Rules:Knowledge Skill Redux

Knowledge skills have been a problem for some time, specifically we want people to have time to get them, and be incentivized to get them, but the cost is fairly prohibitive, and raising skills is very expensive. Therefore, mixing some 6th Edition sensibilities with some 5th Edition ones I propose:

Knowledge skills are no longer traditional skills.

There is four skills called Academic Knowledge (logic linked), Professional Knowledge (logic linked), Street Knowledge (intuition linked), Interest Knowledge (intuition linked). These skills use the standard training time for skills, and the karma costs for Knowledge and Language skills.

Knowledge skills cannot receive specializations.

There are various knowledge types. Purchasing a knowledge type costs 2 Karma and 1 month of downtime. Specializations can be purchased for 1 karma and 1 month of downtime, and are a specialization of a knowledge type. When you buy a Knowledge skill you get one free form.

Characters can only roll a pool that they have a Knowledge Type for. So, for example, someone with Street Knowledge (Gangs Spec: Seattle; Drugs; Seattle Area) 5, cannot roll to identify a Shadowrunner using their street knowledges, since they do not have a Shadow Community or something skill. However, if they're trying to give info on the local Ancients scene in Redmond, they'd roll with +2.

As before, instead of rolling a knowledge skill someone can roll a relevant Active skill as if it was a knowledge skill. So the above runner can't roll a Street Knowledge (Yakuza) check in order to notice the relationships in the meeting, but could roll an Etiquette roll as if it was.

For languages, they are purchased as before, but Lingos can be purchased as a knowledge type instead of a specialization.

At character creation, characters receive the same number of knowledge skills/languages as before, but 1 point can be spent to add 2 Forms or Lingos to a skill. So if a character had 4 Intuition and 3 Logic, they would get 14 points, and might be able to buy:

• Sperethiel: 2
• Street Knowledge (Gangs, Seattle Area) 4
• Professional Knowledge (Security Procedures) 3
• Academic Knowledge (Psychology) 3

Some changes:

• Mnemonic Enhancer looks like it should be changed, but no

• Skillsofts and Hardwires work as they currently do where you must buy the skill at a rating. So if you have a skill system you might end up with Street Knowledge (Gangs, Organized Crime) 3 Wires: Drugs 4 Shadowrunners 2

• College Education and School of Hard Knocks work as before during character creation. They cut the time to learn a Type or Spec by 50% after character creation instead of their previous rules.

• Uneducated is unchanged.

• Soft Nanoware - Learning Stimulus causes the time to learn a knowledge type to become 1 week.

• Knowledge Infusion causes you to immediately gain a single knowledge type.

• Chosen Follower - when you use the Knowledge version, gain a knowledge form in every type of Knowledge, must be related to magic

Worked Example

So looking at Malta he has:

Street Knowledge: Area Knowledge (Seattle): 5

Street Knowledge: Gangs: 4

Academic Knowledge: Magical Theory: 3

Professional Knowledge: Megacorps: 1

Professional Knowledge: HVAC: 1

Academic Knowledge: Dragons: 4

So he has 2 Karma in Professional Knowledge. So depending on how we want to do this he probably gets: So gets Professional Knowledge (Megacorps) 1, which is 1 Karma. We could either give him the +1 karma free and give him Professional Knowledge (Megacorps, HVAC) 1, or we could charge him the 1 karma.

He has 25 Karma in Street Knowledges, that's easy, spending 21 karma he gets Street Knowledge 6 and spend the 2 karma for the second type, Street Knowledge (Area: Seattle, Gangs) 6. The likely thing to do is that Malta is 1 karma down on Professional and 2 up on Street so he's currently 1 karma up.

For Academic Knowledges he has 16 karma spent. Academic Knowledge (Magical Theory, Dragons) 4 leaves him 4 karma up. This leaves him 5 total karma up. The options there are to either give him Academic Knowledge (Magical Theory, Dragons) 5, or just leave the leftover karma on the table. I think that's the most likely.