Originally Posted by Icelander
It's something most real people fail, so not rolling seems pretty unrealisitc.
It's easy to say that you won't use your credit cards and you'll avoid everyone you know. But do you know how to obtain sufficient money to travel and live without access to electronic banking, how to obtain shelter without money, ID (many hotels require credit cards these days) or friends to allow you to stay?
How do you keep your gear and clothing, as well as your body, clean and presentable, so that you aren't interfered with or even stopped as a thief or vagrant? Or at minumum noticed and remembered? Actual homeless people might be anynomous, but PCs without the right skills won't be able to survive as they do and will probably stick out like sore thumbs, as people with relatively expensive stuff who for some reason are living like homeless people.
And if you avoid all areas you are known to frequent, you avoid every place you actually know, as in, have some idea about the places where you can stay without a credit card, how to act, dress and behave like a local, how to travel and eat on a budget, etc.
Blending into a population of strangers is absolutely a skilled activity, though smart people with Dabbler from books, TV and RPGs might feel they could do it from default.
And maybe they could, but they'd need to have decent defaults in skills like Area Knowledge, Streetwise and Urban Survival, depending on their chosen methods, and possibly even Acting, Administration (knowing how to circumvent bureaucratic requirements for ID for various things), Disguse (looking more like the person whose ID you stole), Fast Talk, Filch, Forgery (to fake valid tickets using expired ones found, etc., and various simple documents or signatures, not actual passports or other ID), Merchant, Observation, Shadowing and the like.
If the police are after you, Criminology is useful for knowing what kind of indicators they can track and Intelligence Analysis does the same if you will be tracked by professionals with acess to information sources beyond what the police can legally get in a useful time frame.
Streetwise will almost always be required to evade official notice while still moving around and obtaining shelter and supplies, with anything that requires crossing borders often sharply raising the difficulty. In the EU, you might be able to buy train tickets with cash and there would be no border ID checks, but finding a place to stay in a foreign country that doesn't require a credit card and sometimes a passport as well, that is pretty much the province of Area Knowledge, which is unlikely in a fofeign country that you do not frequent, or Streetwise.
All of this is made a lot simpler if you have a lot of cash, but in a TL8 world, getting a lot of cash without coming to official notice might require a Streetwise roll on its own, even if you technically own the money or assets worth it. And, obviously, realistic people rarely do any of this succesfully without Allies, Claim to Hospitality, Contacts and the Friend Perk.
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