I hated those days so much. I love a good gish but not cover up for shitty forced resource management.
"oh boy, I played a fantasy game so I can be someone that can use magic and think about all the neat ways to use it and have an escapist power fantasy ... except that I'll arbitrarily just run out of magic so I can't play my concept anymore until later. Great. Thats exactly what I wanted. Thanks D&D." I'm so glad when a group is open to another system.
-edit- to clarify, I'm just saying I don't care for that style of play. I hope you find people to play that kind of game with and have a good time. Just at a different table than mine ;)
I see most of the chat isn't familiar with the 'chameleon' prestige class from 3.5. It was super underpowered but it seems like you all would think that means updating it would be a good approach to handling this player.
My wife played a changeling chameleon one campaign, and while the rest of the party blew her away in combat, in RP she was pure gold.
In settings, altering "max zoom" fixed it for me. Bumped it from x30 to x50 and it became readable.
Makes me feel sad my favorite system isn't well known enough to be here (HERO system, or champions), but it always warms the heart to make fun of old White Wolf stuff some more
I remember the mystic. As a psion fan across multiple editions, I thought the incomplete version of the first levels of mystic was neat and had some interesting ideas. Then they released the rest of the levels where it arbitrarily stopped gaining casting and I was so frustrated/vexed/disappointed/confused I homebrewed my own psion just to be able to move on.