What is the [psychic] tag meant for, and how distinct is it from [psionics] and [mystic]?

Question

The psychic tag has no tag info/wiki, but the tag currently appears on 8 questions. 6 of them are about Pathfinder (all but 1 of those are about the Psychic class, as far as I can tell), and 2 are about D&D 5e. One of those last two is about psychic damage; the other more recent question is apparently asking about psychics "like ones described in the expanded psychic handbook (D&D 3.5)".

There seem to be two other related existing tags, though neither are totally identical.

The psionics tag info says:

For questions about psionics, a pseudo-scientific term referring to unnatural mental powers, including telekinesis, psychometry and telepathy.

The concept of psionics seems similar to the abilities used by the Psychic class in Pathfinder, but it seems like the Psion also exists as a separate class with its own abilities so I'm assuming it's different from psionics somehow.

And the mystic tag info says:

The mystic, also known as the psion, is a class in Dungeons & Dragons that is able to harness innate psionic abilities. These abilities are often distinct from and less common than traditional spellcasting.

Again, the concept seems similar to that of the psychic, but I'm assuming there's some important distinctions. If so, it makes sense that psychic should be its own separate tag.

What exactly should the psychic tag be used for?

Is it distinct from psionics and mystic? Assuming the tag should remain, should it just cover the Psychic class from Pathfinder (and classes in similar RPGs of the same name) - if not, what kind of questions should it be used for?

Answer 1

History lesson:

• D&D includes supplemental material detailing “psionics,” a form of supernatural power distinct from “magic.” Something along these lines appears somewhere in each numbered edition of D&D. Instead of Vancian spell slots, psionics uses a point-based system. Narratively, it is a much more “internal” form of power, projected from a mind into reality, which is backed up in various D&D campaign settings (e.g. manifesters in the Forgotten Realms project their own personal “mini-Weave” rather than use Mystra’s or Shar’s as spellcasters do).

  • Notably, “psychic” is often used as an adjective that is synonymous to “psionic,” as for example in the “psychic warrior” class that uses psionics to augment martial prowess.

• D&D 3.5e releases most of the content from the Expanded Psionics Handbook under the Open Game License, and includes it in its System Reference Document. Being open-game content, psionics is thus opened up for third-party publications, e.g. Hyperconscious.

• Pathfinder is also based on the open-game content of D&D 3.5e, but Paizo repeatedly states they are uninterested in psionics. Dreamscarred Press, whose founders had contributed to Hyperconscious and who had continued to produce psionics material for D&D 3.5e, switch to Pathfinder relatively early on, producing psionics material for that system in the absence of anything official.

• Paizo releases Occult Adventures, which includes “psychic magic.” This was magic, not psionics, and there is a fair amount of internal consistency about that, however, the choice to name it “psychic magic,” rather than, say, “occult magic,” and the use of many psionic powers’ names for the psychic spells, produces a massive amount of completely-unwarranted confusion. Dreamscarred Press loses an enormous amount of business almost overnight, and spends a great deal of page-space across an entire line of publications trying to sort out and clarify the differences between the two. (Disclaimer: I contributed to DSP’s efforts to clarify the two.)

  • Occult Adventures also includes a class called the “psychic,” just to add another layer of confusion.

• D&D 5e releases the mystic, Unearthed Arcana content that showcases how 5e might do psionics. It is again a point-based system, and again says “mystics shun the world to turn their eyes inward” and use “inner, psychic strength.” As Unearthed Arcana material, it is not “official” and psionics in 5e might end up very differently from the mystic as presented.

• Pathfinder 2e is released, and the sort of magic previously referred to as “psychic magic” is now “occult magic.” The bard is a core occult-magic class, instead of an arcane class as in D&D and Pathfinder 1e.

Which basically explains the confusion we have in our tags: because Occult Adventures chose to confuse things and muddy the waters, it is very easy to misunderstand and misuse these tags. Perhaps worse, until recently we have been using occult-adventures for most of the psychic Pathfinder material, either alongside psychic or instead of psychic. In fact, questions tagged occult-adventurespsychic are actually referring to the class psychic.

It seems to me that the folksonomy is looking for four tags here:

1. Something to refer to the psionics found widely in D&D and elsewhere.

2. Something to refer to the psychic magic of Occult Adventures and the occult magic of Pathfinder 2e.

3. Something to refer to the psychic class from Occult Adventures, and again possibly elsewhere.

4. Something to refer to the mystic class from 5e Unearthed Arcana, and possibly elsewhere.

Both psychic and mystic run afoul of the same problems I raised for the Pathfinder magus, but worse since as a tag it’s not even clear that they are being used as classes, or even as nouns rather than adjectives. But as in that case, the only solution available seems to be to throw up our hands and bite the bullet on it. “Psychic” additionally runs into people mixing it up with “psionics,” since outside of Occult Adventures and the post-OA Pathfinder material, the two words are synonymous—as seen in the 5e mystic’s introduction quoted earlier.

In short, Paizo has done us no favors here, and that’s reflected in the current confusion.

So then, proposals:

• occult-magic is created and added to questions asking about the psychic magic of Pathfinder 1e and the occult magic of Pathfinder 2e. Having occult-magic be the main tag may help reduce the likelihood that someone referring to psionics will use it, and in any event since Pathfinder 2e uses “occult magic” this seems likely to be the official name going forward.

• psychic-magic is created and synonymized with occult-magic. This eliminates some of the discoverability problem that occult-adventures had, since someone typing in “psychic” will see it, possibly making Pathfinder 1e players more likely to correctly get occult-magic on their questions even though that system doesn’t use that term.

• occult-adventures is removed from relevant questions in favor of occult-magic. The ultimate fate of occult-adventures may become the subject of a separate meta question if anything more seems to be necessary.

• psychic is renamed to psychic-class. I don’t like this, but it seems to me that it’s the only way to clarify to readers that are unfamiliar with the Pathfinder situation that it refers to a class. This tag is removed from any mystic questions and replaced with psionics. This tag is removed from any Pathfinder psychic/occult-magic questions not involving the psychic class, and replaced with occult-magic.

• psionics is kept the way it is. Compared to psychic/occult magic, it has a longer history, a wider use outside of a single system (including non-D&D systems), and in any event, there isn’t a useful qualifier for it the way there is for “psychic magic” that clarifies the situation.

• mystic is kept the way it is. It could become mystic-class, but I’d prefer to wait until it actually becomes a problem the way psychic and psionics have before doing that.

Answer 2

The psychic tag is not being used for a specific class.

Instead, it seems to have been used for the psychic system of magic in pathfinder. Which means it should probably be renamed into psychic-magic. Of the 8 questions, only 3 have to specifically do with the psychic class (1 of which is a duplicate created by an impatient asker of one of the other questions).

Additionally, psionics and psychic-magic are different.

In Pathfinder, Psionics refers to the third party set of alternative rules that is an updated version of Psionics from 3.5 for Pathfinder.

Psychic-Magic refers to another kind of magic, akin to arcane and divine magic.

On the subject of the occult-adventures tag.

The psychic tag should not be synonymized with the occult-adventures tag. occult-adventures (OA) is a bad tag on it's own since as a source book tag it suffers from being simultaneously too broad while being too narrow. It's too broad since it has to cover the breadth of material introduced in the book (spells, feats, new magic system, rituals, classes, archetypes, etc), and it's too narrow because it restricts the questions to only ones about content from that book.

This means questions, like this one or this one which are related to material from OA, but not actually about OA content, will be made. Similarly, it means tags about material introduced in OA, like kineticist, will be made, because they are narrow enough, yet broad enough, to be useful as a tag, thus making the OA tag redundant on those questions. Similarly, question like this one don't fall under the OA tag, because despite being about a class that was released in OA, they do not deal with material from OA.

Finally, we shouldn't need a tag for a source book, instead questions about content in a source book should have tags related to the content they are asking about (eg. kineticist). Sometimes this could even be the same as the name of the source book (eg. mythic-adventures). However, just like we don't need a core-rulebook or player-handbook tag, we don't need a tag for each source book.

What should we do.

1. Turn psychic into psychic-magic, and update the tag wiki accordingly.

   • The tag excerpt for it should be something like "For questions about the Psychic magic ruleset used in Pathfinder. For questions about mental powers, or Psionics see the Psionics tag."
   • The wiki post should be something like "A Pathfinder ruleset introduced with the book Occult Adventures released in July 2015, the Psychic Magic rules provide an another form of magic designed to used alongside Arcane and Divine Magic."

2. Burninate the occult-adventures tag, it's not useful.

3. Leave psionics and mystic the way they are, no need for changes.