[Basic] Skill of the week: Area Knowledge

[johndallman]

A skill almost everyone should have for their home locality, and it's present on a large fraction of published character templates. The rules work fine for ordinary geographic areas, but get more interesting for other cases.

For example, Area Knowledge (Internet) is probably a valid specialisation in the contemporary world, but it goes out of date much faster than normal Area Knowledge. We have rules we can use for this: the "Time" section of the "Geographical and Temporal Scope" box on B176 works, if you use time periods shorter than years in place of miles on the Long-Distance Modifiers table. Months might be a bit cruel, though.

For my Infinite Cabal campaign, Area Knowledge (Infinite Worlds) for the universe as a whole uses the scope rules for an interplanetary state. Acquiring this skill is hard work by yourself; the PCs have acquired a gazetteer from Infinity, oddly similar to the world list in Infinite Worlds. This makes life easier for the players, who no longer have to firewall their reading from their characters' knowledge. Infinite Worlds also has rules for applying more normal Area Knowledge across parallels and echoes.

Area Knowledge can be a useful complimentary skill for many History or Expert Skill rolls, and many other "knowledge" skills. It has a more formal counterpart in Geography (Regional), which may tell you why the area has particular traits. In many ways, this is the "Find ways to take advantage of the environment" skill, useful for finding merchant and goods (High-Tech and Mysteries), people (Social Engineering), knowing details of social behaviour (SE again), and searching for targets and travelling quickly (Action 2: Exploits).

Horror points out that Area Knowledge for exotic planes of existence has a default to Occultism; it also looks good for escaping into the sheer complexity of a city - unless your opponent has more Area Knowledge than you; Monster Hunters uses the skill in its chase rules. Low-Tech Companion 3 covers the importance of Area Knowledge for Survival and effective hunter-gathering and low-tech Navigation. Martial Arts makes it a primary skill for spies and crime-fighters, official or otherwise.

The main Dungeon Fantasy templates don't include Area Knowledge: I guess by the time you've learned enough about a dungeon, it's been cleaned out. Mass Combat doesn't mention it either, although it's a classic skill for irregular troops defending their homes.

What have you done with Area Knowledge in a game - or wished you could?

[Mailanka]

Some Area Knowledge specializations are just fascinating. There are planar Area Knowledges, of course, like Area Knowledge (Hell). But one of the more fascinating ones I found was "Area Knowledge (Cyberscape)" Knowing know where to go buy illicit programs, or where to search for particular files, or where you might best hide files that the government would never find. An ideal skill for a cyberpunk game.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by johndallman

For example, Area Knowledge (Internet) is probably a valid specialisation in the contemporary world, but it goes out of date much faster than normal Area Knowledge. We have rules we can use for this: the "Time" section of the "Geographical and Temporal Scope" box on B176 works, if you use time periods shorter than years in place of miles on the Long-Distance Modifiers table. Months might be a bit cruel, though.

You could use seasons. 4 of those in a year.

Someone once said that Internet years are like dog years, seven Internet years in a regular year. So that's another option, about half a s cruel as using months, but I don't think it's worth the arithmetical burden, compared to just using seasons.

[simply Nathan]

Area Knowledge (My Parents' House) is probably a wasted point.

I am a firm believer that if an area isn't going to come up in the campaign characters shouldn't pay points for an Area Knowledge specialty for it. This is why I don't require characters to have Area Knowledge (Hometown XYZ) in a dungeon-delving campaign, though Area Knowledge (Underdeep) or Area Knowledge (Continent) could be pertinent.

If I were to run a game that took place within a megacity, I'd ask any players of characters without Area Knowledge thereof to give a good reason, but not ask where the Area Knowledge is for characters who are newcomers; obviously they come from someplace, but that doesn't mean I have to charge them points for knowing about the layouts of places outside the campaign's scope.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

Area Knowledge (My Parents' House) is probably a wasted point.

The way I see it, the smaller an area Area Knowledge covers, the more you know about it. AK (Paren't House) would mean you know it in ludicrus(sp?) detail. You know about every creaky floorboard, every secret passageway and tunnel. You intuitively know all corridor distances and spacings, so that even with Eidetic Memory you can move around blind. You know everything!

It's still probably a bad idea to spend 1 CP on that, especially given that most private houses don't have any secret passageways, tunnels or doors.

[namada]

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[Not]

I put it on character sheets for gangster or Shadowrun-style games, but I'm never clear how it differs from Streetwise or Urban Survival. It even overlaps a little with scrounging. So I tend to buy up all four. Is that dumb?

[scc]

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

Area Knowledge (My Parents' House) is probably a wasted point.

I am a firm believer that if an area isn't going to come up in the campaign characters shouldn't pay points for an Area Knowledge specialty for it. This is why I don't require characters to have Area Knowledge (Hometown XYZ) in a dungeon-delving campaign, though Area Knowledge (Underdeep) or Area Knowledge (Continent) could be pertinent.

If I were to run a game that took place within a megacity, I'd ask any players of characters without Area Knowledge thereof to give a good reason, but not ask where the Area Knowledge is for characters who are newcomers; obviously they come from someplace, but that doesn't mean I have to charge them points for knowing about the layouts of places outside the campaign's scope.

Area Knowledge for a character home town is the sort of thing you get for free. GURPS doesn't handle this well, but I think the free version of Fuzion does. Certain skills are 'Everyman Skills', basically the skills a character would need to survive in the society he comes from, get a +3. Figuring out what these skills are and making a Talent for them, and possibly even giving characters levels in it for free is a worthwhile endeavor to prevent embarrassing situations. While characters might take Survival they may not take Cooking, because they think the skill deal with professional Cooking and not basic need to live stuff

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by scc

Area Knowledge for a character home town is the sort of thing you get for free

I agree. I think most people are going off of their default. Maybe they would have skill 8 or 9 if GURPS could handle giving out those skill levels well.

The people who have a point in this skill are military strategists, city planners, and other people who have sat down and spent a few hundred hours studying the area in question. Other than the two I have listed, not much comes to mind. I don't think taxi drivers even spend that much time learning streets. They're probably using Dabbler and a very high TDM.

This seems like the place where familiarity would be a nice thing to apply to skills, but unfortunately it's only for technologies and not for defaults, so that's a double whammy. I think it's the only way to get defaults to make sense, though, especially in cases like this. The average Chinese person's understanding of NYC and the average New York resident's knowledge will be vastly different. I wish we had a good way for applying familiarity penalties to defaults to handle that.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

This seems like the place where familiarity would be a nice thing to apply to skills, but unfortunately it's only for technologies and not for defaults, so that's a double whammy. I think it's the only way to get defaults to make sense, though, especially in cases like this. The average Chinese person's understanding of NYC and the average New York resident's knowledge will be vastly different. I wish we had a good way for applying familiarity penalties to defaults to handle that.

It's been ages since I read the RAW, but my understanding is that Area Knowledge skill in GURPS isn't just about knowing th physical layout of the area, e.g. main streets and biomes and so forth, but also all the more in-depth stuff, gang turfs and so forth, where different social classes, subcultures and ethnicities (or religions) live.

It follows logically from my understanding that Area Knowledge skill rolls merely to know the basic layout of a city, or a rural area, should be at a very generous bonus, at least +4, possibly even +6.

(Back in the 3E era, I figured I probably had 1 CP in Area Knowledge (Earth). With 4E, it's more likely I've got Current Affairs something, politics and maybe economics/resources too, 1 CP in each, and defaulting Area Knowledge (Earth) from IQ.)