After wwatching Heroes and seeing the new girl that can imitate the skills of those around her, I'm left wondering how I could import this into Shadowrun. I'm left thinking it would function similar to Skillwires, but requires exposure to the skill you want at teh level you want to imitate rather than purchasing a program. Anyone want to give me something more to go from?

Ok, some thoughts, purely off the top of my head, with no thought overly given to balance...

So, it's a power you buy in levels. The level caps the maximum amount of skill you can imitate, so a rating 4 power means your imitated skill is capped at 4.

The adept copies the power of anyone using a skill within their LOS. The copied skill is set at the skill level of the subject being copied or the rating of the power (whichever is lower). Only one skill can be copied at a time. Once a subject moves out of LOS, the power fades from the adept in (adepts magic rating) combat turns. Changing the current skill being copied is a free action as long as the adept has seen someone using the skill since his last action.

i'm not sure technology can reasonably accomplish that. at best, i might see a piece of cyberware that, if you study an opponent in a given situation for a few rounds, you can get a temporary bonus to a single skill used against them (unarmed, firearms, whatever) because you can somewhat predict their actions.

Heh, in a somewhat related topic, I ran a stupidly confident Mr. Lucky with 8 Edge and an augmented 9 Agility for a high powered one shot run once. Other than Perception and Dodge (taken at 5s), he only had points in skills that normally could not be defaulted to, and even then only a single point. He could do anything- sort of. Reassuring everyone that you've "seen this kind of thing get done on the trids all the time..." while disarming a bomb is good clean fun.

mfb's version would be similar to one of the genewares, Synch IIRC, which gives +1 DP when fighting someone whose fighting style you've observed. A program which a) has capacity to observe, through a feed from cybereyes or some such, and b) can run an analysis, and c) can interact with a combat skillwire, could perhaps replicate that bonus. You'd need to be, or get help from, a combat specialist to create the Expert System, plus the Software skill to write the code.
I'm guessing 2K nuyen would be a fair market price, and it could only run on a comlink with System 4 or better. ("Minimum system requirements" and so forth.) Alternatively, make it available in Rating 1-6, $1000 per rating, and it rolls Rating dice when studying a subject, and gives +1 DP per hit. Appropriate modifiers... and if it watches someone using kenjutsu, then mid-combat they switch to karate, then the bonus is lost until the system can analyse their karate patterns.

Hero System has such a skill for (meta) humans. There could be a few reasonably balanced meta-skills for combat... what Charisma-based skill would you use for taunting an opponent to get them to lose self-control, and what modifiers would ensue?

As an adept power... .25 per rating, or .5 per rating, for Omniskill or Skill Mirror?

Cf. the Marvel Comics character Taskmaster.

How about this? (stealing liberally from the Linguistics adept power)


Jack Of All Trades (Cost: 2)
The Jack Of All Trades power combines enhanced memorization and mimicry to allow an adept to pick up a new skill after minimal exposure—no Karma expenditure or test required.
After (10 – Magic) hours of contact to the new skill in use, the adept makes an Intuition + Logic Test using a threshold noted below. If successful, the adept develops the skill at Rating 1 at no Karma cost. Increasing the skill beyond this point requires normal Karma expenditure, but the base learning time for the adept is halved. Magical and Resonance Skills cannot be learned in this way.

Thresholds:
2: Combat Active skills, Physical Active Skills
3: Vehicle Active skills, Social Active Skills
4: Technical Active Skills

the Hero system has a cramming mechanic that might be adapted, as long as you accept that the bonuses are not permanent.

i probably wouldn't let it go much further than removing the defaulting penalty and allowing you to use trained-only skills untrained once you've seen someone else do it for a while. i might even consider allowing it at higher ratings, where you get a small bonus to the dicepool. if you use the rule for skills capping hits, i'd also expand the hit maximum with this power.

honestly, with a decent attribute, you could be rolling a pretty decent DP anyways.