Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Well, that's your problem. Fortunately, you're the GM, so you can change those rules if you want to.

Sagatafl uses a Time Step Scale, everywhere in the system. It's one of (many) components used system-wide (I allused to the Extent Scale earlier). An excerpt of the TSS:

1/10 Second
1 Second
6 Seconds (one combat Round)
1 Minute
6 Minutes
1 Hour
4 Hours
1 Day
1 Week
1 Moon (4 Weeks)
6 Moons
3 Years (almost exactly 39 Moons)
15 Years.

The steps are chosen so that they'll be easy to memorize, rather than for arithmetical elegance, so the smallest steps are x4 while the largest are x10. Also, you'r supposed to use /10 and x10 beyond the "ends" of the scale (the low "end" is 1 Second, the high "end" 6000 Years).

To rush an activity so it is 1 TSS faster, increases the Roll Difficulty by 2. That's painful and dangerous, and only for the highly skilled, an effect of Sagatafl's roll mechanic (where skill is orthogonal to difficulty).

To rush an activity by 2 TSS, the fastest possible (and the closest to GURPS' RAW "-10 for instant") increases RD by 5, and is an insane option to choose unless you are extremely skilled and have something to lower your RD, such as high-Quality equipment, or magical equipment, or both, but it does mean that something that normally requires 1 Hour (or 1 Hour per roll cycle) can be done in 1 Minute (or 1 Min/cycle). It's also possible to rush by half a TSS step. That always halves the time, and increases the RD by 1.

Taking extra time slows time by 1 TSS for a -1 RD bonus, or 2 TSS for a -2 RD bonus. No more than that is possible.

I get the impression GURPS has the rush/slow rules it has (although having such rules, and in the core book, is always better than not having them) due to some desire to empower characters to precisely "dial" what kind of penalty they want. I don't think that's good, though.

GURPS' RAW says that you can do something at double speed for -5.

Why not change that to double speed for -4, x4 speed for -8, and x8 speed for -12? It breaks with the principle that you're supposed to use -10 for "almost impossible tasks", but I'm not sure I like that anyway.

Another option is -3 for double speed, -6 for x4 speed and -10 for x10 speed. Either way, using that as a house rule means you take away the ability of characters to precisely choose the degree of rush, but in exchange, you make rushing somewhat more attractive (except -10), and somewhat more powerful (again, except -10). Rushing also becomes accessible to less wildly skilled characters, compared to the RAW, but is still an unwise choice for those with pedestrian skill levels.

Or you can build a Time Step Scale to use with GURPS, perhaps inspired by the Range/Speed chart?

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Sorry, I only skimmed the thread, so I may be repeating earlier advice. If so, consider these additional data points.

Designing an organization - that is, deciding how many people you need, and in what capacity, and how to organize them - is Administration.

Administration is also suitable for generic interviews which are mainly about organizational fit: are you an obvious troublemaker? Do you/can you align with the organizational culture and philosophy well enough to do your job the way they want you to? I tend to agree that someone with Administration (and nothing else) would pass over hidden gems and eccentric/troublesome geniuses, because Administration doesn't effectively assess those. (However, if someone had Psychology - or advice from a referrer about their positive qualities - and chose to hire them for those qualities, Administration would be appropriate to figuring out how to fit them into the organization so that they can receive all the needed training and/or provide their genius with minimal disruption to the rest of the organization.)

In modern hiring scenarios, the applicant typically submits a detailed application or resume listing their education and experience and maybe a little bit about their personality or work style. Anyone with a particular skill could use it to evaluate other people's competence with that skill, either by judging the value of their experience ("he graduated from Schloffo's Elite Underwater Basketweaving College and then went on to work for King Bob's Black Basket Navy? Most impressive...") or by testing them directly with questions or practical tests. If you intend to do this yourself at interview time, you'd need that skill.

Leadership isn't necessarily good at telling whether people are good at their jobs or designing organizations, but I'd let it be used for assessing command ability, morale, discipline, and obedience. If you've got 100 people and you need to pick half of them to make into an effective unit with the basic ability to convey and follow orders, with little or no regard for individual personalities or competencies, this would be your go-to skill. (And here, again, Administration would give you some idea who to pair up with who, how to best distribute according to skill/competence and so forth.)

Detect Lie, obviously, detects lies. Good for interviews and cover letters, less good for evaluating applications or resumes since there's so little information to work with.

Body Language also detects lies, but only in person. It also gives you some idea of the subject's feelings, similar to Empathy; an interview process could be designed to induce the subject to react to various questions and ideas in an observable way to find out how he really feels about something, or how competent he believes he is vs. what he claims, etc. Not much of a hiring skill on its own, but should be available as a complementary roll to any other hiring skill as long as you're personally observing the interview.

I'd say that most interviews don't use Psychology (Applied). It takes a minimum of one hour of conversation just to attempt the roll, and the subject knows that he's being evaluated which will tend to confound the interviewer. Exceptions would be long interviews (maybe lunch, especially dinner, or some other kind of outing) or multiple interviews. These are usually reserved for executives and other extremely important positions, because it's a long process and usually unnecessary for people who won't have a lot of responsibility.

Anyway, Psychology would tell you everything about a prospect that Administration would in addition to ferreting out hidden talents, hidden liabilities, loyalty, and competence under pressure. It wouldn't tell you what to do with them, though; that's still Administration.

In theory, you could use Psychology twice as fast at -5, which would let you make a Psychology roll during a regular half-hour interview; tack on, say, about -3 for the prospect's wariness, and an interviewer could attempt to assess everyone this way. Someone who's very lucky, or cinematically competent, could even succeed...

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

A habit I've taken to is reading "margin of success" in that specific roll as "a candidate pool equal to the MOS as read on the speed/range table". So a MOS of 0 gives 2 suitable candidates they can choose from, 1 gives 3, 2 gives 5, etc. I've also permitted them to trade MOS in order to increase the quality of the candidates, with every point the MOS is reduced by resulting in a general +1 bonus to the candidate's skill values (which I usually cap at +2) due to them restricting the candidate pool to only those who are overqualified.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Sounds like a brilliant fix for that particular problem, I'll try that.

If only you had been writing Social Engineering.

I'll have to figure out some modifiers for rarity, as well as some for the size of the candidate pool that make sense. No matter how good the recruiter is, he should be restricted by the population he can reach where he is.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

I think it's better to make it a Quick Contest against Acting than to give a flat penalty.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Agreed.

Agreed. One of the reasons why the PCs are prepared to take people from any cultural background and with all sorts of small headaches attached is that they are confident that with the top leaders on their side having Administration -18+ and their very top executive having Administration -26, they can find a way to adapt the talent to the organisation and if that isn't going to work, adapt the organisation to the talent, if he justifies that level of investment.

In the case of our PCs, we have a very well-administered TL4 organisation that might count as advanced in TL for organisational effeciency, due to near-universal literacy and numeracy within the organisation, magical means of communications*, rapid transport by full-rigged ships with ships' wizards who have magical control over the wind and being ultimately overseen by someone with Administration -26. Basically, imagine a Duth East Indies Company with some magical improvements.

They are recruiting among a society with TL3 (stagnant at early) technology, with literacy rates at below 20% and where there has recently been two decades of unrest and civil chaos followed by two years of war. More than 50% of the population where they are are effectively refugees, though since this region of the country was underpopulated before the war, a good part of the refugees are actually managing to scrabble for survival as farmers, farm labourers, shepherds or some such.

They are doing most of their recruiting in a city of 100,000 with 200,000 refugees living close by. Another 700,000 people live in the hinterland of the city and yet another million are under the, very theoretical, political control of the city authorities in their guise as the new government of the fallen empire.

Another three millions of the remaining population of said empire is now living under occupation. A lot of them don't seem to mind, while others have become fierce partisans of the new regime. Others, of course, are fighting the invaders in the name of one of the dozen or so factions that have tried to claim power after the death of the old God-King. Suffice it to say that for the moment, the PCs cannot recruit among those people and are stuck with their ca 2 million potential recruits, of whom around a million is within a comfortable distance from most of their operations.

Obviously, many educated experts will be imported from abroad, but given that there is all this cheap manpower there, the PCs want to hire most anyone who could be useful to them in the war they are fighting and in the rebuilding they want to carry out of the local economy.

*Which includes daily written reports from all major outposts that are put into magical cabinets and appear in a matching cabinet at headquarters.

I'm guessing that either Leadership or Teaching would be the skill for NCOs or junior officers to know which of their men is ready for promotion. When the PCs want to expand three 100 man companies into a full thousand man regiment, they'll probably rely on the officers and NCOs to select the men who will become the NCOs and officers of the new units.

At least for choosing squad leaders to be given special extra NCO training among recruits you are instructing, I could see Teaching. But otherwise, I'd expect that having some idea about the qualities, strengths and weaknesses, of the men you lead is a basic function of Leadership.

I'd say that anyone the PCs are going to trust to handle a lot of money, to hire people on their own or to carry weapons or even enter the most secure areas within their most important complex will have to go through at least an hour's interview. Probably an hour's interview with one of the top people of the organisation (who, as I discussed in a previous post, have, at the very least, Administration 18+, Detect Lies 15+, Leadership 15+ and often Pscyhology (Applied) at 12+), after having passed through a layer or two of underlings who approved them.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Just so. And note that a TDM of +0 already assumes adventuring use, which for social skills certainly means potentially wary targets.

You ought to give a positive TDM for people who are in very casual circumstances, particularly trusting or make a point of being open with the character.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Agreed. I'd want some way to ballpark stuff like that. From a plausibility standpoint, how long would it take to make an unmodified roll against the skill of the recruiter in order to get a certain perceptage of the available people to apply and how much could MoS alter that percentage?

Highly detailed point-based systems used to account for rarity of a certain character concept would be a bad idea anyway. That's nothing but false precision. You get more accuracy by making holistic estimates, backed up and reality checked, if possible, with datums from real history and demographics.

The human mind is capable of woolely estimating a lot of stuff much better than we can break it down into individual factors and calculate it.

Just try it with catching a thrown ball. Bet you can't do the calculations without a hell of a supercomputer (and even then, your model is imperfect and would, if used as the basis for a reenactment, lead to an exponentially increasing margin of error which eventually leads to the model having no relationship with reality, due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions), but you can catch the ball.

While they'd be glad to get any of the real stars that are available locally, they accept that most of them will already have employment.

Mostly, for the civil side of their project they want enough competent TL4 engineers, overseers and instructors from abroad, with skill 14+, to be able to make use of a local labour force of 20,000+, at least for some time. Those will be supervised by a few exceptional and highly sought after people with skill 18+ in their respective specialities (or maybe just Techniques), to whom the PCs are reconciled with having to pay a lot of money.

And then they want the local people to run this labour force and infrastructure behind it and to hire all the actual labourers.

Ideally, they'd want to do this yesterday, but failing that, how fast could this be arranged?

It would be done by someone with Administration -26 and Propaganda -23, spending half a day in each city he visits (travelling by magic) and leaving behind instructions for his staff there, handbills to be printed and arrangements for a ship to take any recruits who have been gathered to sail to the warzone. The cities would be a total of 20, large port cities in six different nations, each of the nations ranging from 2 million to 6 million and the population of the cities ranging from 40,000-150,000.

In cultural terms, imagine that some of them are more-or-less 17th Dutch Republic, some are Venetian or Genoese of the same period, others are 17th century France or Britain and the rest are Mediterranean/Greek of a vague medievalish/Early Modern-ish era, with TL declining as he goes further east, until he reaches decandent Byzantine/Ottoman TL3 where they are at war. So, cultural differences, but not world-spanning ones, in that all the cities he visits have more in common than the culture he's recruiting them to work within.

We'll assume that he spent a full working week on preparing a Propaganda campaign and that the half-day in each city represents a quick interval of adjusting it to local needs* and then an Administration roll at -10 for instant use to perform recruiting there.

He's achieving, for each city, whatever the Propaganda campaign does (i.e. people who turn up to the offices after he leaves) and also, for the half-day he's there, he does as much as an ordinary recruiter with skill -18** would have done in a week of recruiting.

I imagine that he'd make another ten-day circuit immediately following the first, thus allowing his efforts ten days to work in each city, and then he'd make a final selection. After that, the recruits he'd judged acceptable would be shipped to a city from which a company ship would take them to Messemprar.

Unless, of course, ten days wasn't plausibly enough for this to work. In which case he'd have to delay between beginning the propaganda and recruiting, which means that recruits would arrive later, which means more time that the other PCs are stuck with merely local talent in Messeprar.

*He has Area Knowledge -12+ in each of the cities and they are culturally similar, though, so not much change is needed.
**He has Efficient (Administration).

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

That actually seems like a good idea.

So:

-1 ___ 70% normal time
-2 ___ 50% normal time
-3 ___ 30% normal time
-4 ___ 20% normal time
-5 ___ 15% normal time
-6 ___ 10% normal time
-7 ___ 7% normal time
-8 ___ 5% normal time
-9 ___ 3% normal time
-10 __ 2% normal time or effectively instant in most cases

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Seems extremely generous, particularly at the early levels. Also, probably will require changing the way Efficient and whatever the time-reduction Technique is called work.