Foreword: Forgive me if it is posted somewhere and due to bad internets skills I can't find it.

Hello all,

I am currently compiling a robust listing of Shadowrun 4 knowledge skills/specializations for a project I am working on and could use your help!

Please visit: http://5150press.com/shadowrun/knowledge.php if your interested in helping.

Thank you in advance!

P.S. The data I am collecting will be publicly available once its done. I will post a link in this thread.
The input form will be taken down at 11:00pm Monday December 20

The problem with that is that individual Knowledge skills can cover damn near anything and easily overlap with each other. You could have Sports (Team Sports), Team Sports (Baseball), Baseball (Japanese Teams), Japanese Baseball Teams (Tokyo Tigers), Tokyo Tigers (Pinch Hitters)... it goes on and on. It's not like Active skills, where each skill has a fairly well-defined area of application; Knowledge skills can be as broad or as narrow as the player wants.

And the GM sets the threshold with respect to how specialised the information required and how broad the skill is.

Seriously. My last character had knowledge skills in Copa Sudamericana Futbol, Cooking with Vegetables, Workout Routines, and Sixth World R&B Music. And that's just one character. Knowledge skills can be and often are anything. I think this is kind of a futile endeavor.

Yeah, and those could have been Cooking (Vegetables), Sixth World Music (R&B), Exercise (Workout Routines), and... I have no idea what copa whatever is, but I'm sure it could be rearranged.

Now, that said, I think that a listing of knowledge skills would be very nice to be able to look over when trying to come up with stuff for a character. With a pool of infinite possibilities, it can be easy to forget something that would be appropriate to your character. I often go through the pregen character sheets when looking for ideas of knowledge skills, and I think this could be a good resource to flip through and get ideas from.

I'm not sure that including specs will be super useful beyond providing a basic example though.

Indeed. It's hard to make good choices in knowledge with so little definition.

Latin America Soccer (Copa Sulamericana).

Depending on how broadly or how specifically you choose your knowledges, the amount of free points you get in BPgen is either nice, or woefully small.

Yes, what is a real issue when using karmagen because you don't gain the free knowledge skill points, so you have to find the balance on flavourful knowledges and useful knowledges for your character.

I think most people go with useful knowledge skills, and skip flavor when doing Karma gen

And really, if you're spending /karma/ for them. Points that could go into a real skill instead, or better stats, it's hard to justify the 4 cooking(vegan) your character should have because of his background.

Knowledge Skill: Lochness Monster, 6 points.

Well, yes, but with free know points you can spend them the way you want without "feeling guilty for not being useful" because they are free.

My current karmagen character is a Jaguar shapeshifter spy for the amazonian government. I'm an exchange student for WU studying agronomic engineering. My knowledge skills are: Amazonian Wilderness Lore (Fauna), Pre-Colombian Folklore (Gods), Agronomic Engineering (Hydroponics) and Parazoology (Shapeshifters). I believe that PCF and AE will be useless knowledge skills, AWL will only be useful if we ever set foot on Amazonia and Parazoology will be my only knowledge skill with some usefulness.

We get some for free at chargen as per RAW unless that got changed in 4a, so I usually don't think of it as spending karma on them. I usually try to get one or two useful skills and spend the rest on flavor. But I don't have a munchkiny bone in my body so maybe that's not normal. This is also a character I wrote seven pages of description and backstory for. Probably overkill.

They're talking about if you are using the karmagen system, in which case you don't get any free knowledge skills, and so you are actually spending karma on them.

Or you could use the "useless" Knowledge skills as camouflage, a buy-in if you will to make min-maxing in other areas easier to swallow.

Oh. Karmagen doesn't have that? That's dumb.

It would be difficult to stat out mechanically.

I had thought about using a method similar to the old BeCKS from TSS, but with knowledge skills pulling from 2 attributes now, I decided to just go with it. (The Karma creation has been my prefered method for years - Thank you BeCKS [Mike Jones].

However, the new system does have one interesting turn around...you don't have to purchase your race.

"You get (Logic+Intuition)*X Karma solely for buying Knowledge skills" - that was pretty easy.

Or you just copy and paste the line used in the BP system. Also, it is logic + Intuition, not willpower.

Gah. Too much D&D, my attributes are all mixed up.

The Health Ministry alerts: too much D&D may cause irreversible damage to your system. Play moderately.

Fair enough, never really thought about it. I'd suggest maybe 6 karma, but until I start a new campaign, I'll not know. (Our current group converted from 3rd).

Biggest thing to worry about is if it unbalances character creation....more than it already is. As an aside, without paying for race in the karma system, how do you balance things like Infected and Spirits and all? (other than the obviousness of the GM pointing, laughing and throwing the book at you)

Well, the important thing to remember for infected is that being infected isn't actually a race, it is a quality which doesn't apply to the 35BP/70 karma limit. As for spirits, those are simply a problem.