If you could have knowledge skills..., What skills would you have? Options

[eralston]

If you were playing a Shadowrun video game, how would you want knowledge skills put into the game? What knowledge skills are important to the game working? What knowledge skills are important to making characters with depth?

This is another "if you made the game" question posed by Shadowrun Awakened again turning to you guys to offer facts instead of speculation. Thank you for taking the time to answer

[Ryu]

The really obvious answer would be "those that might matter to a game". You´ll have to decide what we as players have to learn and what our characters should learn.

What I´d personally like in the game is language. That would be a comparably easy to implement, as any communication could be flagged with a language tag. Depending on the setting at least english, japanese, chinese, german, russian and some native american languages should be common. Due to the stated lack of reading/writing skills those should be implemented, too. One could go as far as demanding minimum skill levels to understand scientific/special interest text, but thats less important.

Other knowledge skills could be needed to gain access privileges to parts of the game world. Organised crime(spec.)/Law enforcement(spec.)/Military/Rigging/Magic community. Those would have to be more limited than original SR of course.

[Ravor]

Well personally I'd love to see Magical/Matrix Theory knowledge skills to be useful, as well as the various Gang Knowledge skills...

[Ophis]

Paranormal animals (so I can recognize blackberry cats...)

Knowledge skills, should probably act as complementary additions to active skills, ie having Ares Security procedures would up your stealth on ares turf, and Mafia hangouts would aid negotiation to acquire black market goods from the mob.

[Kyoto Kid]

...TT Politics.

:ic:...for when those frickin fracking sassin frassin long eared galoots take over my territory.

Oooooo I hates them varmints.

[Shrike30]

Things like gang knowledge, weapon recognition, etc could be used if you're going to have a "threat evaluation" formula of some sort (basically, an indicator to the player of how dangerous the thing he's looking at is). An appropriate knowledge skill would allow the player to get a more accurate estimate of how dangerous the target is.

[PBTHHHHT]

Civil engineering/Architecture so you know what walls/supports to blow out. ;-)

I like Shrike's suggestion, so one can kinda know how bad of a situation they're in.

[Darkest Angel]

Security Procedures/Lone Star Tactics. So you know how to circumvent them when used against you.

Megacorporate/Underworld/Global Politics, to give you an idea who Mr Johnson works for.

[Wounded Ronin]

Both Psychology and Small Unit Tactics have crunchy rules behind them so they should be included.

There should be a generic knowledge skill which you can use for your Centering, where you can type a description of your choice.

[eralston]

What would you guys want to use yours knowledge skill for? How do you use knowledge skills in your game?

In my game, I generally have the advantage of knowing what knowledge skills are in the group so I can toss out tasks for anything from "psychology" to "1,001 things to do with a blender". How often do you utilize them like that? How would you want that in a game? Is it worth putting in?

[Ryu]

You´ll have to do it the other way round here. A limited list of skills is important to ensure that kind of regular use. Only a GM can offer the flexibility to handle an open skill system.

We use our knowledge skills to provide bonus information about the things that happen. I think that would be rather easy to implement. A few knowledge skills can be used actively, so the category name is a bit off.

[Pyritefoolsgold]

It should work like this: There should be a way of accessing a description of buildings, people, paracritters, drones, etc. If you click on a ganger, then you should have to make a test with knowledge (gangs) + intuition to get the name of his gang and the gangs description in the description of the ganger.

Here's a short list of things I'd find useful:

Street Knowledge:
Corporate
Police
Gangs
Paracritters
Military
Organized Crime
Cyberware
Guns
Street magic

A corp security guard, or corporate equipment, would let you know which corp they are from with a success on the corporate knowledge test. With Police, you would be able to know what items are illegal to carry where, and you might even give us a map overview system that shows police patrol routes, corporate holdings, gang turf, paracritter hotspots, military installations, organized crime interests, cyberware doctors, and gun stores.