Remastered Psychic House Rule to restore a focus point in an encounter


Homebrew and House Rules


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

After looking over the newly remastered Psychic, I am disappointed to see that the unique essence of the original class (from immediately after the Dark Archive was first published and before the game was remastered at all) has been left stripped from the class, and that is the ability to use more focus points per encounter in the day, for every encounter, than any other class.

This uniqueness of the class was stripped out before the Dark Archive ever got remastered itself, by giving every class with focus points the ability to regain all of their focus points with enough time to refocus between encounters, whereas previously every other caster could only recover 1 focus point after an encounter (until later feats got involved, and it was never up to all 3).

Being able to recover 2 in the time it takes other classes to regain 1 is not nothing, but it is not something that comes up often enough to really set the psychic apart from other casters any more, especially since they get so few spell slot spells in a day.

So here is the fix I will be implementing in the games I GM:

Whenever a Psychic gains the stupefied condition from the end of the Unleash Psyche ability, they regain one focus point if they have brought any significant enemy (worth 10 xp or more) to 0 hit points while their psyche was unleashed.

I am sure many players will not find this change to be enough to boost the psychic to the level of some of the more powerful casters in PF2, but it does give them one unique way to potentially use more focus points than any other caster in an encounter, and it addresses another long standing issues psychic players have faced in my campaigns: It gives them a little more staying power in the longer, multi-round encounters that can spring up when you have encounters collapse into each other.

I bet a lot of tables are thinking up ways they are going to modify the remastered Psychic in their games, and I'd love to hear them as well. I am trying to change as little as possible, and I don't mind the change to Imaginary Weapon, but the Psychic class really needs something to give it some specialness again with the remastered edition and I will be trying this out to see if it feels special for my psychic player.


Oooh, regaining a focus point after your unleash psyche ends is an interesting and unique buff to the class and one that feels like it wouldn't be too broken if you just let it happen without the qualifier of having to bring down an enemy first.

It'd be a benefit that may or may not see use in every combat, but would help patch up the lack of spell slots.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

That is probably the cleanest way to run it, and how I would write it if I was a developer for Paizo, as I do think the Psychic has always really struggled with longer encounters.

For my table I will probably keep the bring down an enemy requirement to keep things interesting for my specific party. Also, the big sprawling encounters tend to involve a lot of lower level enemies so it is probably not as big of a challenge as it would be at the table of a GM who tends only to use fewer, higher level enemies.

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