Ok so one of my players has raised an interesting question about the use of psychic powers and I'm a little bit undecided on this one. Now they do frequent here and they know who they are so if I spot you on here I know if you're dropping hints and trying to disrupt the conversation and I will drop rocks on you next session, big rocks that go boom!
A question has been asked concerning the uses of Compel and Machine Curse against Tau and their possible effectiveness.
My thoughts so far is that Compel may be partially useless on many Xenos races as you are asking them a command in Gothic while they might only understand Tau and therefore would have zero effectiveness. The other argument is whether you could target the pilot of a suit and force them to eject. My thoughts are whether the suit design would shield the user somewhat from the effect as in theory whats to stop you just using them to incapacitate an entire group of them or say using the idea on enemy tank units and asking them to stop the engine. The Machine trait would have allowed me a blanket no but it's not on a crisis suit and nothing says they need a direct line of sight on the pilot.
The other argument is over machine curse and whether that can be used to knock out a suit. It does state it can take out vehicles or weapons but the question is whether Imperial jinxing and understanding of how to jinx their own kit is still valid against alien technology. Also I would have guessed unlike many Imperial pieces, would Tau kit have internal failsafes. I would have said no and that isn't because it will break my entire campaign and give them an easy way to take out 90% of my adversaries. I could just use GM block but that would be mean and if I can get a better justification then that would be idea.
Other question, totally unrelated but it has me thinking it at the same time, would this same tech jinxing work on other alien tech such as Eldar Wraithbone and vehicles or Necron tech? That power is exceptionally vague and a really badly worded one.