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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 6898373" data-attributes="member: 58172">About nomenclature. Break away from psionic technobabble. Just use the standard D&D term for standard concepts.For example, the psionic disciplines.Divination. Not clairesentience. The two terms mean exactly the same thing. Of the two, the term divination is reasonable, familiar, and official. Besides, a real psionic technobabbler would call it ‘esp’ (extra-sensory perception) and the person who does it an ‘esper’. In D&D land, just call it Divination.Evocation. Not psychokinesis. I prefer psionics to focus on telekinesis as a force associating with the mind, perhaps an aspect of the fifth element, ether, ethereality, spirit, light, gravity, and so on. It seems telekinetic ‘force’ and arcane ‘force’ are the same thing. Telekinesis is an aspect of mentalism and subtle.Thematically, I prefer psionics stay away from concrete elementalism (pyromancy, cryomancy-hydromancy, aeromancy, geomancy). At least split off elementalism into a separate archetype if a pyromancer or pyrokineticist is going to happen. Note, the Players Handbook categorizes the Telekinesis spell as transmutation, ugh. Really, this and similar spells like Fly belong with other force effect spells like Wall of Force and Magic Missile, in the evocation category.In any case, psionic Telekinesis is a subset of Evocation.Teleportation. Not psychoportation. The 5e Players Handbook (203) defines ‘conjuration’ as:"Conjuration spells involve the transportation of objects and creatures from one location to another. Some spells summon creatures or objects to the caster's side, whereas others allow the caster to teleport to another location. "This meaning of conjuration is exactly what technobabble psychoportation means. So it is possible to call the discipline ‘conjuration’. That said, the psionic teleportation virtually never ‘summons’ creatures. The focus is more on jumping thru space-time. In any case, teleportation is a subset of conjuration. Possibly, teleportation is distinctive enough to count as its own category.Illusion. Not metacreativity. Most illusion spells create an objective reality out of an ephemeral energy - be it telekinetic ‘force’, arcane ‘force’, astral ‘ectoplasm’, magical ‘energy’, ghostly ‘shadow’, ‘reality’ alteration, or whatever. All of these illusions are manifestations of telekinetic energy. Mind over matter. Note certain spells labeled ‘conjuration’ are actually objects that are ‘created out of nothing’. Really, these objects are created out of the will of the mind, and are by definition, made out of telekinetic energy. These quasi-real objects belong to the creative discipline of illusion.Shapeshift. Not psychometabolism. Heh, the term psychometabolism is one of the most glaring examples of psionic technobabble. It is tempting to equate it with transmutation. Yet psychometabolism specifically refers to mind over body, a living being, and shifting body shapes. The term transmutation is too broad and wildly inconsistent. Shapeshift is the most familiar (and medieval-esque) term for the psychometabolic group of concepts.D&D 5e categorizes healing spells as ‘evocation’ in the sense of ‘positive energy’. I get that, and support it. At the same time, healing spells also deserve the tags abjuration and shapeshift-psychometabolism. Healing is also its own distinctive category.In sum, using D&D 5e terminology, the six psionic disciplines that tag and organize the spells are:• Divination• Enchantment• Evocation• Teleportation (a distinctive subset of conjuration)• Illusion• Shapeshift (a distinctive subset of transmutation and including healing)</blockquote>

Verification