Two questions re: Sarishan Sorc-Priests and Psionics

(snip) I think anyone looking at this should bear in mind a non-trivial portion of the judges out there think this is an illegal build. Like Josh I remember it as the Stat Monkey saying a variation of, “no spell casting period. You literally just awoke with mental powers.”

I might warn a player the first time I saw such a build. I would eventually disallow such a character to be run at tables I judge. Of course this could be changed by an official rules update.

This is my exact concern, and as someone who only very sporadically views the boards, and someone who doesn’t expect players to do so, I know I would be annoyed as a player to occasionally run into people who think I am a cheat because I followed the rules as written in the book. Especially support the GM has is, “I think one of the authors said something about that on the boards.”

BTW, it is my recollection that Stat Monkey did start with the hard line, “no spell casting period” idea, but moderated throughout the thread. He may have been thinking about moderating from that hardline to allowing spellcasting in step 9, instead of moderating from the book to not allow spell casting, but I distinctly remember the thread ending with some “I’ll have to think about it” in some regard, and considering it was just in a discussion thread, I thus considered it undecided.

Full disclosure, I have an undisciplined psion character. I built it without casting in character creation because of Stat Monkey’s post, but don’t expect others to have done so. In reality, the talents I take in step 9, if I can’t take ASC there, I just take further up build instead of ASC, so by about 1.6 or 1.7 there is virtually no difference in build except I don’t have the advanced universal spells. (there is a temporary slow down because I have to take prestidigitation separate from ASC, but it is minor). If this were resolved that we can follow the rules as written, I would correct my character build to reflect that, but at this time I prefer to be conservative with the rules. I just don’t expect others to be, and could see this causing trouble and ill will in players.