If he proves trustworthy we can train him. We can literally read minds
Age of Strife
It's like you didn't even read my post beyond the first sentence, second paragraph. This is Warhammer. Literally no one is trustworthy if they still have human emotions.
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
I think it's more along the lines of being able to detect any doubt/chaos/whatever before it progresses into full-on betrayal. Mind reading would be helpful in that regard, whether he's lying to himself or not. There would be warning signs and we'd be able to head it off before it becomes an issue.
On the other hand I lost track a couple pages back and am just going by the two posts above. I should really reconsider jumping in to an argument unprepared...
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
@oilworker Your arguments aren't accurate, or nearly accurate enough that they should be considered. Effectively everything you've proposed we do has a greater than 80% chance of failure, and you also suggest we do them stacked on top of each other. You want a risk assessment? If we were to only do two of the things you suggested at once, we would have less than a 2% chance of the end result being better than what we're getting by doing nothing.
That is not a risk. Hell, that's not even a gamble. I know you've probably been reading my and other people's posts where we debate risk and reward, but we don't argue our points by repeatedly pushing "No risk no reward," or "we have to do something otherwise X," we present evidence or opinion that proves that the reward we're aiming is of greater value than the risk we take attempting it, or at least of greater value than the other choices we have. Without proving anything, you will continue to be shot down like you have been over the last several pages.
That is not a risk. Hell, that's not even a gamble. I know you've probably been reading my and other people's posts where we debate risk and reward, but we don't argue our points by repeatedly pushing "No risk no reward," or "we have to do something otherwise X," we present evidence or opinion that proves that the reward we're aiming is of greater value than the risk we take attempting it, or at least of greater value than the other choices we have. Without proving anything, you will continue to be shot down like you have been over the last several pages.
Our mind reading is only surface thoughts at present, with a bit of a deep dive. And going deep is invasive, if the Dark Seer is any standard
Direct, unfiltered mental contact with Mirande can be as soul destroying as being 'blessed' by the Lord of Change if there's a leak in the signal.
Oh yes, we have the mind of a Lord of Change in us.
Direct, unfiltered mental contact with Mirande can be as soul destroying as being 'blessed' by the Lord of Change if there's a leak in the signal.
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Honestly, I'm probably the biggest advocate Sorcery - well, of taking time to properly vet how sorcery actually works in the context of this game to see if it can be applied safely, instead of just blindly trying to suppress it. Which I still hold is why we keep needed to make self-control checks (learning a direct offensive power may help) just like we would have to to not use any psychic powers.
Anyway - that's beside the point...
I would never actually want to teach it to anyone until we had done a proper analysis of both teaching methods and the character of the student. A slow build up of trusted personnel will let us delegate most of that, but I don't really see that taking under a decade, and could involve setting up preparatory education.
Trouble is, that's an insane and counterproductive way of playing the Quest that plays right into the hands of Chaos.
We have to be able to trust people.
Not trusting them is basically why 40k gets so grimderp.
Anyway - that's beside the point...
I would never actually want to teach it to anyone until we had done a proper analysis of both teaching methods and the character of the student. A slow build up of trusted personnel will let us delegate most of that, but I don't really see that taking under a decade, and could involve setting up preparatory education.
Trouble is, that's an insane and counterproductive way of playing the Quest that plays right into the hands of Chaos.
We have to be able to trust people.
Not trusting them is basically why 40k gets so grimderp.
Unless the Dark Seer simply prefers the mental vivisection method because the results are more amusing.
We know that Telepathy IV + Advanced Mind Reading is enough to copy memory packets like the Eldar Index, which implies a pretty deep read.
With Chaos, you basically can't trust people with things like sorcery. Simple as that. What you need is multiple layers of redundant controls, to first minimise the number of people who fall and then to minimise the damage they can do when some of them inevitably do.
The Imperium is adaptive to the setting it's in. They significantly allow less than one in ten billion people to learn sorcery, maybe less than one in a hundred billion or even trillion.
We can't go that far, instead we have to make our own candidates trustworthy for sorcery by intensive control of their upbringing.
We don't have to roll willpower not to use psyker powers. We simply don't when we don't have to. Sorcery is clearly different. I think it's going to be a perpetual temptation until we get high enough willpower to auto-pass the check.
We know that Telepathy IV + Advanced Mind Reading is enough to copy memory packets like the Eldar Index, which implies a pretty deep read.
With Chaos, you basically can't trust people with things like sorcery. Simple as that. What you need is multiple layers of redundant controls, to first minimise the number of people who fall and then to minimise the damage they can do when some of them inevitably do.
The Imperium is adaptive to the setting it's in. They significantly allow less than one in ten billion people to learn sorcery, maybe less than one in a hundred billion or even trillion.
We can't go that far, instead we have to make our own candidates trustworthy for sorcery by intensive control of their upbringing.
We don't have to roll willpower not to use psyker powers. We simply don't when we don't have to. Sorcery is clearly different. I think it's going to be a perpetual temptation until we get high enough willpower to auto-pass the check.
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Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
You, you I like. In a sea of galvanized and, dare I say it, party line opinions on psykers, the warp, and sorcery, you are a mote of reason amidst a sea of blind optimism and total paranoia. In practice, it may not be a particularly happy medium, but at least it's not chibi Imperium or My Little Chaos Cult.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Whilst i mostly agree with you here Al i still think we should pass the sorcery knowledge on, even if thats just to a single vetted person. In my view its something we can give to people with mind edit when we know from mind reading and uplink that they have 35+ willpower and the right virtue and personality traits.
I would think we want more than one, if only so the next generation has someone who can stop them if one of them goes bad. Single point of failure and all.
More than one, but less than many.
Given that Mirande isn't auto-passing the temptation rolls on Willpower 50, that seems pretty risky. She has heroic reroll in case she botches a check. Other sorcerers won't, so will probably need higher Willpower than she currently does.
I think this is something we want to wait to give it to master psykers who successful complete the Virtue-Sin hybridisation path and have mastered the Eldar Index. If we work out how to manufacture Iluminated, we make that a requirement as well.
It's probably better for no one to have the option of sorcery than to risk it spreading to people we can't trust.
You don't need sorcery to stop sorcery, in fact it's probably best not to have it with the way corruption works.
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More that single point of failure is also just too easy for Chaos to induce discontinuity in the inheritance, and that it'd take sorcerous knowledge to notice when stuff's going screwy. They'd need frequent checks to make sure they're all still uncorrupted and not crossing the line.
I'd consider teaching sorcery to be a postdoctorate thing for psykers, but possibly also available for others trained to have the same stability of will and moral fiber. After all, to teach our psykers the virtue/vice walk, we also need ordinary people who have mastered the traits(so that they can propagate those across society via education as well).
From these, we can pick a few of the best to be taught.
I'd consider teaching sorcery to be a postdoctorate thing for psykers, but possibly also available for others trained to have the same stability of will and moral fiber. After all, to teach our psykers the virtue/vice walk, we also need ordinary people who have mastered the traits(so that they can propagate those across society via education as well).
From these, we can pick a few of the best to be taught.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
Doesn't the Imperium assign specially trained handlers alongside their psykers to act as instant containment for major failures of control? Could we perhaps introduce a similar model for sorcerers(and psykers too, why the hell not), but with less immediately negative undertones?
For example, Mirande's own relationship with Anna. When Dia explained that Mirande was different, Anna took her words to mean that Mirande was fragile, but not in the same way she was, and that she needed protecting. She took it upon herself to shield Anna from the (simple)machinations of other children and the world in general. While nobody can make a particularly clear argument that it actually did anything for Mirande, creating a sort of stable relationship with a non-psyker who is trained from childhood to act as a protector(and if necessary executioner) may prove to have positive benefits in the long term, as well as produce a small division of fairly resistant non-psykers.
All of this talk, of course, leads to the idea that a similar, if more overtly 'we're here to make sure you don't hurt anyone other than yourself if you mess up' sort of protector or team of protectors, be used to assist in the development of sorcerers and contain the danger they represent while still allowing us to make them with some degree of stability.
I feel like having psyker and sorcerer training distinct is a useful safety measure.
That said if we do intensive virtue training we'll be starting probably before we even know who's a psyker, so we can skim off the absolute best of the nonpsyker population
That said if we do intensive virtue training we'll be starting probably before we even know who's a psyker, so we can skim off the absolute best of the nonpsyker population
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SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
The problem is your requirements aren't realistically achievable.
A master psyker needs to be 100 years old there is every chance Mirande will die before that can happen. Full mastery of the virtue sin path would provide 30+ willpower points on its own.
2 Brave
7 virtues
4-5 advanced virtues
7 combined sin virtues
3-4 advanced sin
2 paragon virtue
2 paragon sin
1 combined virtue sin paragon
Throw in 14-15 base and you're on 50 odd with grand master sorcery 59 with Primaris psyker. I do not think we need to go to such extreme lengths before implanting it.
I think the best way to handle it is to ensure that any psyker would have 45 willpower or more after its implanted (with the +5 bonus). Otherwise the requirements become to high and we risk losing the sorcery knowledge and it DOES have massive potential to boost our end game state as long as we take calculated risks and don't do anything stupid.
My ideal implantation point would be as follows.
Once the psyker has all the combined sins and virtues and advanced virtues alongside the eldar index and being a primaris psyker.
Assuming a base of 10 willpower which would be exceptionally low considering the effort invested the character should have the following.
Base 10
Brave +2
All 7 base virtues +7
All advanced virtues +4
All combined virtue/sins +7
Eldar Index +2
Primaris Psyker +9
41 willpower which then becomes 46 with the sorcery talent.
Realistically speaking the person will likely also have a single discipline talent at a pretty high level as well. Assuming they dedicate enough actions to get their discipline to level 3 with the paradox cube before achieving primaris psyker they would have discipline level six when they hit Primaris for another +2 willpower as well.
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- Location
- somewhere
More realistic way to get to 50 wp: 16 base, 9 primaris, 3 iron will, 2 brave, 2 Eldar Index, 6 disciplines, 12 some combination of virtues, composite virtues and vitue/sin syntheses (I don't think it's either realistic or desirable for everyone to have exactly the same one).
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SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Getting every one to have level 4-5 in all their disciplines is going to be MUCH more difficult than getting them all to walk the Virtue sin path
Note the discipline costs.
200-400-800-1600
training a discipline to level 4 with no paradox cube to assist would take a 25-30 willpower psyker the equivalent of 15-16 actions. In that time frame a psyker could have walked half of more of the entire pathway of virtues and sins whilst also massively boosting their willpower and thus increasing the amount they gain from actions spent training.
Discipline levels are categorically not a good avenue for willpower unless you already have huge amounts of it.
Also AN has specifically stated that each tier of psyker education opens up another discipline tree that you can have.
A Primaris Psyker would only be able to have four disciplines and so will at most get 5 willpower from them.
Also the Iron will trait doesn't appear to be teachable.
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Quite true. If everyone has the same set of traits they can all be subverted the same way.
I think just encouraging virtues in the general population while developing synthesized virtue/vice pairs where we encounter naturally arising vices should be best for a general policy and make a relatively high willpower population/home environment to draw recruits from.
While psykers, sorcerors, and psyker support staff get the full dedicated effort to raise their willpower.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Given that the combined virtue sin combinations imply the person is centred and balanced I think this argument is illogical. A person with eye of the storm is much harder to manipulate and influence one way or the other.
The idea that because a group of people have the same balanced traits and thus the same protections means it would be easier to subvert them is illogical in the extreme because we're not talking about a type of wall that you simply undermine but a an absolute protection against any attempts to push them from that vector.
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- Location
- somewhere
Note how we have the option to either unlock a new discipline or advance telepathy to II in the current vote. I take that to mean that unlocking a discipline costs extra and the base cost for advancing to level II is the same as the base cost for I + the extra cost for unlocking.
Gtting a second discipline to +2 wp is possible given enough time, and we probably don't want to teach sorcery to people who haven't thoroughly proven their reliability and stability anyway.
Not that, but because developing synthesized virtues is extremely effort intensive and not very likely to be in character for NPCs, we need SOMETHING for the common civilian, and Combined Virtues for everyone simply takes too much effort to feasibly implement as a 1:1 project, while at the same time the very nature of combined traits means that broad spanning efforts to encourage them don't work as they oppose and support themselves. You could encourage patience or wroth culturally with relative ease, but you can't encourage Eye of the Storm the same way because the components are inherently contradictory.
Psykers, sorcerors and support staff for those can get the full dedicated effort to program them for balance, but it has to be done starting from childhood to get anywhere soon.
For everyone else, we need a broader cultural indoctrination.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Ah well I'm talking about for psykers. Common civilians being mostly virtue bound is fine with me. Psykers must walk the combined path though as it provides massive stability against chaos corruption pushes both in terms of willpower increases and in terms of blunting mind altering effects that push people towards certain extremes.
I wouldn't be so sure. it took 200 advancement points with the paradox cube to get divination level 2 so that suggests the level 2 discipline does take more work. The paradox cube specialized ability to teach simply meant that the same progression points were worth a lot more.
Even assuming you are correct though discipline level 4 provides 1 point of willpower. We aren't getting multiple psykers to have level 6 or more in disciplines at least in anything approaching trivial time frames.
We need to gear our goals towards mid term effects and short term willpower gain.
For willpower gain the absolute most effective and fast way to boost willpower is the virtue system. The discipline systems willpower boosts are ancillary benefits you shouldn't be looking at it for willpower except in edge cases. The number of actions needed for disciplines to provide willpower boosts is far more than what it would take to gain willpower via the virtue system especially with the way the virtue system builds on its self.
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- somewhere
All psykers being forced into completely identical personalities is unacceptable and will likely lead to much more serious problems than a slightly lower willpower. Not necessarily corruption, but it's narratively almost inevitable that something like that will backfire in a major way. There needs to be some room for individual variation. 12 willpower from virtues + virtue /sin mergers is already a lot and about as far as I'm willing to go. If you are insisting on going for the maximum I will vote against it at every opportunity, even at the cost of possibly ending up with less.
It's not like willpower is main benefit of raising psychic disciplines, any psykers who have shown themselves to be reliable, experienced and battle tested enough to look like a reasonably safe choice to teach sorcery will have invested a lot into raising their disciplines anyway.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Um, having the same virtues doesn't mean having an identical personality. A pacifist might be Just and Patient and Temperate, while his brother, a soldier, is also Just, also Patient, and also Temperate. And not wroth either, because he can control his emotions. Traits don't represent interests, hobbies, and different perceptions well. At least, the virtues don't, and even education doesn't quite fit in on some stuff.
Creating a Standard Template Psyker may not be a bad thing.
Essentially a modified form of what we know the Index does - strip out the Eldar bullshit, make it into a cognitive imprint designed specifically to create the proper respect and attitudes required.
It'd be a form of the typical psycho-indoctrination used by the Imperium, but hopefully not as terribly implemented.
If it can be soul-linked like the Index, then all the better - the children would default to following the imprint.
(and at an advanced level, that might open up Ancestral Memory Reincarnation)
Essentially a modified form of what we know the Index does - strip out the Eldar bullshit, make it into a cognitive imprint designed specifically to create the proper respect and attitudes required.
It'd be a form of the typical psycho-indoctrination used by the Imperium, but hopefully not as terribly implemented.
If it can be soul-linked like the Index, then all the better - the children would default to following the imprint.
(and at an advanced level, that might open up Ancestral Memory Reincarnation)