I’m going to start this new blog by violating the golden rule of rpg blogging– talking about my character. Well, actually about my character’s class: the Psion. I decided to retire my Revenant Invoker in exchange for a character much more suited to the adventure and to The Party. My main constraint in choosing a character was keeping Controller role, while choosing a class that fit with combat style of the rest of the party. The problem with the Invoker was that most of his powers wound up either damaging his allies, which was dangerous to a party without any high-hp Defenders. Also most of the powers pushed allies and enemies into less than optimal positions. I used the DDI tools to scroll through all the Controllers and settled on the preview PHB3 Psion based on the fact that its powers are as precise as any post-season baseball pitcher.
The nice thing about 4th edition is that each character now has a wide array of special powers, making one more class with a unique set of powers not feel as out of place as they have in the past. PHB2 already had a number of powers with the Psychic keyword, and “psychic” works in 4e just like any other keyword such as “fire” or “radiant.” One problem in 3/3.5 was that the standard array of items and powers did not help protect players from psychic attacks. Here psychic attacks are like any other attack against Fort or Will, so they fit in nicely with the feel of the rest of 4e and our established campaign. The big difference between the Psion and previous characters is that instead of encounter powers, the Psion is has a number of augment points to spend on beefing up his at-will powers. I think the system works pretty well and provides for flexibility in choosing powers I think a nice at-the-table touch would be to use physical counters to represent the the power points.
Playing a Psion will provide lots of topics for future posts as I figure out how to fit in him in a traditional fantasy world.
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