Josh came over at random today, and so it was declared after much Taco Bell that he run a delve for one of our neighbors (since apparently my neighbors are a collective of like-minded geeks) and myself. We ran Orc Fortress, the level 3 delve out of Dungeon Delve. The party consisted of a dwarf great weapon fighter, tiefling psion, and longtooth shifter beastmaster ranger, all level 4.
The first encounter was kind of shaky, and served as a portent of things to come. I'd taken an artificer multiclass feat since no one was a leader, and that barely saw us through the delve. Honestly, we only won because Josh was juggling stats and shit around to account for the fact that we had a smaller party than normal, new people, and no leader. That, and the ranger kept forgetting basic ranger-stuff like designating quarry, using encounter attacks, and sometimes attacking period. Even by removing monsters to adjust the XP value there was simply no fucking way we stood a chance without some hardcore fudging and outright removal of monster powers.
But, thats really not the overall point of this. I want to talk about my brief experience with the psion. I really like the psion. Before, the power point system was really just a more flexible spontaneous spellcaster that required more bookwork and headaches for the DM that didnt have a shitload of time to prep/didnt own the book. Plenty of potential for abuse, and also if you made it so that magic and psionics were "different", well, that was just another thing you had to worry about accounting for in your adventures. Bleh.
Not any more. Power points give it a different feel, as well as a nifty resource management mechanic that doesnt require a lot of paperwork to manage. It adds flexibility, but not all the abuse that could come with it.
Its a lot of fun having a huge bundle of at-wills that I can boost in power as the situation calls for it. Against one critter, I could just roll out mind thrust or memory hole. Oh, a bunch of minions clusterd up? Fine then, lets boost up memory hole with a couple points and explode all their heads. Big bad brute has a pretty powerful attack, so I'll roll a few more points on to betrayal and let him maul his own commander to death. Shit like that. I love it. I normally hate complicated subsystems, but this really isnt. Its simple, easy to figure out, and pretty damned easy to use.
Josh is going to run another delve on Monday. I'm going to give the monk a shot and see how it works. That, or a tiefling avenger. We'll see.
July 21, 2009
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