What good are knowledge/lore skills in any modern, cyberpunk,

You are so millenial it hurts.

Time saving

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>>53872264
The repealing of Net Neutrality has made it almost impossible to look up anything a chummer would need to know.

Time savings, yes. Applied knowledge: the fact that you looked up how to build something on the Internet doesn't mean it'll be easy doing it IRL. Also, detecting bullshit: without outside knowledge one could easily fall for bait like those homemade crystal memes.

>>53872264
Looking up much of chemical and biological stuff is a pain in the ass (t. bio student), many cool things are hidden behind a paywall because they are scientific works, and in cyberpunks might need outright illegal or secret information.

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>>53872264
In a cyberpunk dystopia, information is currency and everything is metered; you can't google shit without paying for it.

Also, such huge advances in the sciences would make most scientific fields even more dense and specialized. That and corporate interests would consider everything to be IP, so getting access to good info is quite a trick.

But here are suggestions:

>Genegineering
>Biorobotics
>Netology
>AI Psychology
>Memetics
>Cyberforensics
>Data Banking

>>53872264
>What good are knowledge/lore skills in any modern, cyberpunk, or scifi game?

Why do you have knowledge/lore as skill categories in any of those settings in the first place?

Googling something doesn't mean you understand it. Without the proper lore, you probably don't even know what to google, let alone whether the results you get are useful, true but irrelevant, or bullshit.

>>53874239
Why do you have knowledge/lore as skill categories in any of those settings in the first place?

Because learning any sort of engineering won't give you any knowledge of biology for example.

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>>53872264

Don't know what to McGoogle if you don't know what to ask for and have the creds to pay for it.

Though maybe Old Lady Wendy's might help you out, but they do say she always takes more than she gives...

>>53872489
>many cool things are hidden behind a paywall
>http://sci-hub.io/

Works 99% of the time

>chemical and biological stuff is a pain in the ass

Just use schemes for the chain reactions, writing the data yourself helps a lot.

>>53872264
Oh, sure, yeah, I'll just Google Seattle gang etiquette and local fences and drug dealers. That sounds like it'll work.

>>53872264
Having access to the information during tense, time sensitive situations; ability to tell when the information spaceGoogle gives you is bullshit; knowing shit when youre stranded on an uninhabited planet with no internet; and so on.

>>53872462
In the united states of dumb maybe

It really depends on what it is. Yes you could google specific facts but lore is more being able to piece all of those isolated bits of knowledge together.

For example anyone can google when an event in history occurred as well as a wiki article summarizing what happened but a historian specialized in the history of that time/culture would have a deeper understanding of the context the event occurred in as well as the effect of the event

>>53875297
>Oh, sure, yeah, I'll just Google Seattle gang etiquette and local fences and drug dealers. That sounds like it'll work.

Came in here to post something roughly approximate to this

You ever known a wikipedia warrior to match a PhD student in topic-specific knowledge? No? Me either.

>>53872264
Here are a few we use in our GITS inspired game.

Battle Tactics (can be rolled to get tactical hints during a combat or setup)
Corporations (corp structures, procedures, culture etc)
Cybernetics (prosthetics etc, implants etc)
Demolitions
Datanet Infrastructure
Politics
Programming & AI
Robotics
Security Systems
Underworld (same as corporations, but for criminal enterprises)
Weaponry systems (eg. AA weaponry, naval weaponry etc. depends on char background)

>>53872264

There are plenty. Even with the stipulation you made, there are plenty of things you just can't google.

>Lore [Street]
This pertains to anything going on the streets. Drugdealers and their plugs. Where to get a dirty firearm. Planned stings. etc.
>Lore [Net]
Famous hackers. If you have a darknet matrix that only l33t netrunners have access to, .onion-esque links. Types of illegal software you can get ahold of. Snuff films. cyberblackmarkets.
>Lore [Corporate]
Company policies and protocols. Habits of the higher ups. The affair that your manager is having with his hot secretary. Gossip.

If you're doing a very net heavy game, there's lots you can do to make things more complex and sophisticated.
>Cryptology
>Networking
>Programming/Scripting
You can expand on some of these a lot. you can include multiple programming languages and make each new one a skill that must be learned.


>Cybernetics
>Biotech
>Pharmaceuticals [this can be subdivided a lot]
>AI Psychology

The difficulty isn't searching, it's that there is too much information and misinformation that you need to work through the chaff.

>>53875212
What about bio-engineering?
/smart-ass

>>53872264
1- Google might not contain information of the inner workings of various criminal organizations or lesser known hotspots / shortcuts and where to buy some less than legal substances.
2- It might be obvious/slower if you google info in front of someone and it will make you look like a total poser
3- some things are hard to pin down with minimal knowledge but someone knowledgeable might know the right questions to ask to figure out the details.
4- You sometimes need to know the rules before you can break them without blowing everything up in your face.

Use you brain anon.

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>>53872264
Yeah, just ask the megacorp about its own connections to the government. I'm sure they wouldn't censor the truth or lie about it. Oh, did you google "normie movie 2 pirated"? You're not going to pay for Mr. Shekelburg's movie that he spend so much time and effort into making? The cyber-stasi have been contacted, this will be used as blackmail for the rest of your life so if you disobey you will be sent to the cyber-gulag.

>>53872264
You might need to know the information NOW. Can't stop to read a wikipedia article in a combat situation or the middle of a meeting.

The internet might not be accessible wherever you are. Could be way out in the woods, out at sea, in the middle of some nebula that fucks communications, be hit by an EMP, whatever.

Some information is too complex to gain sufficient understanding of to be useful in a short (or long) amount of time. I can read about quantum entanglement on the internet and obtain a basic understanding of it, but it would take much more knowledge to actually use that information in a way that is helpful.

The information you are looking for might be illegal/censored or incredibly hard to find. Though with another type of knowledge you might know where and how to find it, like knowing how to access the deep web.

You also might not know enough about something to even know what to search for on the internet. If I handed you a vial of pink liquid and said "Be careful" you would have no idea what it is or how to find out what it is. Same goes for diagnosing an illness or disease/poison, you can see that someone is having a seizure but there's too many things that cause seizures to just look up what the cause is.

Though it is worth pointing out that some of these can be gotten around by just asking people on the internet who know more than you about them. But that takes longer and could be bad or incomplete advice.

>>53872462
how to spot the burger

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>>53875376
>>53882067
>Thinking the internet, of all things, wouldn't be globally regulated in a cyberpunk dystopia

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>>53872264
Odd knowledge Skills we have taken, and have used to great effect, thus far in Shadowrun:
>Irrigation
>Trid Games
>Porn
>Old Operating Systems
>Commercial Jingles
>Spaghetti Westerns
>Clubbing
>Young Adult Erotic Fanfiction
>Star Trek
>Anime
>Furries
>Quantum Physics
>Metaphysical Relgious Pseudoscience

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also besides the loss of net neutrality and the rise of censorship, a lot of information will be behind paywalls inaccessible to the average citizen. Since code isn't a limited resource large corporations want to keep that information safe so they can monopolize the market (but the public claim will be that it is to protect innocent businesses against hackers). medical and nutrition information will be hard to come by because it allows big companies to sell unnecessary vitamins and tablets using now hard to dispute pseudoscience, unhealthy foods will also be easier to sell as healthy for you for this reason. less practical information on the environment and ecosystems will be difficult to get a hold of allowing corporations to run without outcry from the public about the environmental effects of their endeavors. Not to mention the purposeful over saturation of misinformation to leave the masses confused.

>>53882410
so basically a parody of today's push for net neutrality and capitalism with a cool aesthetic.

Look into Eclipse Phase and it's knowledge skills in regards to the Mesh.

>>53881450
THIS!
Data isn't the problem.
Parsing through it is.

>>53875376
...have you not heard of the internet restrictions in countries that are not America? Oh no, my friend, killing the American Freedom of Speech on the internet will merely shut off what little ways the rest of the world has to get around that.

>>53881450
Basically, points in knowledge are about how well you can spot bullshit while searching about this field.

>>53872264

>Paranoïa
Because you cannot trust what you find online - especially sensitive data. It's a common practice for crime syndicates to upload virus-infected skill programs in order to hack cyberbrains - they also sell virus-infected skill chips on the black market and run infected virtual realities (especially the ones dedicated to porn). Corporations also do the same to discourage people using unlicensed/copied software. There are also quantities of fake blueprints to build unlicensed cyberware and weapons - many also contain flaws that will cause the gear to break down (those "errors" can only be identified with skill). Good and reliable data is always expensive and hard to find.

>>53872264
Search history:
How to build bomb
TATP receipe
Hardware stores in seattle
How to remove glass shrapnel

>>53875297
>>53875584
>tfw just googled seattle gang etiquette out of curiosity
Map of various gang areas and their territories, a note on "graffiti culture" and what to expect in Seattle as relates to gangs, and a news article or two.

And a Shadowrun wiki "seattle gang" page.

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>>53883468
Yeah, as well as knowing where to look - especially for sensitive info, spotting bullshit, getting around paywalls and things, searching without being traced too badly, and ultimately also applying the data you can find - information =/= knowledge and especially not experience (though things like shadowrun's skillsofts or When Gravity Fails "daddies" could help with that)

>>53882432
It's always funny how parody and satire usually hits the mark long before any of that is relevant.

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>>53885104
I think we've been getting pretty close lately.
I'm not sure if its gonna be cyberpunk or post apocalyptic though. nor do I know which would be worse.

>>53872264
The main function of knowing information in a distributed-information society that applies to RPGs in a useful way is that understanding information clues you in to connections you would not notice if you were restricted to "looking things up". Knowing what surface area is in a general sense will give me a significant advantage if I have to paint a house versus somebody who doesn't, even if neither of us knows the exact way to calculate the surface area of a house and both of us need to "look it up." I would know what to look up, and they wouldn't.

In other words, knowledge skills are "give me a clue or hint" skills, not "give me facts" skills. In a setting where just anybody could find a whole heap of facts without having any kind of formal training this is doubly important.

t. a teacher who actually has to justify formal education in a distributed-information society (the one we're in) on a day to day basis as part of my job

In the real world, it's already difficult to google something you want to know without coming upon a shitload of misinformation and idiots with inane and baseless opinions, even when they actually believe they're helping.

Scale that to a scifi or cyberpunk setting and you find that googling shit is the worst possible step you can take when looking for information.

>>53872264
Because googling things is a pain in the arse for anything beyond the most shallow information. Same way you can't do advanced math by flipping through a wiki.

But if you're retarded, claim that the knowledge skill represents the ability to interpret online information so with that Maths (6), you're just flipping through The Google and spitting out predictions on bullet arcs because you know how to interpret the ebullshit in question.

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>>53888711
The ebullshit in question rather than actually knowing it yourself*.

Behold, the end of the development of civilization!

>>53872264
> Can't you just google shit
Not really, no.
Let me give you a tip: if the information is freely and publicly available, it's usually isn't worth shit - either because it's old news, or because it isn't news at all.

>>53872264
>Implying Dystopian future Google won't censor the fuck out of everything and manipulate any and all information to conform to the Megacorps predefined narrative.

>>53889095
>implying it isn't doing it now
Remember: create context, not control content. Even the most shocking information can be disregarded if you spin it as bogus.

>>53872264
What if you're light-years away from the nearest internet analogue? What good will Google do you then?

>>53889122
Well yeah, but Cyberpunk Google is gonna take that shit up to 11. Which might actually make for interesting bits of setting flavor, watching now the media twists whatever exploits the PCs get up to.

>>53872264
>The local ACAA terrorists have an old tech sarin gas bomb they hid in a warehouse.
>During combat, large quantities of it leak onto a party member.
>Wat do?
lmgtfy

>>53890460
Apparently, atropine and pralidoxime are what you want.

>>53875872
I know. It still baffles me how PhD students believe they know anything.

>>53890516
Or, the quick thinker with knowledge on the subject breaks a fire hydrant and sprays the exposee in water ASAP.