Psionic Options Revisited: Does psionic recovery make a die usable again? Psionic Blast? Was the druid's starry form inspired by thought form? w/ Jeremy Crawford

THIS IS A AN AUTOMATIC CAPTION TEXT from YouTube, so it’s not “perfect”. My advice is to use it just to help people like me that are not english speaking, to understand the Video/Podcast all right hello and welcome back to another dragon Plus livestream with me as his wants to do every other episode is Jeremy Crawford pretends lead designer of the players handbook and thank you always good to be here I am just barely dodging this dragon’s fire at the moment I’m the this.get Soraya’s using his psionic powers to protect me and I am boarding an ember on ship so that I can fly off to this terrifying skull castle behind me yes I think Skeletor is hanging out in there that is skeletor’s Winter Palace in ever on one thing I never understood about he-man was Skeletor was a skeleton yet was as muscle-bound as he-man just a skeleton of a face and the rest of him was you know skin and muscle you know it is possible the skull was a mask and the body was real or maybe he was just skeleton and the body was just a muscle suit I like that so for folks that are tuning in we are going to be returning to the topic at hand that we touched upon last week with Jeremy we started to dive into the most recent unearthed Arcana columns and we ended on the psionic options revisited that were released as a PDF on April 14th so as mentioned we do have many of the questions that came in during chat during the livestream to get through we also want to dive in a bit more to the actual material itself but but before we do again we wanted to let folks know speaking of virtual backgrounds onto the indie website we’ve been maintaining the stay at home play at home program page for folks during this time as of yesterday we’ve added some back I think we have to call them general backgrounds that are suitable for resume conferencing not necessarily assume backgrounds but and yesterday’s release of free material we dropped our first batch of backgrounds and suitable for zoom with a bit of a pepper on thing this is one of the ones that I’m using Jeremy looks like he’s wrangled some art from a previous book this this is from Morgan Keenan Stumbo those yes I remember I remember the gift Yankee and good sir I fight that we livestream that one on one occasion I in any case we do hope that folks are staying safe and we are pleased as always that you’re taking the time out of your schedule to tune in if you do have any questions regarding today’s material or anything in general please do put it in chat please do preface it with question if we don’t get to it immediately we do compile and go through all the questions later date but before we get into the questions Jeremy how are you doing sir how how is this is week seven for work from home for us here in Seattle how are you hanging in there we are we really up to week seven this is midway through week seven oh my gosh so this has just become so much the new normal for me that I have completely lost track of how long we have been doing this so I my days my days are not a whole lot different from when they were before the quarantine in that I spend most of my days working on D&D the big difference is I’m at home instead of at the office but thankfully I still get to see you and the rest of the team thanks to how we’re connected through technology but I am starting to miss you know real face-to-face interaction our daily walks that we have outside definitely help to you know stretch our legs and be reminded there’s a world out there but yeah otherwise you know sort of here in my my D&D study just working away well hang in there and it’s everyone else please do hang in there as well things that you might be last I failed on my homework assignment my homework assignment was to touch base on Final Fantasy 7 redo but I did not I failed oh my goodness that knee deep in fortnight and starting to watch devs on the FX which was a bit captivating things you are reading watching and playing these days so first before I get to stuff I’m doing I’m not sure I mentioned in our episode last week that there is a free demo for the Final Fantasy 7 remake so so you have zero cost associated with trying that out other than the time of course and it was playing the demo that that’s what got me to get the game it captivated me right away as for when I’m playing I’m continuing to make my way through Final Fantasy 7 I think I’m on chapter 13 now there are 18 chapters in the game so I’m hoping to wrap that up sometime in the coming week I haven’t watched much TV since you and I last talked on this show other than watching an episode or two of the new amazing story series which is one of the programs on Apple’s new streaming service and so far it’s very well done Steven Spielberg’s executive producer I don’t know if you ever saw the old amazing stories TV show I did this this is a revival of that show I still remember the episode of the guy who was too drawn into his TV programming and they kept coming out of the screaming yeah know that that is the one streaming platform I think we don’t have in this house Netflix Amazon Hulu Disney Plus ESPN plus it’s it’s all there see honestly we’ve been going through devs is quite good community dropped to Netflix shits Creek we never watched that is now a binge worthy show for us zero zero zero on Amazon I’m starting to get into so yeah I mean actually having having more evenings at home than before the quarantine has certainly driven driven home how many shows there are to watch because I I in a typical week don’t watch a whole lot of TV but you know sometimes I get in the mood but I’ll only be able to like sort of you know see a little bit of this a little bit of that but now with more time some of these weeks I’m like my gosh there are all these shows and of quality I mean yes might not all be Grand Slams but a lot of them are certainly home runs or a double at least yeah I mean you and I are of an era where you got ABC NBC and CBS and you got the programming you got if you were a lucky NBC would run a V miniseries which was you know the height of content oh my god now I’m gonna be thinking of lizard people well let me let me put my money where my mouth is and actually get to some of the questions that folks had written in with the last time in chat so that we do actually cover them and so again we’re gonna get it into the unearthed Arcana psionic options revisited a little bit more into depth um but some of the questions that came in and during chat last time and I’ll just go through the top of the order here astronomy affair astronomy I furry I’m gonna mispronounce all of that many of many of these screen names were never meant to be set out loud no it’s it’s a it’s a clever take on astronomer and I’m sure I’m butchering it completely however they asked how are you guys handling the action economy balance of the summoning spells and and we talked a little bit about the summoning abilities last time summoning summon the Beast fuel spirit is cool but can be compete with pulling out eight challenge rating one eight so as I mentioned last time most of the summoning spells that are currently in the game’s books require a minute or more and so most of them don’t see use in the midst of combat now of course if you’ve summoned the creature outside combat then you get to benefit from its assistance once battle starts now one of the big exceptions to this is the conger animal spells in the players handbook that spell is one action and so druids and others who have accessed that to that spell can on the spot summon up some nature spirits to take the form of animals and assist them in the heat of battle now one of the ways that the new summon beast eale spirits spell sort of is balanced with conjurer animals in existence is difference in level and also the creature itself that you get with the beast eale spirit is generally better than many of the animals that you can summon that all said there are going to be certain Constance’s we’re having a bunch of critters will simply be more powerful than having one and so there there will be situational differences between the two and if someone beast eale spirit makes it into print we will certainly you know do some careful fine-tuning to make sure it is an appealing option for its level in a game that also has condor animals okay I’ve been this question just came in today as well but I saw from last time and this one I think I can’t pronounce because it’s black ace 13 unless the XIII are actually meant to be pronounced but they asked does psionic recovery make of a dye usable again alright so now we’re diving into our under Turkana and and so by a psionic recovery I am assuming they’re referring to the feature that’s called SCI replenishment and if that is in fact what they’re talking about yes SCI replenishment does give you access to your psionic talent die even if it has been expended because you rolled a four on a d4 so sky replenishment is a way for you to get your dye back but you can do that only once per day you get to you know focus your mind use the spoon s action and get your dye back and we thought we we put that in by the way because you know after testing it out and what not we need to make sure there was a way to get the dye back at least once if you happen to have a horrible run of luck and just burned through your die in you know your first few rolls so this is an in relation to the sign Knight and their psionic talent so I know we’re gonna be diving into some of these subclasses yeah so so again they must have meant the feature called SCI replenishment and well let’s talk about something that is not in psionic options revisited hekimae asks psionic and blast was as cool spelled for wizards and warlocks is there a reason why it was yes if we present something in under their Cana that later doesn’t make it into one of our books and in this case we we actually did the rare thing of letting people know that something didn’t even make it to the next round of unearthed Arcana that that is usually because it didn’t score high enough in satisfaction for us to go further with it when it comes to seismic blast it actually scored just okay so by our standards it didn’t fail but it also barely passed and when we looked at the feedback we we saw that the spell actually had enough overlap with other effects in the game especially with also now accounting for spells in explorers guide to wild mount that we decided not to pursue it one of the things that was fascinating that came up with psionic blast is a number of playtesters were confusing it with the mind flayers mind blast and expecting it to work the same way even though they don’t have the same name we just decided to move on because the the effect we were able to replicate elsewhere in the game and that was true with all of the spells in the psyonix revisited article all of the ones that we mentioned that that we’re not moving forward with at this time it’s usually because they are there they didn’t score you know spectacularly when it comes to satisfaction from play testers and or they had enough overlap with things already in the game that there wasn’t a whole lot of motivation for us to continue on with them because with spells were often looking for new ones to fill a functional or story gap in the game and it’s very hard to justify adding potentially adding this spell eventually to the game as an official add on if it’s basically doing something very close to one another spell is doing or or a particular classes features might be doing we generally are looking for it to fill some kind of gap in the game like that sometimes that’s as simple as oh we realize we don’t have enough spells that deal psychic damage for instance that that was actually on our minds when we did the spells for Zenith ours guide to everything there are a number of spells there that are filling gaps that we identified in the game and that that is one of the reasons why a couple of hundred arcanas ago we had a a odd acid spell mixed in with some summoning spells it’s because actually we realize we needed some more acid options in the game and not in our normal yes please don’t we’ve got enough to worry about yeah we’ve got a couple more questions I’ll just roll roll through these before we get into the discussion max ximena’s asks and none of the psionic abilities from the recent unearthed Arcana seem to be keyed to any ability score do you have any intention of doing so with future on earth rubber cannons I wouldn’t imagine most people associate psionics with intelligence even if the sonic wizard and mystic are described so if you think about other types of supernatural power in D&D most of them are not associated with a particular ability score for instance we have sorcerers and wizards who both wield what what in the D&D multiverse is referred to as arcane power and wizards do it with their intelligence and sorcerers do it with their charisma I you see this you know again throughout the game where there are different ability scores associated even sometimes with the same source of power so when it comes to the psionic options revisited article there is some variation the sigh knight uses intelligence the soul knife actually doesn’t have any particular ability associated with their psionic talent the the psionic soul sorcerer uses charisma as is normal for a sorcerer and then if you look at the new feats that were in this most recent unearthed Arcana you’ll see there that you have a number of ability options and they tend to be either what we think of as mental abilities or physical abilities so in some of these feats you choose if your psychic power is associated with say your intelligence wisdom or charisma or in the case of the metabolic control feat you decide if it is associated with your strength dexterity or Constitution the idea here is that psionic power might for a particular person be a manifestation of a powerful intellect but it could also be a manifestation of really strong emotion it could be a manifestation of what in some stories is just referred to as Hart and here I don’t mean the the organ the heart but sort of your spirit your soul or in the case of metabolic control you have tapped into psionic power in your very body and we went this direction rather than tying it all to intellect or you know again the score name intelligence because in stories of people who have psychic abilities it manifests in very different ways if you think you know some of them if you think of a character like Professor X he’s sort of a classic you know big brain character but you have other characters with psychic abilities where their psionic manifestations are much more emotional you know that they you know when they get angry or sad then often that’s or are happy or joyful that’s often what triggers their power to manifest yeah I mean Iran comes to mind is this somebody from an anger perspective that might manifest some of the strength yeah because the jet the Jedi are another example of characters in non D&D fiction who have abilities that could be described as psionic let me ask one more before we dive into the material itself and this one came from Twitter ukelele emblem last livestream you mentioned whenever possible we repurpose design in regards to the SCI wizard among other ideas was the star druid star a form inspired inspired sorry by the site Wizards platform so I would say the story form was inspired by the thought-form but there was a definitely parallel design going on sometimes we will be working on things and we’ll have an idea that we’re interested in exploring and we might explore it in parallel in in several different manifestations and so we were interested in exploring the sort of transformative feature where the spellcaster takes on this new form we explored it in both the psionics wizard and in the circle of the stars for the druid how those two are connected is that internally after looking at the play test feedback we decided to step away from the psionics wizard which then made us confident to move forward with the starry form for the circle of the stars because if we had seen the play test feedback for the psionics wizard and it looked like oh we’re going to move forward with this then it would be less likely for us to do a very similar feature in the circle of the stars but by that point we were already pretty sure the psionics wizard wasn’t gonna make it and so we’re like alright we’ll move forward with the starry form in the circle of the stars okay many of the questions that had come in last time so we thought we would do a little bit of a deeper dive into the material itself Germany you wanted to discuss a bit of the subclasses class by class I believed and and again for folks that are tuning in please do keep those questions coming and we’ll compile those as we go either an hour for the future so where should we begin for folks that are following along at home we’ve got psionic options revisited and we have I believed three subclasses that were discussed in this video how about we started the talk with the fighter subclass the sigh Knight so all three of the these subclasses are revisions of subclasses that we’ve we’ve shared in unearthed Arcana in recent months the Sai Knight is a revision of the psychic warrior a subclass they would that was out a number of unearthed Arcana installments ago right away people will see we changed the name we changed it largely because playtests feedback came in and there was some confusion about why was this thing called a psychic warrior and again psychic not only as an English meaning but in D&D it’s also associated with psychic damage when this subclass is much more about telekinetic abilities rather than dealing psychic damage to people it was a fair thing to bring up it was a blind spot for us because when we did the first version of the subclass we were picking up a name from an earlier edition of the game that’s where the psychic warrior came from and we’re really using the word psychic in its english sense because the wording in english can just refer to basically any kind of mental power and so we thought well this is a fair comment this subclass really isn’t about what D&D called psychic damage and so we are exploring a new name the Sai night which is pretty straightforward it is a you know a fighter who who is channeling a sigh which is the you know psionic power and we chose the word night because partly because we’ve been doing this a little bit with the fighter and we have the eldritch night in The Player’s Handbook and we recently did the room night and it just sounded cool so we’ll see what people think you know it’s it’s a part of the plato’s process especially when we get feedback on names then we see you know well does the new name stick or you know do we do we continue to iterate now when it comes to the abilities themselves some of the psychic warriors abilities from the previous unearthed Arcana still exist here but not in their original form and one of the big reasons for that is our decision I mentioned this in the previous episode to come up with a mechanic that all of these subclasses would have that would give them something in common as psionic characters because one of the pieces of playtests feedback we got was hey these subclasses are really cool but it would be even cooler if there was something mechanically connecting them you know where if you know whichever one you played they would do something at the table beyond just the feel of it I mean because of course we were already you know they already had like telepathy and telekinesis cetera so beyond the effects themselves some game mechanic that would make them feel like they they had something in common and so we developed this psionic talent dye which is you know this dye you roll for certain psionic abilities and the dye can get bigger and also smaller representing an ebb and flow of your power and a certain amount of uncertainty because I thought it would be fun as a person playing one of these characters to have almost this mini game you’re playing of like alright you know am I is my is my sonic power going to swell or is it gonna start diminishing and you know have that feed into some of your decision-making as you decide which features to use at different points in an adventure now the each of the three subclasses gets a a feature called psionic talent which is the feature that supplies them with this sign on a talent die now even though each of them have a feature with the same name this the thing they have in common is simply this is where their get the Scion a talent die if you then dig into the meat of each of these features they’re radically different because in each case they’re able to do different things with that Sun on a calendar so the dye represents the raw psionic power that they have but then they get to use that power in different ways so in the case of the cyanide that power at third level can be used to create protective fields to shield people can be used to make side powered leaps this was something we added in because people when giving us play test feedback on the psychic warriors said hey how come I can’t use my telekinetic abilities to make you know super-powered leaps so we added that in and then there is also the ability to use the dye to make telekinetic strikes we were very mindful about making sure there was an offensive option a defensive option and then an option that was not necessarily combat related because the sign powered leap could be useful not only in combat but also in parts of an adventure when the characters are simply exploring like hey you know syenite can you leap up there and check that area out that the rest of us can’t reach and so this is the collection of options the cyanide has up front before then getting their next batch of psionic abilities starting a sentence level now one thing I’ll say about the psionic talent guide before I move on is the unusualness of it in that a lot of D&D things you always want to roll high and we preserve that with the psionic talent die in that if you roll high the immediate result will be good like if you if you are doing a telekinetic strike and your your psionic talent die is a d6 and you roll a six you’re happy because you just dealt more damage than if you would say rolled one right but the twist that is special about the psionic talent die because we want it to represent the ebb and flow of your power is that if you roll the highest number on the die so on a t6 if you roll a six what happens there is yeah you just did a cool thing but you also just spent a little too much of your power and so the die then drops one size so it goes from if it was a 76 it goes to a d4 now the opposite is also true if let’s say you roll the die and you get a one and this is true no matter what the dice aya the dies size is if you roll a one on it kind of bummed cuz I only I only did one more you know if you’re doing telekinetic strike in the case of the Sinai I did a whopping one force damage to the person but because in that expenditure of power you managed to actually conserve some the dye now increases in size so then the next time instead of rolling if it was a t6 the next time you get to roll a d8 now that’s assuming that the starting size of your die is a d8 because the die can never get bigger than your starting size that’s a question I’ve seen come up on Twitter and so I want to make sure that’s clear to everybody your guy can never increase past its starting size which is one of the reasons why it’s then so cool when you reach higher levels and your die starts getting bigger you know when a or get when you get to fifth level it becomes a d8 when you hit an 11th level it becomes a t10 17th level you’re rolling in d12 so you know and which means then a d12 is the the biggest thing I can ever become I like the idea that it’s not the die type that changes in size it’s the actual physical size of the die that you’re using I’m not rolling a d6 the results are still gonna be the same but it’s a bigger died it’s more aggressive yeah it’s it’s a it’s a it’s a an interesting mechanic it’s making my head spin in a good way and I’m thinking for no other reason then playing games can imagine why lately playing games with kids as I’m doing now it’s an interesting rollover mechanic to say to them hey sometimes you roll in the one sometimes you’re low 22 soften the blow if you choose to go down that road as opposed to hey what the dive ball would May if you choose down to go down the road of well you roll the low this time but you didn’t expend your effort so you’re going to be able to have a little bit more effort left in the tank and get a bonus on it seems like there’s an applicability that that is is it very useful here but in other areas yeah and that that that feeling that you just described is exactly what I’m wanting us to explore and you know who knows this could be a kind of thing we could explore elsewhere in the game perhaps at another time but but right now I felt it was a really neat way to express your power a being and flowing we’ll see we’ll see what play testers say if they dig it I hope people do I think it’s fun but hey I like rolling dice and and honestly I think often uncertainty is fun there there are plenty of things in the game too that will give you certainty but one of the reasons why idea D&D uses so many dice is you get to be surprised even then even the DM gets to be surprised because you don’t know what that guy is going to show you that it could you know it could be an epic success it could be an epic failure even the epic failures though have good memorable moments so when when it comes to leveling up as a syenite of course at seventh level you then get the psionic thrust ability which now we need as telekinetic strike means you have a chance to knock the person prone because of the telekinetic force that hits them or you have the ability to move them ten feet in any direction or horizontally so you know you could that means you could use this to draw them closer to yourself to hurl them away and in this theme of of telekinesis at seventh level the syenite also gets the ability to move a creature an object with their mind and this is this is sort of like levitation but and in fact a little view behind the curtain initially we had this as just using the levitate spell but the closer we got to releasing the unearthed Arcana we realize we wanted this to be more specific for the sign ight and to have the flexibility that you see here a tenth level you you get a scienced metabolism letting you resist some certain types of damage and to be immune to the poisoned condition and then you have the bulwark of force which lets you protect people this is very similar to an ability that was in the psychic Warrior in its previous version but it is now allowing you to use your psionic talent dying to give yourself more uses of it if you want and then finally the subclass culminates in the knight being able to cast the telekinesis spell but to do so by means of their psionic power so when they cast this spell it requires no verbal or somatic or material components and they are using their psionic talent die to fuel the use of this spell so when they use it their die then automatically decreases by one guy sighs it’s almost sort of like a spell slot you’re spending but in this case it’s your you are burning your die so you could if your diet at this point was a d12 you could just turn it to a d8 and cast telekinesis and if anyone hasn’t read the telekinesis spell in The Player’s Handbook it is a juicy spell there is a lot you can do with it and this is actually a pretty high level spell for this fighter to be able to toy around with but we sort of felt you know if if this if this subclass is all about telekinesis it would be a big miss if they were unable to actually access the telekinesis spell I’m looking it up now on handy dandy demon you’re like oh what can I do with this juicy magic I mean it is it is not just prestidigitation plus oh no you’re talking about moving objects up to a thousand pounds yes up to thirty feet in any direction yeah huge or smaller creatures so yeah it is it is a juicy spell I mean cuz this is this is you know any story where you’ve seen somebody use their mind power to like hold up a bridge or you know hurl a massive statue across the room you know that kind of thing that’s what the telekinesis spell is all about npnp it is it is mighty mighty magic shall we go into the soul night yes I’m looking at him now so that is the Stein night but the second subclass was for the rogue and that is the soul knife so how to discuss the soul knife all right so the soul knife is the one subclass in this article who did not get a new name it was called the soul knife the last time people saw it the the name of this one did not cause any static in the plate s feedback and it’s a it’s also a name we adopted going back a couple of addition from a couple of additions ago and right away just like in the Sinai the soul knife gets the psionic talent but this time rather than having you know the telekinetic leaps and strikes and you know telekinetic barriers the soul knife being a rogue who is all a brat about using their psionic powers for infiltration and whatnot they are able to use their psionic power one to create a sort of mini telepathic network with people using their psychic whispers ability because we thought soul knives as rows would be sought after in certain places in the D&D multiverse because wouldn’t you want an infiltration group that never has to utter a word to each other because they are they are all whispering to each other telepathically so that was the story idea behind this psychic whispers feature and then they also have this feature called the side bolstered neck now big part of being a rogue is not only sneak attack which is often what people think of because of combat in the game but another major part of row row being a rogue is being amazingly skillful rogues have typically have more proficiencies than anybody else in a group they have all sorts of tools that there’s disposal for getting out of tricky situations and so the idea here is that the soul knife is this this person who with their strange mind powers is able to turn failure into success so what this lets you do is if you fail an ability check using a skill or tool with which you have proficiency you can roll your psionic talent die add it to the check and potentially turn that failure into a success so you can imagine you know this this rogue trying to unlock a door and the DM tells them well you failed well then you know the rogue uses their mind powers and and then they’re like I succeeded because because because you know they’re they’re able to use use the shine of their of their psychic abilities to figure something out about the lock that their mundane abilities didn’t at first notice the toddler’s happened to fall into place whether or not my pick I made yeah now this this featured the side bolstered neck is is intentionally very broad it applies to any skill or tool that the rogue has proficiency with so this also could apply to say persuasion or deception you know the the soul knife might be infiltrating a masquerade ball and might be trying to deceive people about their identity and let’s say the DM asks the soul knife to make a deception check and then the DM tells after the roll tells them they failed well again maybe the soul knife decides to lean into their psionic ability and somehow manipulate the social situation and if they roll well enough on their psionic talent dye turn that failure into a success and suddenly because of of using their their psychic abilities that guard who is about to disbelieve the soul knife’s lie suddenly believes it so again they’re all there all sorts of ways that the side bolstered nack can be used in you to really flavor some scenes in D&D in interesting ways now we get to the ability that gives the Soul knife their name and that is their psychic blades their ability to manifest psychic daggers or short swords however you want to imagine them but while other rogues are usually relying on a physical finesse weapon or ranged weapon soul knives typically rely on these psychic blades that they manifest and i i love the the scariness of this I even made sure we we put into the flavor text this idea that some some thieves guilds and monarchs and others love having soul knife assassins because there are no wounds left behind when a person is is damaged by a a blade made out of pure psionic energy and investigate that yeah yeah exactly and these blades have the finesse and thrown properties meaning because of the finesse meaning they do work with the rogues sneak-attack ability and because it has the thrown property it means you can also hold them and so if the road wants to throw these blades made out of psychic energy they can do so and we’ve pointed out that these blades do immediately vanish so no one can pick up your psychic blade and throw it ahead packet we we have also built in the ability for you to make a bonus action attack with your psychic blades this is essentially a replacement for the two weapon and fighting rule in the combat chapter we didn’t want the soul knife to have to loop through that rule and so we built an alternative to it right into the psychic blades part of the reason why it wouldn’t actually work to loop through the two weapon fighting rule is that rule is built assuming the person using it is holding weapons in their hands whereas the soul knife is not holding these in their hands they just they manifest as you attack and then vanish and so they simply wouldn’t work with the regular the regular rule and we also wanted to do something different these allow you to add your ability SCOR modifier to the damage of this puzzle bonus attack unlike the true weapon fighting rule in the combat chapter of The Player’s Handbook but in this case the die size is different so normally the psychic blades have the d6 whereas if you do this bonus action attack they have a d4 now the 9th level feature of the full knife it’s called soul blades builds on your psychic blades feature from level 3 but first is the homing strikes again we go to this theme of of the soul knife able to turn failure into success so just as the sigh the sign bolstered neck back at third level let you turn a failed ability check potentially into a success if you roll high enough on your psionic talent die this this allows you to do the same kind of thing but with an attack role so if you miss you can roll your sign a Cal and I add the number you rolled to the attack role and which then might cause that miss to instead hit your target now if you do hit your psionic talent died recently so the number you rolled we put this in here because we realized if we didn’t this would actually be too good because if you had if you had really good luck on your psionic talent die and it didn’t ever drop you could just turn miss into hit after missing to hit after this don’t just keep going and going and going so this ensures that you know you you do lose some of your psionic power if you manage to cause the strike that was about to go over there too suddenly home in and hit the person a couple quick questions that have been coming in as we’ve been talking about the psychic blades first could a monk deflect a psychic blade thrown that’s a good question but asked me the other ask me the other one I’m gonna look at the exact wording of deflect missiles ability second question being could they penetrate anti-magic protection if you know the psychic blade is different than then magically so the psychic the psychic bleeds features specifically says that the blades are magic blades okay so they are still deflated deflected by anti magic sure yes they are I said it that way because I am endlessly fascinated by how many questions come up about anti magic field a spell which the typical campaign will never see in use but and by the way this is this has been true for multiple editions of D&D we have actually at the office have talked for years about the fact that few spells get as much conversation relative to how often they’re immunes as anti magic fields because if you go on the internet you like let’s say let’s say to someone we’re visiting from Mars and they knew nothing about Dungeons & Dragons and they just went to forums and Reddit and Twitter and thought let’s just see what this game is about they would leave thinking that man every session of D&D must include a casting of anti-magic field because of the amount of discussion surrounding that spell now I think the reason for it is the spell poses some interesting metaphysical questions and many of us who love D&D love it because of the world building that is not only explicit in D&D but also implicit and so I think a lot of the anti magic feel the fascination is ultimately a fascination with begin world-building and so I sympathize with it while also being amused by it because it’s like again wowzers this is a lot of conversation about something that a typical session will never see now now that’s a call the challenge accepted if someone you know that scenario where either the NPC is protected by an anti magic sphere and you can undermine them or some trick or trap that you have to manipulate is protected by an anti magic sphere how do you get through it so yes gent was also and I saw this as well the way that you’ve got your zoom background it looked like you were pulling your book out of the head of the dread dragon so we so in the psychic blade this is going back to the deflect missiles question the monk would not be able to catch it because we specify that the blade vanishes immediately after it hits or misses its target and whereas in deflect missiles it’s you can use your reaction to deflect or catch the missile when you are hit by a ranged weapon attack so as essentially the instant the monk is hit the the psychic blade is vanished but what if the monk is wearing gauntlets crafted out of anti-magic spear material so the moment we actually create such gauntlets I will ask that question I know answer that question now now the monk the monk can still deflect you know in in other words use the damage reduction part of deflect missiles but again there’s just the monk can’t actually catch it because as soon as like they put their hand around it it’s gone all righty so that is the sole knife waylaid the conversation by the time we got to the ninth local power we have not gone through the 13th or 17th level powers all right so the ninth level one though before we move on also includes the ability to throw one of your psychic blades and teleport to the place where you throw it honestly this was a bit I put in here simply because I thought it was cool so I hope I hopefully testers think so one of the reasons why I was enchanted by the idea is again this notion of soul knifes being great at infiltration and so really what I was imagining was sure this has combat uses but I was actually more enchanted by the non combat uses like trying to sneak into a guard tower and curling one of these these knives up at like a window and then you know teleporting up there again just just neat neat narrative and exploration possibilities the psionic veil very similar to something that was in the soul knife before which is proof we’re invisible and then they have the ability to to stab directly into a targets mind with their their psychic blades and stun the person so we only have five minutes left and we have a whole other subclass to go through the psionic soul the one thing I’ll say about the psionic soul right away and this this was previously the aberrant mind is the psionic soul got really positive playtests feedback from before so a lot of the aberrant minds core functionality is present here in the psionic soul but now using the cinetic talent guy we’ve also been asked on Twitter and elsewhere why the removal of the aberrant flavoring a big part of that was we had an of people in the play test feedback say we love we love this subclass but do we have to have so much mucus and tentacles if we want if we want to get these psionic powers and our answer was no there was actually nothing inherent to the abilities of the aberrant mind that required tentacles and mucus and so what we did what we did is we took we took the core functionality preserved it and then presented an array of aesthetic and story options for your psionic origin and so I would encourage people who want to who still want some some juicy flavor for the psionic soul sorcerers psionic power take a look at the psionic origins table if you loved the tentacles and mucus from the aberrant mind we have got you covered with option number seven which is you were implanted with a mind flayer tadpole but the Serra morphosis never completed and now the psionic power is yours when you use it your flesh shines with a strange mucus and and you will see that in each of these origin options we have not only given you a story suggestion for the origination of your psionic power but we often also give a flavor suggestion for how your psionic powers manifest so in that case this this person who survived mind flare Sarah Moore phasis they they’re shining with mucus but it could also be that you have optioned to where a psychic wind from the astral plane carried psionic energy into your being when you use your powers now faint motes of light sparkle around you but if tentacles are your jam because again we’ve actually got you covered twice if you liked the aberrant mind you can go with option one you were exposed to the far realms warping influence you can now use your mind in ways you never thought possible and you’re also convinced that a tendril is growing upon you we will leave it to you where that tendril is manifesting and we’ll also leave it to you to decide whether it’s real or not we purposefully left it here that you know maybe maybe it is a hallucination maybe you do in fact have such a thing growing from you so we we created a array of options all of them pointing at wherever this power came from you now have extraordinary psionic ability and and it is extraordinary because not only do you have the features that are in the subclass including a psionic talent feature just as the cyanide and soul knife and the sign an account feature but the scientist will sorcerer also has access to the entire sorcerer spell list and is able to marry their psionic ability to the capabilities of that list and use their psionic power to manifest the effects represented by those spells and so we can get into that more in our next episode yes less the mucus and tentacles there you what if what it would have fine thoughts to leave with so yes we will return if not next week then the week after we’ll figure out that scheduling and will continue the conversation about the psionic options revisited I know folks have been adding in questions along the way so again we’ll be compiling those and getting to those next time so again we’d like to thank everyone for taking an hour out of your day to spend it with Jeremy and myself this is the dragon post livestream so speaking of Dragon Plus we’re going to have that next issue out I believe on Monday for sure we’re gonna be talking in its digital pages with Jeremy as well regarding mythic odyssey’s barrows and Wes will be talking about big creatures and battlefields and taking a look over the wall at magic and the quarry asset I saw Dan Dillon in chat as well and if you’d like to take a look at one of his creature creations you can look at the dragon rat in the current issue of Dragon Plus always for free on iOS Android and so thanks again for everyone thank you to Jeremy for joining us in the Dragons tail you got to watch out for the dragon behind you he hasn’t the fires haven’t reached you yet they looked awfully close now again it’s think to its thanks to my guests arrived friend over here and his anti magic sphere I don’t even think that’s anti magic field [Laughter] alright everyone I know we’re gonna be tuning out but we will see you next time bye everyone

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Psionic Options Revisited: Does psionic recovery make a die usable again? Psionic Blast? Was the druid’s starry form inspired by thought form? w/ Jeremy Crawford – Dragon+

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