Weird Powers: The Hive Mother

[ravenfish]

For what it's worth, a quick google search suggests that American companies tend to allot their workers 8 sick days per year, out of roughly 260 working days. This would seem to imply that they assume their workers will be too sick to be helpful on the order of 3% of the time, quite close to the 4.6% unavailability implied by a 15 or less appearance roll. Perhaps we should move this to a new thread, though- it's not particularly relevant to the matter at hand.

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

For what it's worth, a quick google search suggests that American companies tend to allot their workers 8 sick days per year, out of roughly 260 working days. This would seem to imply that they assume their workers will be too sick to be helpful on the order of 3% of the time, quite close to the 4.6% unavailability implied by a 15 or less appearance roll. Perhaps we should move this to a new thread, though- it's not particularly relevant to the matter at hand.

That number most likely also take into account that some workers will sometimes call in sick when they actually aren't (which is not much of an issue for most loyal allies). It might very well also take into account that you often don't want diseases to spread in the workplace even when the worker would be helpful (often a lesser concern when the task the ally might help you with is a life or death situation). There are other considerations as well such as people having to work when they feel sick being bad for morale. Even before acounting for all these things, 3% is not insignificantly lower than 4.6%.

[AlexanderHowl]

In other developed nations though, you can have up to five weeks of vacation time (some nations have up to ten work weeks of leave when you include holidays), so the frequency can be much lower than in the USA (as low as 210 days or 57.5% of the time). If you include normal work hours though, availability could be as low as 1680 hours out of 8760 hours or 19.2% of the time.

[Flyndaran]

In many American companies, your availability is merely a suggestion to bosses. You can be continually scheduled to work during those times, and failure to do so will be marked as "no call, no show".
Even with physical evidence, at will employment means that if they really want to, then you will get fired soon enough.
It's happened to virtually every single service industry worker I know here. So please don't use official rules as evidence of what actually happens.

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

In many American companies, your availability is merely a suggestion to bosses. You can be continually scheduled to work during those times, and failure to do so will be marked as "no call, no show".
Even with physical evidence, at will employment means that if they really want to, then you will get fired soon enough.
It's happened to virtually every single service industry worker I know here. So please don't use official rules as evidence of what actually happens.

I certainly hold no faith in the goodwill of captains of industry. I merely wanted an order of magnitude estimate of how frequently people are put out of commission by illness, and that was the easiest way I could think of to find one. I agree that it will not correspond exactly to reality- but then, neither will the rules of an RPG, so, with a difference of less than a factor of two, I confess myself satisfied (with the RPG, I mean, not with American society).

[Flyndaran]

Then at the very least you'd have to use things like HT, and how much one interacts with people to gauge how often they get sick.
I'm not sure vague species averages would really have much use.

(Sorry for getting grumpy as this issue just popped up with someone I know, so it hit close to home. Not to mention that at this moment I'm sick too.)

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

I certainly hold no faith in the goodwill of captains of industry. I merely wanted an order of magnitude estimate of how frequently people are put out of commission by illness, and that was the easiest way I could think of to find one. I agree that it will not correspond exactly to reality- but then, neither will the rules of an RPG, so, with a difference of less than a factor of two, I confess myself satisfied (with the RPG, I mean, not with American society).

It most likely isn't a difference of less than a factor of two for how often a normal person gets too sick to be able to contribute to work though. For reasons such as the ones I mentioned, the number of sick days is significantly higher than how often such a person is incapable of working. Combined with the fact that there was a difference close to a factor of two even before taking that into account, the difference being less than that is probably not plausible.

Then there is also the fact that many Allies would have HT above average.

[ravenfish]

In hopes of returning this thread to what promised to be a very interesting discussion of arbitrarily numerous allies before I brought this frequency of appearance thing up, I have set out the discussion of it in a new thread here

[oneofmanynameless]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

In hopes of returning this thread to what promised to be a very interesting discussion of arbitrarily numerous allies before I brought this frequency of appearance thing up, I have set out the discussion of it in a new thread here

Thank you for this. I am super interested in the answer to the question of FoA, but am still wondering about how to handle arbitrarily numerous allies.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless

Thank you for this. I am super interested in the answer to the question of FoA, but am still wondering about how to handle arbitrarily numerous allies.

(a) The question is not how many you have, but how many you can call up at once.

(b) If you have a reserve, that can be interpreted as "if I get this one killed, I can obtain a replacement with minimal delay."

(c) If new Allies take time to be conceived, mature, and come into service, I would call this buying more levels of Allies as you gain experience. If they can be popped out fairly quickly, I would use the Favors version of Allies to produce an expendable Ally when you need one, in the spirit of Impulse Buys.