Imagine the scene. The battle brothers have worked hard to penetrate the middle of an ancient ruin, dealing with scores of cultists and dark mechanicum along the way. But the surprise factor of their assault could only last so long, word has got back to the black legion that they are not alone. In one of the last catacombs, they emerge from the mist, 3 terminators covered in markings of vile devotion, ancient auto-cannons at their sides. In support, 6 chaos marines in lighter armour, lit by the blue glow of their plasma weapons.

This is it, endgame. The battle brothers have a couple of mission under their belt, enough to finally bond as a team, but this is going to be hard fought and not all of them are going to make it. This is the price that has to be paid to stop them and the artefact.

Quick to react, the Ultramarine Librarian seizes the advantage and moves to act first.

"Word of the emperor"

(Rank 4, WP 65, Lead by example +14 + reroll, Psychic hood +5, Psy level 6, Push + Warp Conduit + 50, Oath of the Emperor +10
Target dice roll 144 with reroll. Chance of failure 1%, Change of warp peril 15%, Minimum degrees of success 5, Average degree of success 9 not including using the reroll to improve the degrees of success rather than just saving to reroll 91+. Chance of any opponents with WP<50 to not be stunned as long as the power goes off 0%)

His brothers, surprised by the opponents lack of action, attack, killing three of the more lightly armed opponents.

Having finished his exertion, the librarian stems the flow of his power to safe levels.

“Compel – Macarena”

(WP 65, LBE +14 + reroll, PH + 5, PL 6 +30, Oath +10.
Target roll 124 with reroll. Change of failure 1.8%, Chance of peril 0.36%, rerolling on failure or double. Minimum degrees of success 3, Average degree of success 7. Chance of WP 50 opponent ignoring it, 1.2%, 13.5% if adding +20 suicide clause)

Unable to push away the Librarian's latin rhythms, the terminators drop their weapons and dance their way to oblivion as the loyalists wail on their still jiving bodies.

========

Silly examples aside, it does seem that these powers when taken to the high levels that can be achieved relatively easily by rank 4/5 warp any fights involving elites and master level enemies.

Now, this isn’t a case of how do you beat this, there are loads of ways to do that (psychic hoods, null fields, unnatural willpower e.t.c. and as we all know GMing isn't about beating the players but providing a challenge). This is more about how to balance these powers so that it doesn’t make 60% of scenarios or enemies redundant. It flips both ways as well, a Deathwatch group without a psyker and a psychic hood pretty much auto lose to a high level chaos psyker with compel.

I’d be interested to hear if any other GM's have hit this problem and if so what they did about it? Does there need to be an errata, limiting the number of targets (like black crusade) or allowing a willpower save (unmodified, like dark heresy) to keep things balanced?

Not those two specifically, but Curse of the Machine is a pain in the butt for me.

Last week, the group entered an area where they were attacked by 3 chaos marines with heavy bolters and 3 chaos marines with regular bolters as well as some Khorne beserkers. The Librarian simply jammed all the heavy bolters and reduced the chain axes to regular (primitive) axes. Since he was leaping about with a jetpack (and since regular bolters do nothing to space marines), he was able to keep them jammed with impunity...also there's no save. And even if there was, they wouldn't make it.

Naviward said:

A few points here
1) How do you get +14 on your lead by example? Its fellowship bonus right?
2) For the Psychic hood your character has to meet requirement to buy it through acquisition if not signature wargear.
3) Warp Conduit is at rank 4. Meaning that your character must already have spent in the XP and reached rank 4. At that level alot of powers

All in all, I do not find it broken at all. A DM would throw in higher level hordes, create tougher scenarios or throw players in a very tough spot. Maybe throw them in a mission where psychic powers may not be applicable.

Its true that all librarians are designed to be powerful. In fact the speciality was designed so that psychic abilities could be used safely. With lesser chances of ill effects. The drawbacks is that they have alot lesser access to psychic techniques and limited to bout 10 techniques known at rank 9 than compared as compared to a Primaris Psyker.

If you think these are broken wait till you get a glimpse of the Divination techniques. Imagine Augury/ Lifting the Veil at such power levels.

I've found Compel and Machine Curse so overpowered that I've had to ban them.

The main issue is that it severely restricts the adversaries that a GM can throw at them and if you're running a pre-written adventure, you can't just replace Alpha Legion Chaos Space Marines with Slaugh. A related problem, the GM can't just use a bigger stick without the game shifting away from the established narrative.

Tau? No challenge.

Orks in Mega armour? No Challenge

Dark Mechanicus?

I have had fights with a full squad of Chaos Marines turn into a joke, where they mindlessly hit each other while being slaughtered by the kill-team. A massively upstated Ork Warboss spent most of the fight twiddling his thumbs thanks to compel and would barely have been able to move, unless I ruled that his weapons and armour were effectively warded, due to sheer Orkiness.

Also if you were to try to deal with these powers by including a psyker among the opposition, any reasonably intelligent Kill-team would just gun the pskyer down and then let their Librarian do his thing.

Lucifer216 said:

You've answered your own conundrum:

The enemy just tries to kill the PC psyker as well.

Quid pro quo, Clarisse.

L

LETE said:

Sadly that's the problem I have with these powers, every fight then becomes about killing or neutralising the psyker (and if it doesn't happen in the first round then it's pretty much all over, even with a WP of 70 or 80 chances are easily with the psyker).

If the powers had allowed a flat WP check to avoid or only affected 1 enemy, then at least they'd be a chance for other opponents doing things to challenge the group and enemies for the other players to engage and defeat.

Ultimately it seems that, much like the bolter weapon stats, the psychic powers need to have a power level errata just to bring them into line with the abilities of other character classes.

Deepstriker said:

Lead by example become fellowship bonus x2 at rank 4

Deepstriker said:

Yeah, admittedly this is more about high level 4/ rank 5 characters, but it's still the power level the characters are going to be at for more of a campaign than not if it runs it's full course.

Deepstriker said:

Actually, I see Augury and Lifting the Veil as much less a problem as at least you can keep the answers vague (although I can see any investigation based stuff being a cake walk with Lifting the Veil). Guess it depends on what sort of game is being run.

I fully admit that there are things that can be done to make these powers less of an issue, it's more that it seems to invalidate a lot of possible enemy types and situations as the psyker will just auto win them. It sounds like you've had less problem with the powers though, have you had to include hordes or anti psychic stuff in ever fight then to keep it balanced?

fleshbearer said:

Keep in mind that the errata says that unless otherwise stated, psychic powers can be dodged just like any other attack. That means Machine Curse should be able to be dodged by enemies, since the power does not specifically state that it can't be dodged. That might make the power a bit less of a pain in the ass for you.

Naviward said:

Hi:

That's usually what tactics would dictate, yes. Go for the most powerful target 1st. This usually applies to all combat/strategic situations.

One day, they'll get the psyker.

...That, or the enemy gets a "bigger psyker"!

...

Pondering more about this:

Mebbe you need more elite/master level enemies... The kill-team has graduated to the Big Leagues.

Also, isn't there some kinda handy Dispell/Disrupt psy power included in DW for these kinds of situations?

L

LETE said:

That just gives me the image of a 20ft chaos psyker....not a bad idea.

LETE said:

True, that or psykers with psychic hoods would also work. You could take the example above and add 4 more terminators so there is at least something left for the others to do. This does cause a different problem though (aside from the fluff part of me screaming at the fact that 5 marines (which aren't even at captain level) offing so many opponents at once) is that it's all well and good until the psyker fails. At that point, the whole team pretty much dies to the marines as they now have 10 more to deal with. This wouldn't happen if compel was 1 enemy rather than psy level (a swing of 5 to 6 is manageable, 5 to 15 is not).

Naviward said:

My DM does throw in hordes. In fact he throws much more hordes at us than single foes (lemme recount 6 fights, 5 with 80% enemies being hordes and 1-2 commanders/hvy weapons/ vehicles).

Then again I've yet to see Chaos using psychic hoods. The reason for that is sorcs' seem obsessed with amassing knowledge and strengthening their warp abilities. A Psychic hood is made of crystals that resonate in tune with the psyker and helps to nullify/ reduce the power of drawn from the warp.

Hehateme said:

If that's the case, then yes, that's actually a pretty solid solution.

Deepstriker said:

Sounds like hordes are the way to go, thanks. I'll give that a try.

Not that up on Chaos fluff, makes sense that they don't like psychic hood. Plenty of sorcery or khornite anti psyker stuff to try instead.

The TT can provide inspiration as well, since they also attempt to have some balance between various armies, and so offer different race specific solutions to psychic assault.

That said, if a librarian at rank 4 who has spent his xp on killing people with his brain pushes then its rather reasonable to expect he is good at it. He probably sucks at all the nifty knowledge skills and such. If your campaign does not require / reward such things then you presumably need to up the ante combat wise. If it does, then his character has a weakness to match his strengths. Have lore checks be necessary to avoid overwhelming force, traps, alerting the enemy, etc. No reason a forewarned enemy, even a fairly mundane one, might not get a hold of psychic nullifiers (technilogical, mechanical, mystical, sorcerous, or what have you) or brain-for-hire psykers or some such to even the odds. A librarian who uses his mind as a blunt instrument may find that every problem requires such force because he does not seek to guide his aim...

Also, don't underplay the pushed psychic power. It's not a casual and surprising paralysis, it's a vein popping duel of minds with screams and automatically invoked phenomena: "The temperature drops and frost slowly creeps up the ceramite plates of your armor, chilling even your super human anatomy. Your atmospheric reading in your helm go wild, and the air distorts for a moment. You feel as much as see the power waves of energy rolling off brother-epistolary Alyksandros as he confronts the traitor marines, leaping before their guns and holding his force staff aloft. With a final motion he slams the staff into the ground and an impossibly loud cracking noise seems to reverberate in your skull. You cannot imagine how much more disoriented the targets of such power must be, but you trust in the Emperor that it will be enough as you unleash the fury of the Astartes with bolter and blade..."

As mentioned, psychic hoods are quite strong, and if you don't think sorcerors would have them, something I figure is at least debateable, then give them something else with the same mechanic. A daemonic pact, the protection of a sacrifice to Khorne ("as long as the blood of this sacrifice is still wet upon your armor, my warriors, the blood god will let you strike down witches with the disdain that such pathetic wretches deserve"), etc.

Chaos marines are usually described as having weird runes and trophies on their armor, when you are dealing with rank 4+ play I think it's totally reasonable for those to be the equivalent of psychic wards in many cases, granting hefty resistance and armor bonuses, at least for major players and certainly for terminators and the like. Certainly any worshipper of khorne might have the equivalent of the one Black Templar talent, Abhor the Witch or whatever, which is super potent. Non Khornate dudes should have their own pet psykers or librarian-sorceror types, so you can fight fire with fire.

Other chaos forces, heretics, etc. might have rogue psykers sporting their own weird gear, great grounding rods attached to their brains by cables or whatnot, no reason not to be creative when dealing with chaos psykers.

Obviously Eldar are easy to explain away, they have warlocks, seers, farseers, runes, spiritstones, wraithbone thingamajiggers, force fields, etc.

Tyranids are immune to many mind affecting powers and can easily have a psyker of their own present, whether its a Warrior Prime, Hive Tyrant, Broodlord, Zoanthrope, Dagon Overlord, or something of your own creation.

Necrons, if you use them, have pariahs and generally insane soak.

Even without weirdboyz, you can come up with some orky defenses, "bigmek brainblokerz", or perhaps bonuses based on numbers. I myself give ork hordes their magnitude as a bonus to willpower against mental powers when I feel its appropriate. So, basically any manipulation to do something unorky will be resisted by massive numbers. The caveat lets me reward more creative poer use and clever manipulation, which seems fair, and is iconic of eldar handling of orks.

The Tau are certainly at a disadvantage against psychic attacks, a disadvantage I like to highlight to let the librarian shine from time to time, but they also are super lethal at extreme ranges, where psykers perform the worst. Most techniques are outranged by the imperial armory let alone tau weapons, and certainly things like compel have a short range indeed. Further, force swords are truly useless when pinned down by railgun and missile fire from half a kilometer away. Over use of such tactics is less than fun, but casually turning tau brains inside out before they ever fire a shot would eventually get old if it was unvaried. Mix and match to taste I suppose.

As for fallen tech priests, if anybody is going to have resistance to mental manipulation it is going to be a guy with a cogitator for a brain, in fact doesn't the machine trait give immunity to mental manipulation? If not it should grant a bonus. Regardless, if I were a warp-corrupted tech priest combining sorcery, xenotech, and experimentation I daresay some anti-psyker toys would be a priority on my wishlist of techtoys of power. Toss some suitable bonuses around and attatch some names. " A coat of psy-reflective glass shards which absorbs mental assaults and psychic attacks with a field rating of 35" or perhaps "an empyrean regulator, designed to prevent incursion by unwanted daemonic entities or psychic attacks, this implant links with a techpriests cogitator matrix and carefully analyzes the flow of warp energies feeding the corrupted machine spirits inhabiting his implants, automatically erecting shunts and barriers to any sudden incursion signaled by an increase in psychic activity in the biological portion of the magos' brain."

I feel like their should be adequate solutions out there for psychic powers, but I would also feel free to be liberal with the penalty for suicidal actions, I figure doing the macarena in a fire fight or even in the face of an impending fire fight is totally suicidal.

Togath said:

Actually our librarian manages all the stuff I listed above as well as having good forbidden lores checks, a number of useful close combat skills and even some extra general skills for narrative time events. And that's with buying multiple powers. Given what other people have said, you could just focus on Compel and then have bucket loads of xp for other useful skills.

Togath said:

I certainly wouldn't sniff at a pushed psychic power, 15% chance of rolling on a pretty scary table of effects is a big deal. It's more the swingy nature of the powers. 15% chance of something bad and the fight being an almost auto lose for the rest of the team. 85% chance of it being over before it's started. While it's an extreme example (a lot of the stuff listed by yourself and others here is very useful to balance it) it isn't a balanced mechanic for either side. And unpushed, turning 6 people to yours side (admittedly with a slightly easier WP check) is still massive.

Togath said:

Sadly, even with the suicidal bonus, the chance of pushing through it isn't that big (just look at the chances I listed in my original post).

That aside, I appreciate the options you and others have listed here, I think there are some good ideas to help balance things through the use of more creative enemies (part of the problem was that I was running the last adventure in the emperor protects and I didn't adapt the opponents enough in it.) and greater use of hordes. I still would have preferred the mechanic to be a little less swingy (fluff wise this sort of anti psyker stuff is relatively rare and I wouldn't want an player with psychic powers to feel like they're being constantly nerffed by the enemies), but it will certain do (unless FFG feel like making the Deathwatch powers more like the Black Crusade ones, hint, hint).

Black Crusade has... really broken powers. If anything, my impression was that the Deathwatch power selection was way more balanced.

Togath said:

I haven't used the black crusade powers in anger, just reading from the book, but generally they seem a lot more balanced. Most of the non-damaging powers seem to only target a single opponent (rather than lots in deathwatch) and the damaging ones tend to scale a fixed amount as the PR goes up rather than just adding more D10's, so there's nothing as powerful as smite.

I admit that there are a couple of powers that looked like they could get out of control, like bolt of change, which does add PR x d10 damage and has multiple bolts (although it's still arguable weaker than smite in a lot of situations) and Symphony of Pain, which seems broken in an all slanneshy party and useless otherwise.

I've not digested all the powers in the book, so it sounds like a might have missed something. Which powers would you say are a big problem in black crusade?

Naviward said:

I don't remember the specifics, but I think the main problem was a slaanesh psyker with Unnatural Strength/Agility/whatever 10 and enough corruption inflicted on each attack to instakill any non-named character.

Don't ask me about the required combination of powers, read about this a long time ago.

Off the top of my head, Doombolt, Warptime, Bolt of Change, Force Storm, Glimpse, and Preternatural Awareness were all pretty OP in their own ways. Changing compel to be single target is all well and good but given the number of things immune to mind affecting (anything with the Tyranid, Daemonic, From Beyond, or Machine traits iirc) I am just not convinced that the number of attacks one could get with Warptime or the number of psychic hits possible with force Storm aren't worse offenders. And things like glimpse are just terribly open for abuse in so many non combat situations.

Togath said:

Yeah, I can see Warptime and Preternatural Awareness being a bit difficult (especially Preternatural Awareness, as it seems you'd do that at the start of every round fettered ever, which doesn't seem like a fun idea, it just slows the game down). Not so sure about the damaging powers though, with a PR rating of 9, Doombolt only does 1d10+9 as semi auto and psychic storm 1d10 + 27 as full auto (which I admit is still pretty nasty, but then it'd be rare to wail on more than 1 opponent a round with it), both of which can be dodged to some extent. Compared to the 9d10 radius 9 smite, which in a lot of situations can't be dodged, I know which is worse. Smite is even better than Bolt of Change, and that definately is overpowered.

I certainly wouldn't say any of these come close to the problems of compel or word of the emperor in scale. Part of this is that we hadn't used tyranids much in our game (I didn't realise they were immune to the powers, which does make them pretty much useless in a nid focused game) but in a chaos or tau game, a lot of the possible enemies as still useless (I don't believe demonic helps in any way against psychic powers).

Glimpse needs to be slapped right now though, as it's effectively half your psi rating to all non combat checks given enough time, it really needs a once an encounter limit or something like that.

Every Daemon that I can think of or that I bothered to check has From Beyond, which reads:

From Beyond
The mind of a creature with this trait is beyond the petty frailties and precarious sanity of a mortal mind. It is immune to Fear, Pinning, Insanity Points, and psychic powers used to cloud, control, or delude its mind.

So yeah, no Compel on Daemons.

Throw waves of Daemons against them then. I think they have access to warp weapons (I seem to recall that warp weapons bypass armour). That would reduce reduce the playing field. Sure they may kill the CSMs hands down with the use of compel but can they stand against an army of daemons and a daemon prince?

Togath said:

I hadn't actually appreciated that all daemons had from beyond, so that's definitely useful to know. Funnily enough the creatures which I'd been looking at with the daemon trait were Obliterators and Possessed Chaos Marines, both that don't have the from beyond trait (which seems to be a rarity).

Deepstriker said:

Does seem to be the way to go. Ultimately, going back to the thread title, it seems from the suggestions here that compel and word of the emperor (assuming it's a mind altering power, but that's a separate question) are very much situational, overpowered in certain games, with humans, chaos marines and tau getting it in the neck the most (especially the poor chaos marines, as they are generally pretty close range and not numerous), but daemons and nids just ignore it and at least there are some options to balance out the effect, assuming the bad guys know what's coming for them.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

No problem, best of luck with your future sessions!