Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
Except that they do. E.g. Expert Skill (Memetics) is explicitly used for Artifact Analysis and is the only skill that doesn't have a penalty attached for this task. It also works for Population Analysis (and is one of two skills without a penalty).
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Okay, that was of course my fault (and I may sometimes try to compensate for it). The rule about Expert Skills not being used to
do stuff is inherently hard to enforce, in that, if you know enough raw facts, you can compare a specific circumstance to those facts and get a somewhat analytical result ("This is just like X"). Which was what I was trying to approximate with the Memetics rule.
However, in this particular case, I think that the idea makes sense. Someone who does high school history courses (which are mostly about giving a baseline of facts), and then reads a lot, can pick up a lot of factual information, but they'll never learn the professional academic historian's job skills of digging through the archives, critically comparing primary sources, and drawing solid new conclusions. To learn that stuff, you need a college-level course - and that of necessity will involve specialisation.
Making General History an Expert Skill (Hard) rather than a Hobby (Easy) is perhaps a matter of taste - you can always slap modifiers on the in-game skill rolls, producing identical net results - but I prefer it because "History" is a
big subject, and knowing lots about all of it should be hard work.