MCDM's Talent

 So, not long after the release of their excellent Flee, Mortals, MCDM has come out with a new class for 5E: The Talent.

Regular readers of this blog will know that there is little that gives more more delight than working science-fiction tropes into fantasy games. My favorite kind of story and world is one that heavily blurs the line between the two genres, sitting at the fuzziest part of the Fantasy-to-Sci-Fi spectrum (bonus points if it's disorientingly weird).

While 5E has played a little in the space of psionics, for the most part it's basically been a different kind of spellcasting - Mind Flayers can cast familiar spells, but they do so without any components - they just need the will to enact the spell. The Soul Knife, Psi Warrior, and Aberrant Mind subclasses further explore this concept.

MCDM has gone in its own direction, and created a class that is meant to really fulfill the Psionic fantasy.

Before we get into the meat of its mechanical concepts, let's talk flavor.

MCDM's Talent does have the pieces you need for a classic "psychic power" character, with characters like Eleven from Stranger Things, Professor X and Jean Grey from X-Men, and a few other cultural touchstones.

Flavor-wise, and certainly in the art for the 100-page supplement (which includes not just the class but also a take on Gemstone Dragonborn and several NPC stat blocks to represent Talents) leans heavily on the comicbook, superhero vibe. Personally, that's less my taste, but to each their own - I'm very much into the Stephen King/Stranger Things (maybe a bit of Dharma Initiative from Lost, and absolutely "Parautilitarians" from Control) version of it.

So, how does this class work?

On the surface, there's a lot of overlap here with both Wizards and Sorcerers. You have a d6 hit die, using Intelligence as the ability that determines the attack bonuses and save DCs of your Powers.

Powers are similar to spells in that there's a big list of them at the end of the class description, and you'll be choosing from amongst them to define your capabilities. Powers come in different orders, similar to spell levels, but there are only 6 orders of Power, and 1st level orders are more or less your "cantrips," which you'll have no problem using as many times as you like.

However, this doesn't make Talents half-casters. 6th level powers are comparable to 9th level spells, but there's a mechanical reason they don't go as high in number.

Because in theory, you could keep manifesting (the term used to distinguish from casting) your most potent Powers without end. It's just very unlikely.

The core idea is that when you manifest a power, you roll your Manifestation Die. This starts off as a d4 at level 1, going up to a d6 at level 5 and a die 8 at level 13. When you manifest a power, (specifically when you finish manifesting it, so if it takes a long time to manifest and you get interrupted, no worries) you have to roll your die.

Depending on the order of the power you're manifesting and the number of powers you are concentrating on (because you can concentrate on multiple powers at a time,) your target Manifestation Score goes up.

If you manifest a 2nd order power (which you can from level 1,) the score is 2. If you're concentrating on another power, you add 1 for each thing you're concentrating on. You roll the die, and then one of three things happen:

If you exceed the score, you're fine - the power goes off and there's nothing else to worry about.

If you meet the score, you manifest the power, but you gain one Strain.

If you roll lower than the score, you still manifest the power, but you now gain Strain equal to the power's order (2, in our example case).

    So, what the hell is Strain?

Strain is a set of class-specific effects that will build on you as you tax yourself using your psionic powers. If your strain exceeds your maximum, you will drop dead. The maximum goes up as you get to higher levels, making it safer to risk gaining strain, but that's the sharp end of the deal here - with great power comes a high chance of dying of an aneurysm. If you're revived after dying as a result of this strain, you revive at your maximum strain - basically saying "stick to the 1st level orders or you're going to probably die again."

But strain is not simply a score to keep track of. Each point of strain you get begins to stack up various effects on you. Each time you gain strain, you choose whether you gain it in your Body, Mind, or Soul. There's then a table that shows what effects affect you with each level of strain on those tracks. And some of these are actually blank.

For example, let's say that I have just gained three strain during the first encounter of the day.

I can put each of those strain in a different category - the first Body Strain effect gives me disadvantage on Strength and Dexterity checks, which could be a challenge if we're doing a lot of physical exploration, but is maybe not too bad if we're in some place that's easier to get around. I could put a point into Mind, which prevents me from taking the Dash, Disengage, or Dodge actions. Not great, but also not a problem if we're unlikely to deal with much combat. Maybe I put it into Soul, getting disadvantage on Wisdom and Charisma checks.

You only actually get a detrimental effect every other time you gain strain in one of these three tracks, but they start to get pretty bad.

The good news is that you can recover from them through a number of ways. When you finish a long rest, all of the strain goes away, much as a spellcaster would get all their spell slots back. But you can also spend hit dice to reduce strain during a short rest (instead of healing with it).

    So, the upshot here is that you can push yourself to maintain more powers at a time or use more high-order powers, but the risk goes up. In tier 1, you're going to have a d4 Manifestation die and be able to manifest 1st and 2nd order powers. Again, you don't need to roll for 1st order powers, but each time you manifest a 2nd level power, you've got a 25% chance to gain 2 strain, a 25% chance to gain only 1, and a 50% chance to gain none. If you're concentrating on another power, you start to become more likely to gain strain. But again, strain will give you some problems, but it won't be fully debilitating, and as long as you don't exceed your maximum, you won't die (from the strain at least).

In other words, it's a lot less predictable how much you'll be able to handle. On a good day when the dice gods love you, you can manifest a lot of powers. On a bad day, you might be forced to slow down.

Dramatically, though, it also has the potential to create some really risky plays: if surviving requires you to get your party the hell out of the way of some horrible aberration, and you desperately need to Fold Space (which does take 10 minutes, but work with me here,) maybe you'll risk taking the 6 strain from rolling a 5 or lower on your d8, potentially killing you, if it means the rest of the party surviving. And hey, with luck perhaps you'll roll a 7 or 8! Maybe you can survive a 6 (giving you just one strain) and only nearly dying.

Now, where the class becomes somewhat Wizard-like is that you can actually learn more Powers beyond what you might have gotten on level-up. When a creature you see manifests a psionic power within 30 feet of you, you can roll your manifestation die and, if you roll over the power's baseline order (no worrying about upcasting) you begin to learn the power, and if you spend an hour a day practicing (including during short rests) you can learn that power after a period of a few days (more days for higher-order powers). Some of the monsters in Flee, Mortals have unique powers that you can learn if you encounter them.

Powers are a wholly separate list of features than spells, even if a lot of them have clear spell equivalents. Powers come in various "specialties," which are roughly equivalent to schools. These are Resopathy, Pyrokinesis, Telekinesis, Telepathy, Metamorphosis, and Chronopathy. These are also, notably, also the subclasses for the Talent, along with another subclass, the Maverick, which has no preference for any particular speciality.

    I have not playtested the class, but I'd really, really like to in a one-shot or short adventure, as it seems super cool. If I like it, I could even play it in a full campaign.

The booklet (well, at a hundred pages it's really just a book) also includes some magic items that can enhance Talents and other users of psionic powers.