Revised Psychic Power Rules

[Dolnikan]

Of course a story tends to not involve a protagonist who dies in a stupid accident. However, our games already involve many things where it comes down to chance and not to the story how a character ends up. For instance, plasma weapons which are known to overheat disastrously. In a book you'll never see a member of the main cast being killed by his own exploding weapon. In the game this can happen and can be fun.
BEing hit or missed by weapons fire is already arbitrary, the whole game is because it is based on randomness(dice rollls)

[Molotov]

One of the hallmarks of the 40k games is the perils of the warp. In a narrative sense, characters can do certain things regularly without calling daemons down upon themselves. You need only look at Ravenor, Eisenhorn and the like. Despite what we say, the players aren't "collaborating to create a story" - they are playing a game, and creating a narrative to go alongside the game.

Inquisitor is not a persistent RPG in the same sense as, for example, Dark Heresy. I would argue that the games set in the 40k universe are crystallised, concentrated versions of that universe. In a mundane, stress-free environment, powers might be easy to use - but then we don't play this game to experience mundane, stress-free environments.

Myself, I'd rather have a table involving psychic phenomena, and then create skills that allow certain psykers the ability to lessen the danger (for example, allowing characters to re-roll risky actions, or re-roll perils, or, or...) - These sorts of things would allow you to represent the sort of skilled psykers represented by Patience Kys, for example.

Still, this clearly becomes something that is down to personal interpretation. I like the idea of psychic powers being "weird" and "dangerous", because it makes the 40k universe more weird and dangerous. If you don't like it, that's fine. I'd be interested to see the rules you're intending to use in your own thread.

I'll try to get a revised set of notes up this weekend.

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

For instance, plasma weapons which are known to overheat disastrously.

Again, I've returned to the Rogue Trader Sustained and Maximal settings on Plasma weapons... The idea that the Ad Mech are dumb enough to put the safety valve on the same side of the weapon as the operator is rather idiotic IMHO.

The reason for the introduction of the overheating rules (in what? 4th edition?) was that people kept forgetting the cooldown period and firing heavy plasma guns on maximal every turn... As things like that are easier to contend with in a game like Inquisitor there really is no need to have "Gets Hot" rules.
Of course there's no reason to have them in the current 40k either - the rule was there to balance the Plasma weapons without the cooldown but Eldar plasma weapons (now known as Starcannon) lost their "gets hot" rule long ago - Imperial plasma weapons could also lose their "gets hot" rule just as easily but momentum has gathered behind the explanation that the AdMech are idiots.
In the same way momentum has gathered behind the idea that Psykers are all just about to explode, that the dangers of psychic ability are as significant as implied in the 40k rules...


From my own perspective Inquisitor is the game where the players are involved in creating the narrative - more so to a degree than in a persistent RPG - the rules are more flexible in an Inquisitor game, the rolls of the dice mere suggestions.

Again, I prefer to have the sort of factor which "perils of the Warp" represents as a tool for plot rather than a random event - its not that they don't exist but they won't throw an 800A/F spanner into the Plasma Reactor of my plotline when I don't want them to.

[MarcoSkoll]

The reason for the introduction of the overheating rules (in what? 4th edition?)

3rd edition. 4th edition had a very nasty version that was later changed back for 5th.

As things like that are easier to contend with in a game like Inquisitor there really is no need to have "Gets Hot" rules.

Except that Inquisitor was written alongside 3rd Edition, not 1st or 2nd, and the canon had changed - the Adeptus Mechanicus no longer fully understand how to maintain and build such ancient technology. (It's not that they build them with the plasma vents pointing at the user, comedic exaggeration or otherwise).

Eldar plasma weapons (now known as Starcannon) lost their "gets hot" rule long ago

Did they ever have one? I don't know whether they had recharging or stuff before 3rd Ed, but the 3rd Ed codex was explicit that they didn't overheat, and 4th edition didn't list gets hot either.

Also, not a great comparison, as the starcannon is a vehicle (or pseudo-vehicle, like the weapons platform or wraithlord) weapon, and plasma weapons don't overheat on vehicles anyway (extra cooling systems, apparently).

~~~~~

Overall, I know you're sold on the Rogue Trader canon, but not all of us got into the game that early, or are even necessarily that old!

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

It may only have been in the interim between the 3rd Ed release and the Codex release but the plasma "gets hot" rule was certainly applied to the Eldar Plasma Cannon (I believe the first instance of the Plasma Cannon as a man portable weapon replacing the Heavy Plasma Gun coincided).

The difficulty with the AdMech not being able to maintain Plasma tech is that (IIRC) Ryza are supposed to be brilliant at it... If you allowed all Imperial Plasma weapons to upgrade to Ryza (again IIRC) Pattern which ignored the "gets hot" rule, if the points cost was low enough then they'd all be Ryza pattern.
The rule exists for game balance and is then (somewhat dubiously IMHO) supported by the fluff whereas in Narrative games we don't have to worry about the game balance in the same way...


However, the question of my preference for older fluff is not the point at issue.

The randomness of a "Perils of the Warp" table is the point I question.

I contend that such perils should be a matter of plot or player choice rather than random factors. It is worth noting that the original rules (published at a time when "Perils of the Warp" was a part of 40k) have only Risky action and Psychic Overload effects, both of which are relatively tame. Perhaps an indication that the rules created for game balance in 40k were not required in the Narrative setting.

[Dolnikan]

Many things have not been included in the main rules of Inquisitor. I think that was not because the authors didn;t think that it would fit in but because they couldn;t put all that in the rulebook. Added to that was the amount of time on their hands.
Most of these perils of the warp aren;t earth-shattering, instead they serve to make psychic failures more interesting. After all, failing at using psychic powers which draw on the realm of chaos itself should not only have a single, predictable effect like losing willpower, with some bad luch the abyss will stare back, and even give a handshake.

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

The Warp may be the Realm of Chaos in some respects but in the same respects it is also the Realm of Law...
The Immaterium follows rules, warp travel  and psychic powers would not be possible without them - nor would the Chaos gods... And psychic abilities aren't sorcery, The Thousand Sons were excommunicated because their sorcery touched on the powers of Chaos, drew power from them but psykers do not work the same way.

Bad things can happen to psykers but, again, I prefer to keep those bad things plot driven or a matter of Player choice. The Warp is a big place and the chances of any given psyker running across something particularly significant in such a wide terrain are too small to be sensibly described within game. One could perhaps suggest that particularly interesting psykers attract attention like moths to a flame and that's why Elrad Ulthuan's las pistol has more wear from smacking Bloodthirsters on the snout than from actual use but why would the psyker you're dealing with be particularly interesting compared to the billions of others in the Imperium?


And please don't involk Nietzsche so badly out of context, he's misunderstood enough as it is.

[MarcoSkoll]

but why would the psyker you're dealing with be particularly interesting compared to the billions of others in the Imperium?

The characters in Inquisitor are, pretty much implicitly, important and/or fated.

If a psyker is going to be interesting, one who is an Inquisitor, who serves an Inquisitor or who will one day battle with the Inquisitor is going to be a lot more worthwhile to corrupt, disrupt or even kill (if their fate involves something the warp entity involved finds unfavourable).

One thing I will add - while I'm not yet sure how much narrative weight these effects might have, I'm deliberately reserving final judgement on that until such a point as I've had a chance to try them myself.

[Dolnikan]

I agree with Marco that the characters in Inquisitor are already interesting, and when they clash you have multiple interesting persons fighting. And there might be many psykers in the universe, but there are even more daemons and other nasties in the warp.

I'm sorry for abusing Nietzshe in the way I did, I realize that it is taking things outof context but I used his words as a wayof putting things. The famous quote has after all become a bit op a cliché in discussions about the warp.

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

And there might be many psykers in the universe, but there are even more daemons and other nasties in the warp.

I'd disagree with that...
The Imperium consists of millions of worlds, a population of trillions and billions* of psykers. While there are legions of daemonic entities serving the four great powers they are not innumerable...
Enslavers and other, non-daemonic, entities almost certainly outnumber the daemons but even so the Psykers still outnumber them IMO.

*I can't recall the incidence of psychic ability, it's been quoted in the past but I can't think where.
However, working on the basis of a Marine Chapter of a thousand I do not believe one would be unreasonable to expect a single Chief Librarian (obviously, he's the Chief after all)... A pair of Epistolaries doesn't seem excessive, four Codicers maintains a simple Hierarchy and, at least in terms of the thousand marines is still a relatively small number... For the sake of argument I'll assume that Lexicani are Company level assets so that gives us seventeen or 1.7%
Now it's not a huge number but it means that, on a Hive World, with each Hive running to, say, twenty-five billion people and a dozen hives... That gives you one psyker for every man, woman and child in the USA... On one planet. (Admittedly most of those wouldn't actually be on the planet, the Black Ships will have taken most of them away and killed a few (or more than a few) but you're still dealing with mind-boggling numbers).
Of the three-hundred and odd planets in the Gothic Sector of Segmentum Obscurras the Fortress and Hive Worlds alone would contribute billions of psykers to the total – and IIRC the Gothic Sector doesn't even contain any Civilised Worlds where the percentage is likely to be even higher due to improved screening and organization.

[MarcoSkoll]

However, working on the basis of a Marine Chapter of a thousand... so that gives us seventeen or 1.7%

I have to disagree in return. Aside from the fact that the chapter headquarters are outside the normal thousand marine limits and that we're starting with a set of individuals that is not representative of the human mean, that's entirely like saying "Crude oil must contain percentages X, Y and Z of these length hydrocarbons, because those are the percentages we want them in". Which, of course, is not true.

A fortress monastery will have a great many serfs and guards who would have been genetically suitable but who could not be implanted due to the Codex Astartes limit.
When you start to consider those in the numbers, and the fact that psychic recruits (due to their rarity) would prove preferential for implantation, the percentages don't look anything like 1.7%.

In fact, personally I believe it's not so much about screening their recruits, but screening the Blackships for anyone who could be Marinated. (And yes, I did mean to say marinated). Not that they'd hugely publicise that...

I can't recall the incidence of psychic ability, it's been quoted in the past but I can't think where.

"The Inquisition" lists Delta and above at one in a billion births.

I used that to come up with my own theory about the Assignment being based on logarithmic rarity, which eventually yielded figures that would be about 15,000-20,000 psykers of Iota or above on a 7 billion planet like Earth. Or ~750,000 in your hiveworld example.

Overall, assuming an average 10 billion humans on each of the million planets (you might push it to 20 billion, but eventually you have to start to wondering where all the food comes from - soylens viridians, rat burgers or manure-grown fungi can't breach the laws of thermodynamics, and it's all ultimately limited by solar input), that's a quadrillion humans, with about 2.5 billion reasonably "powerful" psykers, in the entire Imperium.

That is billions, but not <carlsagan>billions and billions</carlsagan>... and the warp wouldn't be that dangerous with that many nasties.

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

It's possible that the instance of psykers on Astartes Seed Worlds is higher than the average but I would doubt it's so significantly higher as to provide that sort of variation.
The Aspirants receive the first implantations before the onset of puberty (with the exception of the cannon breaking Chapters) which is when the majority of psykers first manifest – so as there's not way to tell until that point whether a child will be a psyker we have to assume that the instance of psykers at that stage is close to the norm for the Imperium as a whole (excepting the slight variance as mentioned above).
Of course as Neophytes manifest as psykers there will be significant wastage – those too weak to become Librarians (and must be soulbound to The Emperor), those unable to control their powers and therefore requiring execution...etc but in addition to that, among those psykers who would normally survive to adulthood, there will be an additional wastage from those whose abilities rebel against the various conditioning therapies which are part of the creation of a Marine.
Now being a Neophyte Astartes is a "career" with a very high attrition rate anyway, mostly a fatal attrition after the onset of puberty, and psykers have the added complication of having to deal with everything their fellows have to do as well as the training required by their own psychic abilities. Imagine, given the fatality rate resultant from the implantation of The Catalespean Node, the trouble a psyker would have trying to maintain control of their abilities which simultaneously learning to sleep in half of his brain at a time...

Hive World populations is an interesting point – Hive Worlds do support populations far in excess of that which their own surface area and stellar output would normally allow. They're reliant on Agri-worlds to do so and it's noted that Hive Worlds which find themselves isolated from that lifeline, either by Warp Storms or by siege suffer horrendous depopulation incredibly quickly.
Hive Worlds are able to partially circumvent the Laws of Thermodynamics by importing a very significant portion of their energy and water needs.
Now, of course, it seems someone forgot that logistical challenge during the Third Armageddon War...
But given that the Earth could, theoretically, support a population of two-thousand trillion* on approximately 1800 kcal per day without reliance on imports it would not be beyond the bounds of possibility for a Hive World (the job of which is, in effect, to generate population) to hold ten times that. In practice it's probably less than 5% of that... but still it's a vast human resource.

Of course the problem with this sort of argument is that very few of the writers of 40k fluff have any real concept of the numbers they're dealing with (Abnett's apparent assumption that two meters equaled six feet not withstanding).

One in a million is a useful trope to express rarity, but suggesting that one in a million of an emergent psychic species is a psyker is... I can't find a single congenital defect which even close to a one in a million risk... to take an extreme example for want of better data its probably something like the chances of carrying a child to term with its brain outside its skull...
However, even given that incidence we're dealing with an empire encompassing 90 billion stars (more than 90% of the galaxy, the galaxy containing approximately 100 billion stars), while not all of those stars have planetary systems and while not all of those planetary systems include anything but dead rocks, even after terraforming activities.
If even one tenth of the stars are under Imperial Control, if even one tenth of those have planets and one tenth of those with planets have populations... even at one in a million you're still looking at psykers equivalent to ninety planets' populations – ten billion per planet (on average) that's nine hundred billion psykers.


* Energy intercepted by the earth per day = circa 1.5x10^22 Joules (3.6x10^18kcal)

[Dolnikan]

A recessive trait could easily only show in one in a million people, even is one in every thousand carries it. The problem of using librarians to calculate the percentage of psykers gives huge numbers of them. As you said, more than a few per cent. If this would be the case the black ships could never have the capacity to transport and process the huge numbers of psykers and Terra would be too small a planet for even a part of the psykers.

Recent estimates say that there would be about ten billion planets in the galaxy of the right size to support life, about half a billion of those would be in the habitable zone. Owning just a million of these of course is quite an accomplishment but leaves space for plenty of others. I would guess that most planets won't even have been discovered yet by the Imperium, there are just so many.

The people at GW have indeed shown that they don't understand the numbers involved in the background. For instance, a hive world with a population of just fifty billion would in an emergency be capable of sending billions of soldiers to battle, when they mobilize in the way the soviet union did in the second world war. With such numbers of defenders it will be nearly impossible to take the planet in the way often depecited by GW, using forces brought in from space with the small amount of ships and their given sizes usually employed in the background.

There are many such examples which show that using the numbers GW has given us are almost completely useless. A billion is a very small number on a galactic scale, even a hundred billion is less that the population of some planets.

[MarcoSkoll]

Hive Worlds are able to partially circumvent the Laws of Thermodynamics by importing a very significant portion of their energy and water needs.

You can't circumvent Thermodynamics. But, Hive Worlds are not a closed system. The Imperium, however, more or less is.

Agri-worlds will have a high energy production, but only a small population (likely measured in millions rather than billions). Hive worlds might have hundreds of billions of mouths to feed, but very little energy production. You can therefore talk in terms of averages.

As it is, with seven billion people we still have major world hunger problems. If we improved our approach to the problem (which would require sacrifices not everyone would want to make), then we could sustain more. 10 billion is probably somewhat conservative as a figure, but it could be argued back and forth, so I'm only looking to be vaguely accurate.

But given that the Earth could, theoretically, support a population of two-thousand trillion* on approximately 1800 kcal per day

Energy intercepted is wildly different to usable energy. Most reflects back into space due to Earth's albedo, some of it maintains global temperatures, there's inherent inefficiencies, you'd have to remove the oceans (which would mess up the climate so much that we, and all food sources, would be dead) and everyone would have to live underground in near darkness, because you couldn't afford to waste a single square foot of land or more than the merest trickle of light.

I can imagine worlds that try and push self-sustaining to that kind of level (the idea is intriguing), but it's definitely not the norm.

[DapperAnarchist]

Going back to 2nd Edition, the Black Ships would direct the most stable of the powerful psykers to those branches of the Imperium that needed them - the Scholastica itself, the Inquisition, and the Chapters of the Astartes. So the Librarians are recruited from the Imperium at large, not just the Chapter Worlds...