Mystic fixes?

[Christew]

Okay. Mea culpa. This was admittedly a cogent and thoughtful defense.

As I understand it, it was abandoned because of conceptual issues, rather than mechanical ones-- there was too much argument about if it fit into standard D&D fantasy and if it needed to be a base class or not.

Fair point, though I'd wager it was at least a combination of the two.

I agree with you on this one. The Mystic as written suffered from trying to cover too many bases-- it was trying to replace all ~7 of the psionic classes in 3.5 (Psion, Psychic Warrior, Soulknife, Lurk, Ardent, Divine Mind, Psychic Warrior) and offer support for all possible archetypes, so you wound up being able to pick and choose the best options from everything. Like if you had a single "Mage" class who could learn every spell in the game. When you combine that with the fact that a bunch of the Disciplines and-- especially-- Psionic Focus abilities were overtuned... yeah, you get someone who can be the best at everything.

(And to be honest, I think (some of) that was known. The Mystic already read like something that was going to get chopped up after playtesting. The developers wanted to get feedback on everything, so they front-loaded the class and left in a ton of options so that every part would get tested. You see the front-loading a lot in experimental UA like the early Ranger revisions.)

But it's not beyond repair. Fix the Disciplines, and you get rid of the "better than everyone else at their own schtick" problem. Restrict subclass Disciplines to subclasses, maybe break off the gish archtypes into their own class (as I did in my rewrite), and things get far, far better.

You have convinced me to look at your rewrite. Touche.

It's 100% identical to the Spell Points variant in the DMG. There are issues (you can nova harder than other full casters, the way psi limit is written loses the one-leveled-spell-per-turn restriction), but they're hardly irrevocable.


That can be fixed with one sentence.

My point was that lacking the restriction makes it not %100 identical. You get the points of a full caster with added nova ability.

You advocate for what seem like reasonable tweaks, but it adds up to almost death by a thousand cuts. If we are retooling the psi points, and the subclasses, and the available powers, and the subtle casting, and limiting versatility at what point have we stopped fixing the Mystic and started just designing a better Psionics class.

Will return after reading your rewrite.