Is there a maximum rating for skills? Specializations? Checked the main book but either its not there or I missed it somewhere.

Nope. They can go as high as you like as long as you pay the Karma for it (which is pretty expensive once you surpass twice your Attribute rating).

And Specializations are limited by the Primary skill, are they not?

Something like 1.5 times or plus 3?

Specializations are capped at base skill x 2 (or 3, for base skill 1).

I like to max knowledge skills out at 10. Because the way the book describes it, having skill 8 in a knowledge skill seems like you're a foremost expert on the topic.

I have, quite a few times in fact. They're pretty cheap to improve, and I'm a huge fan of Knowledge Skills (they're the best thing SR3 introduced in my opinion) so maybe that had something to do with it.

My last caracter had an absolutely obscene number of knowledge skills... But she *was* an info-broker, so I guess it made snese to have close to 20 of the suckers...

I often raise the knowledge skills of things that I find usefull or things that I didn't have for a run but would have liked. I've also been known to have as many as 8 slots filled with know-, lingua-, or data- softs slotted at any one time using multiple 4 slot chipjacks. Save karma and spends money, but it depends on what type of game you're playing.

It used to be your skill can't be higher then twice its base attribute but its been awhile.

Personally, I always maxed skills out at 12.
After that, there's just too many dice to roll.

if you use the training rules in sr comp then you start to get really long training times as you get higher skills - i did a calc once while bored taking a test and figured that the highest skill a being could get that was awake in 5,000 year stints was somewhere in the 30's.

Thanx 3Threes - that info could become useful someday =)

How did you get that calculation? Following the rules for Training Times in the Shadowrun Companion, improving an Active Skill from 29 to 30 takes a base time of (75 Karma times 7) days, or 525 days which is just a year and a half. Since the target number for trying to reduce that time is unlikely to happen (target number 60), you can just skip it and increase the time by 50%. That means the final amount of time is just over two years. Reading the rules for instructors, it doesn't seem dependant on your own success at the training time test; every success the instructor makes on an Instruction(4) test counts as one success regardless of how many you achieved. So even just two successes on that test will cut the time in half.

Each skill point below that takes progressively less time. Elves in particular aren't going to have much trouble hitting 30 while they're still relatively young, and even an ork has a shot of hitting it before they're out of middle age.

But within the span of a character's life in the shadows, it is indeed very unprobable.

Checking the math, advancing an active skill from 238 to 239 takes almost 5000 years. Advancing an active skill from nothing up to 50 takes less than 78 years (time based on assuming it was in the max karma cost from the beginning, so the actual time is less).

Herald...did you take instructers into account lol

You have too much time on your hands

It's only a minute or so with the book and a spreadsheet. No I did not add in the difficulty of finding an instructor or the slight penalty for "going alone" that I am not in the mood to look up.

Did you count training time form rating 1 to 2 then 3 then 4 and on and on, you know you can't skip levels right. So from rating 1 to 30's may take 5000 years. It don't really matter though does it?

you people have WAY to much free time.

Great thing about a spreadsheet is you can define a formula in one cell, copy it along to match a change in one of the inputs, and then look at the fun list of output. Skill level 50 takes less than 78 years total so 30 will not take 5000.

Once you get up to the $4,000 per day range, you are probably better just taking the extra time to learn it unaided. Assuming no aid, the time for a skill from 0 to 50 will be about 113 years.

EDIT: Sorry I misread something.

Of course, all of these times are just for learning the skill and don't really take 'life' into account for the most part, right?

Those are based on the official 4 hours of training per day. That's 20 hours for life and sleep.

But what about other skills? Obviously it'll take longer just because no one is going to be able to devote themselves to a single thing for a century solid. That's my point really.

Heh, well if you want to take reality and common sense into account. I as a GM would have long retired a player before he/she got to skill levels of fifty. So the point is moot. Even so, anyone who's considering how long it takes to raise a skill to fifty is probably pretty dedicated to that skill. If you wanted to raise ALL your active skills (we'll assume about 10 of them) to fifty, it doesn't matter what order you increase them in (thank-you commutative and distributive laws), it's going to take 780 years at 4 hours a day with no instructor. Now, after you come back from reeling over ten skills at 50, realize that it's still much, much less than 5,000.

I realize that there's not much common sense in the topic at hand, and obviously those Immortal Elves can have some pretty insane skills, but even more reasonable numbers in the double digits are probably out of reach of characters and npc's in the game.

Plus, I'm pretty bored and needed to do something, so I thought I'd chime in on this thread...heh.

I've rarely had problems with characters taking their skills to ridiculous levels, but on the rare occasions that I have, I've told them that the maximum is 10+(total karma earned / 100 round down)
It's sort of arbitrary, I mean I couldld've chosen any similar formula like 8+karma/5, but it prevents players from dumping 90% or more of their karma into one skill.