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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8716779" data-attributes="member: 4937">In my game the difference is very clear: arcane magic is the stuff you do yourself out of your own power and divine magic is the stuff you persuade something else to do on your behalf.  I haven't started running 5e but in my 3.Xe campaign there are 4 primary casters - wizards, sorcerers, clerics, and shamans.   Those represent all 4 combinations of arcane/divine and prepared/spontaneous casting.   Bards are basically "half-caster" wizards from a different tradition and Champions (aka "Paladins") are basically "half-caster" clerics with a slightly different relationship to their deities.  There is also a "half-caster" arcane class with spell-like abilities rather than spells called the Feyborn (mostly used by NPC fairies as it originally started out as a way to increase Fey HD will systematically increasing spellcasting abilities).  There are no psionics per se in my current game.  The reason for this is that there is nothing distinctive about the flavor of psionists IMO.  Back in the day when Psionics were first introduced into the game, they were distinguished by being a form of magic that wasn't directly tied to your level.   That was distinctive.  They let you have powerful magic users without giving them a lot of HD, or children without a lot of experience born powerful.  But as soon as psionist became a class with levels, they lost all distinctiveness.  This is especially true if you have a spontaneous arcane caster class like Sorcerer.  If you want to play a psionist in my game, you pick an appropriate Sorcerer bloodline (subclass in 5e terms) and you pick spells with the [Psychic] tag and feats that enhance those spells.  This avoids the problem of "Is psionics different than magic or not?"  My answer is firmly on the side of "It's just magic.", which I feel is the correct answer both internally to a D&D setting and externally based on the real-world origin of the concepts.Now, I don't hate the idea, I just find them redundant.  I don't feel a need to have a class that is mechanically different but not distinctive.  Typically though Psion classes are generic enough that they represent one of the two casters I might consider being the sole magic using class if I wanted to do a particular setting with a distinctive feel (the other is Shaman) and "There are no wizards or sorcerers or clerics" might be a fun homebrew setting.  But I don't see a need for them otherwise.</blockquote>

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