I think the wording is clear. “Your Charisma score increases by 1, to a maximum of 20.” Nothing about it says you can’t take the feat, you just miss out on the increase, since you’re already at the maximum of 20.
Pretty solid list at a skim. There are a few inclusions that I probably wouldn’t have chosen and I assume my own list would probably have a few you wouldn’t have chosen. But, the basic idea is there.
That’s a really good point. Abjuration is such a weird spell school, it’s easy to forget what does and doesn’t fall under it. But you’re absolutely right; Shield, Mage Armor, anything that boils down to “kinetic barrier” is absolutely appropriate.
I disagree about energy manipulation. I think...
I agree. Like I said, if you were going to make a psionic pyrokenete, it would best be served by its own class rather than being part of the psion. And frankly, I wouldn’t even bother because I don’t think D&D’s advancement structure lends itself well to modeling the archetype.
This is part of...
I would be pretty reserved in what I would pick, because while yes, you can justify practically any spell effect as theoretically working as a psychic power or something some psychic character in some piece of media has done. But, as others have noted, at some point you’re just making another...
I’m tempted to just go through the full 2024 PHB spell list and make note of which spells I would give the base psion and which spells I would say not at base but maybe from a subclass. But that would have to wait until I get home, and at that point it’s going to be really hard to convince...
Psychic pyrokenesis is a very significant trope, despite the connection not being very obvious on its surface. But, pyrokenetes are often just pyrokenetes and don’t usually have other psychic abilities. Pyrokenesis also tends to have high associated risks, such as being difficult to control -...
Well, yeah. Obviously if the rest of the group enjoyed playing this way, then more power to them. I’d only have been dragging the game down if I had stuck around. That wasn’t the impression I got, but I could have been wrong. The vibes were terrible all around, I probably wouldn’t have come back...
I mean it would have been one thing if he had actually been roleplaying interactions with NPCs while running his business. Not my cup of tea, but an understandable play preference. But, this was mostly dry number crunching. It really felt like this guy would rather have been playing...
I once got invited to a game by a friend I met playing Magic the Gathering. Don’t remember the system, but it’s not really relevant. Anyway, I and two of the three other players built fairly combat-focused characters - we had two martial artist type characters and one barbarian-esque Amazon...
Oh, I absolutely agree! I think that because improv is essentially prepping and executing simultaneously, it’s usually better to prep in advance if you can. It is, of course, impossible to predict everything you might possibly need to prepare, and even if you could it would take infinite time to...
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s real demand for a warlord like there was for artificer or psion. I mean, I’d be thrilled, but I don’t think it’s even on WotC’s radar.
I also am of the opinion that improvisation is just planning and implementing simultaneously. So, I’d argue that an improvised game isn’t essentially different than a prepared game, except in that the improvised game’s preparation happened as it was being run instead of in advance. Maybe I’m...
Of course railroads are widely accepted as bad form, because being bad form is part of the definition. Again, it’s like saying “being boring is widely considered bad form.” Yeah, of course it is, because “boring” is a personal assessment of something being negative in a specific way.
Put...
But what I’m saying is, what one person might see as a linear adventure with an appropriate amount of autonomy, another person might see as "You have no autonomy, no choice you make will ever matter, the outcome of every encounter and combat is predetermined".