Process Chip Changes

High level process chips essentially allow skills to be acquired for money, and do not have many significant downsides. I believe that this needs a little balancing work in the Oracle game due to the large sums of credits floating around. I propose that each skill has a maximum level that process chips can be bought for, detailed below. Some skills lend themselves to being put into data chip form because they rely more on memory and information storage, such as Corporate Knowledge and Medicine. Skills such as firearms and stealth, however, rely more on reacting quickly to situations and it will not be as easy to get high level chips that can do this.

If you currently own a process chip of a higher level than is allowed, then you can automatically change it to the maximum level and refund the difference in cost.

Skill	Maximum Level	Notes
Arts & Culture	8	No bonus from speciality
Assess Tech	8
Athletics	5
Attitude	5
Business	6
Close Combat	6
Computers & A.I	8
Corporate Knowledge	9
Crime	4	Higher chips available on black market
Cybernetics & Robotics	8
Drive	6
Heavy Firearms	6
Light Firearms	6
Looking Good	6
Lying & Acting	4
Mechtronics	8
Medicine	8
Observation	6
Pilot	6
Psychology	6
Science	6
Stealth	6
Street Culture	4
Support Weapons	6
Tactical Firearms	6

The listed maximum values are for commercially available chips. Prototypes, experimental chips, chips from specialist suppliers and chips made in downtimes can reach higher levels.

I'd actually been thinking about this lately myself, although I hadn't said anything about it. The idea I had come up with was that process chips could only bump your effective skill up to double your current actual skill level in a given skill? The way they're described as working with what basically amounts to a complete reference guide with almost instantaneous recall made me think of it - it's not like you can give a ten-year old a postgrad-level physics textbook and have them be able to understand and use it properly even if they can instantly reference anything they want. There's a level of basic skill you have to have in a field before access to advanced reference material could even begin to be useful. That way would require you to still make a reasonable investment in a skill before you could use a process chip to bump it to really high levels.

OTOH, it kind of ruins the original intended purpose of process chips. Maybe a cap of actual skill +5 (or maybe even variable skill+X based on how well the specific skill lends itself to this kind of thing) would work better? Then even if you're incompetent at a given skill you can still use the process chip to make yourself capable without being able to go overboard with it, and again you need to have made reasonable investment in the skill itself before you can use process chips to get really high.

Those were just my thoughts on it anyhow (and I might be misremembering how process chips are supposed to work). The skill-specific caps idea also makes sense - obviously there's a limit to how much knowing a lot about guns actually helps when it comes to shooting them, that kind of thing. Fortunately it doesn't impact me at all yet.