The Death of Knowledge Skills:

[mvdwege]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

As pointed out by others already, using the Internet correctly is itself a KS.

 

 

I'd say in a modern-day campaign with Internet access guaranteed for the players, a KS: General Knowledge as a Familiarity would be a good reflection of current day knowledge.

 

But still I'd stick with asking the players that they already have the KS when they start looking for information. In my experience, the only way to sift the chaff out of the search results is having some knowledge of the subject you're searching for already.

[Armitage]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

As an aside, the computer section of The Ultimate Base has Computer Net Access: KS: Everything 30- (21 Active Points) and Really Good Computer Net Access: KS: Everything 50- (41 Active Points).

[phoenix240]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

I still don't like that phrasing. There is a huge amount of information available online but net access isn't Omniscience particularly for the type of bizarre information PCs might be interested in many settings.

[psyber624]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

Well, once you get beyond 17- you are really just offsetting modifiers. 30- means you have a chance at finding out about nearly anything. 50- means that if you don't have a chance to figure it out your GM is a %$^& for letting you buy it in the first place

 

With a reasonable skill roll all you have to do is apply difficulty modifiers to the point where its nearly impossible if you feel that the information should not be available on the net. If they actually MAKE the roll, then they got lucky and some guy named Joe just happened to be blogging about it at some point.

[Chris Goodwin]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

"Okay. Ten minutes later, after you've gotten through about three pages of search engine optimization spam, another dozen or so of porn, and a weird bunch of links on how Steve Jackson's INWO predicted 9/11, you find a page from a TV station's web site indexed in 2009. The comments are quite entertaining..."

 

Or

 

"How about you take this piece of paper here, and draft a query. Feel free to use all of the quotation marks, Boolean operators, and so forth, that you know. Now tweak it about ten times. Bear in mind that your "smart" phone isn't as fast as your desktop PC, especially when you've got every app, ever, installed on it, and -- oh yeah, typing errors on a touch screen. And let's have an Unluck roll to see what your signal strength is..."

 

Or

 

"Hey look, the first link takes you to TV Tropes. An hour later, you realize that you're deep into a rabbit hole and learning about cross-dressing incest scenes in anime..."

[Martin2]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

This is probably an example of todays internet youth.

 

"I do not need to learn anything as if I need to know something I will just look it up on the internet"

 

This is why education standards are going down in countries which allow students to have mobiles in classes.

 

Knowledge is not just finding examples of the answer to you exam questions on the internet (and if you pay someone enough money you do not have to as they provide you with an original answer). Knowledge is infact how you use that information.

 

I would like to ask the people who think you can replace every knowledge skill with the skill: use internet

 

Exactly what knowledge skills do they would could be replaced with a person with the only skill of using an internet search engine?

 

Then the people with that relevant skill can then say if it can be replaced by the internet.

[phoenix240]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

Maybe the time an Internet search takes could be in part based on the margin of success on the skill roll?

[Armitage]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

Knowledge is not just finding examples of the answer to you exam questions on the internet (and if you pay someone enough money you do not have to as they provide you with an original answer). Knowledge is in fact how you use that information.

 

This is also the difference between a Knowledge Skill and a Professional Skill. Knowing something is not the same as knowing how to do something.

For anything practical, it would be a Complementary Skill, at best.

[Lucius]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

KS: Assassination Techniques

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary notes that once again Lucius misses the point, and posts his write up of "Knowledge of Death Skills"

[phoenix240]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

Hostile?

[Sean Waters]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

I imagine that traffic through some of those sites is monitored and probably your IP address goes on a list somewhere. Doesn't stop you looking, of course...

 

As I may have mentioned on another thread, bed searches are good for some things, less so for others.

 

If you want to know the date of a historical event that you know the name of, say a battle, then you can usually quickly and easily and accurately get the answer.

 

If you want someone's opinion on something (type anything in, followed by 'review') then you can get a lot of opinions.

 

If you want to look up whether Carlos Mendoza is on the top 10 most wanted list, you can do that quickly and easily. Similarly you can probably find pictures of teh top 10 most wanted and compare them to someone you've seen. If, however, you have seen someone and want to find their identity, best of luck: unless they are so famous you have probably heard of them anyway, typing a list of distinguishing appearance features into a search engine will be an exercise in pointlessness.

 

Want to know how to make a bomb? Well, look that up and you are definitely going on a list somewhere, and you will find lots of different ways to do it, some of which might actually work and some of which might not. Some might well kill you as health and safety is rarely the first consideration of people who post this sort of stuff.

 

Whatever you are looking for you will find a lot of porn, and people trying to sell you stuff.

 

If you go to forum boards for advice, well, who knows who else is reading them and can make deductions of their own?

 

Finding Newton's laws of motion on the internet - pretty easy - applying them to a real world situation, I'll be asking you to point to the 'KS Maths/Physics' on your character sheet.

 

So, I'd probably give 'Computer Link (The Internet) 1 point' as an everyman Perk, and let you buy internet research as a skill, generally used for a complementary roll, sometimes in its own right.

 

However, I'd also be realistic about what you can find on the internet, and how accurate that information is. Don't bother cross checking and you might well regret it.

[Bolon]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

As an educator, having the knowledge of something doesn't mean you have the ability to use it. If it is based on getting a fact or single detail, I would allow it but to do something, it would be very useless. Let's look at the person who tries to diagnose an illness via an internet database. Does the person have the necessary secondary skills to interpret their findings? If your answer is that they can just look it up, then you need to add additional time. Does the person have speed reading or some other method to transmit that body of knowledge into the brain quickly but slow enough that there is comprehension of the material? If it is to do something, do they have the right tools including the physical dexterity to do the task? How many times have you done something that improved since you have tried it once? There is the same knowledge from the skill to remove errors in instructions and compensate for differences in technique, tools and situations. Having a skill also gives the user a degree of experience in the skill so they are not shocked by unusual results or just the nature of the task. How often do you just check if you are doing something right even though you have no signs of error? Our own confidence is a factor in taking the risk of doing things right the first time. Is the person a quick study or do they need to rehearse?

 

I could see something like this in a character who was a chameleon or con-artist but even those, in movies and books, go through that montage of practice to learn the skill for their con. In fiction, it should be that same. Chipped skills in another game had it right by requiring a person to be chipped for so long before they would get full benefit of that skill as the muscle memory and confidence rose. A research method will never replace an expert or someone with some real life experience in a skill. Getting facts is one thing but having a full blown knowledge skill or a professional skill from a research device is illogical. To make it almost instantly retrieving knowledge is also crazy as it took me almost 10 minutes to type in this info.

 

It has to be out of combat and taking time. I don't see crazy long times as the device would be a time saving modifier but it would require concentration and time. Even in a heads-up display or direct brain interface, there would be a moment of time to ask the question and then digest the information as our brains as just not that fast. To get what the player envisions would cost more than just a cell phone with google. How many people still have problems with autocorrect functions and fat fingers as they type? Imagine the Thing using a cellphone for research. LOL

[phoenix240]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

I imagine that traffic through some of those sites is monitored and probably your IP address goes on a list somewhere. Doesn't stop you looking, of course...

 

As I may have mentioned on another thread, bed searches are good for some things, less so for others.

 

If you want to know the date of a historical event that you know the name of, say a battle, then you can usually quickly and easily and accurately get the answer.

 

If you want someone's opinion on something (type anything in, followed by 'review') then you can get a lot of opinions.

 

If you want to look up whether Carlos Mendoza is on the top 10 most wanted list, you can do that quickly and easily. Similarly you can probably find pictures of teh top 10 most wanted and compare them to someone you've seen. If, however, you have seen someone and want to find their identity, best of luck: unless they are so famous you have probably heard of them anyway, typing a list of distinguishing appearance features into a search engine will be an exercise in pointlessness.

 

Want to know how to make a bomb? Well, look that up and you are definitely going on a list somewhere, and you will find lots of different ways to do it, some of which might actually work and some of which might not. Some might well kill you as health and safety is rarely the first consideration of people who post this sort of stuff.

 

Whatever you are looking for you will find a lot of porn, and people trying to sell you stuff.

 

If you go to forum boards for advice, well, who knows who else is reading them and can make deductions of their own?

 

Finding Newton's laws of motion on the internet - pretty easy - applying them to a real world situation, I'll be asking you to point to the 'KS Maths/Physics' on your character sheet.

 

So, I'd probably give 'Computer Link (The Internet) 1 point' as an everyman Perk, and let you buy internet research as a skill, generally used for a complementary roll, sometimes in its own right.

 

However, I'd also be realistic about what you can find on the internet, and how accurate that information is. Don't bother cross checking and you might well regret it.

 

 

 

Repped

[Ndreare]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

The argument that knowing something is just knowing and not Gronking (is that even a word) is not valid RAW. RAW Distinguishes Knowledge from Application.

 

Knowledge Skills are just that Knowledge

Profetional Skills are the skill used for aplication of the other skills & knowledge you have

Science Skills are a combination of knowledge and aplication

[Roter Baron]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

The answers you get from the internet (or books - well: people9 are only as good as the questions you can ask.

 

The questions you ask increase in quality with the knowledge you already have.

 

The (not only practical but also intellectual) application of such aquired answers increase in quality with the contextual knowledge you command over said tiopic.

 

Thus "Who was Germany's leader during WW1?" is easily found on the internet (BTW: Is it "in" or "on" the internet? Or both?). "How much is the outbreak of WW1 Kaiser Wilhelm's personal fault?" may give you oppinions, but to validate them can only be successfully accomplished by personal knowlegde (or years of internet studies to get all that knowledge).

 

The internet is very useful but in the end overrated. Even when you are not surfing for por...litical discussions.

[Tasha]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

The argument that knowing something is just knowing and not Gronking (is that even a word) is not valid RAW. RAW Distinguishes Knowledge from Application.

 

Knowledge Skills are just that Knowledge

Profetional Skills are the skill used for aplication of the other skills & knowledge you have

Science Skills are a combination of knowledge and aplication

 

I believe the word you are looking for is Grokking. From Heinlein. Basically means to fully know a subject. From "Stranger in a Strange Land"

 

ie KS Cars. Will tell me anything I want to know about cars. To fix a Car I would need Mechanics. KS cars could be complementary to my roll

PS Car Mechanic means that I can find a paying job fixing cars.

Sciences are really a kind of Knowledge Skill. I would still need PS Scientist to do the job.

[Ndreare]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

Yes and yes.

[Sean Waters]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

I think the biggest argument against an easy and cheap way for any character to 'know' whatever they wish (at least in terms of allowing it in Hero) is encapsulated in the title of this thread: if you allowed it no one would bother buying knowledge skills.

 

Mind you the 'practical' argument is probably better. I've got the Hero rules in hardback and .pdf. If I want to argue a point, say for a post on this forum, I usually have to actually look the thing up, because it usually does not say precisely what I think it does. That can take some time, even though I am pretty familiar with the source material.

 

If I'm using my PS: Gamemaster skill, the books and .pdf are a potentially invaluable resource - potentially, because no one really wants me to spend 15 minutes checking how long it takes to slow down from non-combat speeds to zero. Generally what the players want is for me to use my KS: Hero System and either remember the rule or apply the whole body of knowledge to come up with something on the fly that is going to be about right and is consistent with other Hero rules.

 

Even if I do need to look something up, I'm going to do it a lot quicker than someone who does not have KS: Hero System. It is not really the sort of thing that a generic 'Research' skill would help with - you have to know the books. The index is the best I have ever seen in a RPG, but even so you need to know what to look up int he index, and what it might non point you to.

 

If I gave the hardbacks and .pdf to someone who did not know anything about Hero, how useful would that be to them? They would have to read the books (and they don't even know which bits to read first) then they would need to play through a few games and get the feel for it and then they could possibly start using all that knowledge in some useful fashion. The more they play, the less they need the books and the quicker and smoother the experience for everyone. By then they have devoted enough time to it to have a KS: Hero System anyway.

 

Is having a resource better than not having a resource? Yes. Is having the resource and very little or no knowledge of the subject going to be of any real use to you? No.

 

This will hold true for any moderately complicated thing you want to know.

 

Aside: I've never really understood difference between PS Plumbing and KS Plumbing. OK, one is more practically oriented, but if you only have PS Plumbing, do you not know anything about plumbing? If you only have KS Plumbing, do you have no idea how to use a wrench? It also seems almost inconceivable that you would have KS Plumbing without ever actually doing any plumbing, or be able to plumb a house without knowing who Thomas Crapper was. You could argue that you need both, really, but I'd argue that it is odd that Plumbing is more expensive as a skill than, say Acrobatics, and for no good reason. I know they are potentially complementary skills, but you'd be better off spending all the points on one of them, wouldn't you?

[IndianaJoe3]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

KS: Plumbing - covers the history of plumbing, weird Japanese toilets, and the most expensive bathrooms in the world.

PS: Plumber - covers following building codes and sweating pipe.

SS: Plumbing - covers plumbing system design and writing building codes.

 

There may be some overlap, but that's the basics.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

Though often useful an internet search is no replacement for actual learned knowledge, research, or earned experience, in the same way that playing trivial pursuit is not a substitute for receiving a well rounded education.

 

In many cases, bereft of a frame of reference allowing correct interpretation, even excellent high-value detailed and accurate information garnered from a google search is of little actual use.

 

Broad strokes can often be ascertained, as can fodder for more refined searches, but deep knowledge and more importantly _understanding_ remain the province of expertise....and thus Knowledge Skills live on.

[Markdoc]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

I think the biggest argument against an easy and cheap way for any character to 'know' whatever they wish (at least in terms of allowing it in Hero) is encapsulated in the title of this thread: if you allowed it no one would bother buying knowledge skills.

 

Mind you the 'practical' argument is probably better. I've got the Hero rules in hardback and .pdf. If I want to argue a point, say for a post on this forum, I usually have to actually look the thing up, because it usually does not say precisely what I think it does. That can take some time, even though I am pretty familiar with the source material.

 

If I'm using my PS: Gamemaster skill, the books and .pdf are a potentially invaluable resource - potentially, because no one really wants me to spend 15 minutes checking how long it takes to slow down from non-combat speeds to zero. Generally what the players want is for me to use my KS: Hero System and either remember the rule or apply the whole body of knowledge to come up with something on the fly that is going to be about right and is consistent with other Hero rules.

 

Even if I do need to look something up, I'm going to do it a lot quicker than someone who does not have KS: Hero System. It is not really the sort of thing that a generic 'Research' skill would help with - you have to know the books. The index is the best I have ever seen in a RPG, but even so you need to know what to look up int he index, and what it might non point you to.

 

If I gave the hardbacks and .pdf to someone who did not know anything about Hero, how useful would that be to them? They would have to read the books (and they don't even know which bits to read first) then they would need to play through a few games and get the feel for it and then they could possibly start using all that knowledge in some useful fashion. The more they play, the less they need the books and the quicker and smoother the experience for everyone. By then they have devoted enough time to it to have a KS: Hero System anyway.

 

Is having a resource better than not having a resource? Yes. Is having the resource and very little or no knowledge of the subject going to be of any real use to you? No.

 

This will hold true for any moderately complicated thing you want to know.

 

I'd agree with this, by and large: you need some knowledge to make use of reference material, and all the internet is, is a very large repository of reference material (some of it of pretty dubious quality). That said, though, it does allow people to easily find out things that a few years ago would have been impossible without a dedicated research team. The same is true of smartphones. Everybody with a modern phone has a default FAM for AK: almost any city. A GM can say that's not paid for with points, and that they can't have it, but the players would be fully within their rights to ridicule such a GM, because in reality they should have that. My own experience is that a decent GPS+net connection is a far more reliable and useful a guide to a large city than an ordinary person who has lived there all their life (and in terms of knowledge, far more capacious). At the same time, there are things you won't find on the net: it may know more restaurants and bars than the most ardent gourmand, but it won't necessarily know about the owners' private after-hours parties, or be able to tell you about specific customers.

 

Likewise unless he has public ID, or similar, you're not going to able to look up a villain's susceptibility. But if he's been in public fights, you probably could look up his basic powers, costumes, known associates, maybe even a good photo or two. If he does have a public ID, you can maybe work out his susceptibility from his ex-girlfriend's comment on E! that he always checked with the waiter if there was kryptonite in the dishes he ordered at restaurants

 

In that regard, the net gives you either a FAM for generally available knowledge, or it can act as a bonus on skill rolls. Of course, you won't always have access to it, or time to access it - in that case, what you carry in your head is going to have to serve. But it's silly to ignore it.

 

Aside: I've never really understood difference between PS Plumbing and KS Plumbing. OK' date=' one is more practically oriented, but if you only have PS Plumbing, do you not know anything about plumbing? If you only have KS Plumbing, do you have no idea how to use a wrench? It also seems almost inconceivable that you would have KS Plumbing without ever actually doing any plumbing, or be able to plumb a house without knowing who Thomas Crapper was. You could argue that you need both, really, but I'd argue that it is odd that Plumbing is more expensive as a skill than, say Acrobatics, and for no good reason. I know they are potentially complementary skills, but you'd be better off spending all the points on one of them, wouldn't you?[/quote']

 

Depends on what you wanted to do. If you wanted to design a plumbing system, KS: Plumbing is likely to be required. If you want to fix a plumbing system, KS: plumbing is going to give you a a pretty crap roll. I have no problem with separating PS and KS: I actually see it as a strength of the Hero skill system. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. As a example, I know a lot about surgery - but I've also done some, and it's a completely different thing. The only way to acquire the PS is to practice, practice, practice. Theoretical knowledge actually isn't that important in performing a specific task: I taught technicians to give vasectomies, for example, without them having any more than general knowledge of what the bits they were cutting and stapling actually were. In most cases, it's true the practical skill assumes some theoretical knowledge, but the theoretical skill doesn't really assume any practical experience.

 

To take your own example, it may be inconceivable to you, but I suspect that in fact the vast majority of plumbers don't know who Thomas Crapper was (that's a very English thing: the word crapper to mean toilet is barely known outside the UK).

 

cheers, Mark

[GhostDancer]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

One of the things I wish I could afford to do is fully digitize and upload the entire unclassified/declassified holdings of the US National Archives, with an endowment set up to fund the same as new material is declassified in perpetuity...

 

A person who could fund this worthy project could likely get a tax credit for it.

[GhostDancer]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

Several of us here have mentioned that effective searches of the web is an art, and that having the requisite KS enhances your chances of locating and recognizing pertinent information.

 

Using the term Google Fu itself raises a red flag. It's OK as a generic term. Specifically, many of us know that Google is often not the best search engine for certain subjects. I lean more heavily on Metacrawler, which searches simultaneously, as does Dogpile. Metacrawler used to search 9 odd sites simultaneously - anyone recommend a better meta search engine for searching the search engines today?

[Ice9]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

It's a bit tricky, because there isn't really a single rule for how easy or difficult something is to find. It can vary from:

* Trivial, no special knowledge required.

* Needs some skill with internet research, but not subject-matter knowledge.

* Needs subject-matter knowledge.

* Can't be found on the internet, at least not fully/accurately.

 

And which is the case varies between subjects somewhat arbitrarily. How I'd model this in HERO is that when searching the net you can use either the Research skill or the relevant KS (or one as complementary to the other if you have both), and the difficulty is lower for informational questions.

[Greywind]

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

 

And some things need "Access" to get to on the net.