As an adept player I'm trying to figure out how my character is OP'd compared to the rest of the team. The tech priest, guardsman, and assassin blow my adept out of the water in combat. When it comes to social skills, yea forget it not my character's cup of tea and she doesn't care. Knowledge, maybe depends on what you want to know. My character has 1 CL, 6 SL's, and 6 FL's with an Int of 52 with one advance left to take. If you want information pertaining to cults and occult practices ok I'm the person to go to. If you want legal advice or medical knowledge umm yea the hospital is that way and the law offices are over that away somewhere have fun. So this problem about a Sage having better SL (Judgement) knowledge, yea ok I'll believe it if the character is playing a lawyer type of character. As to my character even as a Sage not likely. My character has no care to pick up that lore, she has more important things to do, hunt down books that shouldn't be out there, hunting down cults, and the occasional demon. Maybe I'm playing the class wrong I don't know.

As to Illithidelderbrain's scenerio, my adept would've helped the tech priest to shut down the servitors. We've done it before. Then help the team take down mr big and ugly. After that was done, I'd have helped the tech priest reprogram the servitors to protect us. Then used the whole team to help do the searching, with my adept telling the others where to look, while the servitors were guarding us.

Just my thoughts on the matter. I don't see where this "adepts know everything" concept comes from. I compare adepts with current day people with PhD's. There are different fields to study for a PhD. If using todays fields, an adept with a PhD is physics is definately the person to go to for information pertaining to physics, but a criminal law arbitrator will have way more knowledge in law that the physics adept. I see adepts as equal parts Librarian and either Indiana Jones (male) or Laura Croft (female). Shaken not stirred.

Shibby1431 said:

No I don't have Ascension personally but my GM has it and I've looked through it. Although the Sage does get Skill mastery In lores doesn't mean the GM has to allow all lores. Clump them up by ordos or similiar topics for example Forbidden Lore Mastery (Heretical): Daemonology, Cult and Heresy. Scholastic Lore Mastery (Mysterious), Legend, Occult, maybe Numerology? You get the picture. I mean really I can have a pretty good imagination but even my suspension of disbelief goes wtf at the thought of a character going to school one day and the next knowing everything there is to know about everything. All you have to do is adjust the lores with what the adept has to give them mastery over their fields of study really what's so hard about that? That way they are still knowledge monkeys in their pertenant field but less informed about other lores. Even if somehow I manage to make it to a 90+ lore test as a player if I roll a 95 or higher I fail at the test. Why? Personally no matter how good my character gets at something I personally give myself a 5% fail chance. But that's just my thinking

Shibby1431 said:

Actually, according to the rules AS STATED in the core book, any roll of 94 or higher is an AUTO FAIL no matter what you are going for.

So even if he got a 300 Int to roll under, he hits that 94, and he don't know ****.

Edit: er, nevermind on my previous post.

On a more urgent note, are more people actualy viewing the satire contained in this thread at face value then not now?

I might be sad now...

Kylen said:

Where is that stated? Not that I don't believe you, but I have no interest in combing through hundreds of pages to find it...

This brokeness in the game is exactly why our game master disallowed our local Power Gamer from playing either the Adept, Assassin, Psyker, Tech-priest, Arbitrator, Cleric, Guardsman, or Scum. In fact, our GM told him that he can't play DH with us at all. He does his own thing on Sundays now, which is alright with me 'cause he would never chip in for pizza but then mooch us each for a slice.

Huh. Looks like I might be wrong. Gonna call my GM on that and see if he knows where it is. OR we were transfering over the "Weapons Always Fail on 94 Plus) over to skill tests for our game.

But that also means ALL characters can be utterly broken by Ascension, cause it means that, depending on the character's skills and specialties, when doing the ONE THING THEY ARE DESIGNED TO DO, LIKE KNOW STUFF FOR ADEPTS, they can't fail, EVER. ON ANYTHING.

Then again, Adepts will NEVER beat out a Scummer or Assassin on Underworld based stuff, or an Arbite on related things.

Then again, Adepts will NEVER beat out a Scummer or Assassin on Underworld based stuff, or an Arbite on related things.

As long as it's Lore (Underworld), the Adept will beat the Scum and the Assassin with one quill tied behind his back.

Graver said:

Unusualsuspect said:

If you look at page 196 of the core rule book, under the section entitled "Weapon Jams" you'll find this little gem:

"...To represent these unfortunate occurrences, an unmodified result of 96 to 00, in addition to being an automatic miss , also indicates the weapon has jammed..."

That I've seen - its why a Best Quality weapon will still miss on 96+, even though it cannot Jam.

I don't see where that automatic miss is stated to affect things like skill tests or even Weapon Skill attacks, which it would have to to apply to anything other than ballistic skill tests.

Unusualsuspect said:

We'll see what can be found. However, in the interest of applying rules for dice rolls equally throughout for tests, I would expect the 94-00 rule to be applied for all tests. I don't believe there are tests that will always succeed without possibility of failure. Otherwise, why would a roll even be made? Especially combat tests and skill tests. By that logic, you could meander into an empty room (fully believing a clue is in there to be found) roll the dice and reasonably expect to find said clue simply because there is no possibility for failure.

IMHO, arguing in favor of such a lopsided concept falls fully under the entry for Rules Lawyer (found on Wikipedia) as well....

That's a mighty fine straw man you've got there, illithid.

Illithidelderbrain said:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_lawyer , Throne bless you Wikipedia.

Actually, no, the book only ever says that guns can jam on a high enough roll, it never states that you can fail any roll by rolling 96+, which means, by RAW, that you can technically get to a point where you never fail.

That's a mighty fine straw man you've got there, illithid.

Aye, that's from the "I'm right, and anyone else is wrong, even if I'm actually wrong, because I'll just use an ad honinem attack against you" school of discussion. It's still a logical fallacy either way, as well as incorrect. I don't see what is "rules lawyery" about using the RAW, since it doesn't involve "interpreting the letter of the law without reference to the spirit", since there is no doubt that the book only states that guns miss/jam on a 96+ roll, but never at all states that for any other roll.

Unusualsuspect said:

Glad you like it! The example I provided could be argued as valid though (hence the point to rules lawyering. And, you did open the door to the skill check example I gave). I also have a problem with this type of scenario:

<GM>: Ok, so the bad guy gets one attack, rolled to hit and missed

<Player 1>: Good times! Well, I never miss, so I take my three attacks and you take 12 points to the body, 9 to the right arm and (WOOOHOOO! I rolled a 10! Rolls again for damage because the superfluous "to hit" roll is now unnecessary ) 23 more points.

The whole point of this execise is to say that I believe there should always be a chance of missing or otherwise failing at an action. If that possibility is removed, then a certain amount of tension is lost somewhere and therefore (imo) some of the fun too. Meanwhile, your resident gun-bunny is looking at his firearm and wondering why he didn't just pick up a melee weapon instead ...

(Note: I was also playing a delay in that previous post. I did go over the rules a couple of times and couldn't find anything that backs up my opinion, so I put the question to FF instead. )

Milland, ok you got me on the rules lawyering, my bad. The situations I provided are a product of powergaming. And (imo) equally reprehensible.

We'll see what can be found. However, in the interest of applying rules for dice rolls equally throughout for tests, I would expect the 94-00 rule to be applied for all tests. I don't believe there are tests that will always succeed without possibility of failure. Otherwise, why would a roll even be made? Especially combat tests and skill tests. By that logic, you could meander into an empty room (fully believing a clue is in there to be found) roll the dice and reasonably expect to find said clue simply because there is no possibility for failure.

I vehemently disagree. Let's pick up your empty concrete room with a clue example: If there's a clue inside that's large enough, I'll simply see it, with no chance of missing it. End of discussion. In rules terms, that's a roll with a 100% (or even bigger) chance of success and most GMs I know would simply abbreviate that to "ok, you find clue X".

Imagine walking into twenty 10'x10' rooms without any kind of furniture, each containing a golf ball. Would you fail to see the golf ball in one of them? I don't think I would. Some things are simply automatic. When might I miss that golf ball? When I'm tired (fatigue for -10%), the illumination is weak and flickering (-20%) and there's an angry ork in the room trying to hack me into pieces while I look for the ball (-20% for distraction). At that point we're back to where a roll is interesting and doesn't need an arbitrary "5% chance of failing to tie your shoelaces"-rule.

The whole point of this execise is to say that I believe there should always be a chance of missing or otherwise failing at an action. If that possibility is removed, then a certain amount of tension is lost somewhere and therefore (imo) some of the fun too. Meanwhile, your resident gun-bunny is looking at his firearm and wondering why he didn't just pick up a melee weapon instead ...

Your resident gunbunny with a semi-solid grasp of statistics would probably notice that the ability to autofire and hit enemies at distances greater than 3m outweigh losing 1/20 points of damage due to jams.

...which, by the way, is another reason adepts are overpowered: They know the great combat disciplines of statistics and physics and they'll usually be capable of finding golf-balls in brightly lit unfurnished rooms!

Illithidelderbrain said:

Sorry Broski, the game doesn't work that way. If there are literally no clues, then you cannot find anything. The best you could achieve is a solid "Yes. There are definitely no clues here. At all. Just concrete."

It's no good saying "said clue" when "said clue" doesn't actually exist. At all.

While this is still **** effective (as it probably should be for someone with such obvious skills) as it tells your searcher that there is literally nothing important here, it does not and cannot bend the laws of reality (subject to GM's approval. You can't rewrite the GM's story because you passed trying to find something that isn't there).

I can just about auto-pass an Inquiry test for finding a particular model of gun on a Feral World. That doesn't stop my GM from saying "No. Guns don't exist here. You cannot find it."

Similarly, I cannot generate minor enemies because I pass my Awareness tests to look for things which aren't there. That is just simply absurd.

Cifer said:

Ok, empty room argument= bad example. Thing is, I do have two ardent rules lawyers, and have to play around their style of play to make the game engaging for them (even with this seeming ability to never ever miss, which is completely terrible. Regardless of circumstance, there should always always be the possibility to miss, without grasping or somehow contriving to make a circumstance avail. to reduce their inherent chance to succeed) while still trying to provide a solid story for the other folks at my table who enjoy the immersion of setting. Asking those two rules lawyers to "not show up" wouldn't be a viable option as they are friends of mine and attendees at the table for over ten years.

Also, you quoted the point, but danced around it to nit-pick at other examples.

And Adepts are totally OP.

You must also remember that just because you find information, does not mean that the info you have found wasn't planted there by the enemy for you to find. If your throne agents are that good their opponents should be also.

Information is power.

False information that seems real is an even more powerful weapon to the enemy.

Can you guys stop having a serious argument on my joke thread, you scared off the life of the party, Graver.

Ok, empty room argument= bad example. Thing is, I do have two ardent rules lawyers, and have to play around their style of play to make the game engaging for them (even with this seeming ability to never ever miss, which is completely terrible. Regardless of circumstance, there should always always be the possibility to miss, without grasping or somehow contriving to make a circumstance avail. to reduce their inherent chance to succeed) while still trying to provide a solid story for the other folks at my table who enjoy the immersion of setting. Asking those two rules lawyers to "not show up" wouldn't be a viable option as they are friends of mine and attendees at the table for over ten years.

But why does there need to be a chance of failure? You don't roll for tying your shoelaces. If someone manages to reduce the complexity of a problem to that of tying your shoelaces, what's the point in assigning an arbitrary chance of failure? Maybe there's no challenge-fun in these tasks, but what if the fun of those comes from finding a way of making them that effortless in the first place? When a player has spent half a session on negotiating with some menacing underworld figures for a heretek auto-lockpick to augment his own impressive abilities with, I'd grant him the satisfaction-fun of waltzing through the suspect nobleman's lesser security areas instead of risking frustration with those 5%. He'll still have the challenge-fun of the high security areas where I won't feel bad about piling on the difficulty levels because I know he'll have a chance of making them.
As for combat, having or not having the 5% miss chance doesn't change anything for its outcome. On the other hand side, consider this: The enemy generally has a Parry/Dodge, possibly even two or three (or sixteen, but let's just not talk about the poor and gimped Vindicare - they need every advantage they can get against the Adept). If the character wants to deny this to the enemy, he has to use the Feint action, negating his multiple strike advantage. If he doesn't, he can generally only get one reliable hit, with the other two depending on the enemy's reaction. What's the difference between rolling three times, saying "07,76,93, I hit three times and deal 8 damage to the torso, 11 to the right arm and 10 to the left leg" and leaving out the rolls? By the way: When using Rogue Trader rules, where the attack DoS can be substituted for the lowest damage die, rolling is always useful to determine how well you succeeded.

Also, you quoted the point, but danced around it to nit-pick at other examples.

That was not my intention. Did this post serve to adress the point? If not, please state it once again for I may have simply missed it.
(And of course, this again highlights the incredible OP-ness of Adepts, who can dance around the point using the int-based Logic skill even in the event that their Lores should ever fail them.)

For some reason, my typed reply cannot be published.

Illithid, cifer, perhaps we should leave this magnificent work of art and sophistication to its own glorious devices, and take our discussion to the Rules or House Rules subforum?