This week on "Magellan Overthinks Everything", we're going to discuss the talent, "The Rite of Pure Thought".

Okay, so, let me start off by saying that I'd like this thread to proceed without any heated arguments. Let's not try to aggressively convince each other that our respective viewpoints are right, but agree to disagree and move on. The entire point of this thread is to find out what everyone's thinking, and odds are no one is going to change their opinion on this one. Okay, I've done what I can. Let's proceed.

Personally, I never really liked the Rite of Pure Thought. In fact, I think any talent that invites a role playing group to ask questions like "what is an emotion?" is more likely to stall the game and turn friends into bitter enemies than anything else. Especially if you have a half-baked psychologist or two in your group, as so many do. The fact that it's really vaguely worded, and therefore incredibly powerful - and as such very tempting to take for the mechanical benefits - doesn't help the matter. I also suspect that many GMs will find themselves tempted to further alter game mechanics because of this talent, and that's never something I approve of.

As for the talent itself, I've never had anyone in my own groups take it, as we all feel that it would stunt our characters something fierce, unless we were always playing unchanging, straight-laced tech-priests with no sense of independent thought. The talent professes to remove all emotion from a character's mind and replace them with cold, hard logic - but all goals are ultimately arbitrary, so without emotion, you have nothing from which to create the premises you need to utilize your logic. As a programmed machine, you can get around this by programming your new brain with the same premises your original character worked with, or by essentially slaving yourself to the rest of the group, using their desires and needs as premises for your own logic. It seems to me, however, that it basically shuts off the character's ability to grow and change on its own, if you're gonna play the talent according to its description.

Now, I'm not devoid of basic human empathy - I know what they were thinking when they made up this talent. They wanted to evoke the Spock feel, a highly intelligent character who every so often professes his lack of understanding of this thing you humans call emotion. Thing is, though, Vulcans do have emotions (as was admitted much later on) and the vast majority of characters in fiction are presented as having no emotions still manage to feel pride, hatred, arrogance, desire and a wide range of other emotions. How are you even supposed to revere the machine spirit, if you can't feel reverence or even respect to begin with?

So, now that that's over, what does everyone else think? Do you have a different interpretation, do you refluff it (like say, having the implant give you direct control of emotional impulses and hormones), do you play it straight according to the trope (with emotionless characters not actually being emotionless), or do you simply give no frakks and take the talent for the mechanical benefits?

We play it straight up as is - and it is hilarious.

I've only had one player take it, waaaaaaaay back when I first started GMing. I vaguely recall treating it like Chem-Geld on steroids, in that it imposed significant penalties for other people to influence his behaviour. I did a lot of rather silly things in that campaign, such as allowing PCs to try and influence each other with Fellowship rolls. Intimidate, Command, etc. The Rite made him essentially immune to it.

I find I don't much care for talents that are supposed to modify how you play a character though; things like Paranoia or Orthoproxy never really have their fluff sides used unless I'm a bugbear about it, so they're basically super awesome talents that everyone rushes for.

It hasn't come up in my games but I'd be tempted to houserule that emotions and brains in general are too poorly understood by the ad-mec to be completely removed from the brain without dire consequences so I'd rule that you can choose one emotion to completely remove (such as fear) and now you never have to worry about that again.

On the flip side I would probably rule that in the case of fear being removed caution would be diminished as well so it would act a lot like the High Vendetta option in the Trials and Travails. After all without fear then anger is probably a lot harder to control.

I'm going to throw out there that the separation of emotion and rationality is scientifically false. If you eliminate someone's ability to experience fear, say from a brain injury that damages someone's amygdala, then that same person can no longer be rational when it comes to tasks that involve risk. Games of chance, like cards or other gambling games, become impossible for these individuals to win, because they cannot rationally understand the risk involve.

For more check out the book Descarte's Error .

That said, I do think you can have fun rping the trait even if you stick to the vulcan tropes.