The 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook Is Pretty Cool
Sometimes it’s easy to get the idea that when I talk about third edition Dungeons & Dragons, I have nothing but negativity about it, which is probably linked to the fact that I am incredibly negative about it. 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons is an impressively intricate game where criticism itself requires a fairly sophisticated engagement. It is, for the most part, and for almost all use cases, a very functional tabletop RPG with a combat system that works reasonably well, and if everyone is on the same page at keeping the game going, isn’t likely to have any meaningful faults.
For the most part, when we criticize tabletop RPGs categorically, we’re always referring to edge cases, because in almost all situations, these are games for sitting down and playing with your friends at a table where you are all more or less able to get along. That lubrication means that games that present as extremely ropey and weak or ill-suited to their task, like, say, Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, are perfectly good at running the kinds of games people are using them for because the game rules are only part of the experience. They are there as a catchment that lies underneath the interaction between players, not as the actual pipework their intentions has to flow through. When Powered by the Apocalypse does this, it’s considered to be fiction forward and groundbreaking. When people use Dungeons & Dragons to do it for 30 years, it’s considered to be a toxic poison that destroys the fandom.
C’est la vie.
Nonetheless, when I talk about the failings of 3rd edition, it is always talking about those edges, those places where the game could break comically, or where the designers were so unaware of what players were actually like that they produced material that I’m reasonably confident was never used. I don’t think anyone has ever played an Urdunir from Races of Faerun in an actual campaign. Still, there are points where 3rd edition’s structure and the way 3rd edition already worked creates a system that I think is deeply interesting and only can work because the rest of the game is around it.
I want to talk about one such example here, which is the 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons book, The Expanded Psionics Handbook. In order to talk about that, though, we need to talk about the 3rd edition Psionics Handbook.
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