D&D 5E Poor Old Mystic The AD&D Legacy Trampled On!!!!

[TheCosmicKid]

You don't need an entire class in order to simply not wear armor.

Of course not. Given your life expectancy without armor, you probably only need a couple of levels.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

'Psionics' are the mental equivalent of 'Bionics', that is, machines used to augment mental ability. For example, if you put a wireless network card in my brain, and a wireless network card in your brain, then we are psionic men. An example of this used correctly is the Telepath Corp in Gerrold's 'War Againt the Chtorr' (people with cloud networked brain power).

If you want to be technical, it's really more the other way around: the study of (alleged, of course) psychic ability and its effect on electronics. People influencing random number generators by thinking hard enough, that sort of thing.

But these days, everybody uses it as a synonym for psychic powers generally, both inside and outside of fiction. Language evolves. Insisting that the original definition is the only correct one is rather Cnutesque.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You don't need an entire class in order to simply not wear armor.

Not as much in 3.0 and later as in prior editions, but yeah, if you want a viable AC w/o armor, a class feature is often called for.

Nor do you need an entire class to shout at your companions, right?

Not if you just want to shout at them in character, no. Just like you don't need a class to cast spells or use weapons, unless you want to actually accomplish something with them.

Warlord.

How 'bout Psylord or Waronicist?

Ascetic would be better than mystic or psionic.

Plus, they could do acid damage.

That's right, that's why I played a Smith, for forging! And, um, an accountant. Those orcs never knew pain before that audit.

The Accountant was /so/ broken. (Not broke, though, never call an accountant broke, or he'll surround you with giant floating numerals and take you down with his Vorpal Pencil...)

 

[Elderbrain]

Has anybody mentioned the Mystic class from the 3.5 Dragonlance book? (Basically, the Divine-spellcasting equivalent of the Sorceror, IMO.) Gee, "Mystic" sure is popular, eh?

 

[Elderbrain]

A mystic is someone who knows, an initiate to the true knowledge and working of the world,
If he start its search with religion belief, its experience often but him aside religion.
If we follow this idea, in DnD a Mystic would be a character that become aware of the existence of the DM and the players!

Heh. Looks like we now know the TRUE IDENTITY of the Athar's "Great Unknown"... it's the DM. (The Athar are a Faction in the Planescape campaign setting that deny that the Powers of the Great Wheel are true deities, and posit the existence of a true God which they call the Great Unknown.)

 

[cbwjm]

Ascetic would be better than mystic or psionic.

Only if they actually are an ascetic. I don't think it really fits as a better name for the mystic.

 

[cbwjm]

Back in the old days (walking 5 miles, both ways uphill, in a blizzard, just to pick up the pizza so we could go back and get TPK'd in 10 minutes in Tomb of Horrors) we had to have niche classes, because that's what a class does! It niches ...

That's right, that's why I played a Smith, for forging! And, um, an accountant. Those orcs never knew pain before that audit.

Everyone knows that the accountant class was OP. I had a player who played one once who locked a dragon down with paperwork for its tax returns. Managed to leave the Dragon's lair with 93% of its horde and the accountant was only level 3!

 

[TheCosmicKid]

The Accountant was /so/ broken. (Not broke, though, never call an accountant broke, or he'll surround you with giant floating numerals and take you down with his Vorpal Pencil...)

If you think pencils do slashing damage, I'm afraid you've been sharpening them wrong.

 

[Gradine]

Only if they actually are an ascetic. I don't think it really fits as a better name for the mystic.

Yeah, ascetic makes me think of monk far more than it does anything relating to psionics.

 

[Celebrim]

If you want to be technical, it's really more the other way around: the study of (alleged, of course) psychic ability and its effect on electronics. People influencing random number generators by thinking hard enough, that sort of thing.

It's possible that it is both, as the term has been widely misunderstood and widely misused since it was introduced. However, when introduced by its creator, the term meant a 'psychic amplifier' that would increase natural psychic ability to the point it would reliable. The idea of a helmet that would receive your psychic emanations and would then electronically amplify them was actually a fairly big idea among scientific quacks right up into the 1950's. The most famous use of this trope is in the first 'Back to the Future' film, Dr. Brown of the 1950's is introduced as a crackpot testing out a psionic amplifier that would allow him to read people's thoughts.

Psychic is a term invented in the wake of the explosive success of science in explaining the world in the late 19th and early 20th century. It essentially means 'magic', and all the traditional claims by traditional magicians tend to fall into the sphere claimed by 'psychic'. The difference is that all the language has been dressed up in Latin and Greek to give it a pseudo-scientific veneer of legitimacy - 'telepathy', 'precognition', 'telekinesis', etc. Some of this was just fortune teller quackery - people knew the marks were more likely to keep believing if you made it sound like science. Some of this was well educated true believers not wanting to give up on the idea that humans had magic powers, and some of that feeds into some surprising places. For example, consider how many 'hard' science fiction authors (Author C. Clarke for one, Iain M. Banks for another), postulate far future transcendence (in almost every book) that finally fulfills the dream of magic by way of gnostic sciences currently unknown to man. Or look at the Kurzwellian's with the secular eschatology of the singularity, or Carl Sagan and his manifest destiny and humanist historicism. All of that is modern magical thinking in in a pseudo-scientific veneer. Because 'science' or something.

And of course it shows up a lot in 'science fiction', where writers really want to write fantasy - complete with wizards and magical swords - but they give those things scientific sounding names or names with less obviously magical baggage.

But these days, everybody uses it as a synonym for psychic powers generally, both inside and outside of fiction. Language evolves. Insisting that the original definition is the only correct one is rather Cnutesque.

Oh sure. But I was trying to highlight that Bab5 for example has 'Techno-Wizards', and veritable angels and demons dressed in science-y language, and that really it was all magic. And to the extent that 'Psionic' isn't magic (cloud networked human minds might really be a possibility), it probably isn't a good fit for a typical fantasy.