Psionic and spells – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

hey everyone welcome back to the Mike Romero’s happy fun hour I’m your host Mike Murrells the franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons apologies for the little bit of delay getting fired up we had just technical issues you know long after a long holiday weekend which i think is everything running but luckily a superhero appeared in the form of Shaun and got everything kicked off can’t seem ease off camera but he is the star of the show without him we’d I wouldn’t have screen to BAE so thank thanks much to him so this week psyonix so this weekend I did a lot of yard work which gave me a lot of time to think and really start pondering psyonix so we’ve got some interesting stuff here some interesting things so the chat we excited about sanics I hope we are I’m looking down at chat we’ve got things a little set up a little bit differently here with things angled yes everyone thank goodness for shown the so I want to show you something can you see if you can see off the screen right now I have it in read mode chat let me know if this is like really hard to read I thought maybe this would be easier to see because we’re going there’s no paved roads here Dini beyond is super handy dandy but it’s not gonna necessarily help us in this case because we’re talk about soundings and we don’t have it the system yet officially at least so the everyone just just give me a trip if you can’t see it but what I want to show you here is one of the several parts so we have a lot to talk about with psionics okay first thing I want to point out is so check it out I had some time this weekend I went ahead and started writing up stuff like so we can actually use it imagine like there’s some cachito Oh see there we go our trains Derek there’s a sonic spell list now yes there is released there might be so I want to talk about the part behind mics my nice big square shaped head the I’ll move stuff around I’ll flip for the pages this case I kind of like my head is useful the you know let me see if I can I’ll just try to zoom in just a little bit more there we go yeah there we go and actually this would be nice because uh I’ll walk you through page by page I know my my block shape balding head is in the way of some of the text but I always try to remember to not talk about a text till I’ve flipped it over so let’s talk a bit about what we’re looking at here so there’s several things that came to me while I was raking up crap from my backyard not always literally crap depending on how what the dogs eaten but the the first thing was if you remember the back when I first started doing the the sanic wizard I was complaining about oh we’ve got you know it’s so hard to do this because if you give you all these sonic powers then other classes can use them so the super obvious thing is to make a separate spell list psionic spells the and really what that does is it keeps things from falling into the hands of classes that I we don’t necessarily want using them so that was something which was just like I was complaining about it and starting trying to design around it and whatever just just make it a separate thing it’s easy right like it’s one of those such an obvious solution you just wonder why didn’t I think of that you know so so there you go so that’s our first thing so okay we have our sonic abilities they’re coming into the game we don’t have week we can use these subclasses now without necessarily things bleeding over to where we don’t want them to go the the arch range Derek the spell is sighs it’s TBD I think it might be like Ranger or warlock sized but it’ll kind of depend on what we actually want to do with the spell list the my if you look here at the psychic warrior under spell casting I under let’s see spells known right it calls out you know three first level spells of your choice from the psionic spell list so my goal would be that that spell list is robust enough that something like the psychic warrior doesn’t have to dip back into other class spell lists to get all its abilities so this is kind of like the first starting point now I think that this works pretty well for the subclasses if we want to do that so we talked before but having that middle ground for Dungeon Master’s who think I want to add some Sonics to my campaign but I don’t have to learn it in another entire system this I think could work pretty well the and as far as a Northland Kyle I think you how many’s how many spells they will have in total it how many I have in mind it’s hard to say I think it’ll be something where we’ll I’ll work on some of the subclasses and then eventually get to the class and kind of see where we end up I think I’d want to earn the side of having fewer rather than more because we can just pull in spells from the regular spell list and I think I would do that or the very least just give you access to them just to keep things simple because again one of the ideas here is we want to give you the flavor sanics without Dungeon Master’s having to learn a bunch of new rules all right so that’s but that’s only one part of what we’re talking about you know that’s kind of like what what that did for me was really conceptually make the subclasses have their own space it’s a shared thing across all these subclasses and I think it feels like it we’ll see I mean you don’t know you’re gonna do we’re gonna do play testing we’re gonna push ahead and see where we end up it might not work but at least it’s a promising path so that’s part one so part two I was thinking a lot about spell points and one of the things that’s struck me with spell points is where they sit conceptually in our design framework for fifth edition’ D&D one of our big things with 5th ed was to say we want to give you not as many choices as you may have found in 3rd or 4th edition but make those choices bigger and that’s what directly led to such a sub classes to sub-races this idea that I want to be an elf now what kind of else do I want to be I can be a high elf I can be a drow and those come with a lot of things and there’s a bundling to it the same thing with classes I class itself is just you know it’s a big choice I can be a wizard or I can be a fighter there’s a two very different classes and by design in fifth edition meant to be very different to feel different right I think that’s one of the things that that gives a role-playing game long legs you know you can play it for years is if you really feel like you can make genuinely different characters and then within that class you’re picking a subclass rather than saying every time you gain a level pick something we’re saying you pick one thing and you get to play through all of that there’s a lot of reasons why we did that I want to touch on a couple the main one being it’s much more accessible for new players or players who aren’t into optimization a player just says I want to be a great Archer so I can just go through and that you think the fighter or you know one of the the weapon abilities you know that menu of abilities again one of them is just it’s really good to arrange characters just just take that it makes the language of the game simpler you know as a player you know what you want to do so you just do it we’re not hiding it behind you to figure out how these three things work together to actually make it work and so forth at the newer player for the less mechanically invested player it’s easier it’s also easier for us conceptually because we’re having bigger ideas like instead of instead of saying like hey this fighter is an archer but what we really mean to say is they took this and this and this and this and this we’re saying this fighter is an archer Archer is a subclass they picked Archer that’s just what they are or samurai or Eldridge Knight the so that’s the that’s kind of the reasoning behind going for fewer choices but bigger choices it also means our design going forward in the future can be a lot more evocative because when you’re designing something big you have a bigger complexity budget to play with you have a bigger power budget to play with and so when you’re looking across those like three to five class features you can build something that really is driven by having all these things build on each other rather than throwing out lots of individual little pieces where there’s powers and fourth edition or feats in third and relying on players to find the combinations because invariably as a designer your intent there is let’s let players build whatever they want I think that’s a little bit you know at the end of the day looking I worked on a ton of 3rd and 4th edition stuff your a little bit as a designer kind of you’re leaving a lot of your players out to dry like they just they don’t want to have to figure that out but you are also opening the door to just that’s where abusive combos come in you’re kind of assuming you know people will find combinations to express a say a unique story but in practice usually what happens is you have players driving combinations that are upsetting the power balance of the game and therefore making the game less fun for everybody you know whether intentionally or not I think a lot of cases people don’t you know they you do it that sounds cool or I just I want to get big damage number and then it might lead to an unhappy conversation the table so that’s all the reasoning vampire night on you a I’m hoping I don’t know about soon because we do have a schedule because remember you a feeds into our future products so often you see things in you a because we’re thinking of publishing them somewhere the and it’s not exactly sure where this might land because it’s still pretty early I know it can be frustrating it feels like it’s been forever for work in psionics but like we are committed to taking the time it necessary to make something really work for the community of D&D Player’s if you remember we took two and a half years playtesting v and there are still things like now I mean it felt great we launched it but there’s like back and like fix that up we didn’t quite know it there’s still things we missed right so for me play testing is super important we want to take our time so the so that’s why fifth editions philosophy is fewer bit bigger choices so then we come to yeah the bonus actions right hey call me tell me yes the house but that was such a big thing anyway don’t to get that don’t try sidetrack me alright China the so when they look at cyanic power points power points are really all about that optimization like lots of little choices combining to make a big choice I don’t know if philosophically they’re necessarily a good fit for 5e but also we already have that option the dmg so I don’t know if saying Sonics is defined by power points is necessarily a good path but that leads to the second idea I had all right because I was thinking okay I think a sign expel list can work I’m gonna skip past so I got the psychic warrior here I did this got the soul knife here yeah actually made me go slower so you guys consider don’t worry about reading it I’ll go back we’re only in like 15 minutes in so I want to get to the back I wrote up a couple of sonic spells waving a laser pointer in front of me that would definitely like oh hey well you know cat like right I did actually you know I was one of insistent putting the two back see in the game which I’m sorry or you’re welcome depending on your view on that race the and Wolford what I’ll do is ever has specific questions and I’ll try walk through things in a more detail what I want to do that was kind of show you go to the back here and look at some of these sound expels because this is where things started to come together for me so if you take a look let’s take a look actually mine fist is a boring one so I wrote these up you know said just to eat over this weekend I was like ok cool the one though that actual went to show you that I don’t know what I can’t get it the second page hang can edit this ok now we could see live as I try to use word alright so here’s how I’m gonna do let me just throw in a page break here and then you get to watch me try to figure out how it was I like doing that thing and this turns into 30 minutes of using ms word with alright so take a look at sense mind because this is what I want to use as the example here what I’m thinking of so since mine is a sanic can’t trip uses one action that might not be where it ends up because I wrote these up that I had an idea components none oh hey we’ve got kind of a little bit defining trait of soundex they don’t have Penta components but then take a peek at that concentration make the odd direction up to one minute might be wrong we might change that whatever this is a can trip that requires concentration okay so imagine this world let’s take a little peek at sense mind by shutting by shutting down your normal senses you extend your mind into the scenic landscape around you for the duration of the spell you are blinded and deafened so what I was thinking it was like you kind of sink into this other sensory world and you can use a bonus action to sense the presence of creatures within a 30-foot cone you learn the number of creatures within the cone in their creature type you cannot detect undead or constructs with the spell a flavor drawback because we traditionally have said undead or like very Hardware feckless onyx but whatever spell is blocked by one foot of stone why don’t you become a metal thin sheet of lead or three feet of water dirt that’s just pulled from the tech magic now imagine this you are a sonic character so we have this idea of disciplines and there are these things that build on each other so imagine if when I go in a sense mind great it’s can trip and let’s say this maybe sense mine’s a bonus action go into sense mind bonus action close my eyes block my hearing down the sensing Minds now imagine there’s a set of spell that our first level or higher that say something like when you have sense mine activate cast the spell it does things like you’re jabbing into people’s minds you’re taking control of their brains you know their prints yeah physically making your brain dancer I didn’t you’re taking control of them you’re reading their mind it’s a mode you go into and it’s kind of capturing this sense of I learn a thing and as I gain levels and I get more spell slots of higher level I’m getting better at it and I can get bigger effects out of it now imagine sense might and now I’m gonna I’m not gonna try to write this but you know whatever I’ll take notes on it so imagine that if that’s kind of like our baseline piece and let’s zoom the so much more oops no it’s still in so imagine that if that’s our sense mine thing which I actually might want to call it like you know enter mindscape I might give it a more you know flavorful main yeah flavorful name this probably becomes up to 10 minutes Caston time is probably one bonus actually and maybe instead of 30 foot code I’m gonna say a 60 foot cone and now I’m managing I’m just gonna make something up this is gonna be pseudocode but I’m just gonna kind of copy and paste it if I don’t know how we’d present this budge you can imagine there’s another spell you know and now what I probably want to do here is by show you okay you extend your mindful sonic landscape around you so imagine this it’s a you know whatever the cloud sanic spell don’t know what level would be it’s one action its ranges that say 100 feet opponents none duration is instantaneous got it in one and what this just says is you know our our pseudocode while you have enter this could be you know this is maybe like the sonic static this is not something we do but there you go just this idea that I have a say it’s a it’s first of all spell slot and then I have enter mindscape I throw this up I’ve got concentration going and now I can do things like I’m gonna flood the air with Sam ecstatic just making everything you have this disadvantage on wisdom saves or creatures of your choice you write things like that let’s see paladin Davros the interaction connects and spell casting imagine in this case they would be they would just be spells for the interactions but we would have an option if you want to make them different the what else we got here I thought I thought so another question about the oh they call me Tomy worried about its concentration one of things I thought about and this might be something that would just do I mean I’m like 90% thinking I would do this is that these this enter mindscape ability here may have something like this but and that this is not final cut but the spells duration cannot be ended due to damage whatever we throw in something there that says your constant things that could break your concentration can mess you up but not taking damage is not one of them and that just might be a signature thing just so you’re not constantly worrying about it the data love swing DeeDee meets inside out it’s exactly right that’s the look a trooper does the return of Sonic’s mean will get thought eaters again yes the crazy platypus guys one of things I thought about what this is that does mean with some of these creatures we could potentially have some really interesting interactions between if we get our rules right what I’m imagining is if I’m psionic and I’m using one of these sonic and rips I might have a creature that sonic that may say something like you know any gate dependent how I get the wording right we don’t want to make it complicated but we might be able to pull out some of that feel of like the sonic combat like hey I’m gonna sanic mode you’re in a sonic mode that means we can enter a different way what I was picturing in my head was just something really simple like if I’m in if I’m in a sonic mode and you’re in a sonic mode – there was just something I can do on top of my turn – just her a little psychic energy yeah you like basically a clash of the minds the you know maybe a rider on top or there’s like this sort of struggle for sonic dominance the way I kind of thought of it is it’s almost like you know in in in Wharf area this idea of air supremacy like there might be some struggle to like control the airspace well in this case the Sanok space around a battlefield I don’t know though I think I’d want to design basically though the functional spells first and then see where that goes I think it’ll be fun though right if Sonic characters were afraid of like the thought eater and they maybe they never read any the most characters might not even notice them it’s only when you’re like in a sonic mode the treatment can interact with the creature but that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves it’s more on the flavor stuff but the the oh yes and tell me I think in this case the blinding and death thing I would pull this out originally that was when I was thinking just as a can trip because essentially it’s like a detect magic it’s very useful divination can trip so I think he I would get rid of that good call that was more when it was a flavorful and it had to sit alongside other countries the a can trips as divination tools we try to be very careful of because we don’t want they’re so easy to spam we don’t want the game to become the Dungeon Master’s running the game and the player is just like I use my sense life I use sensing you again and again and again and they could slow the game down so but in this case I’d be ok with it because there might be some other thing we’re throwing here earth just kind of assumed that this is gonna take up some of the complexity of your character good play test and we’ll come that off but the so the what’s kind of fun about this though is I talked last week about the Summoner so one thing you can imagine just do a quick copy paste here is that you could have a canned trip that summons a creature in 3rd edition in the 3/5 psionics book there was this idea of astral constructs so we could have one faster construct again the pseudo-code don’t try to play with this oh because it’s gonna make no sense could be one bonus action range say 30 feet points none constructs it and it’s basically you summon a and let’s just say one-hit die asshole construct and in the can trip mode it might be you know it uses your actions to do stuff yeah it’s a can trip it’s pretty simple and you need to control it now the benefit here is it’s basically it’s an up gunned mage hand I could like use my actions to make it move around go grab stuff while I’m just standing still and then what you could then do is you know upgrade HD with spell slots that’s an easy one you could give it special abilities we talked last week one of the things could be I create my astral construct then I look you know I pick one creature and I pull one of its spheres out and fuse it with the astral constructs so now what ever else sees this kind of like you know ectoplasmic creature the creature have targeted seems like its greatest fear now I’m standing there bearing down on it it could be a way to deliver a motion-control type effects you could see someone you really trust so you’re willing to you to do whatever you say right the arch rage Erica the question about psychics in general will there also be room for how categories are magic interact you know the like divine in arcane the the one tricky thing is we’ve never really done that so if we were to go back and do it there would be some amount of rewriting existing material and we’re always a little really crazy about doing the axe I thought it added weren’t clear if the complexity that added added in would be worth it the the raping ROG please make an astral summoner class don’t shoehorn it into an existing thing I think what we’ve got here is that this would be something that would really come to life in the mystic class itself because one of the things this kind of gives to the third point one of the things about this when you look at this construction of spell well wizard could take this and spend their spell slots and cancerous on it like reggaeton playing the psychic wizard no problem I can do this but you’re not really gonna have any spell sorry class features that speak to this spell because you’re sort of riding on top of the wizard chassis and then as I thought about that felt kind of right you know when you think about the eldritch Knight compared to a wizard they’re really specialized you know there’s some restrictions on which schools they can use and their class features are really about combining fighting with spell casting so what I imagine is that the full mystic character class probably built on the cleric chassis that’s where it’s built right now d8 hit died not getting your multiple attacks you’re really relied on and that’s that’s what a lot of the issues with the mystic came from trying to do so many things up one chassis so what this would do is we’d really focus on saying the mystic rather than having to include the soul knife rather than having to include the psychic warrior we like for me one of the hints that you’re dealing with a kind of an incoherent class a class that’s doing too much is when you have to give out weapon and armor proficiencies based on subclass now it’s not a given right some classes that works I think the cleric it actually works pretty well because we start you with medium and then we’d say is this more of a marshal most domains a pretty marshal in flavor so you got your heavy armor but I think that’s okay because you’re used to thinking of clerics is kind of you know having the different garb they wear based on their thing my secret thing is aside I always liked playing clerics and light armor like playing clerics of nature or who are of the sea really I wear leather armor ever really high dexterity and high wisdom and I might be more of an archer or your arm using finesse weapons or something like that the and so the idea being that when I was working on the mystic and really having a stretch like these these subclasses just feel like different classes and that’s what kind of helped fuel some of this so maybe throw in some more questions here mr. quaint 11 could enter mindscape be more robust as a common class feature of psionic subclasses that’s the thing I would yeah that I would want to look at and this would be part of the next phase of the design step is one of the tensions that this approach does have if I have my psionic subclasses in the Senate class where do I one of what goes in the spell list that they share that I know is now Universal versus what becomes unique to the class because making the classes unique elements really stand out I’d want I want to do that by making them really feel like these the signs of a true psionic master so it would really matter it really depend on where he put those things one thing for instance that I could see doing this again off the top of my head but have some rule for just the sign at core class is that they might be on the maintain concentration on to sign at Kent trips at once and so then you just immediately feel I’m a lot more versatile right I can play these other classes and really focus on one can trip in one style but if I want to be real master of a bunch of them I want to play the mystic the falling of our twenties Derrick yeah like the tech magic will be universal right so rather than saying sonic detect magic we would just say the detect magic spell is on is on your spell list and then we might just have a class feature or somewhere say look your your components are none if you’re using it as a psionic user but I don’t know if we want to go that far and that would probably just rest on the class itself rather than the other classes the so yeah um yeah defiant Mars kicked with spell slots that’s that’s a good way to think of it if your Magic the Gathering player yeah this idea that you play some cards the kick mechanic is I have to save a card it could be two mana total whatever color it’s like a 1/1 creature that does something when it’s tapped and it could save this card is kick to get some +1 +1 tokens or you get cast the spell effect it’s kind of how I feel this except that card stays in play and then I keep spending men on it to activate it and it’s got a lot more abilities on it the so yeah the I think this could be a pretty interesting approach because what I wanted to do was capture that flexible feel of spell points without using spell points because I just felt like we were really struggling against this idea of that that really high little have a high level of precision that spell points allow for just not necessarily fitting into the default design idiom of fifth edition the because that is really about this points make a lot of sense if you’re saying I want you make lots of small choices that then combine into reflect your character as a whole or your characters actions so the this I think might be a good middle ground but wise I also think about it what it really means is if you decide I want to use the spell point system so I’m going to just go to the dmg and use it essentially translates into something that looks a lot like spell points from earlier editions where it’s you’re using a can trip that’s zero points you know can trips cost or free and then I’m spending points to augment that can trip I’m giving this thing special effects a new additional powers and so on now one thing to keep in mind going to come up here to mine spike this is just our simple damaging sanic spell I don’t think this would necessarily be one that would be concentration because I don’t want to I don’t wanna go hog-wild love this and assume everything has to work this way so it’s also possible that rather than being can trips these can be reclassified as something else and in this the within the subclasses it could just say hey you get a sanic let’s say discipline and so we know they’re distinct from Canter’s one thing that why I kind of like that is that the it makes it distinct in your mind you know we could write things we could write a class feature that says hey you can you can concentrate on two disciplines at once I’m not worried about if in the future we add other can trips that require concentration and there’s some weird cross effects there that I don’t intend so this might be a case where some specificity could help the it also just might be and it’s a nice little callback to an existing term we’ve used the but I imagine these these would just appear on the spell list as you know your spell list a jerk and trips here’s your disciplines here your spells that’s that it’ll be a new category the Harmelin wordsmithing thank you data this way always always strive to maximize Mike Romulans in the pallet pallette endeavors would you still include the visual odd auto honorable displays of using Sonics how with a contract to hide them I’m kind of thinking that for you know and my initial thing was throwing in components none making Sonic’s a lot more subtle but I’d want to think about that a bit Oh arts my drip out mine spike is already a second little spell that I steal there already is a name we’ll call this mine strike just give down whatever it’s thanks calling that out the thing was too good to be true if it’s out there the so yeah the what I think the key here would be the is just making sure that this system doesn’t get too sprawling my main worry right now I’m thinking about it is let’s good let’s take a look at our astral construct right I’m looking all the things that I’ve got here you know I can update upgraded state dice with spell slots some of the special abilities would be you know inspire motions yeah we get so like you have damage boost attack like spells what I don’t want is to make this overly complicated to the point where if playing mystic I’ve got like my disciplines and I’ve got all my spells of autumn and specific disciplines and how many spells do I have to give you to make sure that’s that’s satisfying without being overwhelming because naturally I think you know especially if we stick this idea that the mystic and concentrate out of multiple disciplines there’s a natural very big stress on the number of spells now and if I was to say one thing that does like when I see new players dealing with D&D the number of spells you know it’s I don’t want to say we may have been too generous in the core game I just worry that there’s a gap between learning D and E and then mastering I know a lot of spells especially when you’re picking through which spells do wanna prepares a wizard or just you know as a cleric going to the entire cleric spell list so now that wouldn’t be as much of a weary on something like the mystic the because we are assuming that’s coming up in a span ssin so you’re probably a little bit more comfortable with mechanics at that stage most we assume we don’t assume beginning players for instance own the zenith ARS guide or Morton Kamen’s in fact there’s a quick aside because today is the release day for morning canyons time of those one thing I’ve noticed in actually this is was something we wanted people talking about more to use compared to Volos saying o Volos is probably the better purchase for the new DM because warden Candis is more for higher the higher challenge monsters and plainer stuff it’s actually by design that’s something we think of we want it to be pretty clear if you go to your friend for friendly local game stores a new player if someone’s there working at the store who knows the DND line they understand kind of what the sequencing is you know it’s not like what book should I get next on know it’s like well it makes sense if you’re running this type of campaign buy this book if you’re just starting as a DM but you want more monsters let me start with Volos then grow into Morton Kamen’s so things like that so it is something we keep in mind you know whatever product that this might show up in since it would be later on in the release schedule we can probably afford to add a little more complexity or sumn mastery this might inspire can be your first character so you might draw on some of your knowledge of playing a wizard or some like that so okay so this is basically what the kind of the three pieces coming together are get this idea of a sonic spell list so now I can safely fence off those effects I don’t want every wizard to get it also means that if you just don’t have a sign a character in your game you don’t have to worry about this stuff because that was another worry I had was okay great we give you soundex whether you like it or not as a dungeon master now any wizard or any cleric and start picking these spells up and that’s just I don’t know if I want to burden every DM with that so that solves that then we have this idea that if we have these disciplines or can trim disciplines are basically up gun can trips not power wise but more in flexibility wise where do those rest and those delivering a lot of our sonic flavor and then having a full Sonic class that can really specialize in these things and make them come to life in a way that the subclasses can’t quite match the subclasses are hitting their flavor but it’s the mystic class that can really bring it all together so the m draco how would you release the revised ranger that is still something which is in process so a quick aside on that we are putting together another update survey for the game as a whole I think it’s gonna come out maybe in the fall or late summer the idea is what we want to do is if you remember if you’ve been playing this long or take part in our surveys about two years ago we did a big survey maybe three years ago now on the basically the the to the game the game came out we want to ask you about the character classes what did you if it was working what did you feel was not working that was where we learned there were a lot of issues with the Ranger and the way of four elements monk very high dissatisfactory like noticeably so compared to everything else everything else is kind of clustered around together you know there’s a ranking but the bottom ranked thing other than the Ranger was was not so far from the top rank thing that we’re worried so that’s how we identified those problems now that Zan’s is out we want to rerun that survey to see how have things changed especially because we have so many new players coming in before we start making like real changes like and if we make a change we’re gonna commit to it or giving you a new option we just want to verify that with a few more years under a you know a few more years of tread on the tire so to speak we’re not making a quick shift that maybe people don’t need as much so the arc trader derick the server results are actually we are pretty we don’t publish the full raw numbers we talk about them in general but that is something that falls into what we consider to be a trade secret so that’s not something which like has where we’re not spending money in time to generate all this you really useful information for us and then just just publish it the UM but we do always try to talk the community so you when you’re looking at what we’re doing we can say hey here’s what we learned and so this is why we’re working on this I always I like that we can we can frame things in terms of the feedback there are a lot of things that which are kind of go more into the business side of things that we don’t necessarily want to share the all right so the yeah Mad Hatter him do people still care about these old problems I mean it’s not quite exactly the question the main thing is in a universe where you have more options to the Ranger and more options to the classes is this still as big of a problem now to be my point of views I don’t think we’ll see much shift because I think the I think what we’ll see is the overall happiness the ranger will probably go up but I still think that the Beastmaster Ranger is gonna have some real serious issues because one thing I’ve even looked let’s let’s look whatever we walk through here right I just described the canned trip for astral construct is essentially I mean the hit dice thing aside I’m using a canned trip and when I think like thus weakest expression of having an allied creature on the table it ends up looking a lot like the animal companion which is probably doesn’t speak very well if the animal companion actually functioning well as something which is a subclass defining feature so but we also again we don’t want to rush ahead and make a change to the core game we might be being we might be in a position where being too conservative especially for like if you’re engaged enough for the game to be like on this stream chatting about design geekery with me you’re probably like why I just fixed this but we always have to keep in mind the real strength of D&D is the new players coming in so we’re really person may be overly cautious about disrupting that we really just don’t have me a position that we’re getting people confused when they’re coming in the game so it’s something we’re always very clearly aware of and I think at the end it’s good for everybody because it means more players means it’s easier to get a group where it’s if you don’t want to DM it’s easy to find another DM so it’s something we’re really aware of the okay so we’re wandering all over the place for stream associate about Sonic so let me walk you through the psychic warrior now this is just something I put together over the weekend so kind of drawing on some of the stuff so this isn’t final but I want to show you some of the stuff I built out here so spell casting this is just what it is right this shouldn’t be anything bizarre here what I imagine though if we did go with this idea the the the disciplines that this would probably say you learned too can trips and you also learn a discipline so I kick destroyer so essentially this was a pretty simple straightforward thing what I wanted to do between psychic destroyer and psychic guardian was pick up this idea of the using your sonic energy to augment yourself so psychic Ghost Rider is essentially a converted spell slot into psychic damage on an attack kind of like a smite psychic Guardian was convert your sight your spell slots into a shield effect for your allies so or yourself so you’re good at protecting you’re good at harming this is probably something where instead of being a bonus action actually right now this is just pill pickups mic so it’s not it has no action here I’d probably cost both of these with your reaction just to kind of have you the sense of my offense or defense this round if you’re gonna its new spell slots psychic storm is when you cast a sonic can’t rip or use the attack action your turn hostile creatures than ten feet of you seen feet of your and if you take psychic damage equal to W intelligence mod minimum one so this is just this is their add some extra damage it’s essentially the extra attack you get when using a can trip that’s the comparison for the Yeller tonight sonic recoveries when you use second wind you regain this first level spell slot now it’s an expended for several spell slots you can’t use this to pile up extra spell slots the opposite of time potency eyeliner it’s sonic surge at 15th bubble you gain the ability to channel additional psionic power when user action surge ability till the end of your next turn if your attack or spell causes a creature to take psychic damage that creature takes an additional one D 10 psychic damage H you can only take this digital damage once during your turn this is one I’m not as crazy about but just it’s a good you know this done is a very strong argument this but what it does is it encourages you to attack lots of people which might not actually be not always the best strategy so and then mind cleaver your tax leave behind traces of disrupt its disruptive psychic energy if you hit a creature with a weapon attack you cause it to become vulnerable to psychic energy until the end of your next turn once you use this ability you get if it’s its cooldown as short or long rest again that works on a psychic destroyer and a lot of your spell’s taking a look at the way of the soul knife so this was similar what we talked about last week I don’t think I did anything really oh wait did I copy and paste something and then yes I did psychic lash slash shows up twice but I think I just don’t need it delete one so anyways so we got the sole knives coming in this lets you do psychic piercing slashing or bludgeoning with your arm strikes I through the range here in addition you can use a bonus action increase the reach of your arm strikes by 30 feet until the end of your turn I don’t wanted that to sit on the bonus action so you sort of thought like which way do I want to go with my action this turn don’t hit someone from far away I’d wanted to do something more exotic so the after so you know for psychic surgery why not adjust to be maximizing psychic damage yeah that could be good you know because then we’re staying within the bounds of what the system expects it’s a pretty good a suggestion Grum will fist the let’s see okay i go back to reading mode i can because i’m reading and now we get to do like mike learns how to use ms word here we go and just chat just chime in if this is a little small the so way of the soul knife i’ll click over to here get my head out of your way no it’s not yeah that’s gonna the river okay so my head’s gonna be in the way doing it sorry everyone that is not working the way I thought it would the okay sorry my head’s gonna be in the way cuz I can’t get it to I could have sworn it was going over once by page mode no it’s going over both pages at once okay again welcome to my Camaros is happy fun hour where we learn to use microsoft word a program which i’ve used for like 25 years now and still and barely proficient with your welcome so here we’ll just kind of go here I’ll zoom in a bit so maybe he comes in so we’ve got we talked to this last week with psychic slash essentially building on the way of the open hand this idea that when you flower your blows you get to pick a sonic effect to drop on top of your own arms drinks it’s a life drain gives you temp it points invoke terror lets you make someone frightened of you these all basically last for one round I’m invoke wrath disadvantage on everyone except you astral slide teleport someone ten feet away and synaptic overload this is where you tag someone with vulnerability to psychic damage until the end of your next turn that vulnerability uh Graham Rufus thinking of that it might be showing up a little too often so that would be maybe going up max damage then we’re getting more of a combo rather than just everything’s overlapping but we’ll see our site this tied into some of the flavor we talked about last week this idea that these characters may be being almost like bounty hunters they they’re good at like honing in on people so as an action sector creature you can see this is meant amuse outside of combat so it’s an action creature makes a wisdom save it has no knowledge that you forced it to tempt the saving throw so this is kinda like it’s almost like a passive attack you’re not hitting someone so hard they notice it and if they’ll save you learn if the creature shares any aspects of its alignment with you you learn its current hit points its current attitude and intentions toward you or one other creature object or location of your choice in addition for the next 24 hours or until you use this ability again you can use an action to determine the creatures distance and direction from you one of these I’ve tried to do here was this idea that if you want to learn multiple things you have to proc multiple saving throws off the target and one you know one successful saving time of the target shuts you down so there is a little bit of a planning element here you don’t just get to learn everything for free you’ve got to try it a few times do you just you know learn one thing and then wait cuz you want to attract this guy you know it’s a little bit of a decision for the soul my figure if they want to do spectral blades you can cause your blades to phase through physical objects and defenses once during your turn you can choose to forego one arm on unarmed strike in place of forcing your creature within the reach of that stack to make a deck saving throw failed save it takes your unarmed strikes damage half or half of it succeeds this is capturing the idea of the attack that can’t miss maybe I’m just phasing through your defenses to disrupt your life force that might need to be a restriction of this psychic damage only so we’re just basically in fifth and if we have an effect like that it becomes a dexterity saving throw because it’s purely can you get out of the way your armor can’t help you rather having a touch of AC or anything else the psychic forum is essentially this is something I liked I just threw it in if you were last week we talked this idea that the energy you manifest to make your blades you can become that that energy use it to become your entire form so the bonus action you gain resistance to all types of damage fly speed of 30 and the ability to pass through solid objects but not and your mood within them it’s been if it lasts for one minute it cools down on its cooldown as long rest cool down it would need some extra language there so but that’s the gist the gist of it then we come to the wizard and this is what we talked about yeah I kind of thought about the wizard what do you get so what let’s say let’s have a frank talk about sanics Sion do we like Sion or do we like mystic chat let me know I’m gonna I’ll take a look I keep an eye over there to see where we go I kind of I like mystic is the class name because it just feels like something that is more it’s a little bit feels like something people would say in the role of D&D that I can picture you walking in to a tavern and say oh he’s a mystic rather he’s a Sion but I see a lot of Sion loved a few words me there maybe the class should be the Sion Crawford I think like Sion if you stick around for his show coming up next you can ask him but I’ll probably throw a poll up on Twitter the and see where that goes but the I mean yeah Daedalus a mystic is very gentle yeah that’s pretty generic the and Professor nightshade mystics are too much like soothsayer yeah I could see that you think mystic it just doesn’t quite match it see okay we’ll see but now I had Sion here for the Wizards maybe the mist maybe the wood becomes the blue Jen but that feels – I’m not crazy about that because that’s just like if essentially if you use I think I was looking up online I think wow Jen I think it’s Chinese derived it’s just kind of funny like the you know the Chinese word for wizard means like psionic wizard that’s just okay don’t know if I necessarily like that makes sense rather get something more something a little more interesting and then level we do a Chinese translation someone will find a way to translate it the yeah okay so maybe we’ll just go Sion I’ll Mentalist grumbles yeah okay known as mentalists boom I like it this is what we talked about a couple weeks ago essentially what we’re giving you is an op gun Espie feature you know it’s kind of interesting because this is this is kind of giving you disciplines maybe I might redesign this based on what I’ve done with Sonic so far I will see this basically gave you access to detect thoughts but it improved it in some ways I won’t go through need at all because if you just look at the spell they see it let’s use the spell with bonus actions instead of actions you get telepathy at the second level this does not tell you you can grab spells from the sonic spell is Jax I just did not even get to it it’s working on the weekend folks can’t carry down the telepath just you get telepathy telekinetic mind essentially let you cast telekinesis early normally I think you’d have to be I love and level the cast at this lets you cast it it’s six level but instead of making the spell better it includes some drawbacks which then eventually fall away once you’re high enough level to cast all the time and then we just we improve those features so yeah that’s where we ended up so I think that the the school of psionics would need to get some revisions based on this introducing disciplines so that brain fighting no crazy I just you forget it fighting brains big giant brains elder brains beware the alright so the infinite core how important you think separating Sonic’s and spell casting ins through the lens of something like darks and even so that that is a big question I you know I kind of feel like while there are story reasons to make them separate that it runs back into this does the cost of keeping those the two things separate and having two systems run in parallel and then have to chart out all their interactions is it worth it are you getting the flavor that you want out of that to a sufficient level and I don’t know if you are in running so went back when I played in ran three five I had players use psionics and I never really felt that going that path was really worth it now that’s just me that’s what I think I would do with this design is make Sonic’s part of the existing magic system and then ask in the subsequent playtester raise does that feel like it’s working would you rather have them driven further apart because I think if you’re a long time player you’ve lived in the world where psionics was different so I kind of want to add invite everyone that’s inviting you to live in a world or the same and then see does that feel good does that work because I do one of the things that’s always been interesting with Sonics is that the it’s something which is fairly popular but it’s not a given for campaigns I really think there was if when Sonics especially in 3 5 you could probably learn a lot about a gaming group by whether they use psyonix or not and my experience was the groups that were ok with a lot of optimization we’re totally fine with Sonics because that’s just how they played and then the groups that really just like wacky characters were okay with sanics and that you and then everyone else was just not interested they didn’t like they didn’t like the wackiness and they didn’t like the power level the because I think the optimizers was just not the puzzle to solve you know it’s everyone’s throwing up play on wires characters so sure however you get there it’s fine then I think the players the campaign’s are more likely just make interesting characters my experience is a lot of those teams and players don’t really care about power level so they would just think odd to be cool to play a Sion with just like these disciplines whatever and they weren’t seeking out like hey how can i optimize my points the but I think is just a matter of the dm’s ability or desire to learn more rules so I think what I’d like to do is try to move things so it’s a bit more easier for DMS to pick up and feel like they can integrate them into the campaign and to see more use of them overall again it’s tricky because the Sonics were popular especially in 3 5 in 4th we just did kind of I mean had to exist within the power system so it wasn’t quite the dramatic difference that you saw in 3rd direction you know we’re trying to go that way but yeah um kittens and mittens Mike do you think mystic sonic would be its own book release no probably not I would rather put it in another book either like the dark Sun setting book which you yourself kids and men’s point out or I could see some future date if we do another book legs and that’s an F saying if I won’t be as far as we did but it’s probably yours off I could see this showing up in dark Sun I could see this showing up as a chapter in that book the one nice thing I like about this approach is if we’re combining this sort of spell list and style of spell with a discipline into one package and then have a sort of subclasses in a class and orbit around it it makes it very nice like here’s a chapter do you use this chapter or not in your game I wouldn’t want to try to make it an entire book on its own because I think that would force us to do more with it than we want to if you’re typically speaking for us a hardcover book has to be about 160 pages and I don’t know if we would be able to fill those 160 pages in a satisfying way as opposed to like a 64 pages that’s a really meaty feature of a book the poor yes so if in there I don’t want anyone reporting this is news right though but just you know the sometimes people can overreact to stuff what if you make sure people understand where we’re coming from yeah this entire approach right if you hate it or you love it be hate it take solace in the fact we could play test this and Everton will hate it that’s done if you like it tamper with your enthusiasm with the realization that if everyone hates this then win play test then we’re knocking it we’re not gonna do it at the end of the day the communities in the driver’s seat and as a designer I love that because it just means I can afford to try wacky things because I know we’re gonna validate it with everyone watching who’s playing and DMing you know so in a lot of ways it’s very liberating you know I didn’t get I know it can be frustrating sometimes you know I’ve questions what the Ranger and stuff people want stuff change really quickly but we want you we’re in this for the long haul so that’s kind of one of the drawbacks that except you know that to hit the claw quality level we want to aim for it means we moved me slower than you think the yeah so I think we are at about less than five of my understanding is Jeremy Crawford is gonna be up next talking bit more about the sort of final design step he doesn’t I mean I talked to him a bit about this morning about the stuff so if you guys are hanging around for that stream and ayran shot asking him questions the he might have no idea talking about the but yeah this is something though initially he liked the static discipline concept so we’ll see we’ll see workouts the but yeah so everyone I’m gonna throw a poll up on Twitter when I get back to when I’m on able to tweet without thinking to meeting or something like that caris to see where the mystic Scion vote breaks down think about this stuff I’m gonna the dosti I’m gonna start announcing settings to alright everything all the plans up here see if you’re sonic you better reach out through this live video feed and read my mind for all the stuff we’re gonna announce it stream of annihilation that’s not screamin at Eastern stream of many eyes this weekend and then the stuff we can’t announce this coming weekend but it’s still on our future but anyway thanks so much everyone this has been I love the show I love being able to share of the stuff with everybody I find it so inspiring it’s so much fun and I kind of like you know seeing the Argon’s play out and where we’re gonna come from because really this entire thing it is a community endeavor right the end of the day D&D is all about us collectively and how we play the game of what we want out of it so yes defiant Mars time to transcribe and go homebrew yes exactly that should be like how I end all the things like homebrew build stuff the and help push the conversation of D&D forward so thank you very much for tuning in and next week we’ll probably on what I’ll do is maybe you start tinkering around with some more other disciplines flesh tomorrow the one drawback to doing this on camera right now is I haven’t done this yet so it’s nice to do it and then talk about it then start doing it on camera rather than just try to make it up as we go completely so thanks for yes I the stream and many eyes will be recorded of the winter live stream and release it on youtube so tune into twitch over the weekend submit can’t catch a live check out our our YouTube channel we’ll have clips there and the entire videos alright take care everyone and I’ll see you all this weekend so tune in to watch my games [Music]

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Psionic and spells – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

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