Soulknife

A Protoss Zealot Soulknife

The lightsaber of Star Wars fame and all weapons like it are universally accepted as one of the most awesome weapons in fiction. And the ability to create a lightsaber with your mind sounds double awesome. Hence, one day in 1997, someone at Blizzard decided that this would be an awesome idea for a unit in Starcraft, the real-time strategy game that they were developing at the time. Thus, the Protoss Zealot was born. A few years later, in 2001, Wizards of the Coast decided to copy it for the Dungeons and Dragons 3.0e Psionics Handbook. Thus, the Soulknife prestige class was born. It was later made into a base class for 3.5e's Expanded Psionics Handbook. Unfortunately, like many before it in third edition, this did not turn out all too well...

The mindblade archetype for the magus is one Pathfinder equivalent/reworking. While it lacks the fun-factor of "Knife to the Soul," it is reasonably powerful. I mean, at least not it's not this. Dreamscarred Press would also come up with a straight port of the soulknife. While still probably the weakest of the psionic classes, it's solidly on-par with the fighter, barbarian, and other straight martial classes, and, unlike the 3.5 version, gets full BAB, better action economy, gets to pick one of three shapes for his soulknife right off the bat (longsword, greatsword, and dual shortswords, basically), and has lots of customization in the form of "blade skills," which are equivalent to magus arcana or barbarian rage powers. Sure, Knife to the Soul got a sorta-nerf, but it's still loads better and more fun to play now, and even has all kinds of archetypes and stuff. There are even ones that let you delve into The Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic or actual psionics. Take a look.

KNIFE MIND ATTACK

The main feature of the Soulknife is its primary weapon, the mind blade(s). It is a psychically created weapon, a shortsword created from the psyche of the soulknife consisting of semisolid psychic energy. If the Soulknife lets go of it, it immediately dissipates unless used as a thrown weapon, and the user can create a new weapon with ease to rearm themselves. Skilled Soulknives can split their weapon up into two blades (though it makes them slightly weaker), imbue them with up to 5d6 extra damage per strike, turn them into bigger swords (long or bastard), throw them, imbue them with enchantments normally found on weapons, attack multiple targets in one blow, damage mental stats on a target and a few other tricks. While these all seem like interesting and fun tricks... when you add them up, the class still sucks. Simply put, the Soulknife is bad. Like, Fighter bad.

Downsides

First, the Soulknife is a full-on combat class, i.e. it has to get in and keep hitting people with its mind blades. The first problem with this is that the Soulknife has 3/4th BAB progression, the same as rogues, clerics, and druids. This is not good for a class meant to hit things in straight-up combat. Next up, while the Soulknife has a d10 hit die, it has only light armor proficiency and no class features that help defending itself, meaning that you're stuck with light armor and a shield to not die. Its lack of feats (aside from a few crappy bonus feats and the ones you get normally) means that even if you try to become better this way you are still very vulnerable in combat.

Next up, the Soulknife is kind of slow to utilize. Until level 5, imbuing your Mind Blade with Psychic Strike is a move action. So if you want to deal some serious damage at lower levels you've got a bit of a problem. If you manage to live that long you'll become able to make your blades better by turning them into longswords or bastard swords... but this takes a full round action, leaving you doing nothing. At this point you'll also start to notice that the rest of your party starts to swing around +2 weapons while you just got your first +1 bonus last level. And at the point where it gets better, pound for pound you still deal less damage than your party's Fighter.

At higher levels Knife to the Soul becomes interesting, given that you can combine it with multiple throwing attacks. This means that you can throw four knives that each deal 3 damage to one mental characteristic of your choice, which might net interesting results when you start to damage Wizards and drain their spells, or defeat a monster in one go with a well-placed throw. The obvious downside to throwing is that it's only got a 30 feet range, putting you into trouble when facing long-distance enemies.

Another problem with the Soulknife is that its skills kind of suck: they're all over the place. There are a couple of DEX based skills (Hide, Move Silently, Tumble) and the useful Autohypnosis, Concentration and Knowledge (Psionics) that you don't see on other classes... but those are spread out over four different attributes. For the rest you have the standard package of skills, so you can't do something interesting with this.

There is a Prestige Class for the Soulknife called the Soulbow in Complete Psionics, and notoriously one of the few decent things in a book full of crap (which is why Wizards of the Coast chose to release it for free as a preview). It allows you to create arrows just like you create your knives and shoot people with it from a safe(r) distance. This sounds meh... until you realize that while in combination with Zen Archery WIS is pretty much the only stat you need for this prestige class but it does zero good for your levels of Soulknife, your bow kind of sucks (a regular composite longbow that cannot be upgraded), the upgrades for your arrows just kind of stop at a certain level, and Phase Arrow (shoot through pretty much anything) is not really worth it. There's a few thing that make it far and away better than the base classes, though. Firstly because you only need one hand to shoot a mind arrow you can use two-weapon fighting and rapid shot to spam a lot of attacks a turn. Lastly, one of the abilities you can add to your arrows is Lucky, for a mere +1 bonus. Lucky lets you reroll an attack with that weapon once per day, which doesn't sound too great till you realize each arrow is its own weapon so you can reroll all your attack rolls which more than makes up for your terrible base attack bonus (and many penalties from TWFing with Rapid Shot). Combined, these can get a bit unwieldy during actual play, though, as you can be rolling to-hit 10 times or even more every turn and as order is actually important you can't roll them all at once (A sane GM will let you roll different colored d20 for the initial attacks, but this doesn't solve the reroll issue). Plus all you'll ever do in combat is full attack.

In short, the only two ways that a Soulknife can kinds work is either as a Fighter but worse (far less attack feats and such), or as a knife-throwing machine that'll fold like wet paper when hit and wastes everyone's time with a ton of die rolls. Which is sad, because its concept is very fun.

d20 Modern

d20 Modern merged the Soulknife and Psychic Warrior into a single class known as the Battle Mind (not to be confused with the 4e class of the same name). This incarnation is actually pretty good. Firstly, magic weapons are never assumed in this system, and you're often forced to evade mundane security. This means being able to generate a magic weapon whenever you want is pretty good and the scaling isn't much of an issue since +3 at level 10 (or 11 if entered through a different method than Strong Hero) is actually pretty good here. It's still medium BAB, but full is a rarity in d20 Modern, and has decent psionics progression.

5th Edition

After effectively being non existent for an edition, the Soulknife was recently added to 5e via playtest for the Mystic class. Unfortunately, it appears the designers have decided that it must continue the class's longstanding tradition of being fucking terrible, with no unique disciplines, no extra level one disciplines, no extra attacks, and incredibly low damage for a class whose entire schtick is supposed to be doing damage with psionic mind-blades.

If you don't mind introducing homebrew, however, you can take a crack at fixing it with this.

Mike Mearls also cooked up an alternative Soulknife... this time as a Monk subclass. Honestly, this version is better than the Unearthed Arcana version, which isn't that hard to pull off.

Its 3rd level features are Soul Knife and Psychic Slash. The first of these is simple, yet powerful: your unarmed strikes can do psychic, piercing, slashing or bludgeoning damage, with you choosing which type is used each time you hit, plus you can use a bonus action to increase your reach with unarmed strikes to 30 feet until the end of your turn.

Psychic Slash, by comparison, lets you apply a bonus rider when you hit a foe with a Flurry of Blows attack that does Psychic damage. Your options are Life Drain (gain temp HP equal to half the damage you dealt), Invoke Terror (target must pass a Wisdom save or be Frightened of you until the end of your next turn), Invoke Wrath (target suffers Disadvantage on all attacks against targes other than you until the end of your next turn), Astral Slide (teleport the target 10 feet to a destination that you can see) and Synaptic Overload (target gains Vulnerability: Psychic until the end of your next turn.

At level 6, it grants the feature Aura Sight. As an action, select a creature that you can see. That creature makes a Wisdom saving throw, though it has no knowledge that you forced it to attempt this saving throw. On a failed save, you learn if the creature shares and aspects of its alignment with you, its current hit points, and its current attitude and intentions toward you or one other creature, object, or location of your choice. In addition, for the next 24 hours or until you use this ability again, you can use an action to determine the creature's distance and direction from you. If a creature succeeds on its saving throw against this ability, you cannot use this ability against that creature again until you complete a long rest.

At level 11, it grants the feature Spectral Blades. Once during your turn, you can choose to forego one unarmed strike in place of forcing a creature within the reach of that attack to make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failed saving throw, it takes your unarmed strike's damage, or half that damage if it succeeds.

Finally, at level 17, it grants the feature Psychic Form, which lets you use a bonus action to transform into a being of pure psionic energy for one minute, which you can do once per long rest. In this state, you have Resistance (All Damage), Fly (30 feet), and the ability to pass through solid objects, but not end your movement within them.

The Final Version

An official Soulknife for 5e debuted in 2020's "Tasha's Cauldron of Everything". Crack open the champagne, because it's not shit! This is a Rogue subclass and, alongside the Psi Warrior Fighter and Aberrant Mind Sorcerer, represents the official future for psionics in 5e; no dedicated classes, but instead subclasses for the "standard array" of classes. Like the Psi Warrior, this Soulknife relies on the use of "Psionic Energy dice", which is a pool of d6s equal to twice the Soulknife's Proficiency bonus; class features that require these "psi-dice" can't be used if there are none left in the pool, and the pool replenishes when the Soulknife completes a Long Rest - the Soulknife can also spend a bonus action to regain a single psi-dice once per short rest. Psi-dice increase in values at levels 5 (d8s), 11 (d10s) and 17 (d12s).

At 3rd level, the soulknife gains the features Psionic Power and Psychic Blades. Psionic Power is made up of two sub-features; Psi-Bolstered Knack lets the soulknife spend a psi-dice and add the result to a failed ability check using a skill or tool in which they have proficiency, with the psi-dice only being expended if this turns the result into a success. Psychic Whispers lets the soulknife forge a temporary 1-mile wide telepathic link with up to Proficiency bonus creatures for psi-dice value hours, so now the wizard can intentionally avoid dropping a fireball on your stealthed ass without metagaming; this can be done for free once per day, but extra times require spending a single psi-dice each time. For Psychic Blades, the soulknife can manifest psy-blades whenever they take the Attack action; a psy-blade is a simple melee weapon with the Finesse and Thrown (60ft) properties that does 1d6 Psychic damage. After attacking with a psy-blade, the soulknife can then attack with a second psy-blade (this one doing 1d4 damage) as a bonus action.

At 9th level, the Soul Blades feature is made up of two sub-features. Homing Strikes is basically Psi-Bolstered Knack, but for missed attacks with psy-blades. Psychic Teleportation lets the soulknife teleport by expending a psi-dice, with the range being (10 X dice roll result) feet.

13th level gives them the Psychic Veil feature; the Soulknife can become invisible by spending psi-dice, although the first invisibility of the day is free.

Finally, at 17th level, the Rend Mind feature lets the Soulknife force a creature hit with a Sneak Attack made with a psy-blade to make a Wisdom save or be Stunned for 1 minute. This can be used once per long rest, or by spending 3 psi-dice.

Fittingly, it makes absolutely no use of mental stats despite being psionic, just like the original Soulknife.

Pathfinder

With the advent of Dreamscarred Press' Psionics line, the psionics system of the D20 system got a major overhaul and improvement. As a side effect, the Soulknife became a lot better and more fun to play. For starters, the Mind Blade itself can be either two light weapons perfect for throwing, a one-handed weapon to use with a shield or a two-handed weapon for extra damage (note that the Half-Giant from the same book can Mind Blades that are one size larger than he is thanks to their special features). On top of that, the Mind Blade can be either Slashing, Piercing or Bludgeoning so you can make a SOUL HAMMER. The blade also remembers this when it vanishes, and reshaping it takes a single full round. The blade enhancements have also been revamped: the increased damage enhancement and special effect tracts have been combined, starting at 3rd level and increasing to a total pool of +9 at level 19. Reshaping the blade's enhancements requires concentrating for 8 hours outside of normal rest, so plan ahead. Psychic Strike still works more or less the same, except both blades have the same enhancement if you have two of them, the effect only triggers when you want to and affects all creatures with an Int score (so suck it, vampires!) and it can be charged with a Psionic Focus. Throw Mind Blade and Quick Draw are still there, and the capstone ability, making it very difficult to lose your Mind Blade to anti-psionics effects, is a bit lacking. At least you get to reconfigure your blade with a full-round action instead of 8 hours.

New to the Pathfinder version are the Blade Skills, gained at every even level. These are the special tricks you see on several Pathfinder classes, like the Barbarian and Rogue. These grant a variety of bonuses improving your Mind Blade and how you use it. Possible bonuses include elemental damage, Reach, Trip, more Psionic Charges, 5-foot steps and even the ability to expend your Psychic Strike to stop any spell, power, SLA or PLA thrown at you (but not Supernatural Abilities), letting you slap aside Fireballs, Disintegrates, Meteor Swarms and what have you. Some of these are far better than others, but there's enough good stuff in there.

The Soulknife also gets a number of Archetypes. These include Armored and Shielded Blade (create armor and a shield just like a Mind Blade at the cost of making your weapon less powerful; use both for some stellar AC at low levels), Cutthroat (Sneak Attack instead of Psychic Strike, also more sneaky abilities), Deadly Fist (supercharged fists), Nimble Blade (get the most out of a Dex-build Soulknife) and the Soulbolt (the Mind Blade becomes a blast of energy instead, basically Soulbow that works). Of particular note are a pair of archetypes that entirely replace Psychic Strike: The Gifted Blade archetype, which gives you Paladin/Ranger tier psionic manifesting, and War Soul, which gives you access to The Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic and the ability to turn your mind blades into working guns.

Overall, Pathfinder's Soulknife is a lot more fun to play with a lot more options, meaning that your KNIFE MIND ATTACK is actually useful instead of a novelty. Still, it's kinda lacking in versatility and still only Tier 4. Warsoul or Gifted Blade raise it to a tier 3. Of particular note is that the book has a way to integrate Gifted Blade into the base class without replacing Psychic Strike, something that would make that tier 3 ranking even more solid.

The Classes of Pathfinder 1st Edition
Core Classes:	Barbarian - Bard - Cleric - Druid - Fighter - Monk Paladin - Ranger - Rogue - Sorcerer - Wizard
Advanced Player's Guide:	Alchemist - Antipaladin - Cavalier Inquisitor - Oracle - Summoner - Witch
Advanced Class Guide:	Arcanist - Bloodrager - Brawler - Hunter - Investigator Shaman - Skald - Slayer - Swashbuckler - Warpriest
Occult Adventures:	Kineticist - Medium - Mesmerist Occultist - Psychic - Spiritualist
Ultimate X:	Gunslinger - Magus - Ninja - Samurai - Shifter - Vigilante

The Third Party Classes of Pathfinder
Psionics:	Psion - Psychic Warrior - Soulknife - Wilder Aegis - Cryptic - Dread - Marksman - Tactician - Vitalist
Path of War:	Stalker - Warder - Warlord - Harbinger - Mystic - Zealot
Akashic Mysteries:	Daevic - Eclipse - Guru - Nexus - Radiant - Rajah - Stormbound - Vizier - Zodiac
Spheres of Power:	Armorist - Elementalist - Eliciter - Fey Adept - Hedgewitch - Incanter Mageknight - Shifter - Soul Weaver - Symbiat - Thaumaturge - Wraith
Spheres of Might:	Armiger - Blacksmith - Commander - Conscript Savant - Scholar - Sentinel - Striker - Technician
Spheres of Guile:	Agent - Courser - Envoy - Mastermind - Professional
Champions of the Spheres:	Prodigy - Sage - Troubadour - Dragoon - Mountebank - Necros - Reaper Warden - Crimson Dancer
Pact Magic:	Pactmaker (formerly known as Medium)