D&D: Psion Psummoners, Artificer Announcements, And More From Mike Mearls
The pseries on psionics comes to a close–for now–with the development of a psionic summoner/constructor, as well as a host of other powers. But stay tuned as well because Mearls has an Artificer Announcement.
This is a pretty exciting one folks. Last week the Psion got wrapped up on Mike Mearls’ Happy Fun Hour, but the whole thing kicks off with an announcement for the Artificer, which is super exciting. There’s a polished draft of the Artificer, ready to go through the editing/revision process before getting into the final version/Unearthed Arcana. All of this is pretty exciting news, considering that we’re getting info on new settings com July 23rd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdNA5EU6bL0
As far as the rest of the Psion goes–this week it’s all about summoning creatures. You can see what goes into the logic/design budget of summoning. An interesting prospect because it’s all about adding other creatures into the mix. And the Psion’s flavor of summoning, in particular, is a ton of fun. It’s all about pulling creatures from the imaginations/fears of other creatures. Much like the Phantasmal Killer spell, you are pulling little “worst nightmare” Pokemon out of your opponents skulls and throwing them at them.
But what do you do if your worst nightmare is DOING the summoning???
But enough about the flavor of it–what was fascinating to me was looking at some of the concrete benefits of summoning that you might not have considered.
- You have more hit points for “the party”
- The party has more actions
- The party control more area/terrain
These three things can change the flow of a fight dramatically if you’re not careful. Especially once you start summoning things that are bigger than medium and can control up to four squares on a grid, effectively denying an entire party’s worth of area to your foes while keeping the party safe from harm. It’s tactically sound, and incredibly powerful even if it doesn’t initially seem like it adds too much.
But keeping the summoning to a 1-for-1 thing seems to make summoning a creature at-will work really well. It means that you can have a little tighter control, designwise, of what the spell is giving to your party:
And you can upcast the spell, spending a spell slot on it, to bring in higher CR creatures. Now, instead of necessarily being something right out of the Monster Manual, there will be stat blocks you can select from.
On top of these summoned creatures, you can also spend spell slots to augment their abilities, giving them extra actions, or causing fear or other emotions, or buffs in general. All in all, the subclass is looking great, and coupled with the Nomad, the Psion is really shaping up. We’re looking forward to seeing the final version of this, especially if it comes situated in a book alongside Dark Sun.
Happy Adventuring! Be sure and check back soon for more artificer and monster announcements.
