Looking at the rules for Psyniscience, it seems at best a situational skill, especially if your GM does not use a lot of warp stuff. As such it seems to me that the Warp Sense talents, especially Improved Warp Sense, are way over priced. For a skill/talent that only one specialty can take, they just seem a little prohibitive. Any thoughts/ suggestion on how to make this better.

Psyniscience could be use to find great tyranid beast (synapse creature), find heavy number of orks in the vicinity, find Eldar and their spirit stone, the web way, even detect tau by their strange link to the warp.

Psyniscience could be use to detect spaceship entering or getting out of warp, creatures of the warp, psyker… and maybe more.

Psyniscience could also tell you what, when and how some event link to the warp take place…

Maybe only librarian could use the talent and skill but with a good look it is far from a lone skill without use. I think cost is justified.

What it can detect is mainly up to the GM interpretation of what the skill can detect, so that varies by GM. The main issue is the cost of warp sense and improved warp sense. A brack crusade character can get the same effect as improved warp snse on of one talent for 200xp. But a Space Marine that wants that has to spend 2K. 10 times as much.

Thebigjul said:

Really good points for Tyranids, though it would only work on synapse creatures, and orks. As for the Eldar they'd be invisible to the skill unless they are using their warp powers (at least to psyniscience). The Tau on the other hand, don't have a link to the warp. On the contrary they have almost zero presence in the warp. Think of it as this: a normal human has a warp presence of 5, a Space Marine librarian would have a warp presence of 100+ and a Tau would have a warp presence of 0.01.

Warp transits are a little iffy, sure if you are close to the place the transit is occuring you might feel it, but psyniscience only detects nearby purtubances if you are on a planet and a ship transits half way accross the system I don't think you could detect that.

As for anything, different conditions give different results, its up to the GM to drive these story and situational ocurances and how, if at all, these things affect or could be affected by the players.

Psyniscience could also be used to feel the passage of a grea number of souls, such as a massive slaughter or natural disaster. For the VERY sensitive, they may be able to feel the push of warp predators in the region who are gathering to fight over the spoils of souls from a battlefield that is ABOUT to become the site of great slaughter.

Those Talents are awful, given that I've NEVER seen Psyniscience used in combat time…which is the only time where something being a Full/Half/Free Action actually matters.

You, sir, have never had a Librarian yelling out orders to the people on the back of the Bio-titan who are attempting to burrow their way with chain axes, krak grrenades and las-cutters into the thing's skull to set a melta bomb in the middle of it's synapse node before the nearby wave of nds overwhelm the local PDF garrison. And for that I pity you

professor_kylan said:

Hell, I pity myself for that.

But I'd think FL: Xenos would give just the same information, if fluffed differently.

Absolutely, but (IMO) it's cooler for a Librarian to be performing that role AND if gives Psyniscience a day in the sun. I'd certainly give bonuses to the character using psyniscience rather than FL:x to pull off that stunt.

herichimo said:

Conderbning Eldar they are quite easy to spot with psyniscience, all their spirit stone are at a certain level warp active and can be detect by this sense, not from really far but still possible. They are only easier to find when using psychic power.

Tau aren't really in the warp but are still present in the warp, only a shadow but as the presence of something can be detect the absence of the same could be notice.

For spaceship warp translation in my opinion any psycker with a psy rating of 5 or more would be aware of a warp translation within the boundaries of a planetary system, or even farther with psy rating of 10.

Those use of psyniscience aren't easy one and will need negative modifier from -10 to -60. But in my opinion psyniscience is a under used skill and if the cost need to be reduce why not butr it is not my point of view.

Thebigjul said:

They aren't "in the warp" any more than a normal human. They interact with the warp exactly as a non-psyker human would (meaning: not at all). The difference between a Tau and a human, though, is a human appears as a 60-watt light bulb to daemons living in the warp while a tau looks like a tiny glowing ember from a birthday candle after its been blown out but a split second before the ember cools.

Meanwhile your average person with psyker powers or potential looks like a bank of stadium lighting on full power to warp daemons.

Its also kind of hard to track nothing. They don't create null fields they simply don't register nearly as easily. If you are tracking an animal through the forest you'd follow the tracks it left behind. If you can't detect the animals tracks you still can't track it by their absence. It simply looks like nothing is there, besides normal nature.

When I first read that psyniscience was a full action I was confused. It seems like it should be a free action to notice things, like Awareness. if you are specificaly looking for something subtle it would be a full action. There is enough stuff in the fluff where completely normal people can feel psychic weirdness before it's making the walls bleed or something. but nulls don't even stand out unless you are close enough to feel the effect and even then you don't know who it is. Otherwise why would the Reading power specificaly say you can tell if they are a null?

professor_kylan said:

My Librarian uses Psyniscience in place of Awareness a lot, and gets good info, so I'm not worried about the skill so much. That's the ONLY time I've heard of the Talents being useful, and while it's a great example, I have to think it's an exception rather than a rule that they were useful for him and for you..