The Emerald Spire with psionics: Pre-generated character build help

[EisenKreutzer]

I'm in the process of prepping for the Emerald Spire with a psionic twist. The plan is to convert the entire adventure to work with a homebrew psionic campaign setting in which divine and arcane magic do not exist.

Since this will be an introduction to psionics for all my players (none of them have any experince with psionics from either Pathfinder or 3rd edition), I have decided to characters for them.
I'll be creating one character for each of the 11 classes in Ultimate Psionics, no archetypes. All players will be playing a refluffed version of the Elan race, which are the default humans in this psionic setting.

Should I require one of them to pick the Cryptic, since the module has a fair amount of traps?

Also, I should probably require one Vitalist, since healing might be a problem otherwise.

My problem is that since we are only five people including myself, if I allow my players to pick whatever strikes their fancy we might end up with a party which will face some difficulties in the dungeon.

Should I just decide on four classes (Aegis/Soulknife/Psychic Warrior, Cryptic, Vitalist, Psion/Wilder?) and build those as interesting as I can? (granted, an interesting built at lvl 1 is hard to pull off, but I'm going to plan out their first three levels and offer suggestions after that)

Alternately, how screwed will they be if I just let them choose any class they fancy?

[Novawurmson]

Hrm. The "no archetypes" thing limits your options quite a bit. I really love Battle Medic Tactician (playing one as a GMPC, GMing for one in another campaign). Soulknife can disarm traps with the Infiltrator archetype. The Trailblazer Aegis can disarm traps (but is otherwise a terrible choice because it loses reconfigure and augment suit).

You could homebrew a "Psionic Trapfinding" and "Psionic Healing" feats and give them to anyone who wants them? That way, anyone could heal or trapmonkey.

[EisenKreutzer]

The idea behind no archetypes was to make this adventure a basic introduction to psionics, since my players have literally 0 experience with the system. They are accomplished Pathfinder players, though, with decent system mastery, so they can handle complexity.

is this a bad idea?

[Novawurmson]

I mean, you could just make a frontliner (aegis or soulknife), a trapfinder (cryptic), healer (vitalist), and caster (psion or wilder), and I'm sure everyone would have a good time. They're all flexible, robust, and numerically powerful classes. They should be able to make it through whatever the the module throws at them.

The question is whether you want to make all 11 classes equally viable in any combination - in which case, you need to have some leniency about the healing and trapfinding thing. For example, if the frontliner also has trapfinding (i.e. infiltrator soulknife), then instead of a dedicated trapmonkey, a dread or psychic warrior becomes much more viable. If the caster is a battle medic tactician who can also heal, then the healer spot could become a marksman for some ranged dps, and so forth and so on.

Random: Make sure to give anyone with a collective the Harmonic Resonance feat. Absolutely incredible when there's multiple psionic characters in a group.