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.
Yea pretty much. Just because two people are patient or two people are wrothful doesn't mean they have the same personality. It effects how they intereact with expected or unexpected stimuli but it's not going to make them carbon copies of each other.
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.
The difference between a pacifist and a soldier is in their beliefs, not necessarily their personality. Active interests and hobbies aren't part of the personality either (personality manifests in what sort of hobbies you tend to enjoy somewhat, but not particularly in what hobbies you happen to have picked up). And we aren't just talking about 3 traits but 15-29 depending on how you count them. It's not just the virtue/sin part of the personality either unless you are ok with craven etc.
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'm not sure that this is something you need sorcery for. The Eldar Index may be enough. The ability of skilled diviners to perceive if people's souls are becoming corrupted should also help a lot.
We can also do things like have all transfers and education occur within very strongly warded (pentagrammatic, hexagrammatic, and Eldar runes all made of psychoreactive material) locations.
Ideally, we'd do it in the Webway, but that's pretty unlikely.
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.
The problem is that sorcerers probably need to have the psyker training to have high enough Willpower to resist temptation, and they also have other options provided by their psyker powers to avoid them getting into situations where temptation will arise.
Consider that the only humans that we know who can reliably learn sorcery without becoming corrupted are Grey Knights. That's a very high bar to pass. Apart from them, the only users of sanctic sorcery are radical Inquisitors, and it's made pretty clear that this is the first step on a path to pretty much irrevocable damnation.
I also think you're underestimating what we can achieve on the Willpower level for trained psykers. Consider that with streamed Willpower education for psykers and someone devoting two actions per turn to them they should be getting 45+ rolls to increase base Willpower (1 base +2 invested actions with an extra roll on a ten) during their fifteen years of education. Education works like:
How I'm doing it is that each year from 1-5 I roll randomly a number of times equal to age to determine which stat is to possibly have its base increased. I then roll to see whether or not it will be increased by comparing to the primary parent's base stats. At age 6 this switches over to either a tutor or the school system, and each stat gets a single chance instead of it being random.
The target number for a base stat increase is equal to 10-(Difference between parent and child's base state). So if I were say comparing the base Martial score of Mirande (4) and Dia (9) then the target number is 5, so a roll on a d10 of 5 or greater results in an increase to the base stat. A roll of 10 is always an increase and gives a chance for another increase.
For universal education, there will be a sort of "Universal tutor" that doesn't actually have stats for anything except education with base stats organized according to priority. Under Streaming, they will all start at 8 and then start focusing in on what the child is best at, increasing the base stats of those topics at the expense of the other stats. The "teacher's" stats can only change +1 or -1 a year and can't drop below 3 (although they can rise above 10).
Trait gain will be focused on improving whatever attribute the child is best at under streaming.
There are certain traits that also modify how this work, mostly by changing the number of random chances to increase stats.
Remember that learning tools do this:
Learning tools provide +2 Learning, but their biggest use is for children, where they provide a +1 to the rolls (and 9 and 10 always succeed) for stat gain and for a base stat under 10 they allow for the die to be rolled again for another chance on a 9 or 10.
And having someone investing actions does this:
[] Try to work with Mirande specifically (Reminder: gains +1 chance to increase willpower)
Any psyker that goes through the full fifteen years intensive training under Mirande should almost certainly have the maximum base Willpower 16.
Anyone who doesn't, doesn't get taught sorcery. This should actually assuage many of the concerns about putting people on the Virtue-Sin path about willpower spirals. Not only should psykers graduate with base Willpower 16, but they should be gaining it by a pretty early age.
To put it context, this is the probability distribution of willpower as the number of rolls increases:
As you can see, by age 10 with two actions dedicated per year, there's a 60% chance of havingbase WP 14+, 30% chance of WP 15+, and 12% chance of already being base Willpower 16.
This assumes, of course, that the system is a good reflection of how the world works for NPCs. I don't see why it wouldn't though. This represents someone with the highest possible base willpower intensively tutoring someone for fifteen years straight.
Only the most incorruptible individuals can be trusted with this. If we lose the knowledge it's arguably less bad than having spread it to one person who shouldn't have it.
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.
You can pretty easily, you just do it over time. First you indulge the sin, and then you overcome it.
It's pretty close to what tantric asceticism is in the real world. It needs support and discipline, probably quite intensive support and discipline, but it's quite possible. Someone teaches the sin and then removes it and teaches the virtue. It's essentially a more structured version of the social expectations and construction of what being a child then a teenager means today. You're expected to act out and misbehave in certain ways, but you're also expected to grow up from that.
@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.
I make a suggestion to train one guy if he proves trustworthy in sorcery because it needs to be passed on and could help Dia.
Also where are you getting your numbers? 80 percent chance of failure? Yes I have read your posts but the very few people have actually set down numbers or some from of concrete proof. Or really any proof but SSS and Artlan.
My whole argument boils down to us having to actually teach someone sorcery. I think we will most likely have too, because the of the Santic wards are sore dry.
Well I'd be pretty disappointed if we only get two hundred points worth of powers to spend.
My suggestion for the different builds
200 Points
-> Least mind edit
-> Least Psychic Shriek
300 Points
-> Least mind edit
-> Lesser mind edit
600 Points
-> Mind reading
-> Least mind edit
-> Least psychic shriek
800 points
-> Mind reading
-> Least mind edit
-> Least psychic shriek
-> Least uplink
-> Least Clairvoyance
The reason i've gone for clairvoyance with the 800 point build is because of how well the powers synergise. With Mind reading at tier 3 Mirande should be able to get a read on people 100m away. With Clairvoyance she could then home in on those areas to see what is happened at the same time.
Mind reading at the next tier is useful but really only worth taking if we're assured of grabbing two more least powers at the same time.
Mind reading to tier 3 is also for the very large increase in benefit from putting the telepathy discipline powers on it.
In the future Mirande is going to train Telepathy to at least Discipline level IV.
With Mind reading at tier 3 after this we'd see the following
Telepathy II -> Mind reading IV
Telepathy III -> Mind reading V
Telepathy IV -> Mind reading VI
Its effects are replicated by psychic shriek which hits as an area of effect. I'd rather go with the anti group abilities because I think single targets Mirande is already capable of dealing with them pretty well.
I make a suggestion to train one guy if he proves trustworthy in sorcery because it needs to be passed on and could help Dia.
Also where are you getting your numbers? 80 percent chance of failure? Yes I have read your posts but the very few people have actually set down numbers or some from of concrete proof. Or really any proof but SSS and Artlan.
My whole argument boils down to us having to actually teach someone sorcery. I think we will most likely have too, because the of the Santic wards are sore dry.
No, you made a suggestion to least mind edit one untrained psyker who we have no history on with a pile of warding sorceries and then send him back to Dia in as little time as less than a full year.
We would risk blowing up his mind with the knowledge, failing to impart it without instantly making him fully corrupted, failing to impart it period because we'd be pushing hard to do so, then the damages we may incur from push phenomena(which again we cannot affect with lost in time to mitigate). Then there's his reaction to the damage, his willingness to go do what we ask, his own malefic sorcery temptation rolls, his success rolls, the possibility that the edits will degrade and he'll be left with incomplete wards, and his chance of walking all the way back to Owl's Nest alone without getting killed or some other nonsense. Oh yeah, plus it might piss off the crazy Dark Eldar Seer.
All in all, the number of rolls(at minimum 10) and the suspected difficulty of success on the rolls(at best, 60% for the one mundane roll of get to Owl's Nest, at worst less than 10% when praying we don't heavily corrupt him by least mind editing a changer of ways into his skull) means that if you mashed all these rolls together, the end result would be so hard as to require an exploding critical 100 just to have a chance at success, because the combined percentages would be below 1%.
The reward for this totally insane risk? Dia's risk of falling is less, possibly even considerably less, but still nowhere near 0. The risk? We create a corrupted chaos sorcerer-psyker with the ability to summon daemons and knowledge of where we live and who we are. So no, I'm not willing to risk a bad end because you want to try to make Dia's danger of falling smaller(when AN has implied that it's only a moderate-to-low chance to begin with).
When thinking about a plan, especially in the 40K universe, it's better to think of every possible way it could go wrong, rather than how it could go right, and after you've done that, to weigh whether or not the end result is worth the risk and cost to get it. Any plan that attempts to send Dia a pet sorcerer to handle her corruption will have so many inherent risks and flaws as to be unusable.
We all agree that sorcery should be passed on, but we also agree that we shouldn't even pretend to try to pass it on without nearly twenty years of preparation for all the things that could go wrong.
I've seen a couple of these plans that people have put up as to how we should spend our powers and a lot of them have the same flaw from my understanding. That flaw being that from my understanding of it our skills can't exceed our discipline level.
Since telepathy II was one of our options it's unlikely we'll be able to take any skills above the "least" category there. We might be able to grab a lesser or two in divination but I think we're going to be selecting from the weakest level of powers for telepathy.
If anyone has any examples of powers exceeding discipline levels or AN saying that they could please do share I'd love to be proved wrong. Seems a little strange though that discipline levels would exist at all if we can just level whatever powers we want whenever. Though it's possible I'm confusing this with our secondary disciplines not being able to exceed our primary(divination) and I'm applying that to everything.
I've seen a couple of these plans that people have put up as to how we should spend our powers and a lot of them have the same flaw from my understanding. That flaw being that from my understanding of it our skills can't exceed our discipline level.
Since telepathy II was one of our options it's unlikely we'll be able to take any skills above the "least" category there. We might be able to grab a lesser or two in divination but I think we're going to be selecting from the weakest level of powers for telepathy.
If anyone has any examples of powers exceeding discipline levels or AN saying that they could please do share I'd love to be proved wrong. Seems a little strange though that discipline levels would exist at all if we can just level whatever powers we want whenever. Though it's possible I'm confusing this with our secondary disciplines not being able to exceed our primary(divination) and I'm applying that to everything.
If we get mind edit would it be possible for this plan to work?
Completely erase Mad Mikes previous existence from his mind/soul.
Put in complete obedience in his mind/soul, so complete his loyalty to us will be nigh unbreakable.
Give him a personality & traits that would make it really hard for him to fall to chaos
Have him only obey you and have him memorize your warp signature (If its possible then, no imposters can trick him that looks like us)
He will never use his power without your explicit order.
Never trust the warp
Then implant the powers that would help Dia into his mind/soul
Edit:We could use this on any death row prisoners we have.
If we get mind edit would it be possible for this plan to work?
Completely erase Mad Mikes previous existence from his mind/soul.
Put in complete obedience in his mind/soul, so complete his loyalty to us will be nigh unbreakable.
Give him a personality & traits that would make it really hard for him to fall to chaos
Have him only obey you and have him memorize your warp signature (If its possible then, no imposters can trick him that looks like us)
He will never use his power without your explicit order.
Never trust the warp
Then implant the powers that would help Dia into his mind/soul
I had not noticed that. Really does make me wonder about discipline levels though.
@Academia Nut What is the purpose of discipline levels? I know you mentioned we'd need Telepathy discipline at IV along with mind reading at III to transfer the Eldar Codex. Is that all they are is a gate for specific actions or is there a limit to how many levels a power can exceed it's discipline by?
I can't believe I didn't noticed we' already passed it with mind reading. Now I'm just confused.
I had not noticed that. Really does make me wonder about discipline levels though.
@Academia Nut What is the purpose of discipline levels? I know you mentioned we'd need Telepathy discipline at IV along with mind reading at III to transfer the Eldar Codex. Is that all they are is a gate for specific actions or is there a limit to how many levels a power can exceed it's discipline by?
I can't believe I didn't noticed we' already passed it with mind reading. Now I'm just confused.
It seems to represent your general rather than specific skill. Powers are what you can do. Discipline level is how good (and safe) you are at doing it.
For example, we can copy the Eldar Index at Mind Reading IV, Telepathy II or III, it's just dangerous.
I had not noticed that. Really does make me wonder about discipline levels though.
@Academia Nut What is the purpose of discipline levels? I know you mentioned we'd need Telepathy discipline at IV along with mind reading at III to transfer the Eldar Codex. Is that all they are is a gate for specific actions or is there a limit to how many levels a power can exceed it's discipline by?
I can't believe I didn't noticed we' already passed it with mind reading. Now I'm just confused.
My understanding is that discipline levels effect our ability to use powers beyond their normal limits and effect the characters understanding of areas within the discipline. For instance we had the potential to try and telepathically consume the souls of the lobotomised earlier. This is way outside of the power set Mirande actually has so it must be interacting with her telepathy discipline and psyker education level.
Trusting people too much will also play into Chaos's hands. The trick is striking a balance. Teach some people sorcery, but keep them under observation.
Well yea, if we have to sentence a person to death for what ever reason OM NOM NOM is pretty much the sensible choice.It's even a humane death what with no being made a warp entities plaything after dying...
Trusting people too much will also play into Chaos's hands. The trick is striking a balance. Teach some people sorcery, but keep them under observation.
The problem is that sorcerers probably need to have the psyker training to have high enough Willpower to resist temptation, and they also have other options provided by their psyker powers to avoid them getting into situations where temptation will arise.
Counterpoint: Psykers are far more likely to soak corruption points due to proximity to psyker powers. The willpower benefits gained from learning psyker stuff don't, in my opinion, outweigh that.
Similalrly, if one DOES fall, I sure as hell only want to face a rogue psyker or a rogue sorcerer, not one with talent is both fields
No, you made a suggestion to least mind edit one untrained psyker who we have no history on with a pile of warding sorceries and then send him back to Dia in as little time as less than a full year.
We would risk blowing up his mind with the knowledge, failing to impart it without instantly making him fully corrupted, failing to impart it period because we'd be pushing hard to do so, then the damages we may incur from push phenomena(which again we cannot affect with lost in time to mitigate). Then there's his reaction to the damage, his willingness to go do what we ask, his own malefic sorcery temptation rolls, his success rolls, the possibility that the edits will degrade and he'll be left with incomplete wards, and his chance of walking all the way back to Owl's Nest alone without getting killed or some other nonsense. Oh yeah, plus it might piss off the crazy Dark Eldar Seer.
All in all, the number of rolls(at minimum 10) and the suspected difficulty of success on the rolls(at best, 60% for the one mundane roll of get to Owl's Nest, at worst less than 10% when praying we don't heavily corrupt him by least mind editing a changer of ways into his skull) means that if you mashed all these rolls together, the end result would be so hard as to require an exploding critical 100 just to have a chance at success, because the combined percentages would be below 1%.
The reward for this totally insane risk? Dia's risk of falling is less, possibly even considerably less, but still nowhere near 0. The risk? We create a corrupted chaos sorcerer-psyker with the ability to summon daemons and knowledge of where we live and who we are. So no, I'm not willing to risk a bad end because you want to try to make Dia's danger of falling smaller(when AN has implied that it's only a moderate-to-low chance to begin with).
When thinking about a plan, especially in the 40K universe, it's better to think of every possible way it could go wrong, rather than how it could go right, and after you've done that, to weigh whether or not the end result is worth the risk and cost to get it. Any plan that attempts to send Dia a pet sorcerer to handle her corruption will have so many inherent risks and flaws as to be unusable.
We all agree that sorcery should be passed on, but we also agree that we shouldn't even pretend to try to pass it on without nearly twenty years of preparation for all the things that could go wrong.
Any power Mirande has would also have her willpower roll included. So we have a hundred with any roll. Let's say we have to hit 140 to pass on the knowledge. We would have to roll above a 40 to have the any possable chance of passing on the basic knowledge. That is not too great of a risk. I am basing this on what was needed in past rolls for Dia and Mirande to get traits.
@Academia Nut would it be easier, harder, or the same to impart knowledge telepathy with another Psyker? I am asking since psykers can draw on the powers of other psykers.
Any power Mirande has would also have her willpower roll included. So we have a hundred with any roll. Let's say we have to hit 140 to pass on the knowledge. We would have to roll above a 40 to have the any possable chance of passing on the basic knowledge. That is not too great of a risk. I am basing this on what was needed in past rolls for Dia and Mirande to get traits.
Consider what the power represents and what least or lesser mind edit actually does. It's editing peoples short term memories in a combat environment to remove their knowledge of our presence. They see us but don't react because Mirande is scrubbing that part of their memories.
Turning what is a small combat trick into the kind of mind alteration you're talking about here isn't something that can just be finessed with willpower it requires skill and knowledge. We could try any way and likely fry the guys mind. It's not worth the attempt right now.
What the higher levels of the disciplines represents is how to take those simpler applications and then use them more broadly than their simple power use would dictate in the first place.
Consider what the power represents and what least or lesser mind edit actually does. It's editing peoples short term memories in a combat environment to remove their knowledge of our presence. They see us but don't react because Mirande is scrubbing that part of their memories.
Turning what is a small combat trick into the kind of mind alteration you're talking about here isn't something that can just be finessed with willpower it requires skill and knowledge. We could try any way and likely fry the guys mind. It's not worth the attempt right now.
Sorry I forgot to include a idea I had. Psykers can use the powers of other psykers to boost their powers. The same way a psker can use a choir for the Astromacion, and battle psykers do. So theoretically we can use Mad Maxs own power to help us impart knowledge.
Counterpoint: Psykers are far more likely to soak corruption points due to proximity to psyker powers. The willpower benefits gained from learning psyker stuff don't, in my opinion, outweigh that.
The Willpower makes a very big difference. A Primaris psyker (which everyone trained by mirande should be), will have +18 on the rolls compared to someone without it That's pretty huge.
A properly trained psyker should also really not be getting any corruption. They can be taught to always fetter, and should be. We should only be recruting experienced psykers who have demonstrated many years of uncorrupted, responsible use of their powers. This can give us confidence that they won't abuse them that we can have for no non-psyker, as they're used to having power and knowledge beyond the ken of mortal man.
