From: sven@ll.mit.edu Subject: Transcription of Knowledges (was DREAM) Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.storyteller;,alt.games.whitewolf Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 11:34:16 -0400 Organization: MIT NEROC (Northeast Radio Observatory Consortium) Path: news.kth.se!nntp.uio.no!news-feed.inet.tele.dk!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-feed5.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!llnews.ll.mit.edu!usenet Lines: 154 Message-ID: <335F7D78.16A@ll.mit.edu> References: <335F321B.7DDB@boat.bt.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win95; I) Xref: news.kth.se alt.games.whitewolf:101250 Jack Rogers wrote: > Dream, the background, allows the user to substitute the rating for > another abilitie. > > How about vampire lore ? > or lupine lore, or wraith or changling or spirit or mummy or gypsie > lore. > > Couple this with a single dot in mind ( to help increase structured > thought ) and a piece of paper and a pen, or perhaps more dangerously > a computer and keyboard. or ( for the enthusiastic amongst you ) a > virtual adept with dream 5 (today it's simulating vampire lore ) > corresponded to the web and think typing all his knowledge to do with > vamps on to computer disk. Seems like, sooner or later, all Mage players get this idea. Use Dream, or maybe a captured spirit, or wraith, or even a living person's mind and memories, power up your own mind (using Mind o), and, writing/typing as fast as you can (maybe using Time ooo for (vulgar) time dilation), record the sum total of Knowledges X, Y, and Z from the source, to be studied at a later time. (We even had a thread about a Virtual Adept doing this very thing (with Vampire Lore) a few months back, but it seems to have died out.) Let me echo Christopher Bibbs here in my opinion of Knowledges, and how they could/should be transcribed: o DABBLER. This is the sort of information you get from maybe spending a day or two in a public library (or at a shooting range, fencing practice, etc., as appropriate to situation), looking up various references, trying out some of the basic principles of the thing, etc., etc., etc. No real experience, just an 'I tried that once' sort of familiarity. Your acquired knowledge on the subject could probably fill a small (5-10 page) paper without leaving too much out. oo STUDENT. Different from 'Dabbler' in that you have put some further effort (_real_, focussed effort, the kind that goes beyond just a 'passing interest for a couple of days') into the study and _practice_ of a thing. You no longer just read the reference books, but look up the footnoted references and read them too. You may do practice problems out of the book, or memorize certain important facts. When mention is made of "Author X's view on the matter," there is at least some chance that you can recall that view without having to look it up again. Your compiled knowledge on the subject is starting to get too broad to record all of it with sufficient clarity, but you could give a pretty good (20-40 page) report that explored several important subtopics in some detail. A better, broad- based survey treatment of many topics (like, say, a 500-page introductory textbook) could also be written, provided you had two or three years to spend on its creation and presentation. ooo GRADUATE. Your interest has progressed past even a detailed few weeks/months of study, and is now of the intensity that takes years of research, and perhaps travel, to satisfy. You have exhausted the majority of publicly-available resources (such as libraries, encyclopaedia, Internet), and have to turn to original or specialized sources (archives, exhibits, foreign experts) to expand your knowledge base. The gulf between knowledge-stored-in-the-mind and knowledge- stored-on-paper starts to widen here; the books, journals, lecture notes, exhibitions, and experimental findings you have absorbed alone would take up a small library in their own right. Most of these knowledgeable scholars publish at least one lengthy (50-100 pages) treatise on a specific aspect of their study (a 'thesis' or 'dissertation'), but it would take decades, if not a lifetime, to record and grasp it all. oooo DOCTORATE. This is what separates the men from the boys, so to speak -- the researcher who has acquired this much material about a subject has done so over many years (like a decade or more), during which time he/she has done little else but study this field of knowledge, and has explored a specific area (or two) in such depth that he/she is now literally a worldwide expert on that specific problem, and a master-level scholar with a detailed understanding of the subject as a whole. Scholars of this level of accomplishment frequently publish their findings (in short abstracts or lengthy dissertations), as do their lesser (Graduate-level) contemporaries. At this level of education, however, the scholar has turned his/her attentions to multiple in-depth problems, or perhaps the extrapolation of ground-breaking theories based on other recent cutting-edge research -- so the work may be difficult for another even to understand, much less transcribe. The work of a doctorate degreeholder could perhaps be summarized in several hundred-page volumes, each of which detailed one of his/her research problems, but that would really only be scratching the surface, and would contain none of his/her secondary research, incidental discoveries, or background knowledges. Such complete transcription is nigh- impossible, although a staff of multiple dedicated stenographers (like Socrates' disciples, for instance) might pull it off over the course of decades. ooooo MASTER. Pretty much the uppermost limit of human achievement; this represents someone like Einstein, or Hawking, or Bruce Lee -- someone who was not only possessed of a natural gift (near-eidetic memory, for example, or super-fast reflexes and exceptional muscle tone) for this sort of thing, but who devoted most of an entire lifetime towards its development, study, practice, and advancement. The sum total of this kind of knowledge could not be recorded -- it took a lifetime to compile, after all, and might take another lifetime to even begin to understand, much less digest in its entirety. To synthesize the discoveries of such genius you would literally have to recreate the mind which came up with such discoveries. oooooo SUPERHUMAN. Downright impossible to even imagine a single entity possessing this much encyclopaedic knowledge regarding _anything_... the closest we come on earth to achieving this level of knowledge is, say, the CIA or NSA or some government agency, with near-limitless resources (super-fast mainframes, gigabytes upon gigabytes of fast-access database material, teams of analysts working around the clock and sharing their findings, etc.), but that's many people and (superhuman) machines, not just one person. Whew! That was a mouthful. So what am I saying? I think that, using the Mind/Dream/Wraith/Umbrood connection, as above, a Knowledge (perhaps even several Knowledges) could be recorded for later use, up to level 1 or perhaps 2. (Recording a level 3 Knowledge would, I think, require more dedicated time than most player characters would prefer to waste on such a trick. Better to research yourself in fits and starts -- that way you can pick up and leave off when you want to.) Another benefit to the above guidelines is that, rather than the all- too-predictable "I'll buy one or two Abilities up to 5 with XP" minmaxer syndrome, a more realistic across-the-board development is encouraged. (i.e., buying several things up to 1 or 2 as you learn through life experience, maybe topping into a 3 or 4 as you focus on a few particular field(s) of study. That's what I've done over the last twenty years or so, anyway.) There was a system posted here before which emphasized stochastic advancement -- in other words, a random distribution of (most of) your experience points, so everything eventually promoted more or less equally, with a few points left over for the player to allocate -- but I prefer to police that sort of thing through role-playing. Curious to know what y'all think. -- S. Skoog