[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

The costs of handwritten tomes intended for high value dungeon loot isn't sensible for contemporary books. You can get an annotated Map for free from Google, but in DF it costs a minimum of $100 (and getting the weight from a tenth of a pound to negligible makes it $1500).

Using the Very Fine modifier but ignoring the weight increase, as you did, seems to be especially dubious because the double weight it is a significant drawback for scholars.

If I go by the current RAW build, based on the memorization Modular Ability plus extra time Limitation, the books wouldn't even enter into it. That said, I could grab the statistic from High-Tech that an average book is 10 megabytes, and multiply that by the weight modifier.

Web-MD or even Wikipedia are probably better than a psuedomedieval primer, and free.

And a lot of college students save cash by downloading torrents of more in-depth texts, either from public repositories or private invite-only sites. It's getting to the point where there almost aren't any books you /can't/ get for free, if you're willing to ignore American copyright laws (such as by living in another jurisdiction).

Well, I have played scholars so I have some experience in using it. The main limitation is the incredible expense and weight of the books. A DF scholar often needs to leave part of his library in town and might want to buy a mule or hire a porter as soon as possible anyway. In a world of instant cheap information and public libraries, this is going to be a significantly more useful ability.

Then I guess the ability I'll be using should be considered more "inspired by" the DF Scholar approach than an outright lifting of it.

Which isn't to say "don't take it", but note that it is a superpower (if the Foundation does turn out to exist, I would suggest trying to make contact with the Serpent's Hand before the Foundation finds you; also Library Card!) and you might want to make it a significant focus of your character (it could be a lot like a gimmick ability on one of those extraordinary detective shows).

So instead of 'The Pretender' or 'The Listener', we'd have 'The Reader'? ... I could dig it. :)

While I have you on the line - can you think of any way to nudge this ability closer to the realism end of the spectrum than the cinematic? Extra dependencies on Eidetic Memory/Memory Palace, some kind of Unusual Background with flufftext about the pedagogy of study techniques, a cap on skill levels, a maintenance cost of spending a lot of time reading to continue to broaden the overall knowledge base, something else...?