Voctor's page

Thanks for the tips QuidEst! Most of those don't sound like they'd really be issues, beyond the first one.

Fixing saves would obviously be the worst. Beyond the saves, it seems like a lot of damage numbers would need to change. From the little I've looked at, the strength difference between spell levels stays higher in PF2, while it drops off pretty sharply after 3rd level in 5e. This impacts every damage power in the class, since the Enhancement costs and benefits are based on this power curve. Given the number of powers that would likely take weeks.

Incapacitation effects are actually very rare outside Telepathy, and those abilities require 3 successful psionic attacks before they can be used. I actually had a telepath in my last campaign, and he never caused problems for bosses. Incapacitation effects are extremely strong in any turn based game, so they've already been balanced for that. Of course psionic combat itself would need to be rewritten due to the previous need to accommodate the change to saves.

Skill replacements aren't really a thing in this class, beyond the very obvious like using Levitate to bypass the need to climb something.

The bonus/penalty stuff would mostly be a lot of cross referencing with PF2 spells. Use PF2's version of Mage Armor as a template to make an appropriate new version of Flesh Armor, etc.

From what I'm seeing I think it would probably take me about a month working on it in my free time, assuming I spent some time before that just becoming familiar enough with the rules to know how all the Pathfinder versions of everything work.

Of course if I were converting for my current campaign that would just be the start. I'd also need to port over the Spirit Guardian ranger subclass (the party's healer is a Ranger with a custom subclass to make it work), the Reputation system that is a core concept of the campaign, and the custom downtime rules that are a central component of that system. I've done a lot of my own work to build 5e into the game I want to run.

So it would probably take more time than it's worth, at least for the campaign we just started. Perhaps I'll work on it in my free time if I feel inspired for some theoretical future campaign.

It seems like the focus point stuff is like Warlock spells in 5E, which is nothing like PSPs. PSPs need a sliding scale for the class to work. Cheap costs for weak effects that can be used repeatedly without rest by a high level character, and expensive effects that are limited for high level characters and completely out of reach for low level characters. It's a point-based replacement to Vancian magic spell slots, and it needs that full range.

I spent countless hours balancing point costs and the total pool per level, all based on Vancian spell level progressions. 3rd level spells are stronger than 1st level spells, so the Psion gets more PSPs going from 4th to 5th level than they did when they went from 1st to 2nd level. Detonate (which costs 12) is about as strong as Fireball, so your Mental Limit doesn't hit 12 until you've reached 5th level. Having spent years playing with it in my campaigns I've got the numbers in a pretty good place.

If I were to convert the class I wouldn't touch PSPs, beyond possible adjustments to the total pool size as they level and individual power costs. They aren't a 5e mechanic anyway, I designed them almost from scratch for the 5e version of the class. I can fit them into any system with Vancian magic since they're just a point based derivative of it.

The really hard part would most likely be overall character strength. How powerful is a P2E wizard at lv 1, lv 5, lv 10, and lv 20 compared to their 5E counterpart? How much does a spells power increases per level (for example, in 5e the increase in power from 2nd level spells to 3rd level spells is much larger than the difference between 3rd level and 4th level)? What mechanics would I have to change entirely because there is no equivalent (e.g. conditions, advantage)? What new mechanics would I need to introduce (e.g. Action cost, crit failure/success on saves)?

I agree that it seems like a very large undertaking. I think the 3 action system would let me do some interesting things with the class, but it would take a lot of rebalancing. At a glance it looks like P2E characters are a lot stronger, so as written the Psion would fall way behind as the group leveled and the class would need a lot of buffs to keep up.

I don't think Focus Points would work directly. Glancing through the rules it looks like they expect a player to have a pool of around 3 focus points. I have mental limit going from 4 to 25, and a lv 20 Psion has a PSP pool of 257. It needs a wide range of costs and a deep pool to replicate the wide range of options.

Imagine adding a mechanic that let you cast any spell for 1 focus point, you'd have 1st level characters running around casting Meteor Swarm laying waste to whole armies. For that reason I couldn't use the Focus Points as written, I'd need to give them way more so I could balance powers around the number of points they cost. If I gave them such a massive Focus Point pool I would bet that it would cause problems with other game mechanics that interact with Focus Points.

Honestly I think the hardest part of conversion would be the difficulty scaling. All the balance for the class was built around 5e's strength progression. If Pathfinder 2e characters get stronger much faster or slower than 5e, than this class would become unbalanced as it leveled. The rest is probably mostly fine, since it looks like P2E uses the same Vancian progression rate that I used to balance PSP growth, power costs, and the rate powers are learned.

Talents are Cantrips, the other powers are more like traditional spells. They just have a PSP cost rather than a level.

Power Cost pulls from a pool of PSPs, with costs and the pool size being derived from the overall strength of the Power and the pool size being based on a derivation of the spell progression from Wizards.

Maintenance specifically doesn't take action economy (you can maintain as many powers as you want at once) but does drain from that PSP pool. Maintaining powers basically burns spell slot uses.

Mental Limit is basically an equivalent of max spell level. A 1st level Wizard can't cast a 2nd level spell because they don't have a spell slot for it. They can't just burn a bunch of lv 1 spell slots to cast it anyway. Since Psions have a PSP pool they could bypass this restriction in theory, so the mental limit is an additional constraint to prevent this.

Huh, very odd. The forum is adding a space in the link "d1 2X" when it shouldn't be there. The space doesn't show up when I edit, so I don't know why that's happening.

Yeah, the Psychic is very similar to the way Psionics have been done in 3e/5e. Basically a wizard that casts spells with the Vancian magic system with a bit of different flavor on top. I personally have a lot of nostalgia for the way Psionics were done way back in 2e, where they were fundamentally different from magic. I like having the ability to include different types of supernatural elements in my games, and the different systems give it a different feel to really drive home that these two things aren't the same. They have significant differences in their strengths and weaknesses which are reinforced through the mechanical differences in the rules, which lead the players to need to adapt to either depending on what they're fighting or leverage both if they have access to them.

I've played 5e for a long time, and I've done a lot of custom work in that game. Now I'm considering switching away from that game for obvious reasons, but I don't want to lose all the work I've done building these rules that are tailored to the game I run.

The most significant is a custom Psionics class that is about on par with the Wizard (including spells) in terms of complexity. It's a 142 page google doc detailing the class, sublcasses, hybrid subclasses for Rogue, Fighter, and Barbarian, Feats, and over 150 powers (their version of spells).

If I were going to try to convert it over, how much work am I in for?

If anyone wants to see the the class I'm talking about for reference, the doc is shared here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1clFSMY-81nGQVqvWzMcDAmH5ChxwPkpYn4Bv5d1 2XxM/edit?usp=sharing