Knowledge Skills

Knowledge Skills

Knowledge skills generally reflect how much a character knows about a given subject, whether it's aliens, languages or laws.

Knowledge is a measure of your character's "common sense" and academic knowledge. Characters with a high Knowledge have a good memory for details, and have learned a lot about different aliens and planets. They often have a flair for languages, and they know how to get things done in bureaucracies.

Knowledge is used whenever a player wants to find out how much his character knows about a certain field. The difficulty depends upon how obscure the information is and how much the character knows about the general subject. Use the following guidelines to pick a difficulty, but remember that they should be modified based on the circumstances.

Very Easy: General, common knowledge that almost anyone would know.

Easy: Most people would know this much.

Moderate: Professional level of knowledge. The average person who has an interest in the subject would know this much.

Difficult: Professionals would know this much about a given subject; the average person would be hard-pressed to give much information.

Very Difficult: This represents detailed, comprehensive knowledge of the subject. Professionals and scholars would probably have to research a subject to gain this amount of knowledge.

Heroic: Only a very small number of people would know this much information.

Gamemasters should modify difficulties — andhow much information characters get — to suit the particular situation. Easily found knowledge probably won't have a modifier; very obscure information could have a difficulty modifier of +10, +20 or much more.

Modifiers might also be made for particular situations under which knowledge must be recalled — trying to remember the right Rodian custom for signalling cease-fire would be easier in the calm comfort of one's starship, and much more difficult in a confusing firefight with several very angry Rodian bounty hunters.

Knowledge skill roll represents what a character can recall at the time the roll is made, or the extent to which the character remembers certain general information. It's not reasonable to say that a character is an expert on the subject simply because he rolls well once when looking for information. A high roll might reveal one specific bit of information sought, and a few hints for finding the rest of the knowledge the character is looking for.

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