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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dire Bare" data-source="post: 7675278" data-attributes="member: 18182">Not a rebuttal, but riffing off your post . . .The terms mystic, sorcerer, wizard, warlock, and even druid are all terms that in literature and "real life" have very fluid and fuzzy meanings, and can be used quite differently and even interchangeably. It's one of the cons of the D&D hobby is that we codify these terms with very specific meanings. Previously, in past versions of D&D, the term "mystic" hasn't been used much and hasn't worked it's way into the "core" of the game (like the warlock has). It's been used so far to describe a spontaneous divine caster (Dragonlance) and a monk-like martial artist (BECMI D&D) at least. To appropriate it for the psionic class I think fits just fine, and does (in my mind) harken back to European traditions of spiritualism, theosophy, and the occult, which is definitely within the D&D psionic wheelhouse. But it does leave a long-standing D&D tradition in the dust, and that's the science fantasy feel of the psionic rules up to this point. And I think that's a mistake.D&D has always been more than the genre of epic fantasy, has always been a weird mish-mash of literary influences and styles, and has always had a healthy dose of pseudoscientific oddity like the psionics rules. D&D has a lot of threads woven into it that have become part of it's own unique DNA, and to leave them behind is a mistake. That was one of the cardinal sins of 4E, is that it left behind a lot of the weird and wonky feel (both in the rules and the fluff) of D&D to make a more tight game and setting. 4E was a fantastic game that was tied to a fantastic setting . . . but left out too much "D&D feel".D&D has struggled to get psionics "right" in every edition (and it seems 5E won't be any different), and has never quite managed to do it. I think majority opinion (purely anecdotal) would favor the 3E "expanded psionics" rules as the best, or at least the most realized, but even that subsystem had its issues. Perhaps that will always be the case, is that psionics is the weird add-on not everybody digs . . .WotC isn't run by fools and they do a lot of marketing to help them guide their decisions. If they have left the pseudoscience behind in favor of mysticism and the occult for psionics (which, BTW, Pathfinder has already done), I'm sure that's based on good data. But it's still a bad choice to totally ditch the science fantasy feel of psionics, at least entirely.I would suggest that WotC continue to use the naming conventions in the draft rules we're discussing now, but map some of the character classes and archetypes to "classic" pseudoscience psi and include language like, "The mystic, also known as the psion . . .", "Some awakened mystics refer to their order as telepaths . . . .", etc. If the classic archetypes are easily modeled by new class/archetypes and called out as such, then changing names from an "occult" feel to a "pseudoscience" feel would be very simple and hopefully keep everybody happy.</blockquote>

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