Who's played Dark Heresy?

[LCP]

Mr Bookworm said it above:

Until Ascension level, the default assumption is that you're not trusted acolytes who get whatever they ask the Inquisitor for. You're the Inquisitor's mooks, who do the work that isn't important enough for him to personally pay attention to. It's not a relationship where you get to ask pretty please for nice things, it's a relationship where he tells you to do something, and you do it with whatever he is nice enough to give to you.

I don't think I can put it better. (I see in your edit you ask for 'proof' or a reference... I'm pretty sure that the position of Acolytes is spelt out along those lines under the fluff section in the DH core book, explaining how the circles of the Inquisition work. Near the big Venn Diagram type thing). It's always going to vary a bit on interpretation, but you are pointing out a problem and we are pointing out a background-consistent, zero-house-rules solution.

When you say these things:

Any Inquisitor worthy of the title who knows his Psyker agent is capable of one shotting anything without fail is going to give him the firepower he needs to do his job at an optimal level if the need is foreseen.

If you can use Divine Shot to OHKO virtually anything, and your Inquisitor knows this, it's not improbable as a rank 7 Psyker.

you seem to me to be telling the GM, from a player's standpoint, what the Inquisitor should be doing.

As Acolytes, you are not a tooled-up kill-team - if there's a target that the Inquisitor just wants made extremely dead, then he can call in an orbital strike, or the Guard (with as many heavy weapons as he likes), or even the Deathwatch, if you want to make a game out of it. Not his Acolytes. You're contacts, you're investigators, and you're expendable. He may give you the weaponry you need to survive, but he's not going to shower you with riches, and that's undeniably what a Very Rare, 5,000 throne man-portable lascannon represents.

On top of all this, if by some chance that very rare lascannon should come along, then as you've acknowledged with the Genestealer example, the psyker has a plethora of extremely useful things he can do without using Divine Shot, which are not accessible to a blunt gunner. Therefore, if you have the gunner and the psyker on the same team, it only makes sense to give the gunner the lascannon, so that you can have the lascannon firing and the psyker psyking... at the same time. Considering a single target, they can then either dodge the psyker's attack, or the heavy weapon (assuming the heavy weapon is single-shot), but can't dodge both, meaning your baseline is still on a par with what you'd be doing with the psyker making the heavy weapon undodgeable. And your upper limit is much, much higher, because they could well just fail to dodge at all and take both hits full to the face. Not to mention the fact that oft times a clever violation of the laws of physics by the party psyker can be infinitely more valuable than direct damage, and he's not free to do that if he's the lascannon gunner.

The argument

Want to maximize the group's killing power? Facing heavily armoured opponents? Give the Divine Shot Psyker his gun.

only makes sense if you assume unlimited resources: by that logic you may as well say "want to maximise the group's killing power? Facing heavily armoured opponents? Give everyone power armour, a power fist, and their own personal Land Raider".


This is all about GMing style, so I can see that if you wanted to, you could GM exactly the kind of game you are talking about, where the psyker totes a lascannon and effortlessly blows away 99% of the opposition. There's no explicit forbiddance of that in the rules. All that I'm trying to point out here is that it doesn't take any kind of contortion of the GM's remit to prevent that from happening by adhering to some sensible IC limitations on the PCs' resources, and enforcing the idea that specialist weapons will only be given to people who specialise in them. As I said above, Psykers don't have the option for SWT (Heavy - Las) and as GM I don't think I'd be inclined to give it to a player who asked for it as an Elite advance: there's absolutely no IC reasoning behind it.

I run my own games this way, and my players are mostly pretty positive about the experience. You can read them for yourself, if you want - they're linked in my sig, and they do include a psyker (although he's a fair way below rank 7 at the moment).


Regarding my Genestealer test:

Okay, I drop the useless stub pistol as a Free Action and Force Barrage him; or Push him, etc...

Thus proving that your assertion was false: Divine Shot was the icing on the heavy weapons cake, and without a heavy weapon, it does not allow you to "uniquely one-shot anything" at all.

Not that it's a serious test in anything but that respect. The Genestealer's got an initiative bonus of 24, you will be psyker fillets before you can say the words "Force Barrage".