Musing over the Psychic phase.

Over tha last few days my mind kept wandering back to 40k (must be the anticipation of a new Blood Angels Codex!) and I kept thinking about the psychic phase and how it could have worked better. So I thought I'd through a few thoughts on the blog.

I really liked the idea of having a distinct phase of the game where psychic powers are played to clean up the confusion and reduce the risk of players forgetting and having to go back in a later part of their turn. Having tried it out numerous times I've simply removed all psykers from my lists to avoid having to participate in a random and clunky system. It feels pretty frustrating that you know have more powers than in any previous edition but no reliable way of casting them.  Here are a few simple changes that I think would massively improve the phase.
- Generate powers as normal and each psychic phase each psyker will generate 1 warp charge point per Mastery level but do not roll 2D6 for the Warp.
- During their psychic phase each psyched can cast as many powers as they know but must stop as soon as they fail a power.
- To cast a power the player chooses a power the psyche knows, subtracts the warp charge cost from their Leadership then the player may choose spend any of the Warp charge points generated by the Psyker and adds +1 to their Leadership for each point spent. The opposing player may choose one of their Psykers to attempt to nullify the power and may spend any number of the Warp change points generated, subtracting -1 from the Leadership for each point spent. Then the casting player rolls the Leadership test. The maximum modified Leadership is 10 and the minimum is 2.
- If the test is passed the power goes off and they may attempt another power with the same model.
- If the test is failed the model has suffered the Perils of the Warp and takes one automatic hit with the following rules Flesh Bane, Haywire, AP-. If the number rolled is equal to or over double the modified Leadership the Psker was testing against it is instead removed from the game as a casualty with no saves of any kind.
- Psychic hoods subtract an additional -1 if one or more dice are used by the owning model to Nullify an opponents power.
- Runes of Warding ignore the first -1 applied to their Leadership when an opponent attempts to Nullify a power.
- Shadow in the Warp works as written.

This allows a player to push their luck whilst also allowing their opponent to try to really sabotage the key powers a player may attempt without all the crazy random tables.