Learning Without Running

One of the problems with the Shadowrun system is that, like almost all role-playing games (with the notable exception of Ars Magica), there is no system for characters to learn anything without going out and risking their lives on adventures. Given the existing rules, you can spend a year being tutored in martial arts by an expert and gain not a single level of skill. This system attempts to address this problem.

Naturally, with a system for learning in place, runners are going to want to take advantage of it as well. Let them. While a mage is holed up in their laboratory for 28 days manufacturing orichalcum, the street samurai is laid up in the hospital recuperating from the surgery to put in that new piece of cyberware, and the decker is busily coding away to stay ahead of the merciless State Of The Art, the other runners can be gaining advantages as well. (Of course, this system also addresses why it’s good to take vacations.)

And, of course, employment in the shadows doesn’t wait for the convenience of a group’s schedule. A Johnson might turn up with a new run that can take them out of the country for three weeks, just when the Physical Adept has lined up some time with that very expensive sensei, the shaman is being taught Inner Secrets of Magic by the aged wizard they have quested so long to find, and the street sam has the Virtual Battle Arena reserved for a month of practice against the latest simulated opponents. Some of that money might get refunded, but if someone else already rearranged their schedule for the players, they’re likely to be displeased if they suddenly call to cancel and want their nuyen back. The players could turn down the job, of course, but if they’re off the market too much, the jobs may dry up. Johnsons don’t wait on a runner’s convenience.

Note that what this system gives characters is “experience points”. Experience points are not karma points by any stretch of the imagination. They can only be used to improve skills and to learn spells: they cannot be used to bond foci, summon Allies, Initiate, or increase your Attributes, and they never increase your karma pool.

Who and what can you learn from?

• Very few institutions teach general skills past a level of 3. In academia, you usually generalize through the lower division, concentrate in the upper division, and specialize in graduate school. Attending school, however, can be difficult for most shadowrunners.
• Getting a tutor is one of the most effective ways to pick up a skill. However, you usually need to pay their lifestyle costs for the time in which they’re tutoring you, and perhaps more. (After all, you might be distracting them from other, equally profitable projects!) Additional costs may be required for access to appropriate practice equipment or information.

  	Mp Multiplier
  Skill	Gen.	Conc.	Spec.	Lang.
  1-3	10	6	4	3
  4-6	50	30	20	6
  7-9	100	60	40	10
  Knowsofts: Mp × 150¥ Linguasofts: Mp × 50¥ Activesofts: Mp × 100¥.

• Tutorsofts exist for many skills. These are skillsofts that allow you to make use of a skill, then highlight the information you just made use of, calling it to your attention (to enhance the transfer into your natural memory). In normal-use mode, they simply operate as a skillsoft. In tutoring mode, the users tend to be distracted as they pause to think about what they just did (a general +2 to target numbers as they contemplate the knowledge flowing through their mind). A tutorsoft is just a skillsoft of a given rating with an attached program of size appropriate to a Special Knowledge Skill of the same rating as the skillsoft itself. They are very popular for languages. Tutorsofts are generally available for General skills to level 3, Concentrations to level 6, and Specializations and languages to level 9.

  Examples: A active tutorsoft teaching Firearms at level 3 would cost (3 × 10 Mp for the skill + 3 × 4 Mp for the tutoring) × 100¥ = 4200¥; learning would require access to the appropriate firearms and a practice range. A knowsoft teaching the Zoology concentration of Biology at 5 (as a way of learning about watchcritters, paranormal or not) would run (5 × 30 Mp for the skill + 5 × 20 Mp for the tutoring) × 150¥ = 37,500¥; learning would require trips to the zoo, watching videos of animals, and wandering in the woods. A Sperethiel tutorial at rating 7 would run (7 × 10 Mp for the skill + 7 × 40 Mp for the tutoring) × 50¥ = 17,500¥; learning would require reading literature written in Sperethiel, and watching and listening to videos and music in that language.

  Interactive tutorials are available at similar levels for most Technical and Knowledge skills, require only a reasonable computer to work on for practice, and are somewhat less efficient at instruction; they generally cost half as much as the equivalent tutorsoft. These only operate as well as taking a class.

• Working on a practice range can help with Combat skills. The higher the skill, the more expensive the range equipment to give you a challenge. The best ones are much like the modern “battle zone” style laser-tag and paintball games. Often, a group of street samurai at similar skill level will rent out one of these places for a while to practice in together. Shooting tin cans off a fence may be adequate for getting your Firearms skill to 2, but you’ll need a real firing range to get it to 4, and serious urban combat simulation for more.

  Program rating	Price per Mp
  1-3	100¥
  4-6	200¥
  7-9	500¥
  10+	1000¥
  Size = Rating2 × multiplier

• Practice sims are popular with riggers. They are essentially video games for riggers, providing a full-immersion experience with a highly realistic simulation of a real vehicle in a variety of situations varying from routine operation to heavy combat in bad terrain. A group of riggers can often network a set of computers to participate in a large practice sim. Practice sims are computer programs with multiplier 6 plus 1 for each skill they exercise. (Thus, a program simulating a harrowing panzer run while controlling a chase drone, exercising the rigger’s Vector Thrust, Gunnery, Firearms, and Winged Plane skills, would have a design size of 10 times the square of the program’s rating; a rating 6 version of this sim would cost 6 × 6 × 10 × 200¥ = 72,000¥.) They require an appropriately sized personal computer to run them; the computer must have multiples of the appropriate size or be networked to similar computers for a group run. The user should have a datajack or vehicle control rig. These allow gaining XP as “practice”, normally, but with an extra two points of multiplier they can also come with a virtual instructor of a rating up to the quality of the sim that can bring it up to the quality of a tutorsoft. Alternatively, you can get the full benefit of a tutorsoft without having to actually be out working in a real vehicle; the effective rating of the tutorsoft is limited by the rating of the practice sim, however.

  Practice sims can be used without cyberware, but this requires a good mockup of a cockpit hooked up to the computer and a simsense headset. The mockup will usually be the most expensive piece of the whole setup.

• “Infotainment” is a form of entertainment that happens to contain useful information as part of the background material. It usually involves fictional characters travelling through realistic situations, and is mostly a way of improving knowledge skills. It creates much less stress than other forms of learning, and is the only sort one can use when recovering from surgery (for a maximum of two blocks a day). “Infotainment” usually costs a little more than your usual trid or simsense program, and is seldom available to teach anything at a higher rating than 3. It generally costs 120–150¥ for an hour’s worth of infotainment in a given topic. (It’s usually rented at about 5¥ an hour.) Quality varies from horribly banal pseudo-documentaries to gripping, well-researched novels.
• Working in a research lab can increase Knowledge skills.
• Good old library research is always a possibility for knowledge skills.
• Working out with others who have similar skills can provide practice-quality experience.
• Highly sculpted Matrix environments can provide virtual-reality arenas for practicing skills to anyone with a datajack. (An ordinary simsense interface simply is not sufficient.) These generally require mainframes to run on.

How hard do I have to work at it?

Work is mostly a matter of how much time you put into things. “Work smarter, not harder” is just one of those empty phrases managers use. For purposes of building a reasonable, not-too-complicated system, I’m dividing the day into six four-hour blocks.

In general, you need two blocks for sleep and one for maintenance (showering, meals, chores, exercise, commuting). You only short yourself these when you’re involved in boot camp or alchemical refining or some similar activity, and shorting yourself on any of these for long is courting burnout.

Two blocks are generally used for actual work, and one more for relaxation (reading books, watching trid, playing games). On weekends, relaxation usually accounts for two to three blocks. Working on a given project for more than two blocks a day is, again, courting burnout, and tends to require vacation afterward.

As a convenient abstraction, assume that a person can maintain perfect health and sanity at 10 blocks per week or 40 blocks per month spent working. Working more than this at a single project qualifies as “overwork”, as does working in such a way that it cuts into your leisure time.

Task Difficulty	Target Number	Minimum skill for reliable success
Simple	2	2
Routine	3	2
Average	4	3
Challenging	5	4
Difficult	6-7	9
Strenuous	8	11
Extreme	9	14
Nearly Impossible	10+	18+

Efficiency of training

Training method	1 xp per...
Boot camp	8 blocks
One-on-one tutoring (human or tutorsoft)	13 blocks
Taking classes, interactive tutorials	20 blocks
Guided research	20 blocks
Unguided research	30 blocks
Practicing at or above reliable skill TN	40 blocks
Performing tasks below reliable skill TN	(no gain)
Infotainment	40 blocks

Note that boot camp-style training works on a related group of skills, rather than a single one. “Reliable skill TN” is the the target number corresponding to the user’s skill level on the chart at the right. (Thus, a Challenging (5) task will provide 1 xp per 40 blocks of practice for a person with skill 6, while it would do nothing at all for someone with skill 9.) Guided research requires having someone to talk to briefly on a regular basis to get pointers on your research and verifying your conclusions. Unguided research means the character is just reading straight out of a library or a stack of books acquired at a bookstore.

This does mean that a decker working on their decking utilities is slowly earning experience for the work they do, as long as they’re coding up something that’s an actual challenge. The same goes for enchanters working at enchanting, and so on. Note that experience gained by doing a particular thing only counts toward that specialization: a decker who gets their experience from writing matrix software can only spend the experience on the Matrix Software specialization. However, karma earned on adventures when decking can be used to fill out the experience into a Software concentration. Similarly, street samurai training up their Firearms need to use more than just a pistol, and enchanters doing nothing but refining orichalcum aren’t going to get better at anything but refining.

Learning spells

Learning spells by burning karma on it works as given in the sourcebooks. However, it’s possible to take a good deal more time to learn a spell without needing to actually spend karma at it, if you have the formula. Roll Sorcery + Magic Theory against a target number of twice the Force you want to learn the spell at, modified by any drain modifiers of the spell. Divide the base time on the chart to the right by the number of successes. (Yes, this means that to learn a Serious spell at force 6 with Sorcery + Magic Theory 9, you’re spending six weeks, on average.) You may only attempt to learn a spell at a given Force (and set of force modifiers) from a given formula once. After that, you must have someone teach it to you while you spend karma, try an easier combination of Force and modifiers, or get a re-researched formula.

Burnout

For every 20 blocks of sleep a character misses, lower their Willpower by 1. Each point can only be regained by spending five days in pure vacation: no chores, no practicing anything. For every 20 blocks of overwork, mark off a fatigue box on their condition monitor. Each box can only be restored by two days of vacation.

Example: Lightfoot is refining orichalcum in preparation for building himself a Power Focus: this means 28 days of obsessive work in the enchantment lab. Assuming he gets 6 hours of sleep a night and is working for 4 blocks a day, by the end of the 28 days he’s racked up 80 blocks of overwork from the weekdays and 32 from the weekends, and 14 blocks of missed sleep. When he finishes the lab work, he’s on Moderate fatigue (just short of Serious) and getting close to losing a point of Willpower. He’s going to need about two weeks of vacation after this before he’s ready to shadowrun again.
If his target number for this enchantment was high enough relative to his Enchanting skill, he would’ve gained (28 days)×(4 blocks/day)÷(40 blocks/xp) = 2 xp in the Refining concentration of Enchanting.

How do I earn karma without shadowrunning?

Well, obviously there are plenty of wage mages who have managed to bond their foci without going out and running against corps. In general, karma is about making a difference. If your character does things that make a difference in the world, they earn karma. (The important thing is making a difference; whether that difference is good or bad doesn’t enter into it.)

Some examples:

• Finishing a major project: designing a new spell that isn’t similar to anything in published grimoires, inventing a new kind of decking utility, synthesizing a new and powerful theory from research results, extending a set of contacts to build a network of spies that will expose dirty corporate laundry, or building an underground empire of BTL distribution. This should earn from 1 to 3 karma, depending on just how groundbreaking your creation is.

  Example: Talks-With-Cats has been working hard to create a ranged Health spell that puts people to sleep without actually affecting their Condition Monitor. When at last he completes the formula and tests the spell, he earns 1 karma.
  His teammate Theora has recently completed extensive work on her new decking utility that creates a virtual machine around a specified target (decker or IC), trapping them inside. This is a major development for deckers and is worth 2 karma.
  The Gaeatronics research team has spent a great deal of time questing on the metaplanes, much cutting-edge theorizing, and burnt tens of thousands of nuyen on help from elementals. They have finally managed to create a spell to accelerate radioactive decay, making it possible to dispose of radioactive waste in decades rather than millennia. They earn 3 karma each for their effort.

• Helping others: yes, those people who are helping out in charities are getting something for it. Going out and personally making a difference for people (not just donating huge amounts of nuyen) can earn you karma, usually about 1 point for every 20 blocks of time you spent helping out in the clinic or soup kitchen. This does not count if you aren’t being badly underpaid for your efforts.

  Example: Barry and Violet are a pair of metahuman Physical Adepts who make a fair amount of nuyen running the shadows, experts in Aikido and Karate respectively. While their teammates are off spending vast amounts of money on their cyberware, elemental summoning materials, libraries, and cyberdecks, they invest in creating a nice little dojo in the low-class neighborhood they live in and teaching the street kids to defend themselves and trying to support ambitions of getting out of the vicious cycle of growing up, joining a gang, dealing drugs and BTLs, and having kids who do the same thing. This helps a bunch of people and occasionally gets them into trouble with the local gangs. They each spend twenty hours a week on the dojo and twenty on improving their skills by studying with their senseis (a nice nuyen sink) or brushing up on other skills with tutoring programs. If all else fails, they can get practice experience in their Karate and Aikido by trying to beat each other up in their respective styles.

How can I pull down the big nuyen for teaching?

Yes, this is a good way for shadowrunners to retire— though people may be regularly wanting to pull you out of retirement or trying to save money on the tutoring by giving you some other form of incentive, often involving threats. You probably want the Instruction skill. Instruction is a Social skill. Applicable Concentrations are the different skill categories (Combat, Physical, Technical and B/R, Magical, Social, Vehicle, Knowledge), and they can be specialized in an individual skill. Instruction makes it possible to teach up to the square of your skill in students, and makes individual tutoring easier.

For a student to get the most efficient learning, the student must roll their Int and their teacher must roll their Instruction against a target number of (6 - (the difference between the skill ratings of the teacher and the student)), summing the successes. If no successes are achieved, the instruction quality goes down by one category, so one-on-one tutoring only works at the level of taking a class, and taking a class descends to the quality of unguided research.

Instruction is one spot away from Leadership on the Skill Web.

Example: Barry is teaching his Street Kid contact some elementary aikido moves; he has no Instruction skill, and a Charisma of 4. The kid gets to roll his Intelligence of 3 against a target number of 6 – Barry’s Aikido skill of 5 + the kid’s Aikido skill of 0 = 1. Barry gets to roll his Charisma against the same target number, plus 4, since he has no skill in teaching. It’s pretty easy for an expert to teach a single beginner, even if they haven’t spent time learning how to teach.
After four months of teaching the kid Aikido for an hour each day after school, Barry has earned a karma point for his selfless dedication to helping another kid out of the slums, and the kid has gained a point of Aikido. Barry wisely chooses to invest the karma point in starting his Instruction skill, with some pointers from Violet (who actually has the skill). The kid now rolls his Intelligence of 3 against a target number of 2 (since his skill went up), and Barry gets to roll one die against the same target number (since he has the Instruction skill now) and three more (from his Charisma) against a target number of 6.
After another four months of this, Barry will get another experience point toward his Instruction skill, since he’s been practicing a skill of 1 at a challenging task. If he sticks with only one student at this rate, it’ll take him more than a year to get his Instruction skill to 2— which is the only way he can handle a larger class size. Maybe he should get some more students in different time slots...

Expected skill levels for professionals

World-class experts are almost always specialized in their discipline; in that specialization, there are likely to only be 1-6 individuals on the planet with that level of skill. Different martial arts schools use different progressions for their belt colors, but generally start with white and move to black. An example progression is white, yellow, orange, green, purple, brown, black. Note that some skills are less salable in an ordinary professional arena, and may need to show up on the black market to command the kind of salaries given here. (A scientist with skill 12 in their chosen field is well worth the luxury lifestyle to the corporation employing them, and tends to be a prime target for extractions. A mercenary with Firearms 12 can probably afford a similar Luxury lifestyle, but probably as an assassin, while the 10th dan black belt probably heads up a franchise and does endorsements while participating in exhibitions and tournaments. Naturally, someone with principles may be forced to sacrifice a great deal of lifestyle, which might make them a bargain for a runner who can demonstrate principles they would approve of.)

Another interesting thing this brings up is the utility of certain bodmods in Shadowtech. A level 4 Encephalon and a Cerebral Booster 2 can bring someone’s effective technical, knowledge, or B/R skill level up by 4, taking a cutting-edge researcher into the world-class expert territory and making a world-class expert truly terrifying. Reflex recorders will work on many other skills, bringing them up by one level, which is often what it takes to afford a substantial salary increase. Physical Adepts buying extra dice with a skill can do similar things.

In general, one block of a tutor’s time costs 1/40 of their monthly lifestyle cost, though the best tutors tend to cost even more than this. Classes are mostly a matter of splitting the cost amongst a group of people and putting in about 25% overhead for training facilities.

If you wish to slow down characters spending vast amounts of karma on skills, apply these training rates, but also reduce the time in these rules by the instruction/skill system in the Shadowrun Companion (p51). Alternatively, force characters to spend at most one karma from any particular run on any skill they used during that run. This will cause gradual improvement in a number of skills rather than instant improvement in one.