Rewriting the Sororitas

[MarcoSkoll]

I'm not sure about the idea of a communal faith pool, because building the faith of all those different characters around a points system won't help make them play in distinct ways.

I'm thinking that the Missionary's faith will be largely based around some of the Word of the Emperor abilities (because he likes shouting prayers at the top of his voice). The other possibles I have still to decide, but in some cases, it might just be a case of a generous Wp & Nv. Depends on how strong their faith is.

[Molotov]

Marco - I'm advising a fellow player on creating a Sister Hospitaller character, and she'll be using similar acts of faith, so I'll let you know how our playtest goes.

[Inquisitor Cade]

I know this tread isn't exactly fresh, but I've developed an opinion on acts of faith that I thought I'd share.

I think that faith doesn't need a points system. Causing miracles shouldn't exhaust a character's supply of faith, that doesn't follow. I also think the power of faith, while potentially potent, is better left ill-defined. It should allow the faithful to achieve what a sceptic or an atheist might claim they could have done without the faith. A powerful faith is still a major asset though, so it should be represented such in game.

I think it is best represented in re-rolls. About to take a really important shot? Focus on the power of your god and then if the dice say you miss, take a re-roll. What do you know, the shot hit based on your ballistic skill, faith played an important part in the mechanics of the event, but on the other hand nothing happened that couldn't have happened without faith.

I'm not quite sure how best to implement it but I guess it would work a bit like concentration. For each action you spend focusing on your god, praying, chanting or just trusting etc, you may re-roll a complete roll of something you intended. So three actions trusting before a shooting attack might lead to re-rolling the to hit roll twice and the damage once. An action trusting in preparation to being engaged in close combat could be used to force a re-roll of the to hit roll, allow a re-roll of the parry roll or force a re-roll of the damage rolled or hit location.

What do people think?

[MarcoSkoll]

That's actually a pretty interesting idea - and it does simplify things. I think I'd want to include action dice within that, because one could imagine a Sister praying to the Emperor to show her the path/see her safe in a task.

One downside is that it would mean putting things like her resistance to psychic powers on a different system, the idea of faith being a shield against the powers of the warp being one I want to keep, but that could simply be -20% to target her with psychic powers or something.

[Zakkeg]

I must say, Cade, that's fairly brilliant. Seems obvious in hindsight (as all the best ideas do), but somehow it never occurred to me. (Or anyone else, apparently.) I'm not as ambitious as Marco sculpting-wise, but if I ever find a decent mini on which to base a Sororita I know how I'm handling acts of faith. Cheers, mate.

[Alyster Wick]

I'll agree (as far as the mechanics go) that you've really hit on something great Cade. Having an ability which is akin to aiming but with faith seems like a great and characterful way to display the strength of the battle sister's beliefs.

That said, I think you've been doing some great work Marco in terms of developing "Miracles" that could be utilized in-game. I think it's worth looking at as an article on overall acts of faith. The Ecclesiartary could definitely use something like that to flesh out and jazz up their characters. It makes a fiery preacher much more interesting (and frightening) in game terms to know that he could randomly strike out with a blow guided by the emperor's hand.

Anyway, I think adopting/adapting Cade's idea is right on for what you're looking for (and avoids to messiness of creating a brand new system) but you've gotten too much good stuff to just abandon. Maybe something to put on the backburner. If you aren't interested then I may want to steal some of your thoughts at some point, once I finish the mountain of stuff already in front of me (if Dapper is reading this he's probably cursing me adding yet another obstacle in front of the article we've been working on...).

[MarcoSkoll]

As I've got to take a Sister Famulous to Molotov's INQvitational this weekend, I went back to the Acts of Faith and rejigged them in a fashion based on Cade's suggestion.

~~~~~

Acts of Faith:
The character can spend actions praying, which requires a successful Wp test. For each of these successful tests, the character gains a "Faith Point". Each of these faith points allows the faithful a re-roll of all the dice in any one roll, or to force a re-roll on enemy character whose action directly affects (GM's discretion) the faithful, and keep the result of their choice. Spending multiple faith points can break the normal "only one re-roll" rule.
At the start of each of the character's turns, their pool of unspent Faith Points is reduced by one.

Additionally, a faithful character may attempt to nullify psychic powers (and recover any associated Wp damage in a similar fashion), but does not otherwise count as a psyker.

~~~~~

I'm not sure quite how these will work out. Faith points are obviously powerful if the character can work up a large stock of them, but given that it takes spending actions and their pool is automatically reduced by one every turn, getting up that large stock for just when you'd need it is no walk in the park.

However, pretty simple and has a "plausible skepticism" angle (in that it doesn't allow anything to happen that couldn't have happened anyway).

Letting them nullify psychic powers with their faith... I'm less sure about this mechanic, but I definitely want faith to be usable as a shield against "magics". I'll report back on this one.

[Dolnikan]

Nullifying powers is a good thing I think, but it should never cause psychic overloads for the psyker, it is merely resisted, there won't be much in the way of backlash I think, and if the power would affect multiple characters I think that it should still have an effect on them, just not on the faithful character. Perhaps it should also cost a faith point.

[MarcoSkoll]

With my normal house rules for nullifications, they cannot cause overloads. I use a ranged Wp roll with a penalty equal to the amount the psychic test was passed by - success nullifies, failure doesn't.
This makes nullifications a bit more risky (as the nullifier takes the penalty, not the caster), as well as making multiple nullifications less of a "brain explodes out of ears" threat (as the penalties no longer stack).

But, in any case, a suggestion has already been made on that front that it's changed to "resist" the power, rather than nullify. This does mean it will never stop the power affecting other characters, but I have instead extended its demesne slightly in allowing the resistance of things like force weapon damage. After all, force weapons lost their instant kill effect versus Sororita in the Witch Hunters codex.

Unfortunately though, it seems everyone is getting hung up on critiquing that half of the talent, which is not the half I'm worried about. There's nothing particularly special in game about being able to counter psychic powers - any psyker gets to do that. Plus there's hexagrammic wards, various degrees of psychic null, etc...

Being able to bend the whims of fate is definitely the more unusual part. Although, as the many failures of fate points that I've suffered in the 40k RPGs have shown me, the ability to re-roll dice when you might need to is not a sure thing.

In any case, I'm changing it. Any faith points have to be declared before the roll is made.

This just seems perfect to me, fixing all of the potential problems I could see. It makes the prayer much less generic and nebulous when you're spending it on specific things rather than being able to use it to tweak whatever roll goes wrong.
It tones it back heavily too, stopping you screwing over the opponent who gets his one in a million chance to work by suddenly dropping a re-roll on him, and making you potentially waste faith points on rolls that would have gone your way anyway.

However, all of the potential punch is still there. It can still let you do all of the same miracles, provided you gamble the faith points at the right time.

(I had instead considered dropping the "keep the result of their choice" term, but I had that in there because I don't feel that faith should end up making a roll worse.)

[Dolnikan]

That way it indeed would be better, preventing it from being too powerful. It could also be an idea to have a maximum number of faith points in storage, otherwise a few turns spent praying can give a character a pile of re-rolls for when the fighting starts.

[MarcoSkoll]

That was the purpose of losing a faith point from the pool at the start of every turn - it's not possible to save them up over more than a turn or two, and even the complete committal of every turn to nothing but prayer won't let them build up at any great speed.

So it's very unlikely a character would ever build up more than 2, maybe 3, at a time (and even that would take some effort, plus luck with the timing) - but I wouldn't want to stop a faithful character spending several turns committing themselves to the Emperor and then performing total miracles.

The alternative solution I had considered was limiting a character to only generating one Faith point per turn (they could pray more than once, but no matter the number of successes, they could only generate one point) and giving them a maximum "pool" of one plus their Wp bonus. This pool would not however be reduced each turn.

I felt this offered a bad incentive to just stockpile them rather than "generating" them as they would be useful/needed, though.

[Dolnikan]

Stockpiling indeed is what has to be prevented, otherwise faithful characters get quite boring. The solutions that I thought up so far however would fail at that, but as it is with many things in the game, the player should have the characters act in a characterful way.