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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9786052" data-attributes="member: 6790260">At least for my part, I see psionic and primal as equally distinct things--and I do see primal as quite distinct from the self, because of many of the symbols and rituals involved with it.Primal magic involves a kind of transcendental understanding, it's just not the kind of understanding that can be communicated through text. That's something that both arcane and divine magic share: they are communication, from one entity to another. Primal magic isn't about communication, but immersion.While for you, man is an animal and thus just as much part of these things as everything else, I don't quite see it that way. Instinct is something difficult to understand--yes, humans have instincts, but a lot of them are pretty weak and minor compared to what other animals possess. When you then enhance that conceptual space with supernatural power--where instinct can literally be magic, itself--then learning from and drawing on the instinctual-supernatural can be outside of the self, without being totally other to the self, the way arcane or divine magic implicitly are.If you like, you could say that I divide these four kinds of magic into a grid: "foreign" vs "innate" (arcane/divine are "foreign" to the self, coming from observation or revelation, psionic/primal are "innate" to the self, being the mind and the body), and "analytical" vs "intuitive" (arcane/psi are analytical, divine/primal are intuitive). Psi is, in this sense, most different from divine because it differs on both axes.(This is also probably the point where I should note that I'd prefer that all four types--arcane, divine, primal, psionic--have to some degree distinct mechanical expression and result, significantly more than what D&D 5e has ended up doing, where they're all functionally 100% the same and differ almost exclusively in pure-fluff descriptive text. Since arcane/divine sailed long ago and 5.5e tripled down on "primal is literally just a different spell list" too, psi is the only remaining axis upon which some kind of differentiation can still be present.)</blockquote>

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