This has been brought up several times. We have had explicit confirmation that we get a +10 to all actions. Said confirmation was on discord and copied to here.
Here's the exact wording.
Discord stuff isn't set in stone; since we don't have an Elevated Domain we don't have the rules here, therefore it can change. As you said.
It doesn't help that I was asleep when he posted that update, and therefore missed nearly the entirety of the post-update chatter - in this case I only came online and caught up to the thread (not the Discord) about twelve hours after the update.
However, a re-read of the vote option does suggest that it is invoked for everything, thereby providing the +10 and the crit-success everywhere and the crit-fail where it doesn't belong. So yes, you are correct about that and I am wrong.
I apologize.
This does not mean that planning wouldn't change to support whatever domain is Elevated. A large portion of planning is about risk management, and any action taken without the Elevated Domain included is inherently at a greater risk of causing problems, therefore we move our resources to support it, thereby mitigating the failure chance.
And for every bonus you can think of to incorporating any Elevated Domain where it doesn't belong on a critical success, I can think of a malus that is just as bad on a critical failure.
Connection seems to apply to almost every action that isn't R&D, and I can fairly easily think of ways to force it to apply that aren't any more of a stretch than Life applying to our previous preaching or infiltration actions. They'll still have the critfail chance, true, but it's still fundamentally a decision between limiting options for more resources or just taking more options and letting resources grow at a natural/slow rate.
It wasn't Life applying there by itself, it was Connections allowing for Life
to Apply there, by saying 'You can make Connections between things that are living'. If we didn't have Connections our early Preaching actions likely would have been
very different, as Connections is our Social Domain. Dana might have allowed us to take them anyway; she's a Good Girl.
You may be satisfied with adjusting our turn plans to heavily lean towards actions with the Connections domain specifically and then shuffling our resources around to cover for failure on places where Connections
doesn't fit.
I'm not. I want the freedom to shuffle our resources around as we require.
No, the Sorcery domain enables crit fails for everything it gets applied to. If it gets applied to everything because it's been elevated to core, then everything gets the chance to crit fail. The potential for crit fails is the price for letting mortals exceed their limits - the only way to counter that is to stack enough bonuses that it's impossible to roll less than 40 below the DC.
The toggle is free and enables exceeding mortal limits, phenomena, and crit fails; the domain costs a token (unless it comes as a result of elevation to core) and enables exceeding mortal limits, a +10 bonus, and crit fails. I can't remember if using the domain instead of the toggle enables phenomena - it's supposed to be safer than the toggle because VM is personally lending her aid instead of just the mortals channeling her domains, but the power of the warp is never completely safe.
Domain
is distinct from the Toggle; throwing a Token at the Sorcery Domain doesn't cause the same problems as switching the Toggle, as any token automatically allows for Crit-Successes the way switching the Toggle does and provides a +10 bonus on top of that.
Switching the Toggle
doesn't provide a +10 bonus (see the last turn - we toggled it on for Project NOMAD pt 1 and got +30), instead it allows mortal contribution (non-psyker Heroes + Doctrinal bonuses) to Miracle on their own, at the cost of crit-failures and Phenomena.
As such, what bringing Sorcery to Core would do is apply the Sorcery Domain to
everything, providing +10 to all actions, and thereby
effectively switching the toggle 'On' for every action that doesn't already incorporate the Sorcery Domain - allowing for phenomena and crit-fails.
Which has issues that are almost inverse to Elevating Connections, in that it generally encourages actions that are Charity/Kinetic and pushing our resources towards Preaching and Infiltration... not that our Preaching or Infiltration actions have all that many Domains attached to them to mitigate crit-fails
with, meaning that we'd rely more heavily on our Heroes.
Though Sorcery
is interesting in that it becomes more effective the more Domains we have, as that allows Sorcery to apply to more things. For example, with the Sun domain, Sorcery would apply to 'Stars Above and Beyond!'
Of course, with the Sun domain, the action would likely be about teaching the Weaver Sect how to make more of them, rather than making a bunch and leaving them lying around.
