What does Uneducated mean, or stupidity in SR4 an essay Options

[Meriss]

This subject came out of a small discussion of a char of mine for a PbP game. What does uneducated mean? Well let's talk about this for a moment. According to some the flaw means that your character has not graduated High School or recieved a GED. But does that make you stupid? Not nessecarily, using a RL example, my dad and my uncle. Now neither one of them ever graduated high school or got their GED. But my father has held a number of jobs, one of which was a high rise superintendent, and he does crosswords, a lot of crosswords. My uncle owns his own construction business, and does all kinds of building research. But according to the RAW both of them have the Uneducated flaw. This brings another thought to mind, what is 2070 high school like. Considering the high level availability of BTL's, AR, commlinks and hot sim what are kids in SR learning? Also the age factor is a point with Elves living 400 years or more and Trolls only living 50 or so. Does Life Long learning mean anything any more? Back on topic Uneducated means different things to diffferent people. Thank you and good night.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

No, Uneducated means 'no modern education whatsoever' - being raised by wolves or luddites.

[Eryk the Red]

Also, remember that it's vague. Not every person without formal education will have this quality; some people are just the right kind of smart anyway. Likewise, some folks slept through school or are otherwise dull-witted enough that this quality would make sense for them even with real education.

You give it to a character if it works for the character. Education level is just a guideline.

[ornot]

The description in the book is of growing up in a primitive society, such as Amazonian Indians or an anti-technology collective. I doubt they even have grade school, let alone any high school. An uneducated character can scarcely read and write.

Mechanically you may not make any rolls involving technical skills or academic and professional knowledges, without purchasing at least 1 skill rank at increased cost. Conversely your average sprawl dweller can roll for a wide range of skills with their Logic-1.

[Nim]

Actually, I'd think an Uneducated character might read and write just fine., but they wouldn't have had much exposure to books about the modern world. And they don't have to be stupid. The flaw represents someone who lacks the basic background knowledge that anyone growing up in a modern society picks up just from exposure.

An ordinary person in a modern society today can default on an attempt to drive a car, even if they've never had a lesson. They've ridden in cars, they've seen people drive cars in TV shows and movies. A person with Uneducated wouldn't know that the steering wheel controled the direction the car went, or to turn the key to start it. They wouldn't know that a red light means 'stop' and a green light means 'go'. They wouldn't know which side of the street to drive on, or even that there WAS a right side of the street to drive on.

Frankly, they'd be pretty darn hard to roleplay right.

[DireRadiant]

It means you cannot default on any Technical, Academic Knowledge and Professional Knowledge skills. It means you also may be required to make success tests for these skills when most people won't. And your karma cost for improving these skills are double, and you cannot ever learn a skill group in this category.

During a normal game that is a lot of potential tests.

Everything else is whatever fluff you want.

[Kyoto Kid]

...for KK4.3 we used the quality to describe the fact that she had a severe learning disability.

Supposedly, the the Negative Quality as written refers to someone who would have grown up totally out of mainstream society, (e.g. "back to earthers" or tribal types living in remote areas). Basically all technical, professional and academic knowledge skills are at double cost (BP & Karma) and the character is "unaware" in any of these skills she does not already possess. Thus, she cannot default to logic for skills she does not already know and may have difficulties adapting to things others take for granted (like commlinks).

Unfortunately In KK's case Uneducated is somewhat a kluge, for she did grow up in a highly civilised setting (Salem TT) and was exposed to formal education. She's the kind who just "didn't quite get it" though and thus would have some of the negative effects of Uneducated (extra BP/Karma for Logic based skills, unable to default), but also has issues with multi tasking, dealing with overly complex situations, and of course mastering technology (kind of the "never could figure out stop the clock on the trivid recorder from flashing "12:00" until she pounded it with her fist & broke it). Of course she really is mildly brain damaged due to beatings she received form her father (which is why I reworked the Dain Bramaged Quality to include some of the limitations from Uneducated and the old Computer Illiterate flaw) and reduced/replaced some of the Reaction based penalties since those are more intuitive.

See:

Dain Bramaged II

[ornot]

[Nim]

Fair enough, ornot - I'd forgotten that was in there. For some reason, I had language skills in my head as one of the things it DIDN'T affect.

[BlueRondo]

Regarding 2070 education, I haven't read any SR books besides the SR4 rulebook, so I'm just going to guess it would be something like the following:

Schools would be run mostly by megacorps (so they can raise the youngsters to be loyal, obedient worker-bees from an early age.) Most kids would be given just enough education to become proficient employees - not much focus on arts, humanities, imaginative thinking, or leadership skills. It wouldn't exactly be bad education (probably better than many of today's public schools in the USA); after all, it's in the interest of the corporation to have engineers and whatnot who know what they're doing. Gifted students, or kids of the big shots, would be singled-out from an early age and placed in special, advanced education programs - with the hope that they would grow up to be future leaders of the corp.

There might also be some independently-owned private schools that focus on providing a serious education, but naturally they would only be available to the select few who can afford the tuition. In fact, perhaps the private universities would expand to include primary and secondary education departments ("Alum of Harvard Elementary, Harvard High, and Harvard College!")

And public schools, if they exist at all, probably wouldn't be much more than a place to stick kids during the day. I'm not sure if there would be any need for public schools, though, because if Joe Average is working for a megacorp, it seems in the megacorp's best interest to "provide free education" for his kids. (1) It makes Joe happier, (2) it helps justify the crap paycheck, and (3) it's a source of future employees raised specifically to meet the corp's needs.

[FriendoftheDork]

[Ravor]

Of course, I'd agrue that the executives don't give a drek about the school that Joe Wageslave's children go to, after all Tom Exec's children get some of the best schooling that his money can buy.

Right or wrongly, I see corp society as looking like a modern version of the Dark Ages, the execs are the Nobles, and they sure as hell aren't going to give the lower classes the tools they would need to unsurp power in the future.

[ornot]

I don't see it as quite that Feudal, although there should be a significant gap between the Rich and the Poor and what they can expect from life.

[FriendoftheDork]

[BlueRondo]

[2bit]

the book is pretty harsh with the quality. :(

[Jaid]

all of the qualities that deny you more than one skill are quite harsh. try being infirm sometime, and see how well you do when you can't make perception tests, climb tests, swim tests, run tests, gymnastics tests (including jumping), stealth tests, disguise tests or escape artist tests.

try being uncouth, and watch in awe as you fail miserably at conning, negotiating, etiquette, detecting cons, intimidating, and being intimidated.

uneducated is no different, it's just crippling in a different way... in a manner of speaking, i would actually consider an uneducated character to be potentially more playable than either an uncouth character or especially an infirm character...

[Kyoto Kid]

[Denicalis]

I think uneducated means just that. Uneducated. You lack formal education. It doesn't mean you're a complete git at everything, but you probably lack the hard, formulaic logic taught by the education system. You probably don't have a great hold on things like history or mathematics. The way I see it, an uneducated cat, not the flaw, just a guy who never went to school, is probably pretty well set up in terms of street smarts and the ability to reason things out. However, someone with the uneducated flaw is exactly that: flawed. This is over and above simply not being educated. It's not being educated and being highly hampered by it. At least that's how I read it.

[Ravor]

[Glyph]

I think defining Uneducated as lacking a formal education is too limited of a definition. Part of the cyberpunk genre is the explosion of information - science isn't locked in an ivory tower any longer. Even today, you have people like Meriss' aforementioned dad and uncle, and there are probably plenty of other high school dropouts who can put their formally educated brethren to shame when it comes to practical know-how. There are probably lots of shadowrunners who grew up on the streets, but still learned skills beyond most wage slaves, such as hacking commlinks, disabling maglocks, and so on. But they learned it all informally, or through mentors, or self-study, or even trial and error.

I would define Uneducated as lacking a modern education. It could be someone from the inner, isolated areas of the Barrens, someone raised in a Neo-Luddite pinkskin tribe, and so on. It is probably taken by characters using Logic as their dump stat anyways, but it doesn't have to mean that the character is stupid. The Barrens rat could know how to decipher the incomprehensible scrawl of graffitti into markings of gang territory, hunt devil rats and cook them over a garbage can fire, dumpster dive for a set of furniture, and otherwise survive in an environment that other characters would be lost in. Similarly, the pinkskin could be able to tell the good mushrooms and berries from the bad ones, cure hides, make and use his own tools and weapons, tame and ride a horse, and so on.

[FriendoftheDork]

[Meriss]

Heh, I love inspiring discussion. And that's exactly what this topic did. Here's a thought. Say you have a Neo-Luddite with no commlink etc. and a Uneducated Troll with full Matrix access, skillwires and the whole nine yards, the troll would be functionally smarter than the Neo-Lud.

[ornot]

I don't quite get your point Meriss.

It seems you're saying someone with skillwires and appropriate skillsofts can do stuff someone with no skill or experience in that particular area can't.

[Meriss]

Not quite ornot. Say you put these two dudes in a Jeopardy style quiz fest. The troll would appear smarter than the Neo-Lud.