Investigation Skills for the Cypher System: Science Nerd

In this series of investigation/knowledge skills for the Cypher System, I have previously focused on what one can call procedural skills.  The previous skills (information systems and chatter) had involved general skills (to provide broad usefulness compared to other skill options) related to classes of actions one may take in a roleplaying game.

These procedural skills focused on information collecting rather than a specific knowledge base.  However, some players may want to play characters with an actual knowledge base.  This calls for a skill in a substantive knowledge area.  One possibility is "science nerd".

Investigation Skills for the Cypher System: Information Systems

In this series of posts, I am proposing some general knowledge/investigation skills for Cypher System games.  Previous posts included a justification for the need of more general investigation skills and provided one detailed example:  chatter.  In this post, I will propose a second skill -- information systems.  The goal is to define a skill that is useful in a broad range of contexts (that is, able to compete with skills like perception for player attention) and will help define aspects of a character for purposes of role playing.  

The essence of the information system skill is aptitude at finding information in organized systems ranging from ancient libraries to advanced electronic databases.