With the ability to remember what was read at a rate of 9600 words a minute... a character with a high logic + Intuition could potential circumnavigate knowledge skills by reading about them... Shakespeare sure my character will finish reading his plays in a week and be able to recite everything perfectly line by line...

What I am asking is with the power to remember a chunk of info via reading, should the bonus -1 to memory thresholds be negated when I need to recall such information...

Perhaps a way to fix this is to limit would could be "remembered" to things that could be found in a text format... for example: there is no book of legal loopholes, they are just common knowledge to lawyers as they practice law so often they understand how things interact on a level that cannot be attained from just reading the text thus my character could learn laws by reading a book of laws but would require a separate test to see if he could put 1+1 together to get 2.

What is everyone else's thoughts on the combination of those two qualities...

I don't see the problem as it's just a more expensive version of datajack + knowsoft.

Sorry - I just don't see it as a problem. It's not much more than someone with Cybereyes can do just by recording the pages of a book as they skim through it. Not that you see books very often in SR2070. More likely you're reading a file in which case you have the data stored already anyway. Yes - it's not quite as good as actually knowing it because you have to look it up, but that's just a Complex Action away. Commlinks have infinite storage as far as simple text is concerned. And you're online anyway so pubic information is easily available. Imagine if you have a thought-activated Google and Wikipedia at your disposal 24/7 - that's what a commlink, trodes and the Matrix are.

I'm not saying that Speed Reading and Photographic Memory are bad, but I think they're far from needing nerfing. As regards non-public information, well the cybereyes or simply copying the file is as good (Better as you can share it).

Considering that 99% of the stuff you can do with speed reading and rote memorization you can also do with a quick google search, it doesn't sound over powered.

Consider the popular skill 'Police procedures". You are trying to use a disguise as a cop, the KS allows you to know how to act. Having a handbook on the same that you can refer to will help, yes, but it is no substitute for actually having the skill.

No. No problem here. Move along people.

- J.

EDIT: Given that most people would rather buy Positive Qualities like SURGEd, Restricted Gear, etc, these Qualities rarely see play in my experience. At least not as often as they should.

To be fair, an image-link with text recognition could do the same thing.

Also to be fair, a knowledge skill isn't just what you remember from books, but also your ability to apply that knowledge. Anyone can go on the net and download a book on gardening, and using it would give you a bonus on a gardening check, but without the gardening knowledge skill you just to have the practical experience to be really good at it.

Even purely academic knowledge skills, say UCAS history, benefit from experience. Once again, anyone can look up data about specific events, but the knowledge skill represents time and energy spent internalizing those facts and understanding them. You may have read about the ghost dance war, but someone with the skill will know about every event in the war, the history of every major figure, and how they interrelate and affected other events.

Especially considering photographic memory is not perfect.

So yes, speed reading + photographic memory is useful, but it's like having access to Wikipedia(which is likely owned by horizon group). You'll know lots of stuff, but some of what you might know is false, and you won't necessarily understand it.

I just love my AI with Photographic Memory and Speed Reading.

Thanks for the response guys... Now I kinda feel bad taking the two qualities.

So looking something up is a Complex action, what kind of action is trying to remember something.

I've led you astray, I'm afraid. Sorry for speaking off the cuff. The closest to official rules I know is the Data Search rules (SR4A, pg. 230). They give looking something up as an Extended Test with a threshold of 6 for public and open information. With a typical dice pool of five, it's going to take a moderately competent person about 9 seconds (3 attempts at 3 seconds per attempt) to get any information. But that's on the Matrix. If you have a local store of the information and its something that you'd normally reference, I'd probably allow it in less, maybe even in one Complex Action if they already had their comm up and running. A bit of a GM call, but if you can do an online search in 9, your own system should be less.

As to an action to remember something, normally you'd just say you know it or you don't. If it's something from the dim and distant past and important to the game, the GM could set it as an Extended Test with just Logic for the dice pool. I personally have never done anything like that because (a) it's never come up and (b) players can't remember things that happen to their character in the same way that they remember things that happen to themselves. I'm fairly often prompting them with names or past events.

Hope this helps. Official rules, pg. 230, SR4A. The rest is just my take on things.

Peace,

K.

Thanks this will help out.. the reason I thought it was too powerful was because under the Memory attribute test it list Logic+Intuition as the dice pool. The threshold to remember something moderately basic, recent, and importance is about 1 to 2 while it says that the test could rise the threshold up to 3-4 because of poor conditions, fairly distant temporally, and of minute details...

My character has a combined Logic and Intuition of 10 and with a -1 to he threshold it is not a problem to remember anything. potentially I could remember minor details with poor conditions automatically, if I am not under duress... This reminds me of a Show called "Psyche" where the main character fools a detective agency into believing he is psychic when he just has a photographic memory...

But as it was mentioned earlier, this does not seem that powerful when your com-link can do the exact same thing with a recording function and with storing text...

According to the pictures of shadowrun characters with com-links, the com-links are built into character skull. is this right? I had always imagined them like an ear piece... unless the pictures were of someone that had surgery to put a com-link in his skull.

Commlinks can be built into the skull - you'll find them in the Cyberware section under "Headware". They don't have to be though. You can just clip them to your belt, wear them like a watch or pretty much anything else you like, really. If the commlink is built into your head then it's available for you to use whenever you like and others might not realise you have it. If its one that you carry then there are a few ways that you can use it. You can use boring old fashioned interfaces like earbuds and built in mic, a small keypad, etc. to use it. It might even have a tiny, low-quality trid (hologram) projector, though even that is old-fashioned by 2070. More likely you would use AR. AR is augmented reality and you can display it using glasses with built in image links, digital contact lenses, goggles, cybereyes or whatever that display the interfaces in space. You'd interact with it using AR gloves (much less bulky than it sounds - it might just mean some rings on your fingertips or something) which you can press the virtual buttons with, etc. But you can even go beyond this stuff by using a SIM module and letting the commlink interfere directly with your brain to make you see the controls, hear voices or display information. You do that either by connecting the commlink directly to your brain via a datajack which you've had surgically implanted, or by "trodes" which you stick to your head. All this can be done wirelessly so that you wouldn't need to actually connect a cable between the commlink and the datajack or trodes.

Welcome to 2070 - you can do a lot with a simple commlink. (Just keep hackers away from it ).

K.

My hacker took these two qualities more as a matter of flavor rather than expecting a huge return on them. However, they can have some interesting uses: managing to quickly memorize a buildings floor plan from seeing it shuffled across a table and the like. Cyberware and programs can accomplish the same things, but this enables a character to recall on the fly(it beats trying to Google something about 5 seconds after you realize you need to know it). I would also consider that if both qualities are taken together that they could have a synergistic feed on the kind of checks they might allow, for example while photographic memory would enable you to recall someone you saw once with reasonable accuracy speed reading would give you much greater detail (basing it off my logical progression of simply training the brain to take in data more quickly+perfect recall).