In the last edition of Shadowrun, we used a complementary skill rule to make use of those Knowledge Skills (not sure, if that was in the book, or a house rule ).

Basically you roll the complementary skill (i.e. Security Systems Knowledge for an Electronics Test to get past a maglock), and every two successes grant an additional die for the actual test.

In SR4 this could be used pretty much the same way, with every two hits on the complementary skill roll granting one additional die for the actual test.

Of course, the use of complementary skills should be reasonable (no Anatomy Knowledge for Firearms ).

This is a great way to actually make use of those Knowledge skills, I think, and allows to further differentiate between various character types.

Bye
Thanee

I found that the complentary skills were more of a pain than they were worth.... having two sets of dice and dice pools in the 20's just got to be too much. Besides EVERYONE took psychology at 6 to help with all those wonderful social skills.
I think that the developers were trying to lower the number of dice rolled per turn in order to speed up the game.
In my campaign knowledge skills basically substitute for having to go out and hit up your contacts for info.

On the topic of Knowledge skills, do Active Skills imply any level of knowledge about a subject? I mean, if you have a rating of 6 in Automotive Mechanic, doesn't that imply you know a thing or two about how cars are built? Or is the character still expected to have a Knowledge Skill to go along with the Active Skill?

Anyway, I kind of like that complementary skill rule. I imagine it would usually only boost the actual test dice pool by one or two dice, which seems reasonable (but what would I know? I've never played a Shadowrun game.)

If you rolled Logic+Knowledge, then you'd get a good amount of hits.

Oh yeah, forgot about Logic.

You would need 6 dice for every additional die in the actual test on average, that's not outrageous, but a nice bonus for those with decent Knowledge.

Of course, as with so many other things, you need to take the skills that fit the character, not the mechanics.

And Psychology wouldn't help with every social skill, just when it is directly related. But that's probably the more difficult part, to decide when and how skills apply.

BlueRondo: In SR3 you automatically got a Knowledge/Background Skill some ranks lower than your Active Skill, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Knowledge Skills, that are direct descendants of an Active Skill make little sense in SR4, I think, you could just roll Logic/Intuition+Skill instead.

What I mean here are only somewhat related knowledges, which are related to the task, tho. Like the Security Systems/Electronics example. They should only apply to some of the tests of a skill, not all, but that's something one needs to cover when deciding on Knowledge Skills (since there is no hard list of them, just some examples, and you can have pretty much anything as Knowledge, that makes any sense).

Bye
Thanee

Wouldn't it be 9 dice? 1/3^2 is 1/9.

You used to get (ActiveSkillRating - 2) as a BackGround Knowledge skill in SOME implementations of SR3. IIRC that was an optional rule found in SRCompanion

Which would mean that you need to be throwing 18 dice on a knowledge skill check in order to average one extra success on the skill check it's complementing. That seems, uh... kinda weak.

Well, it's basically free. It's just a small bonus, and one extra hit can be quite useful.

Bye
Thanee

It's as basically free as however much BP/karma you put into getting the attribute and knowledge skill to the point where you were throwing that many dice at it I'm just saying, it should be a little more useful than one extra die for every 2 successes.

You could just use multiple knowledge skills to break the hard skill caps, like using magical theory to add dice to spellcasting and summoning.

it would probably make better sense to use the teamwork rule thats already present in SR4 to work for complimentary skills. The teamwork roll gives you an extra die per success of the teamworking person's roll. That would basically drill down to an extra average success per 9 dice in skill+attributes for the helper person (or skill).

Using the Teamwork rules (i.e. twice as many additional dice) sounds like a good idea.

I was just a being cautious with racking together all those extra dice.

But it's probably alright, 9 dice for one extra hit on average doesn't seem too much.

Bye
Thanee