The Psionic Class pt2 – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

hello out there on twitch and later YouTube welcome to the mic Merrill’s happy fun hour I am your host the eponymous Mike morals I am the franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons that’s right they gave me both they didn’t just give me one they said that’s Parham up so hey how’s it run goin house chat how’s everyone doing on this fine Tuesday I guess I think it’s Wednesday depending on what time zone you’re in the so yeah we’ve got another week another entry in our little quest for psyonix so I’ve got the class up in here let me do a little recap what we’ve done greetings and salutations to you to lambreaux 1 and greetings to everyone else the is yeah I think it’s a super Pro I can’t quite read that they some of you if you follow me on Twitter know I had a very I have a very adorable little sheltie puppy that we’ve acquired and she fell asleep all snuggled up next to me and I could not I could not bear to move and wake up that little pup luckily the cat came along and decided to take care of the situation so he got us all out of bed yes so I was able to overcome the puppy’s cuteness to make it into work today though I would not think this date in old I don’t know the so let’s take a look at what we’ve got so far do a quick recap try not to burn too much time here so we can get right into the interesting bits we’ve got here what we were working on is the new scion character class scion replacing the mystic you might see mystic still pop up the text here I haven’t just done a fine to replace quite yet rather just do it manually oh wait here’s one boom progress made there we go ignore some of the table stuff here sigh points in the side limit this is just gonna be something that we will have to start with we want to try to for the scion using Sonic’s start with trying to use spell Slav so I think we can make work and then that makes it very easy to convert over to points if you want to go that route cuz we already have points in the dmg so there you go the what we’ve got here is a core character class built on the wizard chassis and when I say built in a class chassis that’s really pointing to the power level profile and so the wizard is all about spells but you know a daily resource augmented a bit with a short rest recharge off of that first level character class feature but otherwise wizard level casting spells and to the point where the subclasses for the wizard are mostly about modifying those spells in some way the so that’s really what we saw the Sion being a good match for it being a class that simple similar to the wizard is gonna be all about the abilities they use those psionic disciplines and our subclasses along the same route as the wizard subclasses focusing he went on a subtype of those psionic abilities aiming at making those basically your character’s specialty doesn’t shut down any options but it just says you’re better this thing than the other things you’re not bad at the other things yours better at this one for me personally I love that kind of game design I love game design where I’m just given candy and toys for doing things rather than taking penalties like penalties that’s boring it’s a game if I wanted penalties I just I not play a game I go to work I do my taxes you know but yeah it’s games let’s just give her one stuff make him happy right that’s that’s what games are there for I’m quick question from Mad Hatter him like you think a book featuring the scion of a sidebar pointing to the dmg spell points yeah I think if we if we stay on course with this design I think I’d if I’d go so far as to even just include that material in there either as an appendix or a sidebar knowing that for especially for players you might not own the dmg and you might if you’re coming in from third edition you might be thinking well this is why I like soundex I like spell points and it’d probably be there probably be a section I’d imagine so this is all theoretical but there would probably be some sort of material to address okay we’re gonna treat Sonics as a default this is the same as because we’re doing that for simplicity we’re thinking of the Dungeon Master who just wants to pick this up and throw it in a campaign and I have to worry about it but if you want to build that up in your campaign this idea that it’s a different type of magic we’d want to talk about that and so giving you some of those options and tools to use if you can say hey look dispel magic doesn’t work on sound X because soun X is different for us that’s definitely something we can support especially if we support it knowing that a dungeon masters opted into it because then we can be a little looser and give you more broad guidelines where you’re applying the guidelines to a specific situation rather than rules that cover how everything could interact especially when it comes to character abilities it’s good at least for a big system like that you want to try to give as much guidance as you can without bloating the system and making it overwhelming the yeah at Stella Castillo one yes so this will be the dark Sun campaign we will get to ask this when the time is right but not not to say we’ll see why but I heard we have some announcements now I don’t know I don’t want to want to start teasing stuff too much but we are definitely the settings there on the menu it’s to matter when we get to them we want to make sure we do them right so but I think we’ve got some cool stuff to announce next month so I’m looking forward to it I hope you’re looking forward to it the Devon seconds will there be a dispel psionics most likely what I and we’ll do instead and don’t want to just jump ahead too far but what I’m thinking about is that the sign expel list will include spells from the core spell list and then there probably will probably be some sort of writer that would say if your sanic person using an ability from the Sonic list treat that effect is psionic in nature for whatever that means so in that case I’d imagine when we had the full thing especially if I cast a spell magic but I’m casting it as a psionic user it can counter psionics so in addition to spells or maybe you couldn’t write depending on where the DM wants to set it if you want to ever really think with a high wall between those power sources so yeah so let’s talk a little bit about what we’re going to do with those psionic disciplines because we’ve talked about the core class which like the wizard is mainly a way to get your sonic abilities and then it’s mostly filled with sub class options you know the the features your sub class gives you last week and you know I don’t know what it is but this year it feels like these League weeks are really long last it’s like a month ago last week we talked about the uh the nomads and we had these you know I’m getting myself confused here and we talked about some of these uh what the nomads suite of disciplines would look like the now the basic mechanic I have in mind is this Sonics the disciplines are defined by very powerful can trips at Wilma abilities that do things that can ships don’t normally do but the price of your concentration the Scion is special in that they can concentrate on two sanic disciplines at once rather than the normal hard cap of one so you have a can trip a sonic can trip you use it to kind concentrate on it that allows you to keep activating it if you lose concentration on it you then potentially lose some of the benefits that you’ve gained from especially using higher level versions of it though depending on the other can trips we roll out you’ll see some that if you lose it it’s just you know it’s giving you some sort of static benefit or some han going benefit that then goes away for instance a mind link and trip might allow you to establish telepathic contact with someone if you lose concentration on it obviously that effect ends and you don’t have to go ahead and re-establish it things like that prime most likely the cost of an action so quick recap of what we did for these are the disciplines that we’re we’re want to flesh out for the nomads the Nomad is our one of our orders and they are all about accumulating knowledge and moving through the weird little gaps in reality that to other folks look like teleportation they’re all about transcending boundaries whether those are the boundaries physical boundaries like here’s a place I can’t get into well I want to get into it or boundaries of knowledge nobody knows of anything about this I want to go find out to a nomad the journey isn’t just from point A to point B it could be from concept to concept B they don’t like the idea of things remaining unknown they want to discover them so one of their six signature abilities is this idea of teleportation so we went through and sketched out what does that will teleport can trip look like when you’re working at the can trips a lot of time the question is what are the limits on it things that you can do all the time are very obnoxious for tension masters if they’re too good and there’s actually tension in game design for tabletop role-playing games especially for D&D Dungeon Master’s are much more forgiving about effects that are limited by a resource I can do this once than I can’t do it again most likely for the rest of the session things that players can do all the time if they distort the game too much just get very irritating for Dungeon Master’s very quickly in terms of feedback we see teams are much quicker to give negative feedback to something that’s at-will than they are to something that is that is a resource to the point there I think I wouldn’t hold a natural ability to the same level of approval necessarily it might need is something more limited not out of the sense that the play testers are wrong by no means more of the sense that people are just more sensitive to it so we just calibrate our expectations a little bit differently I think if we I think it’s one thing we learned probably from the core design of the core fifth edition game is that there’s a little bit more opportunity how to put it we’re a little bit because we follow the play test feedback which I think was that’s what we should have done but I think we ended up with actual abilities that maybe aren’t as good as they could be and still have the system be balanced the Brutes subclass I loved use this as an example the brute was something we didn’t under Canada could horrible ratings yet if you were to look at it mathematically it was just getting extra damage on all of its attacks it was better than the champion but on par with the battle master now that it may have an off still I can’t remedy exact numbers but there was just the sense that if I was to take the encounter based abilities of the battle master just convert them to raw numbers and then spread them out over a kind of well what do we think is a good estimate of a number of rounds of combat and then even saying even that spike is not so high that even if you just like fought all day like 80 rounds of combat it still wouldn’t distort things it was still people had a very quick knee-jerk reaction to not wanting it so that’s something really to think about in your own design but it’s something for us to manage too it’s really think about you know getting that right it’s very tricky people just yeah so the yeah and I in Condon oh yeah it probably bad things because people were sad it made the champion look bad I think it’s also a big part of it but it’s irritating because the game designer in me I want to play a brute because it’s more fun yeah i io flat out say the champion is probably to me it’s a it’s a subclass that does it does a good job in mostly but it’s missing a big thing it relies on critical hits which is fine you create more often but it’s for beginning players who are probably the least likely of everyone at the table to realize that got- lay it on a 19 rather than a 20 even on a 20 they might not know and so it’s just one of those things where relying on your math your mastery of the core system to really actually make this work so it looks really simple and it’s not going to go back and do six edition you know it’s not back to you but it’s just one of those things with like oh that you know it is not quite doing what I want it to do but you know again we really respect the players handbook we don’t want to go back and start willing with willy-nilly changing things so anyways let’s talk about the Nomad right quick question from Grom roll fist Mike you were mentioning Nomad is exploring the boundaries of reality so I got a time element like a can should lets you spend concentration to get more reactions yeah and I think that is um that I think something with time travel be cool now time travel at a tabletop game oh it’s rough it is really hard but I thought I like the challenge of it so you know what let’s do this scramble fist challenge accepted let’s see what we can do with some elements of time travel now we have if I remember right we have temporal step coming at 14th level you can travel through both space and time in space this is from the subclass when you teleport you can choose to skip forward in time mechanically what we’re seeing is this is essentially kind of like a time stop or an exile kind of effect so I think of them you just sort of step out of the game for a little bit get to take some actions then pop back in or you can just delay having to come back in the three rounds from now things like that so I think that and you know what would be fun I’m gonna say this I think it would be really fun if we end up having to kill this class feature because we made canned trips and abilities and and disciplines that obviated it obviate I love that word such a good word I just love saying it the so one of the things if you were with me and then prior episodes what I try to avoid in subclass features is or class features is to give an effect that’s just a spell sometimes you can’t get around that sometimes you just you know what it’s the best way to execute on something so you’ll just do it but it’s really nice when things aren’t just like Oh like I’m the enchanter so I can charm people and now you should charm people by casting term person or charm monster not just by having this class feature that duplicates a spell so Cromwell fist challenge accepted let’s make temporal step let’s put it out the past year by coming up with some great disciplines that make it so we don’t need it so I’m gonna go down here and I kind of like the visual enough you know what I will expand this oh and by the way time travel from the spells yep okay we’ll spend a second looking at it but there’s not much in the core game so let’s do this oh I have caps lock on what is this AOL that’s a reference letter lost on most younger viewers so let’s go a little time travel because that’s insane but this is the thing try doing things that are crazy right that that’s get players excited like whoa that’s nuts how can you do that well let’s try it let’s see this is this is the time to get things wrong I totally embrace that in your first draft this is time to mess things up get them wrong because this is the point in which you can recover decide things don’t work but sometimes you’re gonna figure out hey this crazy thing it actually worked hey so let’s see what we got here now other than time stop let’s take a look at our spells and I’m just gonna look at all spells I’m gonna do a search word time time travels not a big big part of D&D so I don’t think there’s a lot I don’t think there’s a spell tag travel up there could be though and handy handy dandy beyond you never know like what you know what you how we might slice things the app let’s just search for time time stop that’s it this is probably the only one I’ll take a look at Hayes – because haste you could argue so time some it’s a ninth double spell so okay we are definitely going where Eagles dare you briefly stop the flow of time for everyone but yourself no time passes further creatures while you take one D 4+1 turns in a row during which you can use actions and move as normal the spell ends if one of the actions used during this period are any effects you create during this period effects are creature other than you or an object being worn or carried by someone other than you in addition the spell ends if you move to a place more than a thousand feet location where you cast it so yeah the what I see in chat people throwing in hey check out haste and slow and blink Oh cut the Ebola take a look at plain to see okay so what the one thing that’s gonna save us here though right was like 95 oh wow that’s a wee powerful it’s one plus what’s one D four plus one so it’s not just one already there’s one that I mean like Amy this is too much but you can’t get bunch of turns here getting three and a half typically so let’s take a look it’s that slow hastened blink okay this is a third level spell transportation you alter time oh we’re altering time you alter a time around up to six creatures of your choice in a 40-foot cube within range each target must succeed in a wisdom saving therapy affected by the spell for the duration an affected spell an effective target speed is halved it takes a minus two penalties to a seen dexterity saving throws and it can’t use reactions on its turn it can use either an action or or a bonus action not both regardless of the creature’s abilities of magic items it can’t make more than one melee arrange attack during its turn okay this is great cuz this is third level so where this is getting close we went from you get this at 17th level to now you get this at fifth level so that’s a nice gap a nice you know leap to make to get this down to first level that you can use every reverie round let’s see if the creature attempts to cast a spell at the casting time of one action or Lindy 20 and 11 or higher it’s gotta wait till next turn that that’s they kill off the it’s gonna use its next action to complete the spell Wow you know what I forgot about this aspect of slow I need to put slow on more of my monsters because this will really really irritate my players I do this because I love of course the last session the players luckily we had our our goblin fighter decided to like leap down to the second deck of an airship without really knowing what was down there which is great it’s trying to be a bunch of undead and a very angry Deathlok Peter affected by the spell makes us a saving thread stockade so it’s gonna you not just stuck with this forever you can try to throw it off the right let’s check out haste haste is slows benevolent twin-brother haste choose a willing creature so this is one creature the slow was looked at I think with six creatures remember right she’s a willing creature that you can see within range until the spell ends double at speed plus two to a seed Vantage and saving throws and one additional action to its turns that action can be used only to take the attack one weapon attack only – disengage hider use an omni action ok cool so this is something where I’m gonna take a little quick aside when I talk with a bonus action this is something where when if you’ve been following me for a while on Twitter or this stream you know I talked a bit about bonus actions I feel that kind of hacky because I think they had an identity and they quickly lost that identity and we’re in a world now where it’s like if I’m a barbarian I want at weapon fight I can’t do that in a rage in the same turn was just kind of like so I’m about bearing into rage I’d stop attacking like it’s a minor pet peeve of mine but this is something that kind of points to where you might have action stacking where the action is very specific in what you can do with it and it’s referring to the specific action types action typing is something in fifth that from a very mechanistic just from the system standpoint is something that I think it is a bit weak at it’s something which we can use to our advantage and talking about our time travel options by very zeroing in on exactly what you can do with those actions and what exactly can have so okay so this is pretty good this is one person but they’re getting this for a minute and they’re getting an extra attack or doing a lot of other funky stuff that they can’t normally do the all right now and the someone mentioned blink too let’s take a look at this is also a third-level so it’s coming in fifth level fifth character level we roll a d20 at the end of each of your turns for the duration of the spell on a roll of 11 or higher you vanish from your current point of existence and appear in the ethereal plane spell fails and the casting is wasted if you’re already on that plane it’s the start of your next turn and when the spell ends if you are on the ethereal you return to an unoccupied space of your choice that you can see within 10 feet of the space you vanished from okay this is almost kinda like skipping through time if were to look at it that time travel ends if no unoccupied space is available within that range or pier in the next time I’ll carry behind space chosen at random if there’s more than one you can just dismiss the spell as an action let’s say you can dis this spells an action like a blink that’s terrible and there goes your action pal good move while on the ethereal plane okay great so the foresight eagerly 7 thank you that’s something which we would expect yes there are no that’s a divination ninth bubble last eight hours though so again we’re seeing these ninth double spells interesting they’re giving these sort of time-traveling effects but they’re doing with like these really big numbers or like you get five actions it’s a lot going on or I think we can chop them down you touch a willing creature it gains a limited ability to see into the future for the duration can’t be surprised has advantage and attack rolls ability checks and saving throws that’s pretty nice other creatures have disadvantage in attack roles that’s really nice this is great buff and that’s not concentration all right so we get this kind of sense of insight and that’s the hard thing you know when you’re with the tabletop game when check out a future in time travel video games especially more scripted you could do the time-travel thing you leap forward the game essentially if you really wanted to get mechanistic about it could just imagine an open-world game it could just run the world for a while then show you what and what you pop back into time and then obviously with time travel backward with the video game if it’s tracking the state of everything in the game it just rewinds back so I mean Prince of Persia did that God now like 13 years ago the so but in a tabletop game mmm I don’t know about you maybe I’m just not good at dungeon messaging but I don’t remember every single thing that happened I’m not like the bronze James I can’t just go back and remember how all 10 people were on the court during like a 30 second exchange Stevie so yeah the so ok let’s take a look at what our will version this might look like because this will be the hardest one as I mentioned before yeah hole zoom in on this you guys can see things better there make that nice and gigantic okay so here’s what we want to do how many should I put this up front just so we know this this can’t be obnoxious and I’m going to find obnoxious I actually to me a useful the game designer not just say obnoxious and walk away because that can mean a lot I want low tracking because this is a quail up this is a natural ability it’s like you need to break down five things like who’s I don’t wanna do that it be round solo tracking I want a little complexity I don’t want low handling time now here’s a thing I’m putting these up front normally we just do these but it’s important because time travel is going to innately want to become come complicated there might be something flavorful that could very quickly violate these rules so sometimes it’s nice to just let’s just make sure we know that this is a quail it’s got to be simple it can’t be too complicated I’m already looking at this at will cantrip for teleportation the restrictions on it we kind of need them stop it from being obnoxious but there’s a bit of a sort of circular thing here because we have these restrictions it’s something players have to think of it is going to start leading to more complexity if I you know right now it’s just you can teleport 10 feet to a position you can see players are naturally just gonna want to use that to just teleport 10 feet in a direction right and we tried to make this something where like okay you can’t move after teleporting it’s using your action so these are things that hopefully you’ll learn pretty quickly you’re not for instance if it was restricted this first bullet point number something we talked about if we restricted your vertical movement that would be something which people would forget all the time and you’re constantly stopping and rewinding so we don’t want that I lost your time traveling but it’s kind of hard to be wined they call me Tomo to be fair aren’t scions going to be chosen by high complexity players we don’t know that we actually this is one thing to keep in mind that you can aim something to be high complexity that’s fine but I only want to do that when we’ve established our baseline complexity is it’s like eating it’s like eating dessert first complexities Greeks lets you do all sorts of wacky stuff and you can design the heck out of things because you get a high complexity budget it’s like eating a lot of calories right if I have a five thousand calorie a day budget as someone who’s often struggled with my weight fantastic five thousand calories you know what school we’re going on for ice cream right that’s not just getting like a scoop of ice cream in a cup I’m getting the freaking sundae with every thing they have in that topping bar thrown on top of it so I have 5,000 calories that’s a ton of fun and then I am old enough now the next day and I wake up I feel horrible right I just I can’t do that anymore all that sugar the so that’s what our complexity budget is like we need to start with that really lean mean core and get ourselves the discipline to like not just go nuts and throw things in and then once we have that down then we can say okay now here’s the high complexity option for the player who wants to really play with the mechanics let me just catch a little bit on shad hair there’s been no there’s a lot of chat stuff flying by I’ve seen has been talking the let’s see what else I got how about time time manipulation use reaction to force to be role of one d20 that’d be kind of interesting here reaction to force re-roll yeah that’s actually a pretty simple mechanic now it’s a reaction so I don’t want to make though the core thing unless well this is where this is where having concentration is nice this might be you know let’s start just by this in this quick more action to activate and requires concentration this might be the one effect here right no I don’t know that’s we’re gonna end up but this is one thing about moving concentration down to can trips that’s nice basically I have this Concha this is this can trip up and active it gives me a new option now I think a reaction of for Surrey role at will might be a little too much here’s my memory of these kind of characters right hey the the auger swings and hits oh hey Bob the guy just died hey what’s your AC oh it’s like 22 okay so it’s really unlikely he’d hit you uh okay I want to use my ability we’re like well how much damage was that I think it it can slow the game down not to the point where I’m just gonna to just say no we can’t do this but something like that keep in mind right it means we’re not quite done I want to poke at this a bit more the oh wow and this could be like some sort of buff right so under fan yeah maybe you get extra reaction maybe it’s just you get some of those benefits we saw the high level things you know bonus to a thing okay bonus true thing might sound like it’s not very descriptive but there actually is like no I mean that’s like like you know one specific role or let’s say saving through so basically a floating bonus I can choose to invoke that might go back the reaction of horse re-roll maybe this works in two ways sort of precognition post cognition I can I can see the pass that gives me a benefit or maybe I can see the future and that lets me avoid danger you know this is one against is whenever you’re having concentration on a can trip is nice because it lets me now I could have a can trip that essentially is buffing you constantly we could maybe like a creepy Bob disengage is a bonus action it’s not like that we might be you know bonus action news but you know I don’t want to I don’t want to step on the road too much I’m just put these further things you know like this engage maybe perception checks preception perception checks maybe since I can kind of see what’s coming I get a benefit to react to it you know avoid surprise kind of like some like when we saw in those spells let’s see what else we got here yeah geek reality 70 the one thing is I think concentration is gonna be for the new things we’re adding I think that’s gonna be a kind of core piece of it but I would I expect is all the spells we pull in from the core list and make basically say hey these are available to psionic users that those most of those want I mean obviously some of them might still use concentration but I think for the new things we’re gonna focus on like that new doesn’t a design style let’s see whose your reaction to move a monster down the initiative order you know this is this is something where I’m gonna like oh I’m blocking the text with my blocky old head let’s do this thank you much 10 seconds so here’s something we’re here you know what I’ll do I will do this and let’s do this let’s do we don’t need two columns for any other particular reason right now so let’s just do that and just there we go I have found an issue messing with the initiative order we’ve tried it a few times in the past and people don’t ever seem to like it doesn’t mean they don’t want to try it here I think this could be something that we can do here but I have found people I think initiative is something which is for a lot of players and Dungeon Master’s unnecessary and a necessary evil so the yeah tacky and railgun please don’t give them away to mess a little it was a can trip yeah doing that all the time could get it could get messy fast but maybe this is something which when rolling for initiative you know it’s also funny it’s the number of times in which you roll for initiative and the sequencing is really important it’s not as it doesn’t seem to come up often enough to be worth the the brain space you know the or just the opportunity cost of like hey here’s our can trip and that’s the thing it does so you know but I’ll just put find a way to make this work what I think I’d want to lean on advantage on initiative that yeah I could work doing a random had in there fain doing a something a reaction to delay people like making them wait a couple turns that kind of work to deal one thing is though if that gets very powerful though especially near the end of the fight if I think a monsters on its last legs and I can push it down after a couple of initiative spots I could basically did deny the turn so that gets very yeah it gets a little wonky this is gonna operate much like tracer an overwatch ask cinder flame you know maybe we talked about a tracer style ability last week where you would move then bounce back to where you were the challenge there is it’s really great flavor it also it makes a ton of sense in a video game where the game is tracking your state and it knows where you were on a tabletop game though it is a little bit trickier because a lot of players might not track where they were might forget and that’s the worst case scenario is if you play with managers player picks their miniature up I’m gonna move over here and swing to this guy oh hey I want to use my thing to go back oh where was I again like that kind of thing so it’s a little tricky but I like the flavor of it right I like the flavor of tracer as a character who’s interacting with time and having that is kind of like one of our core concepts here choosing where you go an initiative checker author well that may be non the interesting way choose your result you might just always get you can pick instead of rolling I pick one of three numbers I’m granting and I surprise you and that kind of fits in with the precognition I don’t know if I want you to gain surprise though because if someone will immediately put this us on a set on in this asset so dat’ll swing your turn is split between two initiative accounts you know something like a legendary action kind of thing legendary creatures that may be kind of interesting huh I don’t know how that would interact with everything else you know that also makes that feels kind of like super speed to me though and I don’t know where I might want to shelled it but that’d be kind of interesting to have a way you can break your turn up into smaller sub turns that you can throw in and mmm let me remove them I don’t know but it doesn’t quite feel like time travel it feels kind of more like speed our change Derick thief taking the 17th double taking two turns the initiative yeah that’s and that’s a 7000 ability and I get I don’t I don’t know sent want to step on that especially as an that will ability good so ok well here let’s do this right I like this idea of at will time travel and I want to take another quick look spells because there was something in here under haste it’s gonna haste it’s a throwable spell so I think if I can hack the spell down I can get it down at first level and I think the thing I don’t want to do with this is something with this additional action on each of its turns you know I’m gonna use an action and I get something here and so what I here’s something which is very prescriptive do is it might also feel really kind of fun what if we did something like this so you get I’m gonna call this is totally fake in the sense that I’m just making this up as a label as no bearing I’m gonna call it your time step actually and what if it’s just like look you can just kind of mess with time around you so you can just you can move ten feet you can I don’t want to use this is gonna addition to your turn so something like you just you can just move ten feet very quickly oh you can swap out here in your hand and maybe there’s something here like you can get a defensive bow something very minor you know maybe you know I’m gonna call baby shield versus won’t attack or save so something like that again this might still be too good and it might need to peek back into but again this is getting more complicated but here’s what as I’m writing this if I explain what it is the the idea here being you’re traveling through time so tight you can you can mess up time so if you do things other people can’t and so I’d like to set it like ok you move 10 feet cuz you can speed time up around yourself or slow I’m sorry you can slow it down relative the people so you’re getting more out of your second I’m gonna swap my gear out right now I’m just gonna speed myself up great everyone else so kind of using that time thing so hey I had a sword and shield ok no sweat I can change my armor oh whatever right maybe that’s it feels a little nomad right depending on where I am I can very quickly change my gear load and then something with like a defensive buff would be nice now here’s the thing though that’s starts to get good enough that as an at-will thing you’re gonna you’re gonna do this every round so I think what we might need to do is give you a little bit of a restriction on what you can do with your regular action and what I think that might look like is I’m gonna say this like you know one attack or one camp or you know list to be determined so here’s what a way I kind of see this if you restrict flavor-wise here’s what I imagine is happening as a nomad you can mess this time but you still only have so much mental processing bandwidth so if you take a certain subset of like simple actions like just stabbing someone or throwing a can trip you can then on top of it create a little extra time for yourself to do something else boom you know it moving a bit further swap out your gear or set up the sense about I’m gonna move very quickly if someone tries to clobber me that could also be an offensive buff I know I don’t make that offensive buff because that’ll cord too nicely with uh with the can trip you just you always be combining those two so the if you remember a few weeks back we took a look at the lrish night we made the the psychic warrior and then LG tonight had the ability aware if you need to use DAC and trip you could make a single up an attack then that got upgraded later on to be whenever you cast a spell you know kind of like that ability of you get this if you do this so that I’d be something that which we do here the help action I’m not necessarily crazy DM envel about putting it in here because that feels a little that the mastermind does that and I don’t think the the mastermind build for the rogue I don’t think the nomads dress is necessarily about helping the team I think nomads are a little greedy I think they travel through time themselves they travel themselves right that they can bring the group along but it’s gonna require a limited resource so yeah the I’m gonna kind of settle on something like this for right now and I think the extra reaction thing I’m a little worried about making that without a resource because I think that just makes you better without any drawback so this is something here that I think can work so now what we then need to do is what could the spell effects be and so here’s what what I just want to think about we’ve had a lot of ideas so it’s just you know it’s really insisting okay whatever oh I see that whenever me and bullets guess we’re not getting along today so a lot of things we talked about here are extra actions see the future and take advantage of that step outside of time I think if we’re gonna do time travel we can be pretty you know the future is easy to get to but I think the past we want to say like oh you can go back like a year or something like that rather than like five seconds right like then it’s just as a DM you’re like well what was you know it’s more precise than we needed to be past and longer increments view the past and future there you go saw that see the future and take advantage of that view the past and teach here see the past and a future that fits our Nomad theme Oh Kayla they want to push the barriers they want to they want to basically dispel the unknown oh we also want this speedy mattress okay okay bullet point lists and I are not getting along well today slow style effects you know ability travel in time so this is again that which is nice it’s a third level spell so I’ll be pretty easy to bring in and then income it up and down let’s see what else we got it OB the past steps on the toes of the waken that might oh it’s right because they’re more I’m gonna leave him there for now but I think yeah that is something to just that italics so just remember be a few tree is much more sealed away as part of thing to the Nomad let’s see X to the X is time step part of your move action no I would see this as just it may see a is an action so here’s an action I’m gonna use my time stuff ability and then it would tell me then what I can do – you can still move in all that let’s see whoredom noxious stress to them not just shared the bring friends with unit through time yeah had nur found I think the I’ll make a note of that mostly greedy but with a resource or higher level spell can affect the Oh time hop yeah disappear makes the Mingus fear for your rounds yeah that’s disappear for a bit do and that net actually pulls in from that class feature we’re looking at putting away to purl step the let’s see Oh another thing which we could do is dictate your initiative results where are we we’re going to dictate your initiative result let’s see what else we got here oh it could you make duplicates of yourself automatic could be zooty um maybe I’ll throw it in here but that gets really good really fast I guess maybe if you don’t like yourself though that would be kind of interesting the oh yeah couple the blink spell effect oh yeah and let’s throw in our spells I just remember this blink slow paced foresight and time stop so we should make sure we’re looking at those spells to see what we can just disassemble and get from there yes tacky and railguns summer a future version of yourself you know this could be something we’re like all the bad news is I want to see that myself and ten years from now how the bad news is that’s just a coffin like here oops they’re gonna make some pretty bad bad decisions in the near future yeah and some sort of hold effect so it makes sense you know freeze and time there’s a lot yeah reaction based abilities you know these kind of capture the idea of knowing the future like I knew I knew that was exactly what Rena to you because I saw the future I went look so now I know exactly how to counter that the okay so this is actually coming together pretty well you know and I think the challenge here this is a tricky one to design with the the can trip because it’s going to be the route right if you don’t like the can trip then you know it’s gonna be such an opportunity cost for you just like load it up and start using these other effects the oh this should be disappointed call them so yeah anyway the I’m kind of leaning toward this idea that it gives you a thing as an action basically spa nice new special action that lets you do a little bit more than you normally can and if you were ever curious this is the kind of model that I had in mind of like what you know if we didn’t have in bonus actions what would it look like it would look something like this right like oh I choose to attack and there’s just an attack one of the options an attack is to up and fighting and it just means you swing twice right the if there are effects that gave you multiple attacks I’d probably just say hey you get a new special multi attack action lets you choose the attack action twice oh yeah I can show up and fight great two up and fight twice right so two stabs with the short sword two stabs with the other short sword and then you’re done right so um let’s see what we got here now I say hey so to chat sound off do you think that what do you think of this can should affect this idea of basically letting you make a little fold in time and what you get a little bit more out of your action than you normally do does that feel like a very low you know basically at-will expression of time travel throw that up there let me know I’m feeling pretty good about it but I am a little worried that it might not be quite the flavor be looking for but I see if it feels powerful I mean it feels kind of cool like I got a special thing that only I can do and doesn’t feel like any of the can trip out there okay let’s try good djf a hundred percent what it should be I love it oh she call it full time he that’s great a great idea like that full-time so i full-time over make a little gap in time I take a take advantage of it so there we go and oh you know another thing you could do oh this is this might be a very you know I’ve seen a couple of people talk about extra reactions so extra reactions that will gets a little obnoxious but I think there’s something very simple here right spell that grants a reaction stacks on top of so here’s what I’m seeing with this as a popped in mind oh I want to take a reaction great I spent a spell slot this might actually do discipline effect called overtime then they’re coming to this in overtime ever gets really tense and what’s gonna happen next um so this might be a Class B true but what I imagine is anytime I wanted to spend a reaction without using my reaction I just expend a spell slot it might be a first of all spell slot so I get more of them and I have a lot of flexibility because I think that would be kind of interesting and fun and feel like oh yeah I’m always doing extra stuff cuz I’m bopping around through time but again I do want to put a cap on it because again if you can just do it all the time it gets really obnoxious it’s just a you know opportunity tax they’re constantly firing off you getting extra ones or you’re actually using shield extra times and whatnot so the but this might be a class feature and it might be at higher levels get one all the time you might just always get a second reaction and higher levels I’m not as worried because at this point you’re like blowing up mountains so it’s not breaking something let’s take a quick look back then are we about eight minutes left so what I want to do is take a look at what we did with the Nomad the class features I’m gonna go back to two column mode because if I remember right I think that lets us see more of the text it kind of does but I think it also puts my my head like right in a dead spot no it does let it lets us see more here okay so let’s walk back through we kind of know now what our cancer is gonna do the cancer it’s really important that the order of the Nomad talks to the toilets it’s signature can trips so the let’s we got bonus disciplines learn traditional psychic disciplines of your choice okay that’s pretty straightforward and then let’s see can the ability to you sign next week all your steps as reaction what was this I thought I was Directorate you can teleport or not cried space you can see within 30 feet of you okay this was this was the the originally this was someplace you had been but then we just that’s just too much tracking okay but this one I’m kind of thinking maybe we don’t necessarily need will see especially these are all about teleportation temp level he gained resistance weapon tax until is starving externa after you teleport I kind of want to replace this one with a time-based one I like the idea that you know I’m kind of surprised first of all I’m only giving you two additional disciplines did I do that for the other for the weekend no I didn’t I didn’t okay we need something in first level because the look the the awakened is giving you a bonus disciplines and then giving you awaken talent in our poor Nomad just gets that the Nomad is looking across the room going hey I’ll give me something what the heck’s up with that you know maybe what we could do here is no I don’t know if I want to give you that extra reaction here I think what I’m going to throw in it first level is pride just I’m gonna be really lame but just to get this thing in here yeah it’s gonna do something here first of all you get a speed benefit this is kind of placeholder I don’t want to make that maybe that does work perfectly I mean chive you guys go nuts and say dear God the medic step that’s the greatest of all things see I don’t want to give an extra reaction at first of all but maybe it’s six level this is where I can start to give you more I like the idea of moving through time and space there’s a nice little balance there and those beings real of the two signature things for the Nomad and then otherwise then you’re gonna you’re gonna flavor more to taste the so but it does make me kind of want to because this again feels kind of like a spell so don’t know what I want to call it but it’s six level here’s another an you additional reaction spend a first level or higher spell slot to gain another reaction so that’s just really pseudocode it’s only about five minutes left I kind of like throwing the next six level the attack and railgun you know speed bonuses are nice right like this is it feels kind of right maybe no difficult terrain I’ll throw a question mark in there this gives it a little bit more of a space time space not time and space do the same value over time we’re gonna head over time what is up with me and kept like I just must have oh man I hit caps lucky him so I used to do something I did back I was just I was a sysadmin at the time so I could get away with it because it’s in charge of all the hardware and later on I would keep doing it was just irritating whoever was taking care of the computers over I worked I used to always have a ritual of whenever whenever I was gonna do keyboard first thing I do is get a flathead screwdriver and pop that cat caps lock key right off that keyboard because it is useless you never need a caps lock keyboard key on your keyboard I don’t know why they still put them there it’s shift shift is right next to it just hold down shift and then when you really gotta yell at someone an AOL chat or whatever was what was it not Instant Messenger just come on son you want to yell hold down that Shift key the is over time the tracer only solo spinel are traded good see that was right they should call it Tecton rogen yes what I’m thinking is you get two reactions and then if you want even more reactions you could expend spell slots we might want to limit to limit this to know I don’t eliminate I want to say look you get you get two reactions you can get two opportunity attacks you can block and I cannot be in cash shield why not your your the Nomad this is what you do the right so Oh initiative + inter adventures in the check Oh mad that’s another thing that might be more fun I throw it here as an alternate you know what you couldn’t do is you could say no no you wouldn’t say yeah in bonus to mark there that’s it maybe that’s my I’m worried about just putting on too much stuff kind of like this more than the speed bonus because the speed bonus again it feels I want to make sure this guy doesn’t feel like a speedster again you’re not the flash your doctor who if doctor who didn’t need to TARDIS he could just travel at a time by really thinking really hard a geek early to seven thank you for coming along I I’m glad you’re enjoying this and it’s been a lot of great feedback from the chance why I kind of feel like we could but pretty good within the past month a Viking sort of multitask now and I first started is that being interesting go back and look at the video I’m sure it’s just me just talking and then like oh there’s people chatting what’s how does that work now the so it’s kind of nice to be able to like have this the back and forth here the UM so we’ve got three minutes left I don’t know if there’s anything huge that I want to try to do obviously I record six eight six six X suggestion to mess with the initiative order you could just have it so the slowest Ally changes places with and I got a little cut off my screen here but it couldn’t the enemy in the turn order the character is already acting around its use they can’t act again till accident yeah I can do something about it a lot of people around it it’s funny though I just I think I wanted to say that we tried playtesting something like that I forget what class it was it may have been like a commander style fighter and people just didn’t like it like they just there were a lot of complaints about it I can’t member that made it to a public play test it was just got shot down an internal play test I am not sure so share big I can we get a rest in the Scion next week and return to it afterwards chat what do you guys think do you think we’ve been doing the sign for a while do you want to venture over to doing something else or do you want to keep going with a Scion I’m pretty flexible at this and just sound off we got two minutes so let your voice be heard the the one thing I’m you know okay you seem like we’re getting emphasize kind of like a hawk Anza gonna be fun to do that fun thing is figure out the guns I think that the guns should be cool Calvin Bala is the is diplom just one power you pick up it’s a grouped Oh what I imagine is that the what you will do is all more so a lock I think everyone some people okay lots of summoners well lots of things sorry for the Scion I think people want to speak I think we can finish the Scion next week would I’m not gonna go on kion online and design all the disciplines cuz that’ll be really boring trust me that’s like spell design is incredibly boring it’s a lot of just looking up stuff and making sure you’re getting your your your things right so here’s what we’ll do I’ll do the shaper next week doesn’t give us the Nomad be awakened in the shaper I think that’s a good enough point where from there I can just delve into getting that design knocked out and then we’ll look at where I am with it and then we’ll see what one of you next what I’ll probably do is this went okay with the with the order domain where I had designed it off camera then showed it to people but maybe since this is something worked on together like it’ll be interesting to see where I ended up and it can be a little bit more I’ll do a lot of questions and you know take a lot of questions from chat so yeah let’s next week let’s do this let’s get the shaper into the into the shape that we have the Nomad where we have basically a couple of our sonic abilities sketched out what I imagine will happen is when you take the the discipline what will happen is it’ll come with a number of options beneath well me with a billion things it’ll probably come with some basic upgrades and then future spells that you can add to your repertoire will you two be spells that justice you know it’s a sonic ability it could be a spell that’s made psionic like saying dispel magics by using it sound eclis so we’re not reprinting anything or it could be here are new ways to use your existing thing I won’t really know though until I designed that first one for realsies and then I think I’ll get a sense of what of how this is playing out but yeah I’d want some element of scaling up to come with it just so you don’t just feel like I have to keep I’m spending all my choices just to keep up I don’t like that I want you to feel like you’re expanding so okay barrage so the red rage made I mean that was on the very early 3.0 D&D pressures causes always liked the concept so okay so anyway I’ll call it the an arc mad hatter him yeah that’s a drawn on so that gets the ride lore um okay we’ll see we’ll see what next year we come up with but yeah so that’s what work on well go through and do the class features and then take a look maybe what I’ll do is I’ll do the class features on stream next week and then I’ll come with some thoughts on the disciplines so not fine too far behind or maybe we’ll just do two more weeks and then I’ll just go and start working off-camera and we’ll start kind of broadening our repertoire of stuff so anyways thank you much for joining me on stream for joining the the happy fun hour I will see everyone next week in which we will talk about the shaper our third subclass and the third category of psychic disciplines and yeah I think we’ll spend tweaks on that well do the class features next week and then we’ll do kind of like we did here the skeleton of the discipline then I can kind of go off and delve into this a bit more depth and we can move on to some other things so all right I’ll see you next week take care and see you then [Music]

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The Psionic Class pt2 – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

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