would normally be their encounter disciplines are weaker than usual, and hit that “balanced-or-better” mark only a set number of times per encounter depending on how you manage your power points. This adds a layer to resource management in a way that doesnt drastically add to bookkeeping or changing the way powers work at the core. I much prefer this to learning numerous subsystems, as in the past.

I mentioned their mark mechanic in a previous post, but I’ll explain it again. They have three at-wills that come into the equation. First, you use battlemind’s demand to mark anything within 3 squares as a minor action, and it lasts until the end of the encounter or you use it again (basically how swordmages do it).
Now, if a marked enemy tries to shift to get away, you can use blurred step to shift after them. So, unless they can shift at least 2 squares its not going to do much good.
Finally, if the enemy attacks an enemy and you’re within melee range you can trigger mind spike as an immediate reaction that deals automatic damage equal to the amount your ally took. Just to make things clear: there is no roll on this. You deal this damage no matter what. The enemy just has to be within melee range.

The battlemind class feature that determines your “style” is Psionic Study, but the only one in the debut is Speed of Thought (Battle Resilience will be included in Player’s Handbook 3). Speed of Thought grants you the speed of thought (surprised?) encounter discipline. It lets you move for free whenever you roll initiative. Its quite a distance, and you can even do this during a surprise round. For a defender this is insanely awesome.

Battlemind disciplines are keyed to Constitution and depending on what class feature you took, you can get some more out of Wisdom or Charisma (Wis for Battlefield Resilience and Cha for Speed of Thought). As the article only features the Speed of Thought class feature, if you are going for optimization then ramp up Con and Cha to get the most out of it (hobgoblins and half-elves ftw!).

There are waaay too many disciplines to go into, so I’ll just go over the basics, by which I mean the level 1 stuff.
Demon dance deals psychic damage and imposes a penalty to opportunity attacks. You can augment it to also negate threatening reach, as well as boost the damage and completely negate the ability to make opportunity attacks, period.
Twisted eye damages a target and imposes an attack penalty based on the number of allies nearby. You can augment it to have it fire as an opportunity attack or cause it to just fucking blind the target for a turn.
Whirling defense damages a target and lets you mark them. You can augment it to grant bonus damage to mind spike, or target every enemy around you. Bad ass.

Daily disciplines dont get augments. They just do what dailies tend to do, which is to say that they do something on a hit or miss (if they even require attacks at all). Battlemind daily attacks come in an even mix of the normal fare and stances. The stance attacks remind me of warden daily evocations because they open up a new at-will attack that you can use for the duration of the stance., each granting you the ability to make a special attack until the stance ends. They’re all opportunity action attacks, so really its just a way of giving you an alternative to using mind spike.

Allies to enemies deals double weapon damage and causes an enemy to attack an ally of your choice. Nothing too complicated, and depending on the monster it could be really awesome.
But…Steal unity strike, on the other hand, deals triple weapon damage in addition to allowing you to make opportunity attacks against marked targets that deal double damage on a hit. They’re also keyed to Constitution, so they are much more effective than normal.

The balancing factor is that you can only do these stance attacks as opportunity attacks against marked monsters that dont shift to get away from you. Otherwise you kind of have to stick with mind spike. I know a lot of players complain that their DMs never have monsters provoke attacks from the defenders (which is kind of the point), and if thats true these will end up being super awesome abilities that likely will never see application. Still, one can dream.

There are two paragon paths, steel ego and zephyr blade. Both are suited for the Speed of Thought build but play very much differently.
Steel egos can use mind spike more frequently on an action point, AoE it for automatic damage whenever, and regain power points on a crit. Their encounter attack lets them basically hit what the fuck ever they want with mind spike for a turn (and also making it usable as a free action once, so you could theoretically do it twice). I’m particularly fond of fear and loathing, which deals a lot of psychic damage and makes the target provoke opportunity attacks whenever it makes a melee attack (save ends). As an added bonus, you can slide it whenever it gets nailed by an opportunity attack.
Zephyr blades are fast mother fuckers. You add your Cha mod to attacks against targets suffering from a few conditions, and gain a passive bonus to Speed. A few of the powers grant you insubstantial and phasing, which adds to your mobility options. Knifing wind isnt terribly interesting, dealing damage with a daze kicker (you can augment for more damage). Storm dance strike, however, is a stance attack that lets you attack up to two creatures and teleport at some point. The granted opportunity attack slows the target and lets you both teleport away. Excellent for positioning!

Now, there are only five feats, and the shitter here is that two are Heroic, two are Paragon, and one is Epic. Not a lot of variety. This in the addition to a lack of supporting magic items is my main dislike for actually playing debut classes. I dont mind giving them a shot in one-shots and delves, but in actually long-term play? Fucking forget it. Not enough to maintain interest…but still cool to see whats up and get some ideas brewing.

This looks like it will be my class of choice from PH3 (with the monk right on its tail).

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.