I don't think that Unnatural attributes should be off limits to Throne Agents; they've got access to the best equipment and training in the Imperium. They should, however, be portrayed as their namesake; unnatural. Unnatural Intelligence is a good example; whether attained through cybernetic implants, hypno-conditioning or another esoteric method the character is now brilliantly intelligent in a way that would be quite disturbing to the average man. To use something from Dune as an example (in true 40k fashion), Mentats are an example of this. Inquisitors can be impossibly driven individuals with absolute conviction in their beliefs, intense to a frightening degree. The conditioned will of a veteran psyker is just as unsettling. As for unnatural physical attributes, cybernetics are one way to account for them, but regardless of the exact nature of how a character gained an Unnatural attribute it should be distinctly superhuman to watch in action. Muscles bulge suddenly and grotesquely, horrible injuries suffered fail to impair the victim as they should and the subject moves with a disturbing grace. The biggest problem I see with Unnatural Attributes are characters that take them and act as if they haven't, reaping the mechanical effects without bothering to consider the other implications.

Do yourselves a BIG favour and read the grandfather of all modern Sci-Fi: The Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Then come back and tell me that the MacDougal and Kinnison families were not sporting some "unnatural" characteristics. It was a standing joke in my old Lensman game (I playtested it!) that a medkit should be defined as containing a barely cooked porterhouse steak (or three!) and a pile of potatos, since Kimbal Kinnison literally eats his way back to health this way in "Galactic Patrol". The earlier mentioned Doc Savage books and of course the Dune series likewise are rife with examples of this type of character. More characters than I care to count in 40K fiction (and I will freely discard the all-too-obvious Space Marine characters for the sake of argument) are screamingly obvious examples of the same thing. Why then should such levels of performance potential be denied to characters that are on or above the par of specialist Astartes? (Deathwatch characters are roughly equal to a rank 9 DH character according to the teaser info). Does Aemos the Autosavant not deserve the unnatural intelligence trait? Does Commisar Cain not deserve the unnatural fellowship trait? Surely Inquisitors Ravenor and Eisenhorn deserve unnatural willpower? I am pretty confident that Colonel Schaefer (Last Chancers) has unnatural toughness (x2 or so) for example: He has body parts torn off in combat and barely so much as flinches, then procedes to kick some one-armed ass since it pissed him off! Near the end of the series it is revealed that Schaefer has been leading special "Last Chancers" suicide missions for a few hundred years!

If you still decide that they have no business being on a character sheet in your game then you can always deny the advance to players who wish to spend XP on them. Still leaves plenty of other expensive stuff to spend points on. Or perhaps require them to buy up to the +30 level on an attribute as a prerequisite to buy the unnatural? Any character that is willing to dump several thousand XP on one stat is pretty serious about that particualr trait by that point. The key here is it is YOUR game! It belongs to the GM and to a slightly lesser extent all of the players involved. If everyone involved likes things a certain way then for that group it is "the right way".

Some pretty interesting arguments so far.

I am totally for unnatural characteristics for player characters but find the mechanic to be a little clunky. It instantly changes the game rather than providing a gradual progression. This causes issues when trying to create interesting encounters that will challenge the Unnaturally tough Vindicare (TB 14 who is immune to shotgun rounds being fired into his eyeball) while not ganking the rest of the party and leading to a lack of fun.

I would prefer a system similar to the machine trait where characters can gradually increase their characteristic bonuses as they progress in rank. It would also be easier to cost these advances reasonably. The problem I see with unnatural characteristics as they are is that leaving them tied to the basic characteristic value can mean they are either far from unnatural (Gretchin I'm looking at you here) or just push the system past breaking point with massive static bonuses for characters who are already the best in the world at what they do.

I just can't not speak up on this lol

The earlier example of the guardsman being incapable of seeing the x4 unnatural agility Death Cult Assassin is... legitimate. Except, it's not a bad thing. This is what happens in ANY level based system. It's like looking at a D&D character and saying, well, my first level fighter with a spot of +2 can't possibly see that 15th level thief who's hiding in shadows with his +23. This is the kind of comparison you're making. You're right, that Death Cult Assassin is going to walk through the lines of a group of shmuck guardsmen with NO EFFORT because he/she is just that **** good. Now, if you put it up against something with Perception x4, and the appropriate stats to match, and they have no way in hell of ever seeing the DCA, then you can complain but that's not the case. Unnatural toughness is the only unnat stat I struggle with in the games I run, and usually, it means it leads to a more... threatening encounter for the rest of the PCs, but this is an incredibly lethal game, with plenty of ways built in to cheat death. Sure, that assassin has a TB of 14 but there are ways to hurt him still, and it will add to the fear factor of the rest of your party, something that is surely diminished from having an unparreled killing machine and them all being in the best possible gear. It takes alittle more work, but as a GM, more work generally means that the encounter, or game session in general, are more rewarding.

There are a number of ways to explain unnatural traits in seemingly normal humans, from the combat drugs and training regimen of a Temple Assassin, to the brain disease that turns a Sage into a super computer of intelligence (hey, that one exists in real life, right now, Rainman anyone?).

Does Aemos the Autosavant not deserve the unnatural intelligence trait?

No. He deserves a very high Intelligence (something in the 60+ range), Total Recall, Foresight, Infused Knowledge (from Rogue Trader), plus any other lore based talents I'm not thinking of, and most if not all Lore skills at +10 if not +20. He doesn't need Unnatural Intelligence.

Surely Inquisitors Ravenor and Eisenhorn deserve unnatural willpower?

No. They need a very high Willpowers (again 60+), for Eisenhorn only moderate a Psy Rating (plus Sorcery later) while for Ravenor a very high Psy Rating (6+) and for both a serious set of Willpower enhancing (and for Ravenor Psy enhancing) talents. Again, they don't need Unnatural Willpower... high end abilities from the cores are quite adequate.

IMO, naturally.

LuciusT said:

So... the Unnatural intelegance availeable to adepts in the DH is something the adept dosn't need and shouldn't get?

Graver said:

IMO, yes.

LuciusT said:

Now there's the kind of good looking, strong-jawed, all-american, red-meat eating answer you just can't argue with.

I don't like Unnatural characteristics being available because of their conotations. A human is very natural, the rules are designed around humans.

These are still people. A human body can only do so much. Being rank 14 doesn't make your nerves send impulses faster than a nerve can normally fire, it means you are more experienced. Being more experienced doesn't mean your flesh can rebound axe blades, it means you are more experienced.

Unnatural abilities are abilities you cannot NATURALLY have. In order for a human to get stronger and tougher he is going to have to have some UNNATURAL things done to him, like say, becoming a space marine and getting some additional organs. Or receiving a cybernetic body, or a octo-core cpu brain augmentor, or being possessed by a daemon, or taking an alien drug.

Anything NOT simply being a 'more experienced human'. A storm trooper is stil a human and I've yet to see any 40k background where they can suddenly bounce bullets. Being an ascension character doesn't some how allow you to magically ignore the limitations of your own body. Storm troopers would be AWESOME in 40k if they could do that, but they can't that's why they have space marines.

People use the novels as examples of higher level play, but none of Ravenor's people were unnaturally tough or strong. None of them were BEYOND human.

That I think is the fundamental problem. Perhaps if it were called 'heroic characteristic' or 'above average characteristic' then it would be so bad, but even then it's a little hard to believe that an 'above average' human can literally bounce axes of their chest because they're TB10...

Hellebore

Hellebore: I don't get what's stopping you from requiring all players that take the unnatural advances to somehow explain their stat increase. In fact, I think that's perfectly natural to require.

Hellebore said:

You don't have much to worry about on the axe bouncing front as the only careers that get Unnatural Toughness (and Strength for that matter) is the Magos (a cyborg) and the Vindicare (the augmented super-sniper). None of the others do ;-) Except for the Death Cult Assassin, the only Unnatural Traits that any of the other careers is Inelegance and Willpower so no axe bouncing with those either... well, except for the psyker but that's just part of their shtick

Hellebore said:

I'm pretty sure that being a psyker counts as some degree of inhumanity - they can, afterall, achieve feats that are completely and utterly impossible for a normal human to perform, and could easily be classified as abhumans.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Yeah, but psykers are covered under the existing rules without requiring Unnatural Characteristics.

LuciusT said:

To an extent. But their maximum potential capabilities are not necessarily something covered as standard by the rules. What about the highest classifications of psykers, who can juggle battle tanks with their minds and enslave whole cities with a single thought?

Such is the sort of power that Unnatural Willpower on a psyker represents quite well (sometimes a little too well, but that's a matter debated furiously elsewhere).

I'm not saying that such abilities require no justification... all I'm saying is that there are suficient justifications for their inclusion that they should not be disregarded out of hand. Just because you personally may dislike their inclusion does not render the rest of the book entirely useless nor does it mean that they shouldn't be in there... it just means that you don't like them and may be inclined to take a permanent marker to those particular entries on the advance schemes.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

On that, I fear that ultimately we must agree to disagree. I notice a number of people on these forums who appear agree with you and a number who appear to agree with me. I hazard to guess that this is the most divisive issue I've seen on this forums for some time... which is OK, IMO.

For myself, this is one of several issues which people have brought up which together are enough to cause me to choose not to buy Ascension... at least not at full price. Maybe when it comes out on pdf or when Amazon gets there act together, but its not worth $50.00 for me. That's my choice as a consumer. You choose otherwise and that's fine too.

For that matter, my Rank 2 Voidmaster (nominally equivalent to a Rank 7 DH character) has Unnatural Intelligence (x2) from her Good Quality Cortex Implant.

As for a Death Cultist's Unnatural Agility, I regard it as being analogous to a Faith Talent. It's a product of a lifetime devoted to murder in a universe where both the Emperor and Khorne give people superpowers for that kind of thing.

Your first problem is assuming that having an Unnatural Characteristic makes you more or less than human. The name "Unnatural Characteristic" is a holdover from the core rulebook and refers to adversaries with exceptional aptitude in certain areas, but it would be no less innacurate to re-label the ability "Formidable Characteristic" and award it as appropriate. It's certinally a more paletable sounding title.Given the Mechanical effects of most Formidab-err, Unnatural Characterstics, I fail to see any problem or imbalance from a rules perspective, they allow a character to gain a noteworthy measure of additional compotence/power without resorting to the crude expedience of adding 10% or 20% to a characteristic or creating new talents, increasing the stat bonus by a times multiplier is an excellent way of increacing ability without simply piling on dozens of additional stat points.

In the case of Formidab-err, Unnatural Intelligence, you either have a computer in your brain or are a member of the Savant career, for which the primary source of inspiration was Uber Aemos, a character in the Eisenhorn Trilogy who suffered from a rare and highly advanced meme-virus that altered his brain functions, leaving him with a literally insaitable thirst for knowledge and the prodigious, one might even say unnatural ability to retain the vast amounts of data he gathered with every waking moment of his long life. There's the suggestion in the core book that an Adept with only one iteration of Formidab-err, Unnatural Intelligence has a second brain attatched to him. Why your Sage is so Throne-damned smart is up to the player and GM to work out. Is it a virus like the original Uber (Aemos) Sage? Augmetics? A rare talent for data acquisiton? The possibilities are endless.

Formidab-err, Unnatural Willpower is entirely appropriate for Inquisitors and Psykers, their wills being extensively trained and honed through grim and harrowing experience. In the case of Formidab-err, Unnatural Willpower, no actual inhuman capability is imparted, no twisting bars with your bare hands or taking a lasbolt on the bare chest and laughing, just a higher (and in many cases, still embarassingly low) chance to resist fear and intimidation, using pre-existing rules as a convenient method of represnting the Inquisitor or Psyker's peerless mental fortitude. In the case of the Psyker, Formidab-err, Unnatural Willpower does the above and also empowers their unnatural ability to channel the energy of the Immaterium to affect change in the real world. This is essential under the current rules to remain competitive with the abilities of their fellow acolytes, who have power weapons, big guns, armoured vehicles etc, and do not need to risk their immortal souls to employ these tools. Don't bother bringing up Force Barrage, it needed a fix before Ascention came out.

One could easily ask "But what about Unnatural Strength and Toughness?" And they'd be fair to ask, these two are considerably more powerful than the other Formidab-err, Unnatural Characteristics. But by the same token, under the current rules they are awarded infrequently and appropriately, only being available through mutation, bionic replacement or the extensive bio-engineering of an Astartes or Imperial Assassin, in all four cases these are licence to be more, or less, than human and in those cases Unnatural Characteristics are faithful representations of their capabilities.

If you don't like Formidab-err, Unnatural Characteristics, fine, but they have been implemented sensibly in Ascention and are almost nonexsistant in Dark Heresy Core and Rogue Trader and therefore do not pose a problem in those systems. If you don't like the implication of the name "Unnatural Characteristic" then rename it, but if you're going to excise Formidab-err, Unnatural Characteristics from careers because you think they are too powerful, you might as well ban most Heavy Weapons, Power Fists, Force Weapons and anything else that could elevate a PC above impotence while you're at it. If your players are comfortible with playing their classes with Formidab-err, Unnatural characterstics excised from their advance schemes, good luck to them I say, but these traits do not break the game and affect the mood only so much as you let it.

Azrail, I find your argument most interesting and yet flawed.

For example, you use Uber Aemos as an example of Unnatural Intelligence and go on the explain the reason for it as a rare genetic meme-virus that alters his brain functions. This is more inline with the pre-existing game mechanics for mutation then it is with purchasing advances from the career tables of skills and talents. And could also be covered by the talent Total Recall, which a scribe could get at Rank 4.

And the thought of gaining these traits through gizmos, gadgets and bionics/cybernetics is covered in the rules as well and therefore is made moot by them being available on the chart.

Your assumption that these could easily be labeled Formidable Characteristics is brash and IMHO incomplete. These traits were created so larger, greater, and more inhuman beasts could exist in the 1-100 scale of the game, and while not completely thought out or balanced accordingly, they work for that function. It is when they are applied so hap-hazardly to PCs that they become ridiculous.

Buy a cortex implant, fine, logically that is a piece of equipment, it can degrade through use, improper maintanence, damage and other external pressures. A critical to the head could easily be modded to damage the implant and you either need to get it removed or replace. Unnatural Intelligence as a "natural" trait within the character doesnt have that inherit drawback.

Most people who do not like the use of these traits do so because of the ease of gaining them. The prices are realatively cheap compared to the effect. Most only cost 1000XP, which may be 5-10 normal Dark Heresy adventures worth of XP, but with Ascension's higher XP awards it is only 2 adventure's worth. It would be stupid to spend the same XP on buying another +5 to that characteristic.

In short, Ascension makes many things available to players that inheritly make no true sense. It works within the setting and we can explain away these abilities using our fluff knowledge, but you are nor required too nor are there any set of rules to guide to govern doing such. The fact that we are even having this topic of discussion is indication that there are issues arising in the direction the game is heading.

While I would love one or two supplements for ascension, I hope the main game line sticks with DH the original version. And I hope to God that after Deathwatch comes out they put together a revised 40KRPG core rule book that covers all three general tiers of characters and fixes some of these "issues".

Peacekeeper_b said:

Because obviously, it's unthinkable to include the effects of some bionic implants, etc as talents and traits... oh, wait.

Augmetics and similar character-changing external factors can (and should) be represented in a number of ways, not just as equipment. Items of wargear (bionic limbs, mechadendrites, cortex implants, etc) have different requirements and availabilities to talents and traits (machinator array, luminen shock, etc), which in turn have different ones to Elite Advances (Cybernetic Resurrection), and so forth. No method of representing such things is inherently incorrect; each should be judged on the nature of what a given option represents overall.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Agreed!

I'm fine with Unnatural Characteristics in my games, especially on the Ascension level. What makes me think they're OK is this big white title on the Ascension cover saying "Everything you knew was a lie". The way I understand it, Warhammer universe is all about inequity, with teeming masses being run by a relatively small number of insanely powerful individuals, and Ascension is about PCs becoming such individuals themselves. At this point, anything that helps drive home the point of their previous deeds being worthless next to what Throne Agents achieve casually strikes me as a good idea.

Obviously, it's not good for every campaign and every playstyle, but I found it working for me.

I only allow the unnatural traits for those who 1) wind up with a mutation for some reason and require them to randomly roll for it to get it or 2) can give me a REALLY good and clever roleplay reason why i should allow them to get it to make the game more interesting for everyone but not overbalance things. To that end i make it extremely difficult to locate cybernetics that allow for unnatural traits OR the medicae skilled enough with a facility skilled enough to implant them correctly ( yes i make the random medicae roll for it for the implantations to be done...EACH day of the procedure for however long it takes and every failure will cause some form of damage or problem to the PC and i make the Players fully aware of the potential problems with the procedure) the ONLY exceptions to this rule are tech-priest characters...they can get normal access to the cybernetics and reasonable(but not easy) access to qualified tech medicae and facilities...but still have to pay very high rates for the procedures. And yes i have randomly botched the roll for implantation that wound up killing a PC before due to inadequate facilities and underskilled medicae staff......such are the risks in the far future...it isnt called grim for nothing

A rules question: there aren't any inherit bonuses for having unnatural characteristics when using them for straight up tests, right? So a Fear test for an Inquisitor with Unnatural Willpower will still be based on his straight Willpower stat? Or a Sage using a Lore skill?

I know about the opposed tests part btw. From a munchkin perspective, unnatural willpower for an inquisitor without psychic powers isn't that useful, is it? I mean, apart from resisting being dominated and such....

Edit: I See Graver wrote about this already earlier in the thread, that's what I get for searching and not reading the thread...

Found the entry in IH regarding difficulties on tests being reduced by one per degree of unnatural stats (page 226 for the curious), so the above post can be disregarded.

Hey guys got a rules question regarding unnatural willpower.

A psyker has WP 90 with unnatural willpower *3. With invocation, does he add 36 or 54 to his power roll?