Homebrew miracle system

[Atrus]

My dislike for the current (imo: weak) AoF abilities having been mentioned enough; I decided to have a bit of fun today and make up a homebrew "Miracle" system add-on to the AoF system.

 

Now this is very rough draft and by no means a finished product and is why I'm bringing it here as a sounding board for ideas and refining.

 

So...

 

Each passed AoF accrues 1 Miracle Point (MP).

Miracle points are spent on Miracles listed below. Each Miracle costs a certain amount of MP and are spent and activated at the start of a players turn specified in the Miracles description and lasts for that players turn.

 

 

Divine Fortitude- 8 points: Activate at the start of opponents turn. All friendly AS keyword units in the army ignore damage received on a d6 roll of 5+. (5+fnp).

 

Hand of Protection- 7 points: Activate at the start of opponents turn. Friendly AS keyword units in the army gain +1 to their SoF invulnerable save to a max of 3+.

 

Divine Wrath- 8 points: Activate at the start of your turn. To-wound rolls of 6 by friendly AS units in the army cause a Mortal Wound in addition to their normal damage.

 

Righteous Armour- 7 points: Activate at start of opponents turn. All friendly AS units in the army may reroll armour saves.

 

Emperors Admonishment- 5 points: Activate at start of opponents turn. All friendly AS units SoF DTW rolls add +2 to their roll.

 

 

My goal here was to make something that satisfied my personal headcannon of legitimately miraculous and inexplicable things happening around the sisters, so the intent is to make the abilities powerful to reflect that.

My thought is this power spike is off set by all the hoops that need to be jumped through to get these abilities off- namely, actually PASSING AoF tests and passing quite a number of them.

These are clearly meant to be a mid to late game benefit. With the exception of 1 Miracle, the earliest a player can get a Miracle activated is turn 3, and then it's likely to be the only one to happen all game.

 

One could accuse me of playing into GWs plan of sisters being hordish in numbers to get the requisite FP to even begin to think about making all those tests.

 

While that is A way to go about it, in fact my thinking is that this instead actually opens the door up for the FP generating orders, relic and WL trait to have a place in the army.

Losing that last squad to get a FP, or wiping an opponents weakened squad, generating that 5+ roll FP or even using your last CP to get that 1 FP to give you that last chance to test that AoF and maybe pass it to get the last point you need for that much needed Miracle next turn to turn the tide.

 

Thoughts?

[ValourousHeart]

I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel when figuring out the game mechanic to use for the thing that makes sisters special.

 

In 8th edition the game mechanic for shooting is the same game mechanic for assault.

Saving throws use the same mechanic as morale tests, except that you use LD instead of Save, and you uses number of casualties instead of AP.

The current acts of faith test is just like like shooting or assault.

 

So there is no need to fuss over the mechanic, just pick something that is already in use in the game and set the relative difficulty based on the chosen mechanic and how easy or difficult you want the task to be.

 

If you want the effects to happen late game then just make the test become easier late game, by adding in the turn.

 

The real issue we should focus on is what effects we want faith to do.  I would like an act of faith tool box that we can use for a number of different things. 

 

Like an act of faith that is our Deny the Witch option.  Perhaps with a mechanic reminiscent of smite.  The lower difficulty stops the power, the higher difficulty allows us to pick an enemy or friendly unit as the target.  This will probably require a lengthy explanation in the book.  We count as having cast the power from the same model, who in this moment counts as part of our army, and we get to pick the target based on the restrictions of the power.  So he would smite one of his own units.  Or for powers that target friendly units, we can deny for a chance to have them affect us instead.

 

Another option we could look at is and act of faith that causes perils of the warp.   Maybe as a response to someone using a psychic power.  Maybe they cast the power with a chance for perils and this AoF is a second chance for perils.  Meaning we would have some nice synergy with Sisters of Silence.

 

Something else we could look at is a way of bringing ourselves good luck or our opponents bad luck.  Other than re-rolls or bonuses / penalties to dice rolls I'm not sure how we would make that one work.

[Brexan]

I do like the concept of having a one-off ‘super act of faith’ like the miracles you’re suggesting, that you can pop toward the end of the game (particularly fun if your back is against the wall). Although that could perhaps be accomplished with a stratagem instead.

 

Keeping track of CPs, VPs, plus Faith points is already criticised for being too much to keep track off without adding faith points as well. Personally I think the answer is to tweek the existing Acts of Faith rather than adding another tier to it.

 

I can’t say I’m massively optimistic that GW will come up with a satisfying system so it’s certainly interesting to see what people come up with.

[dracpanzer]

I like the overall concept. But would never pass enough faith tests to be able to attempt to use this.

[Servant of Dante]

It's an interesting concept. I prefer AoFs to be smaller effects that can be interpreted as willpower/willingness to die/etc since that's how I see them actually functioning in-universe, but I won't go into that since it's off topic.

 

This system is meant to be pinned on to the current AoF system, right? It's certainly an cool idea from a design standpoint, and these larger, essentially once per battle effects sound cool to me. Personally, I'd allow Divine Armour to be used at the start of either player's turn, in case you happen to have a unit charging in on your turn and you want to make sure they make it through to the next turn. A really niche application considering out best AS melee unit (Repentia) have basically no armour save, but still.

[ERJAK]

To preface the rest of this I want 1 point made absolutely clear: In this system EVERY competitive sisters of battle list will be contructed SOLELY around maximizing the usage and output of Divine Wrath.

EVERY SINGLE ONE.

(I really can't emphasize this enough, on demand mortal wound generation is so incredibly valuable that everything else goes buy the wayside. What you've done is essentially bundled a roundtrip airline ticket with your vacuum cleaner (look it up))

 

The problem here is that the miracles A. Force you to either bring FP generating abilities or a billion infantry and B. They make the current AoFs obsolete. You can get 6MP per turn so you will be trying for every AoF you possibly can every phase. Every list needs 10 MANDATORY but should be shooting for 16-20. If you build a sisters list with less than 10 FP, you're pretty much trolling.

 

Firstly, the miracles are so good they make AoFs irrelevant. You'd use all 6 AoFs every turn trying to rack up miracle points, regardless of whether you needed them or not. NOTHING the current AoFs offer is anywhere NEAR as valuable as being 1/8th of the way closer to using divine wrath. I'd have an Ebon Chalice battalion with an imagifier and any other bonuses I could stack on specifically dedicated to using the AoFs. It'd be more valuable to use an FP on an ebon chalice imagifier than it would be to use it on REPENTIA. That's how good divine wrath is.

 

Secondly, divine wrath is so good it makes the other miracles irrelevant. In fact, i makes other BUILDS irrlevant. Every sisters list would be 3xHB ret squads and as many stormbolters and immoflamers as you could possibly take with enough FP generation and AoF rerolls to guarantee divine wrath turn 2 and turn 3. An SoB army constructed around maximizing divine wrath would be able to shred through about a Castellan and a half with just the mortal wound output.

 

The third problem: Even though the other, non-divine wrath miracles are significantly better than AoFs, to the point where you'd just spam out AoFs to try and get them faster, they're still not...great. You only get MAYBE 2 uses per game and you won't be able to use them on turn 1, so their impact is already blunted a bit. Combine that with all 4 of then being DEFENSIVE, but potentially being impossible to use in the first TWO turns of the game (if you go second you can't use the defensive ones except MAYBE the Deny one until turn 3, where it really doesn't matter anymore) and they're another hoop you jump through only to realize absolutely no one is impressed.

 

4. It makes going second an even bigger disadvantage due to 3.5 out of the 5 of them not being usable until your opponents turn 3. By turn 3, the vast majority of what is going to be killed is already dead. It's massively diminishing returns to wait this long for frankly mediocre defensive buffs.

Edited June 29, 2019 by ERJAK

[Atrus]

I'm not 8gnoring you guys. On deployment and don't have time to make decent posts.