So I built a psyker recently, and I wanted to know what the chances of getting Psychic Phenomena and/or Perils of the Warp would be. I couldn't find anything online that answered all my questions so I decided to make one myself. I figured I would share it here because there will probably be a few people here that are interested in the information it presents. There are no macros or VB in the file, just plain old excel formulas.

File Name: Psyker Probabilities.xls

Link: http://www.mediafire.com/?9y6z1qes46dupf0

If you find any problems with it please let me know.

For me? - Always too darn high! And they tend to come up just when you really cant use them.

I always try to use Psy Powers on my Psykers ony when really necessary and mundane methods are fasty inferior. The risk of pre-Ascension psy power use is high.

Hehe... Yeah it certainly feels that way sometimes. However, you can get to a point where you have less chance of rolling perils than the trooper has of jamming his gun. In the end, it seems like psyker powers really aren't all that bad to use once you get FbtW and/or PS (even when throwing lots of dice). Granted there is always that chance you will get eaten by the warp or turn into a daemonhost, but the chances of that happening are actually pretty small.

I plan on expanding the probabilities to show chances of gaining insanity/corruption, hurting yourself/others, and death, but I haven't had time to go through the tables and set them up for that analysis yet. I'll probably have it done by the end of the week though.

Found and fixed an issue with the unfettered powers when using the Ascension Psychic Supremacy house rule. I updated the file so the same link as above will point to the corrected version.

They never come up enough for my tastes. I always get such a grin of glee whenever one of my players rolls a 9. The psyker in our last game didn't do it enough. That said, in the last Deathwatch game we played a player was pushing every turn.

We had two holes in the world and it was raining blood - all at the same time! That was great fun!

BYE

Dude, in our last mission our Psyker was rolling so many nines I literally pulled him out of the group. His cell mates nearly killed him! It was so crazy that I was seriously considering coming up with a house rule to REDUCE it. I mean, the more dice he rolls the more likely it's going to happen and he popped two at once on a couple of occasions.

The cell currently has no psyker because of it. Anyone else have this problem?

Jeff Tibbetts said:

It's not a problem, it's a feature!

Seriously, though, if a Psyker wants to live he will Invoke and roll the minimal amount of dice that gives him about 50% chance of meeting the Threshold. Anything more and he's practically inviting trouble.

If these probabilities are not to your tastes, you might want to check out the psychic rules in other 40k systems. I'd especially recommend Black Crusade - while Only War is newer (and the beta version is available already, in case you didn't know), it focuses too much on combat powers and on translating stuff from new TT corebook as accurately as possible, which leaves you with few powers useful outside of battlefield conditions.

Ah yes Dark Heresy psykers.. a class that actively encourages you to not use the powers given to your class.

Morangias, I have played and run RT as well and I actually like those better, but there's something about the DH rules that appeals to me. Maybe it's the ability to choose how much you want to pump into it. The problem for me is that, as Ravager says, it discourages the psyker to use their abilities too much in my opinion. I know it's dangerous, but honestly these psykers have been tested and trained. A lot. It seems like it's just too dang much. I know it's not like they're popping daemons out, but with how suspicious most folks are (even/especially their own colleagues) it seems like someone is going to decide their too dangerous. This last mission was a bit much, and it didn't even seem like his rolling was bad he was just using a lot of powers.

Jeff Tibbetts said:

Yub! As soon as 3 or more dice are involed, things can get funky. Each one of them has a 10% chance of calling in chaos of one sort or another. After the release of RT, i changed it to "if you use only as much as half of your Psi rating, their will be no Phenomena". Makes things a lot safer.

Gregorius21778 said:

Which is cool, except he's still pretty low level so that makes it a bit tough. I'm just worried that if I don't let him back in the cell nobody will want to play a psyker. You know, maybe that's okay. They can really help, but are they necessary? Probably not. I think I will def house rule the same thing though, basically Fettered Strength in effect. I still like the DH one and want it to work.

Oh gawd it gets WORSE?

I have a player who decided the damm phenomena and perils charts are his frigging pokemon lists. He throws powers so much he got four or five in the last game session, on two dice, and it gets WORSE?

I swear he was giddy when I threw that ebon ghiest at him.

He hasn't even thrown weaken viel yet though he means to… like hell I'm reminding him.

SirRunOn said:

I had a player who also loved rolling on the Psychic Phenomena chart. Until one time he rolled and went to the Perils of the Warp chart, and happened to net a 100 on his next roll. Burned a fate point there, hehehe. Thank the Emperor that happened, because the session before that I gave the Arbitrator in the group a coded message from their Inquisitor stating "That if you deem the Psyker to be corrupted by chaos or consorting with blasphemous beings, you have my blessings to execute our expendable guest." The Psyker got his act together.

One thing I can recommend that if they like throwing their gift around with no remorse for the consequences, let a rival Inquisitor or group capture the Psyker and prepare to execute him for so and so crimes being committed. And right before they do, he gets rescued from his Inquisitor/group. Just an idea. I don't recommend this scenario for all Players. Just the less devious ones. The players who want their character's to become utterly corrupted, I have far more worse fates in mind.

SirRunOn said:

Hahahahaha! That was awesome…