The Psion Might Just Be D&D’s Newest Class – But It’ll Take More Than A New Playtest To Convince Me

We’ve been down this road before, but, D&D unveiled a new Unearthed Arcana for the Psion class. Psychic powers ahoy.

WotC dropped a new playtest today, and it’s a big one. The Psion makes another debut, this time for 5.5E. But we’ve been fooled before. It’ll take more than a brand new playtest to convince me we’re going to actually see it in a final version. RIP Mystic.

Still, this is an exciting new playtest that reveals the Psion, four subclasses, a collection of spells, and a whole bunch of Feats to make everyone at least a little psionic. If they want to be. So let’s take a look at the Psion playtest.

The Psion Playtest: Won’t Be Fooled Again

Psionics in D&D are a long and storied tradition that stretches back all the way to Gary Gygax and his home game, where characters could roll to see if they had a secret psionic talent. Wild talents, then grew into whole systems and subsystems. Famously, in 3rd Edition and 3.5, there were two books, both the Psionics Handbook and the Expanded Psionics Handbook.

And in 5th Edition, we saw a whole brand new take on Psionics in the form of the Mystic. But that never made it past the Unearthed Arcana stage. In fact, most of its concepts vanished entirely—the Mystic had different psionic forms it could take, with different powers. And those all fell away in favor of a much simpler approach to psionics: the Psionic Power Die.

Psionic Powere Dice should be a familiar concept to anyone who’s played a Psi Warrior Fighter or a Soulknife Rogue. They’re the only trace of psionics as imagined in that Unearthed Arcana that made it through to 5E official. And then later, Tasha’s Cauldron gave us both Telekinetic and Telepathic, two feats that grant spells that are “close enough” to psychic powers.

I mention all this to temper expectations—my own, mostly. Once burned, twice shy, as the saying goes. But the Psion Playtest is robust and comes with a ton of support for it. So did the Mystic, though. So you might want to keep an eye out for that survey.

This does raise a question: is Dark Sun coming back? One of the big reasons that WotC gave for not releasingthe Mystic or the Psion was that there was no book for it to accompany. Well, if the class is getting a release, maybe that means there’s a Dark Sun book in the works. We’ll have to wait and see of course. But for now, let’s take a look at what the Psion actually does.

The Psion – How Does It Actually Work?

In a nutshell, the new Psion class is a full spellcaster. More specifically, they’re like a kind of conceptual Sorcerer. Only instead of modifying spells with Metamagic, they modify them with psionic power. Which is an effective way to streamline the idea. Thoough I do wonder if WotC will feel like this steps on the Sorcerer’s schtick.

At level 1, you gain the most important feature of your class: Spellcasting. This is hands down where you’ll get everything. And you get the full spellcaster progression – specifically you get the Sorcerer’s spell progression, meaning you’ll start knowing 4 spells, and will eventually have up to 22 spells that you can cast with the standard suite of spell slots. The rest of the class revolves around spellcasting. Subtle Telekinesis, for instance, is the “invisible Mage Hand” effect from the Telekinesis feat.

But instead of Sorcery Points, the Psion has the Psionic Power feature. Which, in keeping with the Soulknife and Psi Warrior tradition, gives you a pool of Psionic Energy Dice. You start with a pool of 4 d6s, and can spend them on various effects or to modify your spells. But that’s for higher levels. At 1st level, as part of the feature, you can only spend a die to push a creature away from you or to telepathically connect to someone for a few minutes (which is fundamentally weaker than similar features gained from subclasses that just give you telepathy). You regain one die per short rest, or all on a long rest.

But you don’t have long to wait. At 2nd level you pick up Psionic Discipline which grants you access to multiple Psionic Disciplines. In the Psion playtest, Disciplines let you spend a psionic power die to do cool things. Most of them modify spells when you cast them.

There’s one called Swift Precognition, for instance, that lets you spend at least one (and possibly more) psionic energy dice to cast an Abjuration or Divination spell as a Bonus Action. This is a great way to get True Strike as a Bonus Action for a single Psionic Energy die.

Psionic Backlash, on the other hand, lets you take a Reaction whenever you’re hit with an attack to spend one PED, and roll two of them, subtracting the total from the damage you take and dealing Psychic damage to the target.

Psion Playtest: Higher Levels are All About Spells

The rest of the class revolves around your psionic powers and spells, as you might expect. At level 5, Psionic Restoration lets you regain more than one psionic energy die when you take aa short rest. And at level 7 you’ll gain a feature that lets you spend hit dice and modify your own psionic energy dice. And finally at level 20, you can spend two hit dice whenever you roll a psionic energy dice, to increase the effects of any psionic energy dice you spend. It’s a little complicated. But you’d get used to it after a while of playing.

But most of what you’ll gain is spells, and a total of four other psionic discipline options (but you have to wait until level 10 and 17 for those). So it really all comes down to the spell list. Thankfully, the spell list is fairly robust. It’s not so much a “deal direct damage to enemies via spells” but they have spells like Polymorph and Banishment and Hypnotic Pattern. And also True Strike, for turn to turn damage, most likely.

The other thing in the Psion playtest are the four new subclasses. And I’m pleased to say, these each seem to offer some radically different ways to use your spell slots and psionic powers. We’ll dig into each of them on their own. As well as going through the new spells and feats, because this is a meaty UA. But for now, you can check out the Psion Playtest. And be sure to leave feedback when the survey opens June 3rd. Otherwise this may vanish back into obscurity.

Powers of the mind, eh? I’m not sure how much they matter.

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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