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With regard to bespoke psychic powers, it seems rather off from a verisimilitude perspective that e.g. if a Farseer mounts a Jetbike then they must immediately forget Guide and instead learn Misfortune before going into battle.

Why?

It's not as if either of these powers is in some way specific to being on foot or mounted, so what's the point?

The theory would be not that the forgot the foot psychic power, but they they chose to study and learn a power that capitalized on high mobility because they knew they liked jetbikes.

Like maybe the foot faseer's path went Guardian> Warlock> Farseer

Where the mounted farseers path was
Windrider> Mounted Warlock> Mounted Farseer.

I'm still not sure I like it better than choices, but I get it.

Maybe you select a defensive/utility power and an attack power for the psyker before the game.

Or maybe, it's more important that the "play against other person" part matches the fluff than the "sit at home alone and write an army" part.

When two units can more or less do the same thing, at some point you will figure out who does it best. At that point, it's no longer a strategic decision and goes to the shelf unless you make up flavorful excuses to run them anyways.

@Jake, I have read your post but am too tired to write a response today. Will respond eventually.

PenitentJake wrote:The theory would be not that the forgot the foot psychic power, but they they chose to study and learn a power that capitalized on high mobility because they knew they liked jetbikes.

Like maybe the foot faseer's path went Guardian> Warlock> Farseer

Where the mounted farseers path was
Windrider> Mounted Warlock> Mounted Farseer.

I'm still not sure I like it better than choices, but I get it.

Fluff nitpick: technically they're supposed to have an aspect warrior in there somewhere. Have to be a former aspect to become a warlock. I think there's even fluff suggesting that all farseers were former warlocks implying that they were all former aspects, but that particular bit of fluff doesn't sit well with me.

More on-topic, the concept of a psyker "studying" and "learning" a power feels off to me. Like, it seems wrong that a pair of farseers would be setting around comparing their stat sheets and discussing the merits of Guide vs Misfortune. Even back when we could pay for multiple powers or generate our choice of power at the start of each battle, it felt a bit strange. If I were to redesign psykers with fluff in mind, I think I'd probably give each faction one or more power lists (sort of like disciplines from past editions but with like, 3 powers instead of 6+) and then give psykers access to the relevant power list. And then let psykers be flexible swiss army knives that can choose how they contribute each turn. Price accordingly. One farseer already Doomed the main thing your army plans on shooting at? Go ahead and toss out a Fortune onto a unit that needs it. Or opt to let him shoot an Eldritch Storm this turn instead. First farseer died? Your army isn't suddenly without Doom; the second farseer can step into that role.

Even if you don't want to implement a complicated subsystem for building up stress by casting too much or whatever, simply lettin psykers choose one of several effects each turn both gives the impression that they have access to a wide variety of psychic effects and have to focus on one of them at a time to pull them off. Optionally: include a core strat that lets you use a second power.

Jidmah wrote:Or maybe, it's more important that the "play against other person" part matches the fluff than the "sit at home alone and write an army" part.

When two units can more or less do the same thing, at some point you will figure out who does it best. At that point, it's no longer a strategic decision and goes to the shelf unless you make up flavorful excuses to run them anyways.

@Jake, I have read your post but am too tired to write a response today. Will respond eventually.

I feel like it's worth noting that *some* (not all) of this efficiency contest is an artificial result of datasheets being broken up based on wargear. So back in the day, a bikeseer and a footseer weren't necessarily competing directly with eachother. A bikeseer was just a farseer that paid a few extra points for some extra mobility, durability, and the ability to keep up with a bike squad. He had access to the same powers as a footseet because they were the same "datasheet." Sure, maybe the totally-not-a-meltagun psychic power made more sense on a terminator librarian than on a foot librarian, but ultimately you were just customizing your librarian(s) rather than framing it in terms of termie librarisn competiting with foot librarians and so forth.

Also, outside of highly optimized play, things like taking a footseer even if a bikeseer is considered more optimal usually isn't a huge deal. Outside of competitive play, you're generally just looking for options to be "good enough" to be viable rather than looking for each option to be perfectly even with other options.

 Jidmah wrote:
Or maybe, it's more important that the "play against other person" part matches the fluff than the "sit at home alone and write an army" part.

When two units can more or less do the same thing, at some point you will figure out who does it best. At that point, it's no longer a strategic decision and goes to the shelf unless you make up flavorful excuses to run them anyways.

@Jake, I have read your post but am too tired to write a response today. Will respond eventually.

That's going to be true for all units in the army, not just those with specific power options. Psychic powers don't just add the optimisation pathway issue to the game, they are just one example of it. People will always optimise their units, allowing power choice back doesn't change that at all.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


Fluff nitpick: technically they're supposed to have an aspect warrior in there somewhere. Have to be a former aspect to become a warlock. I think there's even fluff suggesting that all farseers were former warlocks implying that they were all former aspects, but that particular bit of fluff doesn't sit well with me.

I wasn't trying to reference official lore or anything, just providing a rough sketch to answer someone else's question. Certainly reasonable that time as an Aspect could be a requirement of either. The point was that psykers might choose to develop and specialize in particular powers that align with other aspects of their martial style.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

More on-topic, the concept of a psyker "studying" and "learning" a power feels off to me.

So what feels "on" to you? Like, Eldrad emerging from the womb with full psychic mastery? Or, like, was it elf puberty; went to sleep one night a zit faced loser, woke up the next day a psychic master... Never had to learn any of it, the power just appeared like pubes!

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Like, it seems wrong that a pair of farseers would be setting around comparing their stat sheets and discussing the merits of Guide vs Misfortune.

No, it likely involved hours of reflection, meditation, ritual preparation with those rituals been adjusted over time through trial and error in order to achieve more tailored results. There may be quests to specific shrines, or perhaps a period of apprenticeship to one or several masters over time. I mean, ever play a Sorcerer in D&D?

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Even back when we could pay for multiple powers or generate our choice of power at the start of each battle, it felt a bit strange. If I were to redesign psykers with fluff in mind, I think I'd probably give each faction one or more power lists (sort of like disciplines from past editions but with like, 3 powers instead of 6+) and then give psykers access to the relevant power list. And then let psykers be flexible swiss army knives that can choose how they contribute each turn. Price accordingly. One farseer already Doomed the main thing your army plans on shooting at? Go ahead and toss out a Fortune onto a unit that needs it. Or opt to let him shoot an Eldritch Storm this turn instead. First farseer died? Your army isn't suddenly without Doom; the second farseer can step into that role.

You think this because you're thinking in terms of stand-alone games and not Crusade campaigns. What you are describing is a Psyker who has achieved the Heroic level, or at the very least, Battle Hardened. But when you Crusade, you don't start at the end point or even the middle; you tend to start at the beginning. People made similar statements about Space Marines when Crusade first dropped: "Space Marines are veterans of thousand of wars, blah, blah, blah."

A Space Marine CAN be a veteran of a thousand wars, sure. Many are. But the dude who just took off his scout armour for the last time and put on his full power armour for the first time is no less a Space Marine. And for a Crusader, it's the playing the journey that is fun. Certainly, your force will have Elite units in it, and those will certainly have "experience" ... But they may still be new to their role as an elite, meaning that there are elements of that role they haven't learned, despite their veteran status in other roles.

So sure, you want super flexible swiss army psyker? I can get behind it. But let me start the day I have my first vision; let me pick my first power based on what I experience in my first battle with psychic awareness: did I kill an enemy from a distance or up close? Did I take hits and stand defiant, or was I too evasive to be hit? Did I rally the Guardians, or terrorize the enemy?

Because when I choose my first battle honour, these battlefield events are the things that will determine whether that is a psychic battle honour, and if so, which one it is. And the process repeats four times, with longer intervals between moments of enlightenment.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Even if you don't want to implement a complicated subsystem for building up stress by casting too much or whatever, simply lettin psykers choose one of several effects each turn both gives the impression that they have access to a wide variety of psychic effects and have to focus on one of them at a time to pull them off. Optionally: include a core strat that lets you use a second power.

Again, psykers AREN'T one size fits all- some of them perhaps SHOULD be limited to one power. In my last post, even I conceded that Hemlock Wraithfighter and the Psyker from the Corsair Voidscarred unit could be reasonably limited to a single chosen power, or even an assigned one. And of course I realize taking your suggestion doesn't necessarily mean applying it equally to every single psychic unit, but you also haven't explicitly said you wouldn't either.

My basic point, from the beginning of this thread, has been that the current system is definitely shallower than what I'm looking for, and ANY proposal that offers more flexibility than what we have now would be preferrable; that includes your suggestions, Jid's and Lathe's suggestions and the suggestion of others in the thread too. Each of us has different ideas- we all fall at different places on the spectrum between total flexibility and total rigidity, but all of us are proposing something with more depth than the status quo.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


I feel like it's worth noting that *some* (not all) of this efficiency contest is an artificial result of datasheets being broken up based on wargear. So back in the day, a bikeseer and a footseer weren't necessarily competing directly with each other. A bikeseer was just a farseer that paid a few extra points for some extra mobility, durability, and the ability to keep up with a bike squad. He had access to the same powers as a footseet because they were the same "datasheet." Sure, maybe the totally-not-a-meltagun psychic power made more sense on a terminator librarian than on a foot librarian, but ultimately you were just customizing your librarian(s) rather than framing it in terms of termie librarisn competiting with foot librarians and so forth.

Also, outside of highly optimized play, things like taking a footseer even if a bikeseer is considered more optimal usually isn't a huge deal. Outside of competitive play, you're generally just looking for options to be "good enough" to be viable rather than looking for each option to be perfectly even with other options.

Good points. The stance that I've taken in my posts to Jidmah has been a stance of meeting halfway, because I understand the point of view. I personally prefer chosen powers for the vast majority of psychic units... But I do see how curated powers chosen specifically to support a unit's battlefield role by synergizing with the other characteristics of the unit helps define and expand the battlefield role in question... And again, if you allow swaps for all or even some units on top of that, IT'S STILL better than what we have, so I'm not gonna shot it down.

 Hellebore wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Or maybe, it's more important that the "play against other person" part matches the fluff than the "sit at home alone and write an army" part.

When two units can more or less do the same thing, at some point you will figure out who does it best. At that point, it's no longer a strategic decision and goes to the shelf unless you make up flavorful excuses to run them anyways.

@Jake, I have read your post but am too tired to write a response today. Will respond eventually.

That's going to be true for all units in the army, not just those with specific power options. Psychic powers don't just add the optimisation pathway issue to the game, they are just one example of it. People will always optimise their units, allowing power choice back doesn't change that at all.

Of course it's true for all units. Which is why GW has been differentiating units in direct competition by changing profiles, adding abilities and splitting datasheets while also increasing the number of roles units fulfill on the battlefield. That's why a farseer on foot has different powers than a farseer on bike - so there is a strategic advantage to bringing both, creating more diverse armies.

If both can take doom and guide like in past editions, this causes the opposite effect - people are being rewarded to spam the bestest unit as often as they can, leading to cookie-cutter lists with no variance.

 PenitentJake wrote:
The point was that psykers might choose to develop and specialize in particular powers that align with other aspects of their martial style.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

More on-topic, the concept of a psyker "studying" and "learning" a power feels off to me.

So what feels "on" to you? Like, Eldrad emerging from the womb with full psychic mastery? Or, like, was it elf puberty; went to sleep one night a zit faced loser, woke up the next day a psychic master... Never had to learn any of it, the power just appeared like pubes!

So what I'm getting at here that I feel you're not seeing is the idea that many psykers in 40k should be capable of a variety of psychic stunts as a baseline. Did Eldrad get better at using powers over time? Sure. But I also suspect that he was capable of doing more than a single psychic thing by the time he was considered a farseer. Like, a neurosurgeon might specialize in brain-related medicine, but he's still going to pick up a lot of medical knowledge before he's allowed to be a surgeon in the first place.

You seem to be picturing a kind of video-gamey (don't mean this as an insult) approach to training up psykers in 40k. Like, a marine with psychic talent specifically studies how to make a force field with his brain, knows nothing else about his craft, and then is sent off to battle as a librarian. Whereas the way I see it, he likely gets a more "general education" about psychic abilities, likely including multiple useful abilities, before he's given his librarian certification and sent to the front lines. Like, he's presumably taught how to safely sense/harness/suppress warp phenomena as baseline skills. He's probably shown the basic of foresight/reading the emperor's tarot if his chapter is into that sort of thing. Even if he's more of a telekinetic guy than a telepathic guy, he's probably still expected to go through telepathy 101 training. He's carrying a force weapon around, so presumably he's taught how to channel energy into/through that thing in some fashion.

All of which is to say that by the time he's sent off as a certified librarian, he's working with a toolbox; not a single tool. A given librarian might not be any good at pyromancy in general, but he's probably working with a general set of psychic muscles he can flex in various ways rather than a list of D&D spells that he either can or can't cast. Need him to protect your squad from incoming fire? Maybe he isn't enough of a telekinetic to put up a wall of force, but maybe he *is* enough of a pyromancer to put up a wall of flames or enough of a future-seer to tell the squad when to duck or enough of a stormcaller to mess with the enemy's aim with wind and snow.

So it's weird when a farseer can see the future in a way that lets you hurt the enemy better (Doom/Guide), but he can't also see the future in a way that lets him keep his friends alive (Fortune). And if he can confuse the enemy's senses telepathically (Misdirection), you'd think he could also at least attempt a Mind War in a pinch even if it isn't his forte.

I'm ranting/rambling a bit, and I really don't mean to go too hard on this point. I'm just saying that framing psykers gaining access to new stunts as them specifically training to do one boardgame ability seems less apt than picturing them working on their, let's say, telepathy in general, which could then manifest in a number of ways. I don't picture farseers sitting around saying, "Teach me the Guide power." I see them sitting around and trying to get better at reading the skein in general and doing so under pressure.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Like, it seems wrong that a pair of farseers would be setting around comparing their stat sheets and discussing the merits of Guide vs Misfortune.

No, it likely involved hours of reflection, meditation, ritual preparation with those rituals been adjusted over time through trial and error in order to achieve more tailored results. There may be quests to specific shrines, or perhaps a period of apprenticeship to one or several masters over time. I mean, ever play a Sorcerer in D&D?

I'm afraid your analogy is going over my head. Don't sorcerers develop their powers naturally/without training? That's a big part of what separates them from wizards in D&D, right?

I think we might be largely agreeing with eachother. I get the impression that you're just framing things in the context of a psyker wanting to unlock a specific video game ability by buying the power specifically whereas I'm thinking of it more as them putting points into various psychic skills which then cause certain stunts/abilities to be gained as a result. That is, you don't learn Doom. You put points into Future-Seeing, and you unlock Doom/Guide/Fortune as a result.

You think this because you're thinking in terms of stand-alone games and not Crusade campaigns. What you are describing is a Psyker who has achieved the Heroic level, or at the very least, Battle Hardened. But when you Crusade, you don't start at the end point or even the middle; you tend to start at the beginning. People made similar statements about Space Marines when Crusade first dropped: "Space Marines are veterans of thousand of wars, blah, blah, blah."

A Space Marine CAN be a veteran of a thousand wars, sure. Many are. But the dude who just took off his scout armour for the last time and put on his full power armour for the first time is no less a Space Marine. And for a Crusader, it's the playing the journey that is fun. Certainly, your force will have Elite units in it, and those will certainly have "experience" ... But they may still be new to their role as an elite, meaning that there are elements of that role they haven't learned, despite their veteran status in other roles.

Agreed that I wasn't speaking with Crusade in mind making this a bit of a tangent, but those criticisms seem pretty valid to be honest. It almost sounds like you want people to think of every newly-made crusade army as consisting exclusively of dudes who just got promoted yesterday. Which again, is a very video gamey sort of approach. Nothing wrong with that, but you can see how the idea that all your terminators and characters and tactical marines just started doing their jobs last week feels like a very specific assumption/twist on the basic idea and not like the default idea itself, right?

If a character is a captain, then I'm picturing a guy who has been marine-ing for a while. He probably already has a reputation for preferring stealth tactics or taking on enemy leaders in personal combat. He didn't spend two centuries without a personality, get promoted, and *then* decide he favored certain tactics because he dug up an extra blackstone fragment during the latest mission. And similarly, when I put a crusade roster together, the backstories I give my psykers don't usually include the words, "This guy just started farseeing last week."

So sure, you want super flexible swiss army psyker? I can get behind it. But let me start the day I have my first vision; let me pick my first power based on what I experience in my first battle with psychic awareness: did I kill an enemy from a distance or up close? Did I take hits and stand defiant, or was I too evasive to be hit? Did I rally the Guardians, or terrorize the enemy?

Because when I choose my first battle honour, these battlefield events are the things that will determine whether that is a psychic battle honour, and if so, which one it is. And the process repeats four times, with longer intervals between moments of enlightenment.

I'm all for customizing characters to help tell their stories, but psychic battle honors don't necessarily mean you gained a brand new capability, right? Like, Foreseen Fallen or whatever the eldar psychic battle honor is called represents an eldar psyker seeing an inevitable death and giving his comrades just enough warning to do something cool as he dies. But like, your farseer was probably capable of seeing futures where people die prior to giving him that battle honor. Or maybe a better example, the one where you see enemy souls and grant ignores cover to your squad as a result. Do you think that your farseer was incapable of perceiving souls in the warp prior to giving him that battle honor, or does giving him that battle honor just represent him honing a skill he already had access to?

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Even if you don't want to implement a complicated subsystem for building up stress by casting too much or whatever, simply lettin psykers choose one of several effects each turn both gives the impression that they have access to a wide variety of psychic effects and have to focus on one of them at a time to pull them off. Optionally: include a core strat that lets you use a second power.

Again, psykers AREN'T one size fits all- some of them perhaps SHOULD be limited to one power. In my last post, even I conceded that Hemlock Wraithfighter and the Psyker from the Corsair Voidscarred unit could be reasonably limited to a single chosen power, or even an assigned one. And of course I realize taking your suggestion doesn't necessarily mean applying it equally to every single psychic unit, but you also haven't explicitly said you wouldn't either.

Sure. Exceptions for mono-power psykers (or some other system) could be implemented where it makes sense to do so. That said, I feel like the majority of psykers represented on the tabletop should reasonably have access to more than one psychic trick. Anything daemonic can easily be assumed to be capable of doing more than one magic trick. The basics of the seer path as described in the Path of the Seer book make it seem like your average eldar seer is capable of reading the future and using that in multiple ways, capable of detecting souls, capable of channeling energy into a witchblade. So I think you could reasonably give warlocks and farseers a few different abilities even if we assume the flashier stuff like eldritch storm/destructor require extra practice. I'm not sure I've ever read a story about a librarian that could only do one magic trick, and their chaos counterparts are similarly flexible if not moreso. Trained human psykers seem to typically have more than one practical application of their abilities even when those abilities are tied to a single "discipline."

The only units that come to mind as necessarily being one-trick-psychic-poniesi are like, zoanthropes and other hyper-specialized tyranid units. But even there, zoats are rocking both a psychic forcefield and a psychic attack, the latter of which they've been shown to be able to configure into different styles of attack.

My basic point, from the beginning of this thread, has been that the current system is definitely shallower than what I'm looking for, and ANY proposal that offers more flexibility than what we have now would be preferrable; that includes your suggestions, Jid's and Lathe's suggestions and the suggestion of others in the thread too. Each of us has different ideas- we all fall at different places on the spectrum between total flexibility and total rigidity, but all of us are proposing something with more depth than the status quo.

Sure. I think we're agreeing on more than we're disagreeing.

@Wyldhunt- Thanks for the detailed response, certainly get where you're coming from. Your video game analogy was pretty dead-on too.

I specifically set out to use mechanics to generate a backstory... I always have a bit of a story going in. I know who's who and I have some sense about what a unit might be looking to grow into, but I really like letting the game decide. It's a weird quirk that's just always been with me, and I think it started with pen and paper RPG's. Not always games that involved "leveling" - I actually much preferred skill based growth like World of Darkness, particularly thinks like the political fallout of learning out-of-clan disciplines.

Interestingly enough, it was a mechanic that translated into Crusade too: there was an upgrade that allowed a psyker to learn a power from a discipline they normally cannot access. I just can't think of that in any other way than a side-quest. Video-gamey indeed.