The Psyker: Flavor and Core Mechanic

This week as we work on the psionic class, I want to take at look at the class’s flavor and how we can model it with a core mechanic.

To start with, I’m going to use “psyker” as the class’s working name. I’m a Warhammer 40k fan, plus I find the name psion a bit too science fiction-oriented for my tastes. However, I expect the name to change as the class design rolls on.

As an aside, picking an obviously wrong working name is a hazardous move. In my experience, temporary codenames almost always become the final name for a thing. The worse the name, the more likely it is to happen. Let’s see where psyker ends up in a couple months!

Start with the Core

Reading through the comments on the last post and thinking of finding a unique niche for the class, I decided to start with the class’s feel. With that in mind, I wrote the following as an intro piece:

Most minds are locked in chains, captured within a single creature’s psyche. These poor creatures live lonely, isolated lives, trapped in their minds and unable to escape. You are a psyker. You picked the lock and escaped a prison that others fail to recognize. Pondering the Seven Riddles of Thought, you have slipped free of your mind’s bounds, allowing your psyche to roam free in the gulf, the dead space between minds.

The gulf is a desolate space, dead of thought, stripped of emotion. It drains your energy as it pushes you back, seeking to drive your mind back into its prison. Venturing into the gulf leaves you enervated, as you fight against its resistance. But that moment of liberty, no matter how draining, allows you to commit wondrous acts. Your imagination forges objects from air. Your will intrudes into other minds, spawning thoughts and emotions as easily as an artist splashes paint across a canvass.

You are a psyker, and your domain is a secret world of mysteries, power, and peril.

Getting to the Point

A funny observation: using published, baseline damage values for spells, we can determine that a spell roughly deals 9 points of damage per level. 1st-level spells overshoot this, but at most other levels that 9 points per level fits nicely.

Even better, it gives us a simple guideline. Each power point is worth about 9 points of damage. A spell of level X costs X power points to cast. We’ll likely need to adjust as we go (1st level spells are notably worth about 11 damage each), but we have a starting point.

We don’t have an answer for how we can limit the psyker’s ability to spam their most powerful attacks. We can get to that later, once we understand what those attacks look like.

However, it does mean that our points approach should yield numbers that are easy to handle. If we match a full caster’s progression and assume a spell of level X is worth X power points, by 10th level a psyker has 41 points. That’s reasonable.

Powering Up

I’d like to call the psyker’s abilities powers, to make them distinct from spells. I’d like them to be flexible, to capture the fun of spending points to power them. How about a telekinetic? Keep in mind this design is early, so it’s written in pseudo-mechanics that capture the design concept without covering all the bases needed for publication.

Telekinesis

You gain the mage hand cantrip. You gain a bonus to its range and duration based on your psyker level.

When you cast mage hand, or as an action during its duration, you can use the following techniques.

Battering Smash. Your mage hand makes a melee attack against a target adjacent to it. Spend power points to increase the damage and move the target.

Sweeping Smash. Spend X power points. Your mage hand makes a melee attack against each target adjacent to it. Spend power points to increase the damage and knock the targets prone.

Forceful Grasp. When you cast mage hand, spend X power points to increase its strength and size.

I think this is a reasonable starting point for a telekinetic. At this stage, it reminds me a little bit of how a rogue might approach a skill or a fighter considers a weapon. To keep the character manageable, we need to avoid giving out too many abilities of this type. Otherwise, the player is faced with a bewildering array of options each round.

We could limit how easy it is to shift from one power to another, but we then risk making this character feel too limited. Finding the balance between flexibility, usability, and power is one of the trickiest parts of game design.

The downside is that I don’t feel the flavor of the intro paragraph coming through yet. I’d like to find a core, central mechanic that makes this class feel very different. I like the idea of psionics feeling like they exist in a different realm, one that is alien to other characters. We might be able to get this across in tactical play with this mechanic:

Mind and Body

You gain your turn as normal, but also gain a psionic turn on your initiative + 10.

Psionic Turn. On our psionic turn, you may use a psionic action. You cannot move or use a bonus action on this turn. Effects triggered by the start or end of your turn happen only if they refer to your psionic turn. If you use a psionic action, on your regular turn you can use only the following actions: Attack, Dash, Disengage.

This mechanic might be too complex, but it gives us a character that acts like no other. It also means that off-the-shelf multiclassing won’t work in this case. We don’t want the psyker using other classes’ stuff on their normal turn and a psionic action on their turn.

So, that’s where we stand for this week. What do you think so far? Do the mechanics go too far, or not far enough? Does this look playable?