It brings us to a question of game design. Are the PHB and DMG a matched pair, where the PHB has all the rules the players use and the DMG has all the rules the DM uses? Or is the PHB supposed to be a mostly self-sufficient set of basic rules for playing the game, and the DMG is advice and tools and optional rules that a DM is likely to find useful? In the former setup, having item destruction rules in the DMG makes sense. In the latter, putting basic operations in the PHB is expected.
Are PCs expected to destroy walls? If so, they should probably have some idea of how hard that is and what it entails.
Damn the fans of the game!
D&D has always had a hard time picking one or the other of these. I think it works best when the PHB tells the players how their characters work, and not necessarily a whole lot more.
I don't agree. Very few people are engineers with a good, realistic understanding of how the actual physical real world works on a fundamental, mechanical level. I've watched big giant tough dudes not be able to loosen a lug nut for example, even though they know they are big and strong. That is to say, people don't see the DCs.
Why? People in the real world don't. Watch any home improvement show where someone hands a homeowner a sledge hammer.
Personally if they want to keep psions as just "reskinned magic" than the subclasses are a perfectly fine way to go about it imo.
That ship has not (for certain) sailed.
That seems emblematic of the issue.
So for me personally I was loving the concept that your talents and disciplines were closer to cantrips that as you gained in level you learned how to spend psi points to adjust and enhance. They only had like 20 some powers but each power had numerous wys of enhancing and modifying it however you only ended up getting like 7 powers over all
