Elves have Bladesingers...
Gishes
Orcs have Warchanters...
Adept might work...
Puissant might also, but more as an adjective...
Ooh, race-specific terms could be good if we had sufficient numbers of different races. Maybe something to do with luck for halflings?
Come on, how come one here never suggested Arcaknight? It even remembers a pokémon, Arcanine.
A good term, even if it makes me think of Arclight theatres. Keep 'em coming!
How about High Arcanist to represent Wizards, Sorcerers and even Warlocks, with Low Arcanist to represent Duskblades, Hexblades and the multiclassed?
I actually really like this one. The divide is there, in a rather good way. We could also have "hedge warrior," to spin off of hedge witch.
OK, I understand a bit better now.
Of course, not every armored horseman is a knight. Most in-game titles have more to do with social status than abilities. Often there is some crossover, since social status and ability are intertwined, but as a general rule a person is defined by social standing.
In a campaign world, the fact is that almost all powerful warriors will have some sort of magical abilities, whether they come from class features or equipment. In the eyes of the general population, is there a big difference between psychic warrior who makes liberal use of Expansion and a straight fighter who has a big stash of Enlarge Person potions? Maybe, but these two characters seem to have more in common with each other than with a gish that casts fireballs and sets his sword on fire, right?
While you are correct that not every warrior on horseback is a knight, there
are certain terms that can be used loosely for members of practically any melee class. Admittedly, the problem is a bit more severe with magic-users--mage, spellcaster, arcanist, and so on--but there's a little bit of it for fighters.
You're right--there is a bit of a difference between gishes, depending on how exactly they use magic or items. Let's focus primarily on those of the showier fashion. In a world with magic items, simply growing in size may not be particularly noticeable to the average peasant. However, Bob the farmer is definitely going to notice the guy with a swirling cloak of stars and a blade that flings bursts of flame.
Now that Hanako and I are living together, I was able to ask her about this one. For those who don't know, Hanako is my linguist roommate who puts a lot of thought into world-building and the development of things over time. I'm going to try to go over what she said as accurately as I can, but I may have to come back in and fix things.
Let's take the word samurai--not thaumurai, actually samurai. She looked up the kanji, and it has a meaning that means "to serve," or "servant." She's not sure if that's the original meaning, but she's giving it a good guess based on her knowledge of how Japanese words. So, we have a general term for one who serves, which eventually becomes far more specific, referring to a particular warrior caste. One, incidentally, that serves masters--much like a knight. Now, there is a tendency is more modern fantasy settings to use "samurai" to simply refer to any Japanese-style swordsman. So, the term went from a general word, to a word describing a very specific group, back to a general word.
It has been pointed out that knight is a weird case of a term that can be either very specific or used more loosely. After discussing samurai, Hanako and I went into a tangential discussion on the development of the knightly class in Europe. The knight started out--though not with the name "knight"--as a very general fighter figure. In fact, the warriors that would eventually become the knights started out as mounted thugs that would fight for the highest bidder. However, over time, the term "miles" came to replace "nobilis" in certain formal texts. Certain historians argue that this coincides with the adoption of the knight into the nobility. So, you had the general fighter figure becoming a very specific fighter figure, but it was still a social class that could be entered by those with sufficient means. Granted, it was expensive, but it could be done. However, the nobility eventually solidified, preventing outsiders from easily entering the knighthood. Here, a very general term becomes a somewhat more specific term, which then becomes a very specific term. Today, "knight" can be used in either a very specific sense, or in a more general sense--which still usually references that specific sense.
In a setting with knightly orders, you cannot call just any warrior a knight. However, in settings without such orders, "knight" would probably refer simply to any virtuous fighter.
Hanako suggests that, if the combination of magic and weaponry is one that is thought of as a combination--that is, it is viewed as a synthesis--it is likely that a specific name would become a general term. Take Xerox, for instance. Technically, it was originally a very specific name for a company. However, since then, we have come to use "xerox machine" as a general term. So, if the Order of Mageblades were the first and most well-known practitioners of magic and melee, then people would eventually use "mageblade" to refer to any gishes, even if they were not members of that order.
There is, however, another possibility. In fantasy martial arts, there is sometimes the concept of magical energy and fighting styles that flow into each other seamlessly. Think some depictions of monks--the ki manipulation and actual fighting are a part of the same discipline, with no distinction drawn between them. Think of the ninja, for whom mastery of weapons and of jutsu are one and the same. In these cases, a new word arises to describe the style because it is
not a combination of existing ones. Instead, it is a thing in and of itself--not two things together, but a thing of its own. As such, it has a name in and of itself--not two names together, but a name of its own.
So, in a setting in which gishes actively combine two distinct mechanics, terms should have roots in specific, but should make sense as general terms. For this, it might actually make sense to use the gish terms for various races. And, hey, if you have githyanki on the Material Plane as one of the dominant races, it could very easily come to pass that "gish" becomes the normal in-universe term. However, given that they usually hang out on the Astral Plane, it might make more sense to look at the racial terms for humanoid races. Amechra's post here helps us a bit, as well as allowing for a bit of diversification. Finesse fighter gishes might go as bladesingers, while more frenzied types could go as warchanters. On the other hand, if duskblades arose early enough, their name might well become the norm.
On the other hand, in settings in which magic and fighting flow together naturally, it makes sense for original terms to have cropped up. If picking up a sword, casting a spell, and casting a sword through a spell are all equally intuitive actions, they should each have their own terminology.
As such, I suggest we look to building two groups of terms. For the settings in which magic and melee are distinct, but can be combined, we need to come up with generic-sounding terms that could have come from a not-too-stupid-sounding specific term. Low arcanist is good here, as are many of the terms previously suggested. These words will always sound slightly less general than things like "mage" or "fighter," simply due to the nature of their development.
For the settings in which the combination of magic and melee is just as natural as either style on its own, we would want words that sound like original terms in and of themselves. Anyone know knows much about constructed languages would be a great boon here, since we should technically be building towards something that sounds natural in English. These are the words that should be just as basic as "mage" and "fighter," since the concepts that they express are on the same level.
