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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9361499" data-attributes="member: 4937">I would encourage you to read the works of Jon Peterson, starting with "Playing at the World".  The D&D wizard comes from Chainmail and predates D&D itself.  And most likely inspiration for the Chainmail wizard was a war game scenario where the battle of Minas Tirith was played out and which included a Wizard figure with the power to cast fireballs and lightning bolts.  Spell memorization and forgetting spells when used was adopted from Vance as a means of controlling the power of the wizard out of several possibilities, but it was not the inspiration for the D&D wizard and for that matter, Vance creation itself would fall into this literary wizard tradition.  I never claimed that the convoluted creation history of the psion was the problem.  I outlined that history merely to show that psion was a misnomer on top of the concept of psychic which itself had been used as a more wholesome replacement for mystic and thus that the class was in fact a magic using class and not as its name would suggest a cybernetic class. The fundamental problem with "psionics" is that a wholly new magical system that isn't integrated with the primary magical system and tacks on another 100 or more pages.  There was never a need for a class and the only reasonable interest of the system died when it became a class rather than an alternative to spell-casting being tied to class.   It survives solely because of mechanical fascination with mana point systems.</blockquote>

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