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Community
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Psion as Wizard archetype − Happy Fun Hour
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<blockquote data-quote="AmerginLiath" data-source="post: 7410503" data-attributes="member: 777"><p>I wonder how much the appeal of psionics in D&D is generational, given the kitbashed nature of sources that played into the early game, as well as the diversity of “fantasy” (still drawing heavily from sword & sorcery stories that featured early-20th century psychic pseudoscience as it’s magic) into the early-mid 1980s. By he emergence of 2nd Edition, the very face of fantasy literature and popular entertainment had shifted to a more homogenized form (compare Excalibur to any Arthur film in the next two decades) and D&D sources began to be actual D&D books like Dragonlance and FR (which were basically cod-Tolkien). As such, the idea of magic wasn’t even truly Vancian any longer in the gamer imagination, inasmuch as the gamer no longer read Vance and imagined the energy of magic in the pseudo-psionic way that he (and later Gygax) imagined it.</p><p></p><p>Not that there’s anything wrong with that (to borrow a phrase), but it’s a different way of considering the influences upon the game and the cultural and literary influences upon the gamer (what are the images borrowed from media that the new gamer uses to imagine what they’re doing when learning the game? Ditto-era Dr. Strange comics and Harry Potter books are very different teachers of what magic looks like). But, in the end, as a generation of gamers grows up on the LotR trilogy instead of Excalibur, that’s going to alter how they see fantasy coming to the table, and that includes a psionic system that builds off literature that was popular in the 50s-80s but hasn’t been in many current players’ lifetime.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AmerginLiath, post: 7410503, member: 777"] I wonder how much the appeal of psionics in D&D is generational, given the kitbashed nature of sources that played into the early game, as well as the diversity of “fantasy” (still drawing heavily from sword & sorcery stories that featured early-20th century psychic pseudoscience as it’s magic) into the early-mid 1980s. By he emergence of 2nd Edition, the very face of fantasy literature and popular entertainment had shifted to a more homogenized form (compare Excalibur to any Arthur film in the next two decades) and D&D sources began to be actual D&D books like Dragonlance and FR (which were basically cod-Tolkien). As such, the idea of magic wasn’t even truly Vancian any longer in the gamer imagination, inasmuch as the gamer no longer read Vance and imagined the energy of magic in the pseudo-psionic way that he (and later Gygax) imagined it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (to borrow a phrase), but it’s a different way of considering the influences upon the game and the cultural and literary influences upon the gamer (what are the images borrowed from media that the new gamer uses to imagine what they’re doing when learning the game? Ditto-era Dr. Strange comics and Harry Potter books are very different teachers of what magic looks like). But, in the end, as a generation of gamers grows up on the LotR trilogy instead of Excalibur, that’s going to alter how they see fantasy coming to the table, and that includes a psionic system that builds off literature that was popular in the 50s-80s but hasn’t been in many current players’ lifetime. [/QUOTE]
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Psion as Wizard archetype − Happy Fun Hour
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