Telepathic Learning w/o breaking the game

[ratsta]

Originally Posted by Inky

That seems odd. Surely the one that gives you the ability to keep ought to cost more than the one that works only while you're within range of the person.

The temporary one might be an easier sell in your case...

I could be misreading it.

Yeah, I'm going to pass on this ability for now. My main concern is less about convincing the GM than convincing myself. I like the utility of it but I really don't want to risk the game balance by having something that allows us to get information before the GM is ready for us to have it!

Originally Posted by transmetahuman

My issue with this power is that "getting into my combination locked, booby trapped safe" is just as much a skill (in any but the game sense) as Brawling.

Agreed. A skill list is an abstraction of reality; it'd be impossible to define what knowledge is part of a skill and what's part of 'related knowledge'. e.g. I have the skill Accountant. Is the password to my work account considered part of that skill? How about the location of the Jones file (which contains info the PCs want).

The best way to run it would be to say you can only draw RAW skills and only get generic information such as the principles of accounting and filing without client-specific data. That seems like the spirit of the ability but it seems illogical that if you could rifle through someone's brain to get skills, there would be some mystical privacy barrier!