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Edit: Fixed link
In general, the two systems are completely different under the hood. They share a lot of similarity at a high level - both are sword and sorcery fantasy RPGs that use stats and attributes and dice. But converting rules and mechanics content from one to the other is not easy.
PF2 does have a Psychic class already. Which can be picked up by other classes as an archetype as well. So maybe that will suit your needs.
Some conversion of terms that I am seeing from reading through your document:
Powers sounds like Cantrips.
Psionic Strength Points are probably equivalent to Focus Points.
Power Cost - all focus spells cost one focus point.
Maintenance - some spells have a duration of 'sustained' which means you have to use one of your three actions each turn to keep the spell going.
Mental Limit - you only have a limited number of focus points. You can recharge them between battles, but when you run out you can't cast any focus spells.
Disciplines would be one of the Conscious Minds or Unconscious Minds choices for the Psychic.
PSP and Power Cost still sound a lot like Focus Points.
And I guess Maintenance sounds more like Witch's Cackle as you describe it more. It only costs a free action, but it also costs a Focus point.
As for being a caster without vancian casting, that sounds like it might be more along the lines of Kineticist that is coming out in a month or three in Rage of Elements.
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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.
In PF2 mechanics this is handled by the spell level of the focus spells. The spell may only cost one focus point, but you have to have the character level minimum in order to be able to cast it .
A 3rd level Witch can't go around casting Curse of Death. That is too powerful of a focus spell.
Another way that this is handled is by scaling of the spells. The amount of impact that a spell has is based on its spell level. So even cantrips that auto scale only scale up to the character's current level. And casting spells from low level slots has less impact than casting the same spell from higher level slots. A level 8 Fireball does 16d6 damage while a level 5 Fireball only does 10d6 damage.
Focus spells, such as Force Bolt have that same type of scaling as the character gains levels.
But this is why I said to begin with that the mechanics under the hood don't translate directly.
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I would not recommend trying to design a class until you've gotten some play experience under your belt. For example, I wouldn't assume the 5e balance points apply just because they both have Vancian casting. Spell slots aren't really rationed out the same way, plus the heightening and counteract mechanics are completely different and very important. Trying to create a replacement for spell slots with a point system sounds really hard to balance out the gate.
Instead, try out the psychic and spell blending wizard, which are probably the closest thing to psionic points builds. See how much playing them feels, and what (if anything) they aren't capturing for you.
By contrast, it is much easier to build monsters and NPCs. That you can just do straight out of the GMG.
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Well, the only thing I can tell you then is that no, there is no mechanic in PF2 that already does what you are looking for.
And I would echo the sentiment of Captain Morgan. Before you finalize your new custom built mechanic, you should probably spend some quality time playing a focus point heavy spellcaster such as an Oracle or Psychic.
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*cracks knuckles*
All right, let's take a look! I'll see what advice I can give you.
First of all, this is a very "un-PF2" class. How much work it's going to be is going to depend partly on how much you want to bring it in line with PF2. You're doing this for a home game you run, so a lot of concerns are taken care of. If the balance is off, you can adjust it. You can tailor adjustments based on the play you see, rather than needing to worry about hypothetical players. (And so on.)
All the advice about "try the game out first" is probably good advice. But hey, if you're up front with the players that stuff might need changes and folks are enjoying themselves, then things are good!
I'd recommend starting with the powers themselves. The class's overall balance of daily resources and stuff can be worried about later, once it's established what the powers can and can't do relative to spells.
In PF2, there are a few major differences compared to 5e spells.
Four degrees of success. Take a damage spell- if somebody fails a save, they take full damage. On a success, they take half. A crit success means none, and a crit failure means they take double. Non-damaging spells generally save any fight-deciding effects for crit failures, and have a one-round consolation prize if the target succeeds.
In your case, that'd be a looot of rewriting. You might decide to leave things as-is. If that's the case, just keep in mind that the class might have more turns where they do nothing because of a successful save.
Incapacitation. This is a big one. In PF2, any effect that immediately takes somebody out of a fight has the incapacitation trait. That means that if you use it on a target more than double the level of the spell slot, then they treat their save as one step better. That includes stuff like Sleep and Blindness, but also Suggestion and Charm.
The reasons for this are threefold. One, to prevent casters from trivializing boss encounters while still giving them the ability to effectively control weaker creatures. Two, to make sure that fight-ending abilities need to remain expensive to impact on-level enemies. (Using a first-level Charm on a twelth-level enemy should be unlikely to work, even if you are also twelth-level yourself.) Three, to make it so that groups of lower-level enemies don't take out PCs on a mildly unlucky roll.
If you don't give Psionics this treatment, they will probably be the best enchanter in the game, with abilities like Post-Hypnotic Suggestion or Phobia Amplification working far more reliably on higher-level bosses than a max-level spell would. This is doubly important if you are using these classes to make NPCs that the PCs will fight.
No skill replacements. Something like Knock no longer bypasses locks by itself, it now imparts a substantial bonus and also brings your baseline up to "barely competent" if you're untrained. So while it's still useful for a Wizard who needs to pick a lock unexpectedly, it's better used on the Rogue who specializes in it.
I don't know if this impacts your powers, but it's worth mentioning.
Minimal bonuses and just one type. Something to keep in mind, bonuses are pretty rare, and generally not too big. They're also pretty much always going to be status bonuses, so they don't stack with other things. Advantage/disadvantage isn't really a thing in PF2, so "roll twice and take the better" effects are rare and generally limited to substantial manipulation of fate.
All right, it's late. I'll leave it at power balance advice. For proficiencies and class stats, I'd probably go ahead and steal from Psychic.
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QuidEst, I just want you to know, you've been providing really helpful and in-depth advice and analysis the last few days I've been around here. Thanks for giving this such serious thought! Even I learned something.
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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.
Yeah, that definitely would be a big issue. I haven't looked closely enough into your document to determine how the power curve looks- psionics by its nature is a bit opaque. But I'll give a quick summary of some important blasting points of comparison:
- Cantrips. These are going to be the bare minimum; if you can't match cantrips for damage and effect, there's not much point in spending points. They're probably a good indication for how many enhance points a player can skimp out on before they're mostly wasting their turn. Electric Arc is considered the best by far, and maybe a little overtuned.- Top level spells. An evocation-specialized Wizard can toss out five top-level blasts per day, and a Sorcerer can do four (but with a little extra oomph). Most casters can only do three, and all of those numbers fall off a cliff when hitting tenth level spells, which are far more limited. Based on 18th level mental limit and PSPs, a psion can eventually toss out eleven "top level" "spells" before getting into end-game territory. That does mean you could balance Psion blasting against "one-level-behind max spell level effects" and end up pretty balanced on that front. (It might need to be closer to max level spells at lower levels and gradually fall just a bit behind.)
- Focus spells. These are "all day, but only once per fight" more or less, so they're also a reasonable balance option to look at.
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.
Ah, nice! That sounds like a good alternative balancing approach.
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.
Understandable! If you ever decide to do it, Pathfinder's archetype system does make a few things easier. Instead of needing special subclasses for "psionic X", you can make a multiclass archetype for the class, and then anybody can add it on. A Ranger that wants to be an incredible healer can just take the Medic or Blessed One archetype.
In any case, I just want to give you a quick welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy the system, as well as your time here.
QuidEst, I just want you to know, you've been providing really helpful and in-depth advice and analysis the last few days I've been around here. Thanks for giving this such serious thought! Even I learned something.
Thank you- that's an honor to hear from Paizo forums' premier kobold catgirl herself!
It seems like the focus point stuff is like Warlock spells in 5E,
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Sorta. They both have a "short rest" recharge mechanic. But in 5e, short rest takes an hour and use a finite resource to heal. It isn't a given that you can take them whenever you want, so a warlock needs to be mindful of their usage.
Meanwhile you can pretty much count on recovering one focus point after each battle. It only takes 10 minutes, and your party is virtually guaranteed to take that 10 minutes to Treat Wounds. (Which has no limit beyond a cool down time you can circumvent with a feat, and resource cost. So usually PF2 PCs go into every fight fully healed.)
So they work more like 4e encounter powers than 5e warlock slots. They have a more limited range of effects than slots but the good ones are about equal to a PC'S second best slot thanks to the automatic heightening.
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I view focus points as doing 4E per-encounter powers, but fixing an important issue.
If you had some special move, and you can only do it once per fight because it gets tiring. Okay, sure.
Now you have three different special moves, but you can do each of them only once per fight because they're tiring. But doing A makes you too tired to do A again, but not too tired to do B? That's weird.
So focus points get rid of that obstacle to immersion.
To be fair, this seems less like a class and more like a psionic manual. A class usually has a theme and leans towards a role or playstyle. This is more all over the place and can't decide what role or class it wants to fullfill so it tries to do everything and anything.
Best advice as someone else mentioned would be to actually experience the system before you try a 1:1 attempt at throwing something like this when you're not really familiar with the system (just reading it isn't really enough).
Biggest hurdle is gonna be making a class that can fight as well as a fighter or cast spells as well as a wizard or sneak around and teleport in ways that makes a rogue jelous. You could always try taking one aspect of the class and make that first but it's still likely to end up a mess.
Many of these can already be mimicked to some degree. Eldritch rogue with psionic class, or just simpler homebrew like giving players psi cantrips regardless of class for utility like Warp Step.
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If you haven't become intimate with the system your home brew likely will not play well.
Pf2e is a house of cards. It's balanced very well but the slightest deviation can have a domino effect.
This is why I refer to the game having checks and balances. If you ignore it are unaware of them, things can fall apart quickly.
Also if you haven't played the system much yet, it won't give you a good indication of how the system itself plays.
Yeah, coming from another system and seeing a good buff spell only grant a +2 to attack can be confusing, because you don't realize it's good. It seems very mild, at lest compared to PF1 (I haven't played 5E). In PF2 though, a long duration +2 is a strong bonus. High level spells will rarely grant a +3/4 to something, and that's rare and high level. That's really as high as numerical bonuses to things get, and they're often all status bonuses so you can't stack multiple different ones.
If you don't recognize this specific aspect coming from a different game, you could wildly unbalance things.
And this is just one of potentially many pitfalls someone homebrewing without already having significant play experience might not realize.
As for the original question, how hard is it to convert things? Well, it's hard. The mechanics (from what I understand) are substantially different.
I would honestly look at the myriad of archetypes and abilities that already exist to see if they can come close to fulfilling the narrative/fantasy aspect of what you're looking for. Although the mechanics are probably going to differ substantially from what you're familiar with.