Decrepit Dakkanaut
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Psychic powers in 40k have always been tricky. Right now they seem to be divided into three categories: Shooting Psychic Powers (not to be confused with the game term), Synergistic Psychic Powers, and Weird Psychic powers. We can divide the psychic powers in the Chaos Space Marine Codex into these categories pretty easily, to illustrate the distinctions and the overlap:
Shooting Psychic Powers
Doombolt
Wind of Chaos
Bolt of Change
Synergistic Psychic Powers
Warptime
Weird Psychic Powers
Gift of Chaos
Lash of Submission
Nurgle's Rot
The last three are interesting because two have features in common with shooting psychic powers, that they are used in the shooting phase instead of another ranged weapon, affect models within a particular range, and Nurgle's Rot has a partial profile (S3 AP-). The Gift of Chaos has a range, but completely bypasses the hit/wound/save mechanisms that make your chance of killing Marneus Calgar or Abbadon in one turn less than 0.17. And it can spawn a...Spawn! Something they all have in common is that they don't require a hit, though they all have a range. The Lash of Submission is the most interesting, allowing the greatest deviation from the established rules, while Nurgle's Rot has the least: allowing shooting into and out of combat, and an area of effect rather than a range. Gift of Chaos doesn't deviate from the normal rules in that it causes its effect on a Toughness test, rather than the usual hit/wound/save, but it does in terms of taking effect at the beginning of the turn, and allowing you to choose which model is effected.
Synergistic psychic powers seem to be a nice compromise between powers that deviate so much from the basic rules that one wonders if one is still playing Warhammer, and powers that are just less reliable weapons. Indeed, the Chaos Daemons Codex seems predicated on the notion that Daemon psychic powers are mostly just guns and 'buffs' (Pavane of Slaanesh and Boon of Mutation being notable exceptions). And the game is replete with specialist models who confer guns and buffs onto units that they're a part of, or nearby to, so that such psychic powers are just less reliable wargear or special rules.
Which brings me to my point: the designers of the Chaos Daemons codex realized who boned the Chaos Daemons would have been had they relied on psychic tests to shoot, buff, and otherwise act. Quite aside from the gross imbalance between facing armies with psychic defenses and armies without, constantly rolling for psychic powers would make the game tedious. That's why Warlocks don't have proper psychic powers. Similar design decisions drove the Tau Battlesuits to use conventional characteristics instead of Walker characteristics. Given the propensity for vehicle-heavy lists, suggesting that people don't find fielding vehicles onerous (and indeed less onerous than hordes of troops), one imagines that the designers may chance that in the next iteration of the Tau Codex. But I digress...
My point is that psychic powers in the current edition, and stretching as far back as Rogue Trader, have been simply another special rule fitted into an existing structure and made less reliable for reasons that are not always clear. The card-game of 2nd edition seemed predicated on the design notion that increasing player interaction is good (the same reason underlying the hit/wound/save rules), but even when it was just a game inside a game it didn't affect the fundamental structure of the game beyond requiring a specific Psychic Phase to shoehorn it into the Warhammer game.
Maybe this is a reductionist account of Warhammer psychic powers, but I think it's an accurate account when assessing what psychic powers add to the game, as opposed to simply being like other special rules that don't have that extra layer of work (psychic tests, perils of the warp, psychic defenses, etc). It means that psychic powers are unsatisfactory to me on two counts: (1) They are not representative: psychic powers are supposed to warp the very fabric of reality to cause effects, but similar effects seem perfectly possible without them. (2) They require too much work for their payoffs, and as evidenced by Chaos Daemons, Eldar Warlocks, Necron Pariahs, and so on treating psychic powers as ordinary special rules (Psycker Battle Squads being an interesting compromise between many psychic models, and work required to resolve effects).
Of course, if you're just representing a bolt of pure ravening warp energy, such as those of Tyranid Zoanthropes, then sure, psychic powers are representative enough, and the extra work involved means that the power actually balances out its characteristics as a weapon. But those are pretty boring psychic powers compared to stuff like Lash of Submission, Gate of Infinity, 'Ere We Go, Jaws of the World Wolf, Eldritch Storm, and so on that actually change the position of models on the field as well as their status.
Take Warptime, for example. Warptime is nice. It's very effective, especially when it can be combined with psychic shooting attacks such as Wind of Chaos. But when used by a Chaos Sorcerer it can be described perfectly functionally as adding the Preferred Enemy and Lightening Claws rules. In a way it's nice that GW has stopped the habit of making up a new special rule every time they want to add flavour to a unit, and instead either creating new rules out of the conjunction of universal special rules, or simply relabeling universal special rules. But again it isn't as descriptive as the Warlock psychic power Enhance, because it doesn't warp time, it just enhances the reliability of the Sorcerer model's ability to address enemy models with shooting and close combat.
Notice that while each 5th edition codex (apart from Chaos Daemons) has a list of Psychic Powers, some of them just aren't useful. Having a variety of six or eight or ten powers is pointless if the powers are duplicative, or some are obviously better than others - Machine Curse in the Space Marine Codex comes to mind. Most Space Marine Librarians look the same as a result - the Gate of Infinity plus another power that's usually the AP3 template one whose label escapes me. The Tyranid Codex remedies this propensity towards uniformity slightly by distributing powers to a number of psychic models, the Space Wolf Codex remedies this badly by forbidding duplication on the whole, if not in detail. There's no point in having 6 options with only 2 being live if 3/4 of a book is flavour-text anyways - rules themselves do not add flavour, it's the language they're dressed up in (see comments about not inventing new special rules...).
So add a third problem (3) the previous categories of psychic powers either limits diversity or requires additional restrictions to promote diversity.
The solution that I've been entertaining to all these problems is pretty radical, and I'm only proposing it in the context of Warhammer 40k because I'd like people to be able to understand it: in discussing how it might be implemented in 40k, I might understand better how it can be implemented generally in wargames. Just to forestall the usual "I don't like it and don't think it would improve the game" comments: it may not, but I'm more interested in the implications and the mechanics of implementation than people's personal preferences. With that caveat, here's the notion:
Psychic powers should affect the basic rules of the game.
Take Warptime, for example. Instead of 'buffing' a unit, it could allow the Chaos Space Marine player to rearrange the order of the turn sequence. It could be used to insert an extra phase (movement/shooting/assault) into the game, or delete a phase (though the latter would be moreso a Stasis power). It could be used to allow a Chaos Space Marine unit to shoot/move/assault in the opposing turn. It could be used to defer the effect of a unit's shooting until after another unit's shooting in the Shooting phase. In all of these admittedly half-baked notions is the idea that instead of changing how a unit works within the ordinary structure of the game, the game's structure is changed to benefit the unit.
What do you think? Any ideas for reformatting existing psychic powers in this way?
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Lieutenant Colonel
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Hi Nurglitch.
Are you proposing using these powers as 'one shot deal ' card type effects , similar to 'dirty tricks ' in Blood Bowl?
Each player gets a set amount of Psychic Power cards at the start of the game (Dependant on natural ability /and psychic models in force?) .
And they play them to thier best advantage at the start of each game turn, perhaps?
Used in this way they have a can have a larger effects on the game, but used in a more restricted way...
EG
Curses.
Blindness,all enemy units are unable to take actions in the shooting phase.
Cowardice, all enemy units lose the ability to take actions in the Assault phase.
Tangle foot, all enemy units lose the ability to take actions in the movement phase.
Bonuses.
Time slide, all freindly units may move twice in the movement phase.
Farsight, all freindly units double weapons ranges in the shooting phase.
Temporal Anomoly, all freindly units gain an aditional attack in close combat this turn.
Maybe let the Curses and Bonuses be played to cancel eachother out?
Blindness and Farsight ,Tangle foot and Time slide, Cowardice and Temporal Anomaly, cancell each other out.
This gives the players the option to minimise oponents psychic attack, or 'take it on the chin', knowing they can play thier psycic cards unopposed later in the game?
Sorry about the rubbish names, and the limited examples.
But I wanted to get the basic idea clear in my head.(Even if it is totaly different to what your proposeing?...  )
TTFN
Lanrak.
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Decrepit Dakkanaut
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Lanrak:
Right now I'm taking it as given that psychic powers are controlled by the 5th edition casting rules. What I'm interested in exploring here is a notion of psychic powers as rules that let you manipulate the basic rules of the game, rather than simply working within that framework. My hope is that as such controls prove insufficient to the task of controlling the effects of such game-altering rules, then that proof will point towards what would be sufficient for the task.
So given that the concept is about manipulating a particular framework, in this case Warhammer 40k for the sake of familiarity and discussion, I don't think it renders the turn structure obsolete. Indeed, a highly structured game like Warhammer 40k seems a perfect starting point given that it gives a fairly arbitrary structure from which players can attempt to deviate.
After all, if players already have the option of ordering actions as they want, the ability to re-order actions has no super-natural significance, if I can offer the notion of the game's basic rules as laws of nature, and psychic power rules as manipulating those laws of nature.
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