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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Altalazar" data-source="post: 1226258" data-attributes="member: 939">In part, I think this would depend on how book knowledge is organized within the gameworld.  Sure, we could just "abstract" it, but it is an interesting issue to think about.For instance, there was the Dewey Decimal System - and card catalogs based on it.  With such a system, you could have a general "research" skill that represented how to utilize that resource to research almost anything.On the other hand, with no such system, instead with just a bunch of books scattered across the land, in mostly private libraries with no formal organization, then general research would tend to be less useful - and it is more about connections with scholars who might have heard who has such-and-such a book - and it is probably more subject-area specific - i.e. to research mold-farming, you might need to talk to the various experts in mold-farming to find out what books they've heard of about the subject, then find out where they might be (who has them).  Some of the mold-farming books, once found, might refer to other mold-farming books, leading to more searching in other private libraries for those other tomes.  But that won't help you out later on if you are looking for books on tatoo-removal, except perhaps incidentally, by having made contacts with a lot of private library owners.Then today, we have the World Wide Web and online databases - where whole new research skills are required, and where you need to pay large sums of money to get access to the best databases, like Lexus-Nexus.  I wonder if it would be worthwhile to make the magical equivalent - I'm sure a mage with a large enough library might want the ability to be able to search it quickly, without too much fuss.  So the "short" answer, for me, is how knowledge is organized in the game world - and perhaps the answer is different depending on where in the world you are.</blockquote>

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