Alright I’m up late and the thing I was working on didn’t work and I don’t want to fall behind on my schedule so let’s just belt out something about the ongoing grievance I have in how 3rd edition D&D treated spellcasters as a better class of people with their own higher standard of living because being able to rewrite reality at will is by no means a perk enough to justify not feeling bummed out.
Let me talk to you about sticks and stones powers.
First the origin of the term. The psionics system of 3rd edition was a beautiful beast and also a complete functional failure. Its presence was demanded implicitly by being a thing that existed in 2ed and people liked, while its exclusion from the core of content was demanded explicitly by being a thing that existed in 2ed and people hated. It was a sci-fi thing, unlike the flying airships and unsupported towers made of glass that the rest of the fantasy genre had going on inside it. The psionic system has two distinct forms; the version that launched in 3rd edition proper, and the followup version in 3.5.
3rd editions’ psionic system had a lot of things in it to try and make sense of things that seemed like they should exist in a story, which included an idea of psychic combat. That was where two psychic characters could give up their actions to tangle with one another in a sequence of paper-rock-scissors-laser-godzilla in an attempt to determine who had the bigger brain, who had dedicated the right resources to it, and crucially, who hadn’t decided to spend a few turns using their actual powers to do actual damage or inflict control. Seriously, psychic combat was a hilarious system because it was only useful for psychics who both wanted to fight one another and deplete each other’s power points. Just using powers on one another, like by say, using psychic powers to bombard the other person with lasers? A lot more effective. But don’t worry, there was also the silliness of psychic combat folding in the Illithid power Mind Blast which is a cone stun that lasts for 1d4+1 rounds, aka ‘probably enough to kill anyone or get away from anyone.’
Yeah, player characters could have Mind Blast, at a certain level. It was the only thing anyone ever bothered with in that system.
Along with that system was a collection of psionic powers that all relied on different stats to make sure the spellcaster had to feel rounded. They then could use these well rounded stats to cast psionic powers which were quite mediocre compared to magical spells of their level, and also because of those rounded stats, likely to fail. The entire system was built on ‘hey, here are nice ideas, why don’t we do this’ and the answer coming out pretty evidently in the first playtest.
Anyway, in the Expanded Psionics Handbook in 3.5, Expanded from the Latin meaning ‘not a pig’s arse’, the rulebook decided to instead make the psychic spellcasters into what they always were: spellcasters. Spellcasters needed things like a familiar stat structure, feat support, prestige classes that advanced spellcasting, powers that scaled, and of course, eventually, as with so many things in 3rd edition D&D, gear support.
The Expanded Psionics Handbook introduced the power stone and the dorje. A power stone is an item that has a single use application of a power in it, imbued by the caster at some point. If you can manifest the power in the stone, you can use the power stone. A dorje is a power stone, but a little waggly stick. The waggly stick could have lots of charges stored in it. That is to say, power stones and dorjes are fundamentally, scrolls and wands, as every other spellcaster in the core rules had at the start of the edition.
All psionic manifesters had a limited pool of spells – sorry, powers – they could cast – sorry, manifest. Anyway, these spellcasters were like sorcerers, who could only cast a few spells and that meant that these items that expanded your available spells were super useful. This also meant there were spells you didn’t necessarly want to know wth your limited choices, but you could spend some of your gold to expand on that. Spells cast out of dorjes and power crystals were cast as weak as they could be – minimum caster level, minimum stat, so for a 1st level power, it would be the duration, range, and effect of a level 1 caster’s version, and the difficulty class to use it would be a dc 10. Not great stuff for offensive powers, you want to be able to put oomph behind those yourself.
But say, Comprehend Languages? Or Knock? or Object Reading? Spells that just give you information and aren’t cast under time pressure for combat? Nobody cares about the difficulty of those. You might as well have those in these convenient forms and never bother learning them for yourself. In the process this creates the vision of a marketplace supplied by the small number of psions who do actually know those powers and learned them entirely to supply everyone else with them through dorjes and power stones, which is, at the least, a little funny.
This led to the term ‘sticks and stones’ powers; powers you didn’t need or care about in most situations but you’d stick some of them in your backpack for convenience when you needed them later. This meant that over time, psionic characters would have a swiss army knife of toys for every out-of-combat situation and it was for a time, criticised.
It was criticised, because it was encroaching on the wizard.
Yes, that’s right we’re back there! We’re back at it! Becuase the problem as described was the problem of one character having too much versatility, and in 3rd edition design, the character who had too much versatility was the wizard’s niche. Wizards had been crafting spells into spellbooks and onto scrolls at the end of every day since day one of 3rd edition. They even got the feat to do it for free! Their spellbook was the biggest, and had the most weird niche things! The game even had rules for wizards that pointed out how sensible it was for a wizard to develop their own unique versions of existing spells!
The whole point of stick-and-stones powers is that the powers systems had things that existed in two non-overlapping fields of play, and then expected you to spend the same limited pool resources between them equally even though one of them could get you shanked by a drunken gnoll.