If one were to take Mnemonic enhancer, which reduces the cost of learning/improving skills by one point of karma, would that in effect give the character a "jack of all trades" ability? Perhaps not actually gaining all skills, but effectively giving them the ability to roll one die without defaulting on any skill.

Sort of like the cantrips from MitS. You can get free, low level spells by making them exclusive or fetished. Why not do the same thing for skills?

Way to let a guy down easy toturi.

Hey, I do have a rep as an insane bookninja to maintain.

It's still a great deal though.

now here's the fun part. Become an initiate, do an astral quest rating 2 (pretty much idiot proof) to learn a spell. Learn a force 6 spell for 1 karma. And get two more dice to do it with!

Is it cheap? yes . Is it legal? yes Should it be allowed? debateable, but it doens't say anywhere that they're not compatible.

Then get the cognition metamagic too and knock off another one.

How exactly are you paying half karma for spells in the first place? Spells aren't skills, and the mnemonic enhancer only saves one karma on skills. Congnition similarly only applies to skills, but can stack with the mnemonic enhancer.

you're right , sorry, figuring in house rules again.

To us it just made sense that if you could use it for skills, it would work for learning spells as well since a good chunk of it is retention , at least w/ hermatics. YMMV

Ah, that makes more sense.
Do you still use the TN F*2 test to actually learn the spell, or has that been made easier too?

No, it's been errata'd to only provide 1 karma cost reduction regardless of grade.

Ah, my bad.

*makes a note to argue his GM out of following that particular Errata if he ever plays the character with it*

I once had a player who had a human sammie with mnemonic enhancer (3) before the errate came out. It's not nice.. after a couple of runs he was a jack-of-all-trades (had started out with good attributes though). The reduction to only 1 karma point reduction makes sense imo.

The level 3 version is still very useful. You get an extra die to all your knowledge skills, and 3 extra to all your language skills. An int 6 character can effectively have 4s in 9 languages, or 5s in 4 languages, providing significant fluency in multiple environments.
Definately beats out knowsofts and linguasofts in my opinion if you aren't playing the int 1 troll (who needs the chips to speak clearly in complete sentences).

Shamans need to go to their totem plane, same with voodoo. Hermetics and wujen go to whatever plane corresponds to the spell (hermetic goes to earth to learn armor, don't remember if it's the same for wujen). It's only for the initiatory astral quest that hermetics and wujen get the metaphysical boot to the teeth.

I was mainly asking because the extra dice from the astral quests are at least as important as the karma reduction when trying to learn a spell.

Hermetics can't quest for health spells, no corresponding plane. They also can't use an elemental to aid study for health spells for the same reason.

Since it isn't earth for manipulations for wujen, I will amend my parenthetical comment with this brief list.

Wood - Detection
Fire - Combat
Earth - Health
Metal - Manipulation (and Sylphs)
Water - Illusion

So wujen get it slightly worse when astrally questing for as an aid to initiation, but at least they can learn Heal with extra dice.

Hmm... missed that line. And that was one of my prime reasons for preferring wujen over hermetics.

I assume, with the errata, the -1 karma cost for skills is at any level. Is this how everyone plays? It seams like a very powerful piece of bioware for .2 BioIndex and 15,000. Does anyone else house-rule this for level 2 or 3?

mnem enh 3 is almost as good as that language-learnin' adept power (can't think of the name). together, they are horriffic. any language you are exposed to for more than an hour or so, you learn (for free!) at an effective rating of 4.

Linguistics allows you to pick up the basics of the language at rating one, not sure where you're getting rating four from, in about four/five hours for no karma and reduces the time to learn it when improving your skill rating after that. You'd have to also take the Cognition metamagic to get near the bonuses of a level three mnemonic enhancer IMO.

Flak, level 3 Mnem Enhancer gives 3 bonus dice to Knowledge and Language Skill Tests, in addition to other things.

Where do you find the'cognition' metamagic technique? I've not heard of it.

SOTA 2064.

Got it thanks.

Does the reduced karma effect learning spells too?

Don't have my book on me, but assuming Herald checked, not by canon. My group plays it as reducing from spells. I don't see why it would reduce learning skill cost, and not spells, other than that it says so in the book.

With the enhancers, you could perhaps reason that it doesn't work with spell learning because it's biotech, and magic and tech don't mix well. But that of course doesn't jive with the adept power of cognition. So ask your friendly neighborhood GM, and see if he/she's feeling generous. Just remember that it's a double edged sword, and could very well mean that the mages you face off against could do this as well, and have a lot more spells than you're used to.
So geek the mage first.

it's horrific. after an hour, you speak any language better than most native speakers.

How well do native speakers speak their own language? I mean most times I put my native speakers of a language at 4, so with a Lingusitic + Mnem Enhancer 3, you'd pass for a native speaker, not any better.

After just scanning the rules, it would take a starting adept 4 hours to learn. Only the thrice initiated adept (with no magic loss) can learn in an hour. Entertainingly, there is no mention of a minimum time needed, so lingual adepts who have initiated 4 times just get to roll the test as often as desired for any language that they encounter.

eh. i usually view 3 as being 'average' for most things. languages are basically knowledge skills; 3 is dedicated and 4 is well-rounded. depends on your opinion of the average person's literacy, i guess. the language TNs are insane, though, so it's hard to properly judge.

Native to me means the guy has to be using it all his life. Dedicated would be someone in elementary/primary school, once out of high/secondary school(or its 2060 equivalent), I'd say well-rounded.

Language Skill Level
1) You know the alphabet.
2) You read Dr Seuss.
3) You read Sweet Valley High.
4) You enjoy Harry Potter.
5) You do essays.
6) You do a thesis.
7) You give lectures.
8) You are the author of a dictionary.

The basic language rules were written from a (dominant monolingual) N. American perspective, following assumptions that don't hold true for the majority of the world's population. It took the longest time for N. American psychologists even to break free from the assumption that children who grew up bilingual tended to be behind their age/schoolmates in English language skills. It's only very recently that the studies have started to come out demonstrating that, once the local native language has been learned, the opposite seems more frequently to be the case. (Previous studies had been confounded by lumping in every child in a bilingual environment, whether or not that child had recently emigrated.)

In any case, we created several edges allowing for different "home" language usage, such as Bilingual (allowing two languages at full IN x 1.5 level, or three or four at (IN x 1.5) -1 or -2 respectively), Natural Linguist (twice starting language points, -1 to all language-related TNs), and Knack for Languages (grew up in a multilingual environment, can make a guess at meaning for any language within the same language family as one you already know as if you had skill level 1 in that language).

Add those kinds of edges to Mnemonic Enhancer, Linguistics, Centring (languages), and Cognition ...

The joyous thing of it is, there does exist a solid magical tradition, in fantasy and fairy tale and myth, suggesting just this type and extent of communication-focused magic!

Any native speaker of that language without Linguistics but with Mnem Enh + Encep 2 + Cer Booster 2 will be doing Nobel Prize Literature.

At least literature worthy of a Nobel Prize before the introduction of such hardware. Since the introduction of such hardware, the Nobel Prizes were all bough by Saeder Krupp as a marketing scheme.

I'd put Creative Writing as Complementary instead as the primary. Creative Writing should work for any language.

I wish.

Understanding and being able to manipulate nuance in one -- essential for creative writing -- is very different than understanding nuance in another: and that's even when the two languages are relatively close together or belong to the same family. German regularly trips up English-speakers because its construction and flow and nuance are utterly different ... even though its vocabulary and basic grammatic structure is similar enough usually to get by.

Go from English into Japanese or one of the Chinese languages, and you not only have a different language surface construction (grammar) and radically different vocabulary, you also have all the extra connotations derived from using a single symbol to have many separate and diverse meanings, even "Japanese" vs. "Chinese" meanings for exactly the same symbol -- and the construction of that symbol implies yet other, embodied meanings: who among native English speakers considers that the double happiness symbol also has overtones of marriage and perfectly fitting into each other and even a specific poem?

Yet another aspect to creative writing [style] is the literature history. I won't go into this in detail, but just pull up TS Eliot and Milton as examples: how can anyone begin to understand their writing, let alone write like them, without a thorough knowledge of all literature -- and even other expressions of local culture -- that have gone before?

Creative Writing as a skill transcends language. People who are good writers, are good writers in any language they know.

And poor writers (creatively) can make passing translations of any work.

Its true, that the better you know a language, the better do you convey the exact emotion/situation you desire, but the natural instinct for good literature is a skill of its own, not linked to native language.

Just think of the many people, even around here, that write shortstories in another language than their primary.

My own english is not perfect, but its passable and certainly better than some native speakers can write it. But its my secondary language. And I can write equally creative stories in either language.

Using TS Elliot as "an example that cannot be tranlated" is not a good enough example. Because TS Elliot has indeed been translated to many languages.

Fyi the reason I pulled up TS Eliot is because I was thinking about Eliot's penchant for pulling bits and pieces of other European writings into his own poems. Most people outside a European literature culture wouldn't be able to come up with something like that. Translate that into a different language and you'll get one meaning of the words -- and lose completely the places where Eliot used a language other than English (let alone why he'd have done so), or played off a pun that doesn't exist outside English, or referenced something local ... and that's quite apart from the flow of the words itself. (One reason why a professor of mine liked to read Dante to our class in Italian, even though only a couple of us actually understood more than a word here or there.)

I myself am an ESL-er. I have some sense of flow/style/nuance in English and two other languages -- each of which is independent of the others; I always get tripped up when I find myself accidentally "translating" rather than just "thinking" in a given language -- and having that sense at all lets me know just how far away I am from having something parallel in any of the other languages I attempt. I'm starting to be able to recognise good creative writing in those others. I know for an absolute fact that my creative skill in one language isn't translating over into those others, and won't for years and years (if ever).

Those who can do. Those who can't...teach.