Psionics: Good, Bad, or Gamebreaking

[Gotterdammerung]

Yes, it basically comes down to a content thing.

Psionic powers are worded for more convenience and in most games convenience equals power. This makes them gamebreaking for a lot of tables.

But since Psionic powers have more careful wording, they don't suffer from as many of the unintentional glitches caused by lazy writing (See arcane spells). This makes them much more tame from a TO or high OP game perspective. This causes them to get a rep of being bad since they are close to a wizard but not as good. (Not as good meaning you can't use RAW psionics like a crowbar to pry your way into unlimited power as easily as you can with the lazily written arcane and divine spells.)

Then we get down to content. Most of the sheer power of conventional casters comes from the sheer amount of spell content. There are large portions of spells in almost every book. And more than one entire book devoted entirely to spell casters only. Example complete warrior is supposed to be about melee's but it has spell casting content in it, meanwhile the casters get complete arcane, complete divine, and complete mage all devoted to their fields. This kind of one sided content output is directly responsible for the "spellcasters are out of hand" situation we find ourselves in today. Combine this with the seemingly non-existent communication between designers and lazy writing, and we end up with spells that do the same thing with the same fluff and justification but stack anyway, spells that do more than the RAI meant for them to do, and series of spells that work together to bypass game mechanics in general to bestow god-like power.

Psionics does not have this kind of content, and in comparison to normal spellcasting, psionics has been worded well. So it is out of position to unseat the solid T1 casters. I still feel it should be classified as a T1, even though it is not as powerful as wizard it can still meet T1 criteria. It is just not the most powerful T1.

Having said all that, there is still ways for psion to be game breaking in a High OP or TO setting.

There are ways to gain all the powers known, then gain infinite power points, then duplicate those powers and pass them out to your party essentially turning your party into equal lvl broken psionicists with infinite power points as well as whatever they normally do. If you throw Spell to power erudite into that mix... you win.


In no way shape or form is psionics "bad". (unless you mean bad in a gamebreaking way).