This is something I do worry about, so thank you for bringing it to me and I'm sorry for overstepping the bounds at any time. In retrospect that tag was probably too hasty, and I'd be willing to retcon it and have him take longer about it. My reasoning for it was that the Doctor is the only person who's been so cheerfully reluctant to share information with him. Most people, when he asks questions, either answer them or get all huffy about answering them, but the Doctor is the only one I can remember who's all 'oh yeah, I know what I'm doing, no worries, no worries', without actually telling Lance what he wants to know in detail or seeming to understand why Lance would want to know. So when he went all 'oh yeah, I know it all, it's in my head, no worries', that's the part that I thought would really ping Lance, which is why I did it then.
As for Romana's post, I was assuming that as the Lance/Doctor-Cho thread progresses he'd had more clues to confirm what he suspects. He does have a tendency to make assumptions and get suspicions based on very little, and sometimes they are wrong, but then he also tries to get them confirmed, too. So if they're having a meal he'd get to see more personality quirks, and given that Lance may have seen the Doctor's handwriting when he oversaw the research with the dragon pearls (would he have?) then by the time of Romana's post he likely would have seen the handwriting in the logbook, too.
But as far as his perceptiveness goes in a greater context, I try to play it as at least partly being sheer breadth of knowledge and experience--he asks all the questions ever, at every opportunity, which allows him to know things most people don't. He also spent some time in the wild, and most of his career has been under fire from assassins, so being perceptive is partly a survival issue. That said, I also do actually play him as a prodigy at least, because in canon he is insanely perceptive. Most of that trait comes from the generation two games, Gold/Silver/Crystal and Heart Gold/Soul Silver, when he gets the player character to help him take down an unethical research lab by the local mafia group, but the way he does it is actually pretty omniscient.
Basically, the player character first meets him at a lake where shenanigans that no one can explain are happening. On his arrival, he already knows exactly what is happening and why, and knows that 'a mysterious radio broadcast' from the nearby town is the cause, but doesn't explain how he knows that. So he asks the PC's help and tells them to meet him in the town. The PC finds him in a shop the mafia group is using as a cover, from which he says the broadcast is coming from, but again, doesn't explain how he knows it's that shop in particular. And then he somehow knows exactly where a secret entrance into the basement laboratory is hidden, something even the mafia grunts comment on in a 'how the fuck did he know that was there?!' sort of fashion.
Obviously he must have done some things in there which the player character didn't see to come to those conclusions, but the rest of the game also makes the player character figure out nearly everything on their own. So the fact that, on this occasion, one single character suddenly does all the work the player character usually does, without explaining how he's coming to conclusions that seem impossible (how did he know that closely-guarded secret entrance behind the counter was actually there?), indicated to me that he had to have extremely high perceptiveness, whether because he does ask all the questions or because he's just naturally observant, or some combination of the two.
In his tags I do try very hard to plot out his process of thinking so people know how he's coming to the conclusions he does, but it's entirely possible they're nonsensical or I've skipped steps (I do have a tendency to miss steps when I already know where all the links are). From the sounds of it this is something that's been bothering you for a while, so if you have any other specific points in mind, would you like to let me know what they were? That way I can either explain what my process was or take note of them so I can do better next time.
sorry for the tl;dr >.<
As for Romana's post, I was assuming that as the Lance/Doctor-Cho thread progresses he'd had more clues to confirm what he suspects. He does have a tendency to make assumptions and get suspicions based on very little, and sometimes they are wrong, but then he also tries to get them confirmed, too. So if they're having a meal he'd get to see more personality quirks, and given that Lance may have seen the Doctor's handwriting when he oversaw the research with the dragon pearls (would he have?) then by the time of Romana's post he likely would have seen the handwriting in the logbook, too.
But as far as his perceptiveness goes in a greater context, I try to play it as at least partly being sheer breadth of knowledge and experience--he asks all the questions ever, at every opportunity, which allows him to know things most people don't. He also spent some time in the wild, and most of his career has been under fire from assassins, so being perceptive is partly a survival issue. That said, I also do actually play him as a prodigy at least, because in canon he is insanely perceptive. Most of that trait comes from the generation two games, Gold/Silver/Crystal and Heart Gold/Soul Silver, when he gets the player character to help him take down an unethical research lab by the local mafia group, but the way he does it is actually pretty omniscient.
Basically, the player character first meets him at a lake where shenanigans that no one can explain are happening. On his arrival, he already knows exactly what is happening and why, and knows that 'a mysterious radio broadcast' from the nearby town is the cause, but doesn't explain how he knows that. So he asks the PC's help and tells them to meet him in the town. The PC finds him in a shop the mafia group is using as a cover, from which he says the broadcast is coming from, but again, doesn't explain how he knows it's that shop in particular. And then he somehow knows exactly where a secret entrance into the basement laboratory is hidden, something even the mafia grunts comment on in a 'how the fuck did he know that was there?!' sort of fashion.
Obviously he must have done some things in there which the player character didn't see to come to those conclusions, but the rest of the game also makes the player character figure out nearly everything on their own. So the fact that, on this occasion, one single character suddenly does all the work the player character usually does, without explaining how he's coming to conclusions that seem impossible (how did he know that closely-guarded secret entrance behind the counter was actually there?), indicated to me that he had to have extremely high perceptiveness, whether because he does ask all the questions or because he's just naturally observant, or some combination of the two.
In his tags I do try very hard to plot out his process of thinking so people know how he's coming to the conclusions he does, but it's entirely possible they're nonsensical or I've skipped steps (I do have a tendency to miss steps when I already know where all the links are). From the sounds of it this is something that's been bothering you for a while, so if you have any other specific points in mind, would you like to let me know what they were? That way I can either explain what my process was or take note of them so I can do better next time.