You know I was looking at ascension today and I realized how crazy OP adepts are when it comes to investigating thing. At max rank they have every kind of lore and unnatural intelligence out the Wazoo as a sage. They're better at researching in every way when compared to a tech-priest, and they know way more about things then an Inquisitor, how is that balanced at all. I mean, I don't even think I caught all the ways that they're broken, if anyone else has some, they should add them.

Thank you! I thought I was the only one seeing this! And, yes, the Sage seems to be the most investigative broken career there is!

When you compare the Sage to the other two main investigative careers (Inquisitor and Judge), he completely outshines them making them utterly pointless. Even starting the career with a moderate amount of Int for an Adept, say 50, by the end of his career, without advancing his Int any further, he would have an IB of 20 while an optimized sage (figuring a 15 was rolled for I) from a forgeworld (adept career) with a best-quality cortex implant would have a max I of 68 or so with an IB of 30, every Lore skill with 0 chance of failing to know something and would have, at bare minimum, 4 DoS on automatically knowing that thing, if not more! Compare that with the Judge who, if built similarly, would only have an I of 65 and an IB of 6. It gets worse when you consider that the Judges main thing is Imperial Law, yet the Sage would have Scholastic Lore (Judgement) at a +20, have an I of 68, +40 for all of his Unnatural Inelegance (x5), and 4 automatic DoS because of that Unnatural Intelligence again meaning that, to a Challenging (+0) matter involving Scholastic Lore (Judgement) he would have a 128% chance of success with a DoS range of 6 - 14! Compare that to the Law-hound, the Judge, who, on the same test would have an 85% chance of success with, on a success, a DoS range of 0 - 8. How is that even fair?! And the Inquisitor is in a similar boat. Never mind that most info-tables for knowing something rarely go beyond 6 DoS to know the deepest darkest secrits of the matter!

Now, i know what you are going to say, "but the Inquisitor and Judge can call in an army of scribes to assist them in the research giving them a +30 and +3 DoS", but that doesn't even come close to the Sage, and never mind that all Throne Agents get Influence so the Sage can do the same thing for even more DoS! Scholastic Lore (Judgement) is the domain of the Judge and when you chose to play a Judge, you do so thinking you are going to be the "law guy". I mean, why even bother when there's a Sage around. Sure the whole group can get together and kick some death-cultist daemon summoning heretic ass, but when it comes to the big finally of setting up the trial and formulating the formal charges against the planetary governor who was the ring leader, just send in the Sage while the Law-Monkey and everyone else gets to sit on their butt's feeling useless. Broken!

Now, I'm not too good at math, but I got a feeling that the Sages IFS (Info per second) is more then ten times that of any other class and, on top of that, they will out preform the Judge in matters of law and the Magus in the Magus' chosen specialty even! The Magus is supposed to be the Library-Tank, but the Sage has taken over that roll as well!

Can anyone suggest any way to fix this obvious imbalance? Or at least offer some suggestion on how the other classes can feel useful in information gathering?

Bombernoy said:

ICWUTUDIDTHAR!!!!!!

A winnar is you Zero Cool!

Just make him take a lot of tests to carry around all those data slates and watch the Judge laugh and laugh as he flexes his giant muscles.

ROTFLMAO! Great sarcasm guys... you know I was wondering when someone would write a topic like this...

Hmm... I still haven read through =A= completely

...but what do you suppose an =A= Sage should be but an wisdom-monster? As far as I can see it, all of the Careers are monsters in their fields. So Adepts/Sages start to be "Mr. I-know-it-all" unless you come after them with -60 penalties.

As far as I can see it, "Ascenions" seems to kinda 40K-Superheroe-Game where all of the figures are this ultra-high-powerfell figures. I am not sure if I like =A= for being what it is, but I do not understand what you expected.

Yawn.

So the "pure knowledge" character option is better at knowing random whatever when compared to the more hybrid "know stuff while kicking ass at the same time" careers... I fail to see the problem.

Adepts/Sages are ALL ABOUT knowing stuff. It is their niche. In short, they are SUPPOSED to be the best at "nerd stuff". The Techpriest/Magos and Arbitrator/Judge are WAY harder to kill and likewise far more skilled at killing the things that have a harder time killing them... Gotta give the relatively squishy librarian their glory.

ZillaPrime said:

It's attitudes like this that lead to slap-dash imbalanced game design! Sure, the Magos and the Judge can do other things, but that doesn't help them one little bit (never mind the poor VA!) when it comes time to run the library sequence against the data-stack! Really, the Sage can solo just about any library you throw at him and doesn't need any other career. What are they supposed to do while the Sage is having his "glory"? The game should be fun for everyone, not forcing them all to play Sages just to get their time in the lime light.

Besides that, what about the guy who made an Arbiter, played that Arbiter faithfully for over a year slowly building him up to be the de-facto "law-guy" and then, once ascended, comes to find that he is completely outclassed in his chosen specialty by a career that, on top of knowing all there is to know about the law, knows pretty much everything else as well?

Gregorius said: "...but what do you suppose an =A= Sage should be but an wisdom-monster? As far as I can see it, all of the Careers are monsters in their fields. So Adepts/Sages start to be "Mr. I-know-it-all" unless you come after them with -60 penalties. "

Two problems that that approach. First, if you make the lore-hunts that difficult, no other PC will stand any kind of chance against such information and will end up burning fate points or some such just to keep up with the Sage equating, again, to the Sage simply soloing any major research encounter that the GM might toss into the game. Second, if the GM has to resort of dirty tricks such as supper rare lore and hard to get at books (or the trick mentioned earlier with heavy data-slates and tomes) eventually the Sage player will get disgusted and leave. It would be obvious that you're picking on him and making abnormally difficult contrived situations just to make things challenging for the character.

Finlay, I know the Sages are utter monsters of lore in the fluff, but this is also a game and for it to be fun all, the careers need to be balanced. If the designers couldn't think of a better way of implementing the Sage and still keep the feel of one from the fluff, perhaps they shouldn't have been included as a playable class in the first place. As it stands, sure, all the careers have their "thing" and they are monstrously good at it in some shape or form, that doesn't change the fact that, in an investigative game, research will be a major component. It will happen a lot, and even if you decide to ignore this major flaw and just have a lot of combat encounters, there will be time when the research has to be done and in those encounters, the Sage will simply pwn everything. Even if you decide to forgo any and all forms of research, the fact that rules and skills for it exist in the books show that it is a part of the game and system but it's a part that this career walks all over. Broken!

Well...it's not that it's broken, but imagine this:

Callidon, Adept extraordinaire, needs to retrieve some case files from a previous injunction against a noble family filed some 2000 years ago, to be used as part of an ongoing prosecution that the Judge is pursuing. BUT WAIT! There are all sorts of hostile index file servitors!!!! Who will defend the halpless Adept as he attempts to sneak into the librarium and retrieve those files. WHO WILL DEFEND HIM!?!? Well duh...the rest of the party of course. Your Shock Trooper Guardsman can set down some wicked surpressing fire in the periodicals, while the VA will slowly stalk and "delay" the Arch-Librarian! And when all seems lost...when wits are frayed and the search is all but abandoned (even with the assistance of our trusty Judge) who can restore their faith? Heirophant Maximus to the RESCUE!!!!!

the point is, the Adept may know the file exists. He may even have an inkling of where to find it and what the key points of the file contain, but without the team working together, they will never escape the clutches of the LIBRARIUM NIHILIUM!!!!!!

/cue dramatic music!

I love this forum.

Graver said:

Hi Graver,

how long does such an "liberary run" take in "table time" do to your experience? I assume that we are talking about either a simple dice role or an extended dice role. Both thinks do not take much table time, which keeps me from seeing your point.

The " people with pc not of the [FieldOfExpertise] can´t do a thing for a long while and are BORED " -syndrom is something I only witnessed in detaile-played combats and detail-played social situations. And in that case only if the GM (me) wasn´t able to switch scenes every 5 minutes to "the others".

@Illithidelderbrain

Callidon, Adept extraordinaire, needs to retrieve some case files from a previous injunction against a noble family filed some 2000 years ago, to be used as part of an ongoing prosecution that the Judge is pursuing. BUT WAIT! There are all sorts of hostile index file servitors!!!! Who will defend the halpless Adept as he attempts to sneak into the librarium and retrieve those files. WHO WILL DEFEND HIM!?!? Well duh...the rest of the party of course. Your Shock Trooper Guardsman can set down some wicked surpressing fire in the periodicals, while the VA will slowly stalk and "delay" the Arch-Librarian! And when all seems lost...when wits are frayed and the search is all but abandoned (even with the assistance of our trusty Judge) who can restore their faith? Heirophant Maximus to the RESCUE!!!!!

Pfft. everyone knows hostile index file servitors don't attack anyone wearing a proper Index File Badge. Er... I meant everyone capable of making a Difficult (-20) Forbidden Lore (Hostile Librarium Equipment) check. And making such a badge is generally governed by Scholastic Lore (Librarium Use).

See? Even encounters designed to be dependant on the whole cell can easily be turned into a one-man-show by a crafty Adept.

Cifer said:

Acutally, creating items is something governed not by Scholastic-Lore-Skills but by Craft-Skills.

My question here in all seriousness is this:

WTF?!

Are we playing the Dark Heresy MMO here? You are not going to achieve anything approaching "balance" in a tabletop roleplaying game and leave the "tabletop" or "roleplaying" aspect even moderately intact. Guardsmen and Assassins are SUPPOSED to be unbalanced against lesser combattants! Arbitrators are SUPPOSED to pull the bad-ass Judge Dredd thing! Techpriests are SUPPOSED to become Mechagodzilla! The idea is to have some fun portraying interesting and special individuals in the Warhammer 40k universe. Simply put, if they "balanced" it, there would not be any fun, as your characters would be virtual clones. If you doubt this please go take a look at D&D 4E. You can literally replace your character sheets in 4E with a small stack of index cards with pre-printed powers on them. Oooh! Fun.... or something. Oh but hey, 4E still allows for character customization: There is a little blank line to name your otherwise indistinguishable stack of index cards!

Most of the players out there who made Adepts and went through all the fun twists and turns of adventure that carried them up to rank 8 did so specifically because they wanted to play a character similar in nature to Aemos the Autosavant in the Eisenhorn series. Any character can kick some ass in DH (a good thing!) but it is definately true that some career paths are better at it than others. Likewise for social and data gathering. Adepts lag behind their teammates in both combat and social aspects, so in what way is it "balance" to put their research and data-searching talents on the same tier as everyone else? That seems like an utterly unfair thing to do to all those Adept players out there. And "if they are so much better at research then maybe they should not be a playable class"... Really now?

On a semi-related note, Deathwatch comes out late this summer and a starting Deathwatch SM is supposed to be roughly equivalent to a rank 9 DH character. Whould we likewise assume that the Adept/Sage is unfairly advantaged against an Astartes because they know the Dewey Decimal System?

MOCK YE NOT THE GREAT WORKS OF ST. DEWEY DECIMUS!

I was totally looking at the stats for a Lord of Change... And it looks like a Rank 16 Adept can totally beat 3 to 8 of them per round... In chess.

Totally OP. There should be something done about this!

( Sorry. I had to do this in keeping with the spirit of the thread. )

@Gregorius

Acutally, creating items is something governed not by Scholastic-Lore-Skills but by Craft-Skills.

That would be the case if Index File Badges were a little more complicated than stapling a piece of tinfoil to a bit of cardboard (yeah, the librarium went through some hard times). The hard thing when forging them is knowing what has to be written on the badge - which is Scholastic Lore (Librarium Use).

@Zilla

On a semi-related note, Deathwatch comes out late this summer and a starting Deathwatch SM is supposed to be roughly equivalent to a rank 9 DH character. Whould we likewise assume that the Adept/Sage is unfairly advantaged against an Astartes because they know the Dewey Decimal System?

Of course! While it may appear that the Astartes are physically stronger than a mere adept, guess what happens when the latter manages to have their targeting coordinates misfiled and the Astartes walk around through some uninhabited wasteland hundreds of lightyears away from the place they should have been inserted.

Truly, the autoquill is mightier than the boltgun.

(Which should obviously give us even more of a hint how OP the adept career is considering they can outmaneuvre the iconic 40k characters!)

Illithidelderbrain said:

OK, that is a great and rousing scene you describe there (one that should be enshrined somewhere), and a great idea for a couple to a few Research Encounters, but it can't and won't work all the time. Again, it simply falls in the "dirty tricks" category. Most research encounters should be just that, Research Encounters and one class completely pwning at teh researches shouldn't necessitate a complete reworking of a crucial and core encounter type. As it is, and wonderfully illustrated by your example, the Sage completely breaks the game because an entire encounter type has to be rethought and reworked into something different just to make sure everyone can contribute equally in that encounter while the Sage is around. Broken!

Gregorius21778 said:

How long a Research Encounter takes is really dependant on the kind of information sought. Just a quick random research encounter will just take maybe 5-10 minutes to play through but those aren't the problem. It's the big climactic tactical researches that I'm looking at, the kind you break the minis out for, draw an Info-Web Correspondence Map on the play-mat, and get out the prop-books with the clue-chits. Those can take a little bit of time to run through, usually about 30 minutes to a few hours depending on how tough the information is to get and how much of it there is. I once had an end research encounter take a full game session to play through, though that was something of a special case as it was a mass-research with hundreds of scribes and copyists involved against a complete data-tomb. However, as that one was run early in Dark Heresy, all the PCs were able to contribute equally to the research. If there had been a Sage involved, none of the other players would have even needed to show up for the game as it would have just been the Sage steamrolling through the data-tomb like it was nothing.

Your second sentence intrigues me, though. To my understanding, the amount of detail you put into an encounter and the amount of time it takes to play through determines (or is determined by) how important that encounter or type of encounter is to the story and game. That being the case, I can see how a social encounter could be almost as involved and in-depth as a research encounter, but how can you possibly make a combat encounter that detailed and important to the over-all plot in Ascension? That would go a long way to helping out the Vindicare Assassin, especially if you have a total n00b in your group who chose to play one without realizing that they were teh gimp.

Oh, and creating a fake library-pass would be a Trade (Copiest) test, something most any Sage worth his salt would have been toting around since rank 1 ;-)

ZillaPrime said:

First, and not quite related, but dose anyone else notice that D&D 4E is becoming the new Godwin of rp topics? Either way, I shall get back to the total srs business that is this topic (I lurv you straight man!):

I'll agree that most players playing Adepts -> Sages do so to specifically to be a lore monster. They understood the game, but should their fun be had at the expense of everyone else who can't contribute equally to a research encounter or library run? You make a big case about how all the character's shouldn't be clones, but in order for all the players to contribute, they would all have to play Sages while the sage is around. How is that imbalance not forcing everyone to play clones of one another? Just because they lag behind in social encounters doesn't mean that they should completely dominate research encounters making it pointless to be anything else but a Sage for research. Beyond that, the GM shouldn't need to come up with contrived combat encounters just to keep the Sage and his rampant power in check.

Researching is a major part of any investigative story, a major part that is completely dominated by one class: the Sage. That breaks the game and that makes the Sage class BROKEN! Is that unfair to the Adept players? Maybe, but isn't leaving it as is unfair to everyone else? Not addressing this obvious flaw is unfair to all those who don't play Adepts, especially to any unsuspecting n00b who might chose to play the most gimped class in the game: the Vindicare. Is it right to be unfair to everyone else just so the Adept -> Sage can use the class as a phallus enhancement?

As to your question about Deathwatch, if the DW marines came into DH, then, ya, the Sage would definitely out-shine them in any and all research encounters, even, ironically enough, the Librarians! The Sage will do that to any and all classes, that is the problem! If someone wanted to do a cross-over, they'd have a hard time making the poor marine player be able to even keep up with the Sage during a library-crawl.

Yui 56 said:

Whoa! WTF! I never noticed that, but you're right. Actually, in doing the math based on the LoC in the back of Ascension I found the fallowing:

LoC has an I: 99 which is good, but an IB of only 27 (there's a misprint in the book only giving him an IB of 17, be ware!) while a well built Sage can have I: 73 but an IB: 35! The I of 73 doesn't matter over-much as with skill and talent proficiencies, that will still push the Sage over 100% (never mind their auto-success for max results special talent) making the actual I score some-what irrelevant.

What is relevant is the IB which the Sage has more of then the LoC! How can that even be possible and true to fluff?! That means that for every Xanatos Speedchess the LoC engages in the Sage can preform 1 and a half counter Xanatos Speedchess maneuvers never mind that with an IB like that, his Just As Planed will almost always go off before the LoC's! Now, while the LoC can try to counter the Sage's Just as Planed with a quick Xanatos Roulette, the Sage can negate the LoC's maneuver with a well placed Xanthose Gambit and have enough IB left over to fallow it up with a Xanatos Roulette of his own. This is even sicker when one considers that the Sage can actually hoist 8 LoCs at once by their own petards causing 8 Xanatos Backfires in one round with a simple 30 Xanatos Pileup and dominate with his Just as Planed! Broken!

Best thread ever on Ascension. Well done Graver . Best laugh i've had in an age .

What is relevant is the IB which the Sage has more of then the LoC! How can that even be possible and true to fluff?! That means that for every Xanatos Speedchess the LoC engages in the Sage can preform 1 and a half counter Xanatos Speedchess maneuvers never mind that with an IB like that, his Just As Planed will almost always go off before the LoC's! Now, while the LoC can try to counter the Sage's Just as Planed with a quick Xanatos Roulette, the Sage can negate the LoC's maneuver with a well placed Xanthose Gambit and have enough IB left over to fallow it up with a Xanatos Roulette of his own. This is even sicker when one considers that the Sage can actually hoist 8 LoCs at once by their own petards causing 8 Xanatos Backfires in one round with a simple 30 Xanatos Pileup and dominate with his Just as Planed! Broken!

I've got a feeling what career dear David might be...

Illithidelderbrain said:

i just figured out a new heresy...someones been messing with the library on Scintilla heresy is under Z instead of H...oh dear throne no...

ThenDoctor said:

We would like to thank your for bringing this to our attention, and will reward you with five chrono increments of time in the Venial Gratification chambers. Those servitors who were originally tasked with collating files have been sacked. JUST. AS. PLANNED.

As biased as I am going to sound, I gotta agree with Zilla here. someone plays an Adept to be like The Librarian, or a more nerdy Laura Croft, or even Indiana Jones. Our Tech Priest will forever and again be better at EVERYTHING tech then our Adept. Our 42 Flavors of Death (aka our Assassin, Guardsmen) are going to forever be better at making things die horrible deaths. Our female Priest of the Booze is going to be forever a better Fellowship monkey then her. Are ANY of these characters going to know more? HELL no. And I don't expect them to EVER have more knowledge access, cause her entire BACKSTORY was reading things she shouldn't and getting tossed about the sector as people got pissed at her knowing more then them. It FITS her, and it works.

Illithidelderbrain said:

The man should never have been beatified. Heresy is next to blasphemy and cowardice in the Emperor's detestation, and so should they be within the Emperor's archives.