Celebrim
Legend
D&D Wizards are less inspired by magic than psions are. Of the two, the psion is the more traditional spellcaster.
This stuff has an actual history pertinent to the 1960s and 1970s when D&D was written.
Beginning in the late 19th century, traditional magic was falling out of favor as more and more things could be explained by science. Mediums and other traditional magic was being called into question but there were still true believers out there among the Victorians that thought it was real. And so, they began altering the way they described magic to make it more socially acceptable. For example, in 1872 they invented the word 'psychic'. The fundamental idea of this new description of magic was that ancient societies had learned to tap into a science of the mind and that far from dismissing traditional magic we should learn to study and enhance it. This actually culminated in the Cold War were both the West and the Soviets had scientific programs studying magic to see if there really were people with psychic abilities who could give them an advantage. All those things that we consider "psychic" like ESP, precognition, mind control, etc. all were studied in that period, and while they were being studied, they entered into a lot of science fiction of the day as possible futures for humanity precisely because they'd been given a pseudo-scientific gloss.
Psionic entered the vocabulary in the mid 20th century as a sibling of the idea of bionic. Just as bionic machines would enhance the human body (remember the "Six Million Dollar Man"), psionic machines would enhance the human mind, increasing and empowering the minds natural abilities of telepathy and precognition and so forth.
The trouble was it was all superstition that had been given it pseudo-scientific gloss to make it seem legitimate, and none of it really was. It never was science to begin with.
Yes, I know all of that. But as usual, early D&D screwed it all up. Instead of calling the mind powers "psychic" as would have been correct and proper, they called the "psionic" because reasons having to do with the most recent book they read, but you'll note that "psionics" aren't cyborgs (which would have been correct for the word). And I want to reemphasize that whole "reading minds, controlling other people with your thoughts type of deal" type of deal is what traditional magic looked like going back as long as we have a historical record.
You see the D&D wizard isn't based on historical magical tradition at all. Instead, it's based on something else that started appearing in late 19th century - the sanitized literary wizard in children's books. Magic was an entirely discredited and generally abhorred thing in the late 19th century, but during the same period it became popular to start telling sanitized versions of things like King Arthur and Robin Hood and so forth to children. And this meant having figures like Merlin as good guys by Victorian standards of morality, and that required removing all the occult references from wizards in stories and having them start doing more wholesome things than "reading minds and controlling other people with your thoughts". Instead of the traditional magic in witchcraft or shamanism or cabalism or really any other magical tradition which was subtle and thus hard to disprove or deny, they started having wizards do wholesome useful things like conjuring fire out of the air. Wizards became less people that trafficked in spirits and figured out how to curse and control their neighbors, but daft old scholarly types with esoteric lore about throwing magical darts and conjuring lightning and turning invisible or what not. And of course, the ultimate example of this type was Gandalf, who became the direct inspiration for the D&D wizard but as with all early D&D stuff rather badly adapted. The D&D wizard has itself become its own archetype.
So yes, Tassadar from Starcraft is a wizard. It's all based on the science fiction stories from the Golden Age of science fiction were authors assumed that magic in some sense might be real because well the government had scientists studying it and a lot of those scientists believed it was real. Psychic is just another word for magic. The Jedi are just wizards, and really the list of powers they have are closer to what ancient people believed magic users could do than what Gandalf does. Real people didn't believe in people throwing fireballs because well you could see that they couldn't, but maybe they could tell the future or read minds because that was a bit fuzzy and hard to disprove.
What you feel about it doesn't really matter. I mean it's a real thing that some people think psychic is science and not magical, but if you look at the actual history that's nonsense. Anything with Jedi and their inspiration the Bene Gesserit is science fantasy, because they just basically have spaceships and wizards.
What my experience is about people who really really want the psychics back is they want magic but cooler. They want magic that doesn't require fiddly spell components, chanting silly words, studying books, and otherwise with limits. They want an unrestricted magic that just happens in the most magical and most archetypally magical way of all - mind over matter. They want magic that bypasses spell resistance, still works in a zone of anti-magic and which isn't at all subject to stifling rules. In other words, they tend to want something unbalanced. They want to be a wizard but better. And as long as it is "better" in some way they like it.
Anyway, this comes from how psionics were used in 1e AD&D, and that part of the story is important. In D&D everything was class based and thus level based. Psionics as they were imagined in 1e AD&D, the one thing that IMO actually made them sort of cool, was they weren't tied to your level. They were just innate magic that you were born with. You could have them as a first level character or a child. They were there rare and tantalizing appendix with arcane rules that hardly anyone actually knew how worked and which rarely came into play. If they'd come into play more often instead of being ignored, people might have realized how bad the rules were and ignored them in a more purposeful manner. They wouldn't have had the gloss of coolness.
Their spectre has been cursing D&D ever since.
The thing is, in 3e we got a much better class that killed the psionic and took all of its stuff without having all the bad rules and without causing all the trouble - the sorcerer. The sorcerer gave us a way to play characters that were born magical by some means (really any means you wanted). Suddenly you could imagine Charles X-Men academy as peopled by sorcerers of various sorts - mutants whose esoteric heritage made them capable of performing magic. It was good. But of course, it wasn't clearly superior to the wizard so the psionic people didn't like it.
And yes, I watched your super smash brothers video and those two characters are clearly wizards or maybe sorcerers. I don't know enough to know the lore, but I'm watching them cast spells using somatic components in the video. There is a complex blended heritage here from several sources, including eastern magic that got tied with martial arts (which in turn inspired the aforementioned Jedi and Bene Gesserit) but that's magic and wizards still.
If you want psionics/psychics well then take out all the Vancian spellcasting classes and just have psionics in your campaign. That will work just fine and even be really flavorful. You really want an alternative magic system, then have an alternative magic system. That would be fine. Just don't pretend it's good for the game to have two magic systems in the same game one of which is notably lacking in all the restrictions the other one has, or that you'd be happy with a single magic system which incorporated psychics in a balanced and restricted way.
Of course not. The daft old muttering wizard with his musty books is too nerdy and not cool enough. I get it.
