Creating a MOSSAD Agent in GURPS

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I didn't even mean abstracting all of it. But it's the sort of adventury profession where the whole skill set should be found in the 200 or so Basic Set skills.
Paperwork would fall under Administration, estimates under Intelligence Analysis, Smuggling for dead drops etc. It's just like having ElOps (Comms) means you can handle Morse Code without spending extra points on Morse.

All of that is quite true. Nothing that an intelligence officer does strictly calls for a new skill. However, there's a difference between a trainee and an experienced veteran. A Professional Skill that offers limited skill applications in the vein of Soldier is often a precursor to detailed training in more complex applications, and thus is a useful thing to teach new trainees.

For instance, if you had to teach every new officer full-on Acting, Administration, Filch, Holdout, Observation, Photography, Pickpocket, Research, Search, Shadowing, Smuggling, Stealth, and three kinds of Electronics Operation, the training would last forever. Instead, you start them off with Professional Skill (Tradecraft) and stipulate that it only works for the specific tasks relevant to being a spy, and only when those tasks would use the proper skill at +4 or better. Thus, where a fully trained person would roll, say, Administration+4 to fill out a report or EO (Surveillance)+4 to drop a prepared listening device on a table, a new operator would roll against the PS . . . but he wouldn't be able to run a company with Administration or install an inline wire tap with EO.

Of course, as with Soldier, once the newbie is fully trained, that skill will hang around on his character sheet unless the GM lets him roll the points over. And it would be fine to do that! However, the PS is still useful for the countless tiny tasks that don't rate a distinct skill. These amount to DX, IQ, HT, Will, or Per rolls often required on the job, and this skill makes it possible to get better at those things without raising an attribute. Thus, just as Soldier is a good estimate of average troop quality (meaning that it establishes the floor for basic military maneuvering), a PS like the one proposed would be a fair way to gauge an intelligence service's mean quality (that is, it evaulates the weakest link in a large-scale operation).