How are people finding the full Psywar rules in actual play? I like the idea of them but I can’t help but feel it might be too much for players. How have you handled introducing this dimension to your games? Have your players been able to run with it or did they need a lot of hand-holding?
Further question, does anyone know of an example I could read through of the full Psywars rules being used. I’m still trying to get my head fully around how to present them at the table and they feature more heavily in the published adventures than I expected.
The Psywar rules work really well. They add a third layer of conflict - either on their own or during a physical combat or even parallel to a quantronic infowar conflict.
If situations are less important, I usually go with the “one metanoia” shortcut.
But often you need to infiltrate a social network or interrogate hard-headed individuals, and that is where Psywar really shines.
I only wish the different types of Psywar methods would have their own special qualities on rolling an Effect on the Psywar damage roll. That is a thing that should have been included in the core rules, I think.
And Stun on a normal Threaten action is absurd once your Face works out that he can throw out Stuns in combat like it’s nothing.
Vicious would be MUCH more practical there.
Honestly, Infinity [CD] really need reworking to be the same as Conan [CD]. At which point adding particular qualities for specific types of ‘Display’ would work really well.
I personally prefer the infinity CD to the Conan ones.
I find the threaten action balanced, but I’m not sure I run it like you or others might do. To me the threaten action correlate to intimidation, which according to the rule can only be attended once on an enemy until the situation changed enough (either he’s been injured, or his mates are dead, injured or surrendered). And I allow the players to use the combat skill of their weapon to do it if they want. So it’s good, everyone is likely to be decent at it, but it’s not spammable.