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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 7148991" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I think you can eat your cake and have it too in this respect. 5e has a limited number of options that directly interact with "magic" as rules jargon. The Sage Advice compendium clarifies exactly what does and doesn't count as magic for rules purposes (basically, if it is a spell, a magic item, uses a spell attack roll, or explicitly says it is "magical" it is, otherwise it is not), and explains that plenty of other stuff in the world is magical in the more general sense. And spells like dispel magic are even more limited--they only effect spells.There is a lot of room for supernatural effects that don't fit under the magic keyword (so to speak) in 5e. In fact, many monster abilities are exactly that. Ki is that, except where it explicitly duplicates spells.So 5e supports supernatural abilities that don't count as magic in the specific jargon sense fairly well.Thematically, the previous playtests had a cool take on it, that psionics was a way of manipulating reality from outside the boundaries of it. When psionics duplicated a spell (like some monster abilities labeled as Psionics) it was manipulating reality to cause it to produce that magical effect. Otherwise, it wasn't magic. Now, there was a truly unfortunate connection to the Far Realms that really only works as an option (it just doesn't fit a lot of psionic themes), but if they set that aside, the description for how it can work as "not magic" was pretty cool.So basically, I guess I'm saying that the previous Mystic playtest handled the issues you are talking about quite well. If they took the best bits of the latest two playtests they could probably make a better foundation to build on than either one of them.Really though, psionics starts with a theme. It isn't about saying, "hey, I want a different way to do magic--er I mean "not" magic" and then giving it a theme from there. It starts with, "hey, some sort of psychic mind stuff would be cool!" So that's where you start. Then you figure out how to make it unique from any other particular class, and make it high quality product. That's about all I care about personally. I like the concept of it not being magic, but if they can do it better as a form of magic, I'm fine with that. Theme and quality of mechanical presence are the important parts for me.</blockquote>

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