Telepathic Learning w/o breaking the game

[ratsta]

tl;dr I've pretty much talked myself out of this, but if someone has some clever ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Hi folks,

My char in a scifi campaign is an historian with a few physical psi powers and it's OK to add some mental ones. We've been given a chunk of points to spend and one idea that piqued my interest is Borrow Skill which a little searching leads me to the Telepathic Learning (PP16) example of Modular Abilities (B71). I'd first like to clarify my understanding of the costs, secondly, clarify details on how it might work and thirdly, ask for feedback on game balance.

1. My understanding is that I don't lose any CP when the ability changes. Thus in the context of Telepathic Learning, I could borrow the co-pilot's skill and assist them land the plane since the main pilot is unconscious.
The cost is Base + CP pool which in the case of the example is 5cp + 4cp/point of borrowed skill. So for 13cp I could borrow up to 2 levels of Piloting. Then when the plane is safely on the ground, I can release and borrow the chief steward's skill of Leadership to help coordinate the safe and expeditious evacuation of the aircraft. I don't lose/burn any CP for this, they're simply reassigned.

This seems awfully cheap for the utility it provides without any kind of limitations (e.g. fatigue or time based). There won't always be someone around with a relevant skill to borrow but in many situations, that isn't a meaningful limitation. Of course we can always make it more expensive; just wondering if anyone else agrees that this is too cheap or can suggest reasons why it's not so cheap after all.

2. For this example ability, would you think that I'd get, to put it bluntly, a menu of skills/abilities to choose from? In terms of flavour, I'd say not, I'd need to specify what skill I'm looking for, but since each borrow is measured in "seconds equal to the number of cp being borrowed", we're both going to get bored with playing Fish. "Does he have piloting?" No, go fish. "Does he have Navigation (Air)?" No, go fish. :) Any suggestions for a nice way to deal with this?

3. I'm mostly concerned with unreasonable access to knowledge. My character is an Historian obsessed with learning all there is to know. We're Humans adrift in a galactic milieux and we're supposed to be hunting for information, uncovering a vast tapestry of legend, intrigue and excitement. If I simply borrow the Royal Historian's History (Kingdom) skill, or the alien shaman's Hidden Lore (Galactic Mysteries) skill, the GM is going to throw his hands up and walk away! Any suggestion on how to NOT break my GM? :D

Thanks!

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by ratsta

This seems awfully cheap for the utility it provides without any kind of limitations (e.g. fatigue or time based). There won't always be someone around with a relevant skill to borrow but in many situations, that isn't a meaningful limitation. Of course we can always make it more expensive; just wondering if anyone else agrees that this is too cheap or can suggest reasons why it's not so cheap after all.

Having GM'ed a character with this ability (specifically, Borrow Skill from p. 57-8 of Psionic Powers) it wasn't game-breaking. However, the campaign was about trying to discover things that, as far as the characters were aware, nobody knew. So it got used for "Acquire the language of this strange place" and things like that, rather than "Tell me the solution to the overall mystery."

Also, the campaign was a lot lower-tech than yours, so there weren't nearly so many skills in play, and they had fewer specialisations.

Originally Posted by ratsta

2. For this example ability, would you think that I'd get, to put it bluntly, a menu of skills/abilities to choose from? In terms of flavour, I'd say not, I'd need to specify what skill I'm looking for, but since each borrow is measured in "seconds equal to the number of cp being borrowed", we're both going to get bored with playing Fish. "Does he have piloting?" No, go fish. "Does he have Navigation (Air)?" No, go fish. :) Any suggestions for a nice way to deal with this?

Borrow Skill has plenty of range, so you aren't limited to an individual. Generally, it was obvious what skill was needed, and it was either gained from "someone around here" or unavailable.

Originally Posted by ratsta

3. I'm mostly concerned with unreasonable access to knowledge. My character is an Historian obsessed with learning all there is to know. We're Humans adrift in a galactic milieux and we're supposed to be hunting for information, uncovering a vast tapestry of legend, intrigue and excitement. If I simply borrow the Royal Historian's History (Kingdom) skill, or the alien shaman's Hidden Lore (Galactic Mysteries) skill, the GM is going to throw his hands up and walk away! Any suggestion on how to NOT break my GM? :D

That depends on how distributed and diluted the knowledge is. If those people know large and obvious pieces of the secret, and can be found, this ability will end the plot quite quickly. But the Royal Historian probably can't tell you much that you would not find in a few days of Research rolls in a big library: he can just tell you faster, if you ask the right questions. Finding the right alien shaman is likely to be a lot harder.

[Inky]

If it would help, you could always restrict it to only willing people (or only willing people or unconscious people), or only people you could touch, or both.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by ratsta

This seems awfully cheap for the utility it provides without any kind of limitations

There are a couple of Limitations built into the ability. It requires access to someone that actually has the skill, and at the level you want to acquire. (That is, you can't Telepathically Learn a skill at stat + 4 if your donor only has it at the 1-point level, say stat -1.) The given range is "one mile". You might restrict that range. But also, don't underestimate the problem of finding the donor. You have to be able to make telepathic contact with them -- which means either you know that the skill-donor is around, or you're doing some sort of Cerebro-esque seach of your one-mile radius to find them. Either way, there's the requirement for a successful skill roll that all PP abilities have.

There's also a time requirement (one second per CP). Not generally significant outside of combat, of course. But it's another area you could alter. Preparation Required, Immediate Preparation Required, or whatever else you find appropriate. (If you can copy a skill only with a minute of calm meditation, you probably aren't going to manage that on an airliner full of screaming passengers plunging to their death and a desperate co-pilot -- at least not without some pretty impressive meditation skills to soak those penalties. If it takes an hour, most emergency uses go out the window, and you reach the level where a group of players is going to need some motivation to stop and let that happen, even without a ticking clock in the adventure.)

All the abilities in PP are built with the standard rules in Basic and Powers (sometimes with PP's own conventions, like attempts to normalize durations and ranges to make it easier to apply increases or decreases consistently). It's just a Modular Ability at the core, so reviewing the rules for that Advantage might suggest some other options for adding Limitations. See the "Under the Hood" sections, reverse engineer the RAW ability, and rebuild it with your new features to get a slightly different price.

[Crystalline_Entity]

It's also worth remembering that Borrow Skill is much less useful without buying Telescan too; according to PP57:

Most Telepathy abilities can only be used on a subject that you can see, one you’ve “locked onto” with a sense like Telescan, or one you’ve made contact with via Telesend

I don't think the underlying Telepathic Learning advantage has the same limitation automatically, it's rather presumably part of the Telepathy power modifier, but it does restrict Borrow Skill as it effectively needs two skill rolls to be used beyond visual range.

[ratsta]

Thanks for the feedback, guys!

Adding limitations is a good idea. "Only willing people" would definitely nerf it!

Yes, I was thinking non-combat uses for the most part where time is usually less critical.

Interesting that PP presents two different ways of achieving a similar result. The Modular Ability on PP16 requires proximity and is capped at 3 skill levels. The one on PP57 is permanent until overwritten and is a little cheaper (25cp for 3 levels with the first method, 16cp for 3 levels with the second and you can keep going if you have more power.

Still not sure the GM will be happy with it, nor me TBH. I might leave this one for later.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by ratsta

3. I'm mostly concerned with unreasonable access to knowledge. My character is an Historian obsessed with learning all there is to know. We're Humans adrift in a galactic milieux and we're supposed to be hunting for information, uncovering a vast tapestry of legend, intrigue and excitement. If I simply borrow the Royal Historian's History (Kingdom) skill, or the alien shaman's Hidden Lore (Galactic Mysteries) skill, the GM is going to throw his hands up and walk away! Any suggestion on how to NOT break my GM? :D

Thanks!

Unless you invest a large amount of points into the trait, and then find a once-in-several-generations historian with the relevant History skill at Attribute+10, you should be fine. The way I think of knowledge skills is that, typically speaking, they let you figure out enough about something to be useful. A successful roll (unless you get an incredibly high MoS, hence needing it at Attribute+10 to reliably pull this off) just tells you some information about your subject. Perhaps it tells you what culture built the tomb you just found, a bit of information on how their tombs are typically laid out (and protected), and maybe who scholars believe is buried in this particular tomb. It's not going to tell you its entire history, where the traps are located, the information that's included in the scrolls within the tomb (although you might know this culture tends to entomb a manuscript with the entombee's full genealogy and personal history, which may well be the information you're seeking), etc. You've still got to go into the tomb to get at the meat of the information you're seeking (or acquire admission into the library your borrowed History skill tells you has the books you need for what you're looking for, or whatever). Also, keep in mind that any skill you gain is temporary, at least until you replace it. You can spend a few months writing a book that you can later reference, but keep in mind real historians (and others who rely heavily upon knowledge-type skills) don't write books simply from memory - they cross reference other books, analyze artifacts, etc... and you won't have access to any of that just from borrowing someone's History skill.

Basically, so long as the GM doesn't have an NPC who could circumvent the whole adventure by telling you everything you need to know with a really good Reaction Roll (or due to mind control, or from being sufficiently reimbursed, or whatever), your ability to borrow skills should serve as a tool, not a way to skip the adventure the GM wrote.

[Inky]

Originally Posted by ratsta

Interesting that PP presents two different ways of achieving a similar result. The Modular Ability on PP16 requires proximity and is capped at 3 skill levels. The one on PP57 is permanent until overwritten and is a little cheaper (25cp for 3 levels with the first method, 16cp for 3 levels with the second and you can keep going if you have more power.

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, as you wouldn't be able to do what Varyon mentioned and copy down reams of information over several weeks - if you could use the skill only while the person was there, you'd basically get no more information than you would by just questioning them.

[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.

[transmetahuman]

Originally Posted by ratsta

Interesting that PP presents two different ways of achieving a similar result. The Modular Ability on PP16 requires proximity and is capped at 3 skill levels. The one on PP57 is permanent until overwritten and is a little cheaper (25cp for 3 levels with the first method, 16cp for 3 levels with the second and you can keep going if you have more power.

Still not sure the GM will be happy with it, nor me TBH. I might leave this one for later.

...Until overwritten or you and your skill donor go beyond the range you rolled. Which isn't likely to be all that far. Even the Retention technique maxes out at three hours.

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. Same for "executing all of my many duties to fulfill the Overlord's complicated Master Plan. Learning his psychology well enough to not trigger him into killing me in a fit of rage".

Both are areas of knowledge that were studied and memorized, though they presumably didn't take 200 hours. The user of this power doesn't have a list of skills he can fish for.