Can anyone give me a page number for complementary skills in 4th?

I know I've read somewhere that you roll the complementary skill and add hits as extra dice to the main skill,... but can't find it again.

urrg.. actually, I might just be thinking of the extra help from contacts bonus for buy/sell tests... memory..... failing........

No such thing in SR4.

right... I just found what it was I was thinking of. That's how Teamwork Tests work.

that or dnd =p

So basically knowledge skills lose value then. In SR 3 you could roll a comp knowledge skill and if you got two successes (hits) it aided you primary skill. Now it's basically nothing but fluff. No point in spending valuable BPs on Knowledge skill then.

more accurate to say that there is less rollplaying reasons for knowledge skills, and even less reason to spend yor even more costly karma on them.

In our games, we give out Common Sense Points (CSP's) for smart actions, humor, that sort of thing, which are the equivelant of karma for knowledge skills only that way you can get more use out of those knowledge skills beyond "these were my interests and areas of knowledge at CharGen"

we used it in 3rd edition a bit, but have started using it more in SR4 due to the higher costs of everything.

And thank you. You're welcome

I did a similar thing in SR3. Whenever players took time to flesh out their characters lives outside of the immediate mission they'd get free knowledge skill points that reflected what they'd been doing. If it was a hobby, they'd get points there, or if they were studying something. As a result, most players would have their characters doing two or three things on-the-side that really helped to add life to their characters. And every so often I'd just tell them to raise a particular skill a point, for free. It worked really well.

I did this, too. I allso try, to make knowledge skills a bit more importent in my games. So players would very often know information, they have the correct skill fore, when it was time for legwork. In some adventures this reduced the time for legwork to zero, because all the knowledge needed was possesed by one of the PCs or the other. Allso, I give small boni for appropriate knowwledge of a sufficient level. not more then +1 or so, but that still motivates to raise knowledgeskills.

Knowledge skills seem plenty important to me as is. I mean, it's good to be able to shoot at things really well but it's useful to know exactly what things need to be shot and how.

You can still roll knowledge skills to get valuable info from the GM. Sure, you can do leg work using your active skills like Etiquette and Data Search to find out who the shadowrunner going after the same mark as you is, but why bother if you already know that from your "Who is who in Seattle shadows" knowledge skill.