Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7673464" data-attributes="member: 4937">And that's my point, or part of it.Which is irrelevant to whether or not psionics is just another name for 'magic'.  The problem that psionic fans have largely defined psionic and their preference for psionic in terms of mechanical variation and resource management.   But the mechanical variation and resource management largely exists in the metagame and not in the game world itself.   We don't normally expect levels, hit points, and spell points to exist in the game world themselves unless we are doing something like Order of the Stick and deliberately breaking the 4th wall.My suspicion is that ultimately the demand for psionics is really only going to be appeased by offering familiar mechanics because for most psionic fans the mechanics are what makes it psionics to them, not the completely unexplained incoherent flavor where no one ever really resolved what psionics are.I mean, you'll have people saying, "Well, psionics are different because their source is internal."   And the sorcerer's power isn't?   And you'll have people saying, "Well, psionics are different because their source isn't magic, it's psionic.", but that's just a tautology.  Psionic is psychic which is magic.  The only difference was whether or not you were trying to be pseudo-scientific about your superstition.  And you'll have people saying, "Well, psionics are different because they are mental."   And normal magic isn't?   Or you'll have people saying, "Well, psionics feel like Jedi or eastern mystics, not like wizards."   But that's just a different magical tradition.   Heck, Obi Wan is called a 'wizard', and Darth Vadar has 'sorcerous ways'.   Just because everyone else is running around with blasters, doesn't mean the Jedi aren't a bunch of eastern themed wizard knights.   "But, crystals!"  Why do you think Wizards are associated with crystal balls?   The point is that people have only a very vague idea what they mean by 'magic' and 'psionic', and when it gets down to the concrete things it's all about operational mechanics & resource management.But 1e only needed different operational mechanics & resource management in order to divorce a system of magic from the class/level system.   And 2e largely did away with that so, so it really only needed spell points because of 1e emulation, and because the standard 1e magic system was Vancian.  By 3e, we were already getting pseudo-Vancian systems like the Sorcerer, and by 5e all the classes are using pseudo-Vancian systems.  So it's not at all clear that there is a flavor reason or a mechanical reasons for a whole different subsystem, but for most existing fans of psionic, psionic means the points subsystem.</blockquote>

Verification