We've got a mystic in my Tuesday group. It's an Unearthed Arcana class so it's wildly OP as it stands. One of the things they've got is psi points. You spend the points to do stuff.

A few of the powers are kind of like counterspell or well, other things where you declare what level you're using and then hope that it actually works. If it doesn't work of you've lost the spell slot and need to try again.

The instructions(?) for the psi points says that you can't say, essentially, "oh, I need to add more psi points to this thing I want to do to make it work". It seems to me that you should say flat out the number of psi points you're using to make it work as opposed to "How ever many it takes to make it work"

The incident I've got in mind is the mystic wanted to lift an iron bull and was asking the DM about how heavy it was. DM tells her it looks like an iron bull (not saying if it was hollow or not) so however heavy you think that is.

And she says that she's going to use how ever many psi points it takes to lift it (in this case it would be seven - the max she could) but doesn't actually say seven.

Which - since you can't add onto the psi points when trying to do something once you start makes it seem like to me you could start at say five psi points and then realize oh, that's not working and add more and no one is the wiser since you're "using however many it takes."

And this way you don't spend as many psi points as if you declared it. (5 for the first try and 7 for the second try is 12 points vs just 7 since you "used however many it took")

Which feels kinda cheating? Because you couldn't get away with, "I use whatever spell slot is necessary to cause the bad guy from tossing a fireball at me" since you don't know what level the guy is tossing it at you.

(3rd - 9th)

Does that make sense or am I just being too... rules lawyer'ry?

No, it's definitely one of those 'spirit' situations in my book. It's not cheating explicitly, but it's definitely side-eye worthy and potentially jerk-ish move.

shinotenshi22: Oh, good, not just me.

I know, from her other game stories she's told me, she can be jerkish (in the name of being IC though I'm a bit iffy on that one) but I don't think she sees it quite like that.

Also she seems to be a bit of a dick DM. She let her second level players get a lot more money then second level should have and if they'd not lost it in a gamble she would have had robbers just steal it from them.

Which would mean she'd need to somehow prevent the PCs from attacking back because that's what a PC is going to do.

so maybe she's a powergamer?

(munchkin? Twink? I've never fully gotten the various distinctions between levels)