Telepathic Learning w/o breaking the game

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by ratsta

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).

No to both. I agree with your next point:

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.

Exactly. Is it something that any accountant might know, or is it something that only this one particular individual knows, because of experiences they had not necessarily as an accountant. (They'd have a password with any job; many non-accountants might have access to the Jones file. Did they teach you about the Jones file in accounting classes in school, so all your classmates know about it even though they don't work in the same place and have never heard of Jones?)

it seems illogical that if you could rifle through someone's brain to get skills, there would be some mystical privacy barrier!

But there's not a mystical privacy barrier. You're just not taking the right action to get the information. You're just acquiring a skill when you use Borrow Skill, when these questions mean you really wanted some particular bits of of information, not the skill itself. You weren't planning on balancing the books; you wanted that password, or the location of the Jones file.

GURPS is a pretty fine-grained, detailed system. Most typical fictional characters don't just have one ability, stacked until the system breaks with every point that can be stuffed into it. They have a whole set of related skills and abilities that work together. A real swordmaster doesn't just have Broadsword-30; they have half a dozen or more other skills related to their training.

In this case, the psi spy doesn't just have Borrow Skill. To be effective at those intrusion and data-theft applications, he needs some other abilities -- in this case, Telereceive (as PP has it; Mind Probe in Basic). That's the psi ability that lets you pull out answers to specific questions from one individual's knowledge, as opposed to the generic cloning you get from Borrow Skill.

Originally Posted by Psionic Powers 59

Once in, you can probe further. This takes a second and requires another Quick Contest. If you win, you can get an honest answer to any question from the subject’s mind (though this won’t help if he does not know the information that you seek).

Another useful GURPS principle for understanding the scope of an ability is the aphorism "buy the effects, not the name". Look at it from a gamist stance, and interpret the abilities based on what the mechanics say they do. They don't do anything else, no matter how logical and necessary that might seem to the character concept. The concept rules, certainly -- but you haven't discovered that your concept demands that this one ability needs to have expanded mechanics. You've discovered that your concept needs to have two or three or more abilities to do everything you imagine the character being able to do, not just one key ability.