My understanding in your example is that with a 7 in this skill, the doctor has read all the books... But with his one in intelligence, he has some issues to coordinate all the information, and to use it efficiently.
The guy with 1 in this skill will have a really basic knowledge, but with a 6 in intelligence, he will be able to exploit this knowledge to get the right conclusions...
But then again, the p69 rule seems, in my opinion, to be necessary in order to have a more realistic version of the game...

One thing to note is that SR4 can actually have problems even in areas where it outshines SR3. It is well known that Blind Archery was simply too difficult in SR3. There are people who can really do it with a high rate of success, and that would have required a skill well over 12 in SR3, while a character in SR4 can actually do it as a starting character. That's a gain for realism.

But that doesn't address the fact that there really are people who can't do a backflip who are able to perform world-class feats of marksmanship. SR4 split quickness and intelligence up, and that goes a long way towards making more realistic characters (finally you can make someone who is really perceptive who isn't also a prize-winning physicist), but it still means that anyone who is really good with a gun is by definition quite proficient in Gymnastics, and we know that isn't true.

Despite the gains made in SR4, there are still some hanging issues:

1. Skills are too expensive. It costs 10 BP for +1 die to every skill in the Firearms group. It costs 10 BP for +1 die to every Agility linked skill. That's bullshit.

2. Skill caps are unrealistic. Sorry guys, there really are things that people can do that they can't do in SR4 because the skill caps are too low. From marksmen to bakers, world class people can perform enviable feats so consistently that from a Shadowrun POV they are "buying success" on tasks that the caps simply will not allow for mundanes. And yet, we know that every man woman and child on Earth is a mundane.

---

On the other side, of course, letting up the skill caps would make people roll larger piles of dice, and that's a pain in the ass. So it's an open question of whether the extra realism of allowing actual world class experts into the game is worth the extra annoyance of having more pieces of plastic flying around. But don't pretend that the limits are there for any other reason - they aren't.

-Frank

It would be Artisan 6 (Baking +2)

as there is no 'superhuman' ranking in the SR3 skill descriptions, i believe you're mistaken. and find me ten people who'd bet on Dodger outhacking Fastjack.

besides, are you really saying that it's worse for characters to be on par with Fastjack or Dodger after spending karma working towards it, than is is for characters to be that good at chargen?

FWIW, the pre-SR4 literature has made me suspicious that Dodger had gone technomancer prior to Crash 2.0.

A character had asked if Dodger was an otaku, and the reply was that he was "something.... else."

But eh, we might not actually find out.

oops, you're right about the Superhuman rating. i haven't used those, so my memory on them is somewhat rusty. your second proof is not proof it all. "perhaps" and "one of" are not terms one uses to describe someone who is a match for an NPC like Fastjack.

all of which is completely tangential to the actual point of my recent posts, which you have thus far avoided answering. one might start to think it's because you can't.

why is a concrete, set-in-stone grading scale a good thing? it allows the GM much, much less ability to tailor NPCs to fit his game. in a no-cap system, the GM can always come up with someone who is better than the PCs; in a capped system, the GM is locked under the same ceiling as everyone else. i'd argue that having lots of deckers who are as good as Dodger is just as bad, if not worse, as having one decker who is better. at least that one decker is something special, something unique. in SR4, deckers as good as Dodger are a dime a dozen. Dodger's just another chump with 13 dice.

eh, agreed, to a point. a system where characters could conceivably have a skill rating of anywhere from 1 to 100 would be annoying as all hell to GM. but that possibility isn't automatically inherent in a no-cap system. for all its many faults, SR3 at least got that right: when's the last time you saw an SR3 character with a skill, or even a specialization, higher than about 15? once you get above a certain point, the cost of progression becomes more than most players are willing to bear; to me, that's a more elegant solution than simply putting a hard cap on things.

but, as you said, that's not really the point of this discussion. the main thing that bothers me about SR4's skills and attributes isn't that they're capped--it's that the cap at chargen and the cap on post-chargen progression are the same. that, to me, takes all the joy out of advancing a character. as i've said before in this thread, if you view the rules as a make-do vehicle for your roleplay, then there's no problem with this; it's even a strength. but if you enjoy the gaming side, then it's a serious flaw.

Reading through the thread, I came up with an interesting question: How bad is the skill description table if you define it as being referring to a character with a linked attribute of 4 for 1-5 and 6 for 6, and 7 for 7?

Look, the only valid point I have seen for the hard caps set the way theya re is this. I do not like rolling dice anymore dice. That is it.

All the other reasons have some bull in them, htat boils down to either the book say so, so it must be right or there is a limit tot eh human body...He Book is a book, wrighten by people,and guess what people can be wrong. The idea thatt eh human body has a limit is rather silly, consideringering that record are being broken today. The faster speed people run is faster than they were 10 years ago. The wieghts people lift is heavier. The math people are tackling is harder.Our understanding of cult of persona is deeper. We are not standing still.We are becomeing more than what we were. That being said I am not asking for no limits.I am asking for limits that let characters to become people who shine in their feild in such away they could if they want to be the biggest in their feild and not just a runner with a rep.

With no progress upward, you are doomed to becoming more like each other. mundans are sckewed in shadowrun at the start and just get screwed harder as the game gets longer. Thena gian this just what I see.I could be wrong

MUCH better steroids. Genetech is getting all grown up too.

The scientific side gets more specific, but not harder. The days of general scientists are long gone, Einstein and Bohr were the last according to my mathematics prof.