Contact Group (SE: Keeping in Contact and others)

[MaryAnn]

1. How shall I handle the advantage of a contact such as Apple or Microsoft? This contact should be able to provide Business, Technical, Research and Artistic skills...
2. If instead I wanted to represent Facebook, should I add Fraternal, News and Investigative skills on top of the previous ones?
3. Should I purchase a different Contact Group for each set of skills, or how would the final advantage look like?

[Refplace]

I'd treat them as a Wildcard Contact in that case. I would alow multiple purchases though. Say the player bought different divisions as different groups.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by MaryAnn

1. How shall I handle the advantage of a contact such as Apple or Microsoft? This contact should be able to provide Business, Technical, Research and Artistic skills...

From real-world experience of doing work for such companies, they don't act as a single Contact, or even as a Contact Group. They have huge numbers of staff, working on a vast variety of things, and the difficult bit is finding the person whose responsibilities include what you need. Once you find him or her, it's quite possible to build up a Contact relationship, and to make use of that to access other resources, up to a point.

The "who does that?" problems tends to happen with organisations of more than a few thousand people, which aren't as centrally directed as armies: the organisation chart is so complex that most people only know their local regions of it. The tendency of upper management to re-organise every few years, and create increasingly meaningless names for divisions, makes the problem worse.

The way to treat the whole company as a Contact is to have someone with vast executive authority as your primary Contact, and get them to use it to produce contacts (small-c) with the right people. A lot more people will promise to do this than will actually deliver on it.

[Alden Loveshade]

I have a suggestion that would apply to this and the other threads you've begun. Rather than starting with figuring out how to apply game mechanics, I would recommend starting with deciding what you want. After you determine that, then think about what game mechanics will work for you.

GURPS is called a "system" rather than a "game" for a good reason. It's intended as a toolkit from which you can pick and choose what you want.

I have over 100 GURPS books, but in a single campaign I might only use a few of them on a regular basis. We ran a continuing fantasy campaign at Strategicon conventions (OrcCon, Gamex, Gateway) with just the GURPS Basic Set and what we created ourselves. We did that primarily because that way all the GMs (and the vast majority of the players) would have what they needed. Frankly, I was a little skeptical about it in the beginning, but it worked fine.

One additional suggestion; if you don't already have it, you might want to get How to be a GURPS GM. I've run GURPS for many years, but still found it helpful.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by MaryAnn

1. How shall I handle the advantage of a contact such as Apple or Microsoft? This contact should be able to provide Business, Technical, Research and Artistic skills...

Why should it provide all those things? I assure you I would not not look to Microsoft for everything I ever wanted to know about Polynesian wedding rituals, or 18 century sculptors. Nor would I phone them up if I wanted a Van Gogh forged...or even appraised.