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!

[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.

[transmetahuman]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

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?)

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.

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.

Excellent point. I don't know if Prodigy, the New Mutant who to my knowledge is the exemplar/originator of this ability, explored and expanded his ability to include Mind Probe later - and his lack of it in the beginning could easily be explained by the way so much of its functions were handled subconsciously, with subconsciously-imposed limits. So his ability could pull whatever he wanted from a mind, but his subconscious limited it to bundles equivalent to RAW skills to protect him. I remember the White Queen lifted a similar restriction of his that only let him keep those skills temporarily, so he permanently gained every skill he had ever mimicked. Or she stimulated doing it to prove some point, something like that.

Something like that could justify only having Borrow Skill. Thanks for pointing that out.

A lot of powers have a lot of their details taken care of subconsciously, or mystically - the döppelganger shapeshifter doesn't consciously place each cell and pigment in his body in the correct place to mimic his subject; most times he won't even be able to see all of his subject, but the mole under the blouse is mimicked nevertheless.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

One thing that comes to mind with telepathic learning is that it fails to build up muscle memory. Therefore, I'd restrict it to IQ, Will, and maybe Per-based skills rather than DX-based skills. And even then, I wouldn't use it for IQ-based skills that rely on a form of muscle memory to use, such as Musical Instrument or Lockpicking.

YMMV, of course.

In cases where muscle memory matters, I'd be inclined to let it work at the average between your personal skill (which may be a default; if it's a skill that cannot be used at default, treat the character as having a default appropriate to the skill's difficulty) and whatever you get from the person you're copying - if I were to copy Chuck Norris' Karate skill, I wouldn't be as good as him (even ignoring any difference in DX between us), but I'd be better than I am now. Of course, this would be done only for uses of the skill that rely on muscle memory - identifying a weapon with IQ-based Guns would be unaffected (doing immediate action to clear a stoppage probably would be affected, however, even though that also uses IQ).