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

I deeply enjojy such fiction as the 1632-series, the Emberverse and the Belisarius-series. In each of them, we have a changing world, collapsing or threathened old societal structures and hyper-competent protagonists responding to the situation by creating new institutions in a very short time.

Now, I obviously realise that the capabilities of the protagonists are skewed significantly toward the 'heroic' end of the human range. In some cases, not only the principal protagonist, but everyone they ally with demonstrate one-in-a-thousand-years levels of competence in a wide range of different disciplines.

That, however, is not a problem. I'm already setting the game in a world where heroes are more heroic, villains more villainous and the elite are more elite. In game terms; courage, conviction, expertise, accomplishment, repute and renown tend to bring with them supernatural gifts, accelerated learning and other larger-than-life talents.

What I'm interested in exploring is rather how what skills are necessary for the rapid building and expansion of militaries, intelligence organisations or civil bureaucracies and how high the levels needed for extremely rapid build-up are in GURPS terms.

For example, the skill of choosing good subordinates on short acquintanceship is obviously vital to anyone looking to do this. Would that use Administration? Leadership? Psychology (Applied)? Intelligence Analysis? Politics?

One PC in the campaign has spent the past two months of game time as the Viceroy of Purple Reign, a powerful trade corporation, mercenary company and privateer fleet in a foreign land where they are employed to help the local forces defend against an invanding army. Before that, he had some two months of preparation time as he visited the area for a few weeks and left some underlings behind for six weeks before coming back with the full force of Purple Reign.

The locals are what remains of a once might empire, but their lands now hold less than a million people (out of five million which they controlled a bare two years ago), less of half of which are fed or employed, and their armed forces are around 50,000, mostly poorly equipped militia. Even worse, the best troops belong to one of a dozen competing factions for ultimate power once the war is over and cooperate only while the invaders represent a worse threat.

Said PC arrived there commanding a 1,000 elite and loyal troops of the PCs' own mercenary forces, a 1,000 other mercenaries of good quality and some 3,000 sailors and marines on their own ships, mostly loyal and competent men. Locally, they had a factor in the person of the second-in-command of a consolidated guild of potters, glazers, glassblowers, weavers, bronzesmiths and other craftsmen and artisans (the Hegemony of Artisans), which has for the last sixteen years kept order in their part of the city* and some three hundred local 'militia'** who have spent the past four months being trained by Purple Reign marines to be full-time soldiers.

The PC, Ankhapet Si'Hamat, is a Persian-esque aristocrat who after being exquisitely educated prefered the company of his uncles and cousins of the desert tribes. He's a mounted archer, a scholar, a sorcerer and a born politician with high ideas about his own importance and an amibition the size of several continents.

He's busily trying to establish a cult of personality around himself and since he can lay down a storm of enchanted arrows in battle that make as much difference as several regiments of troops, he'd succeeding fairly well in that. Of course, slaying two dragons in full view of tens of thousand of people on his introduction to the locals didn't do him any harm.

He's a polymath, with fairly Julius Caesar-esque capabilities for mastering most anything he sets his mind to learn. In terms of skills, he has a lot of scholarly skills at 16-18, such as Thaumatology, Theology, History, Geography, Expert Skill (Political Science) and, of course, Writing, Literature and Poetry. He also has Mathematics, Architecture and Engineering at similar levels, not to mention Tactics and Operations. And he has Diplomacy -18, Propaganda -17 and Intelligence Analysis -16. Not to mention that he has Administration, Leadership and Strategy at skill 19 and Politics and Public Speaking at 20.

Coupled with Attractive, Charisma 2, Status 4 and Voice, he can maybe even overcome being a foreigner in a xenophobic land, especially since he can speak a little of the local lingo and is quite familiar with their culture, not to mention being from a neighbouring country which is not perceived as being all that savage or barbaric, all things considered.

He's also got a small circle of talented advisors, such as an alchemist and an artilleryrist to mastermind his plans in the field of alchemy, weapons design and technology, who are around skill 18-24 in their various fields. And he has a military chief of staff with Administration (Military) -18, Intelligence Analysis (Military) -18 and Leadership -18, in addition to solid 15+ in most other military skills.

Finally, the financier responsible for keeping the operation solvent and negotiating with foreign merchants, finance ministers and mercenary lords is a PC with skill 20+ in most everything he'll roll against, up to skill 25 in Merchant and Finance. And the herald and chief spymaster is a PC too, with Charisma 3, Cultural Adaptability, Empathy, Fashion Sense, Language Talent, Photographic Memory and Voice; not to mention skill 15+ in all the necessary skills and skill 18 in Administration, Intelligence Analysis and Propaganda, as well as Current Affairs (Politics) -20, Politics -21 and Public Speaking -21.

Most of these characters have decent Teaching too and some of them have Body Language and/or Detect Lie. The chief of counterintelligence has both Body Language and Detect Lie at skill -19. None of them, however, has Psychology (Applied) at any high level, except the spymaster who has -15 (-18 when he can converse with subject).

I'm wondering how fast these few extremely capable characters, aided by the officers and men of their own mercenaries, could create local institutions and train local people. Veterans are widely available, but there are some legal restrictions on obtaining them. Assume that no more than a thousand already serving military veterans can be obtained.

How swiftly can units of organised military personnel, whose loyalty they can somewhat trust, be available to them?

I'm thinking that their initial material would be the 300 chosen artisan 'militia'-men, a thousand experienced street fighters from a friendly revolutionary/criminal organisation, most of them former slaves (and 200 of them former gladitators), combined with some 500 prime veterans chosen among 50,000 men as leaders, instructors and elite troops. Another 500 broken-down veterans useful as instructors or garrison, but not capable of marching 20 miles per day.

Add some 200-500 shepherd/bandits*** and their families who weren't serving in the local military (because they were too clever to be rounded up), but jump at the chance of regular pay.

How long to turn these people into real military units? What skill rolls ought I make? Who makes them?

And how fast can they grow an intelligence network? Plenty of out-of-work spies and assassins around, but how fast can they be vetted?

*After the civil wars broke out.
**While they were never full time, they still do represent picked men out of security forces who have spent 16 years defending hearth and home in a city which has been at war, wracked by riot and riven by gangs for almost two decades. These chosen three hundred are those who decided that they liked fighting more than craftsmanship, when the push came to shove, and were chosen by veteran soldiers as the best of some thousand volunteers.
***They could get more, but this represents choosing only those with skill at arms, experience of skirmishing or at least good potential.

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

Psychology (Applied) with the main job skill as an assisting roll (probably Soldier for soldiers, PS (Clerk) or Administration for bureaucrats, Armoury for swordsmiths). I see Administration as for dealing with bureaucracies, Intelligence Analysis as long-term and based on diverse sources, and Leadership and Politics as driving your personal relationships with individuals rather than what they do when you aren't around. Leadership might make someone work harder and more carefully, but not change their competence and personality.

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

Hmmm... that seems to make Psychology (Applied) more important for historical conquerors than most of their other skills. Having Psychology (Applied) at -18 would allow you to almost unerringly pick good tacticians, trainers, tax collectors, administrators, bureaucrats, etc. By contrast, being good at Tactics, Administration or Accounting only makes a difference of +1/-1, with +2/-2 on a critical. In fact, by electing not to roll against the supporting skill, you could even select the best people without knowing a single thing about their area of expertise, which seems to be rather odd.

I'd want skill in the field you are selecting for competence in to matter more than that. Psychology (Applied) might be very good for estimating whether someone is trustworthy in personality, but it should not be able to tell you whether he has any skill at his job.

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

Sagatafl often has similar Skills and mechanics to GURPS.

There, I'd use Psychology: Practical as the main roll, quite possibly with a Complenetary Skill roll for some other skill. They have a more powerful effect than in GURPS, if successful, so I'd only allow one skill used, with a penalty (a modified RD) if the skill isn't very appropriate, if it's a bit far-fetched for the actual current usage. In some cases, with some characters, Theology: Socialism might make a good CSR, for instance.

The one exception is if the character being evaluated is psychologically unusual, including but not limited to psychological disorders.

In such cases, the evaluator shouldn't be able to get good results with merely layman's rule-of-thumb psychology, but ought to have a formal and comprehensive "theory of the mind", as represented by Psychology: Theoretical (which shouldn't exist in most past societies, or at best in a very primitive and gimped form, represented in GURPS by slapping a TLx onto it, e.g the TL3 societies didn't know beep about the Human mind).

Psychology: Practical can still be used, but ought to be massively penalized.

One way of being psychologically unusual is to be starkly more intelligent than the norm, which presumably many of the PCs and NPCs in your campaign are. You'd think that exceptionally intelligent individuals always have an easy time understanding each other's reactions, but that's not always so, e.g. due to very different life experiences, especially in the formative years. That's why Psychology: Theoretical, or whatever GURPS' analogous mandatory specialization is called, can be of use.

Some serious psychological disads may also be dangerously easy to overlook if you use Psychology: Practical instead of Psychology: Theoretical. That's another pitfall. The Practical version is safer to use if you can be abslutely sure that everybody is at least reasonably sane, and many people with serious psychological disorders spend a lot of time trying to "pass" as healthy. It's a common misunderstanding that everybody with a mental disease is parading it cheerfully in front of everybody, "look at me, there's something wrong with me!"

That can be due to the desire to fit in and be accepted, or simply needing to find a job, to find gainful employ in the social structure to avoid starvation or at least avoid missing out on basic niceties.

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

I agree with Polydamas that it's an important skill. While it's good that the spymaster PC has it (although it probably ought to be higher, since he isn't always getting the Empathy bonus), I think the leader PC also ought to have it.

As for using it for an evaluation, I don't envision it working as any kind of "Sherlock Scan" ability, where you can just "know". I'm thinking it's used as the basis for an interview with the person, quite possibly a "covert" interview where the interviewer is trying to conceal the purpose of the interview from the subject, maybe even masking it as everyday conversation. Of course that means a penalty. It also takes time. And it can tax the patience of the subject, especially if he feels he's being judged, which most people find uncomfortable.

If you want to make the supporting skill more important, you could give a larger penalty to Psychology (Applied) and then also award a larger bonus from the CSR, maybe double the normal bonus.

Or you could be more hardcore and use the roll-for-the-lowest-of -principle. That way, if the character has Leadership 14 and Psychology (Applied) 17, he rolls for 14.

Or you could turn it around, and roll for the other skill, but with an optional CSR for Psychology (Applied). Or if legal, make the CSR mandatory.



Also, contemplate the rarity of 17/18/19 skills in world demographic terms. These PCs and NPCs in your campaign are true masters. And in my opinion, GURPS is wrong in not allowing great skill to make a larger difference than what you outline: +/- 1, or +/-2 on a critical.

I think, and I am obviously trying to reflect that in Sagatafl's mechanics, that the truly skilled ought to be able to perform really well, achieving the equivalent of +/-4 or 5 or sometimes even more, on GURPS' scale.

From having read the Mass Combat rules (buth the 3E Compendium II ones, and the new PDF), but not actually played them out, it seems to me that brilliant captains and generals aren't able to achieve results that are at all proportional to their brilliance. Right from the first time I read the PDF, possibly even earlier with the Compendium version, I sat there and wondered "why can't genius strategists kick more butt than that, achieve more with smaller forces?"

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

In real life you can't separate those, however. I didn't say that Psychology (Applied) was the best way to judge expertise, but I did say that it was the right skill to decide “can I trust him? Is he the sort of person who tends to do well at this? Will he work well with his colleagues?” One might use skill X, or Current Affairs, or Research, or a Contact to judge someone's competence at skill X.

And of course, if none of the politically acceptable candidates has more than Tactics-12, or the would-be-treasurer is a sociopath with the technique Acting (Seeming Honest)-20, that Psychology-18 may not help you chose brilliant tacticians and trustworthy bureaucrats.

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

This is for evaluating psychological suitability and trustworthiness, not for professional competence?

I think I'd prefer to roll seperately for those two, as they'd have a tendency of being very different. For one thing, considerably more than half of potential recruits will have an inconvenient loyalty to one faction or another. Many of them may even have differing public and private loyalties, in the intrigue-filled atmosphere of a fallen empire which spent three centuries in decadence and noble rivalry before being torn apart by religious- and class-based civil warfare.

Well, the majority of people in the campaign world are fairly normal, with the distribution of exceptional people staying mostly close to realism. It's only that the upper bounds of exceptionalism are sharply increased, so that people with drive and ambition can rise much faster and further in this world than in ours.

All in all, I'd guess that maybe half of the people who in our world would be talented experts are instead varying degrees of extraordinarily talented and the more talent they have, the greater their chances of divine blessings or other supernatural gifts of varying sources.

There has been massive famine and umemployment, but the famine started being alleviated four months ago* and for the past month, hoarded treasure has been spent on a huge economic boom, as the various factions are competing for influence by distributing food, the soldiers are being re-equipped and the PC-advised local government** has started huge public work projects to improve sanitation for the refugees and increase the acricultural yield of the newly settled land.

The people are, in many cases, brutalised, famished, sick and emotionally devastated. They are also, however, mostly those of the population who refused to accept life under the invaders and who have managed to survive the past decades. And they are emerging out of a siege situation into a gold-rush style economic boom, as their foreign trade almost instantly jumped back to where it was three centuries ago, which is four times what it was a generation ago and twenty times what it was during the last two years.

There is now enough food in the markets, but that doesn't mean that everyone can afford it. So getting a job is very important. Getting good jobs, with high pay and benefits, is even more important. For people with special skills that are primarily useful to large organisations with particular requirements, it's crucial to convince potential employers that you are both competent and trustworthy. In the case of the experienced spies and assassins who served the fallen nobles of the former regime, this is extremely difficult, but extremely lucrative if you succeed.

The PCs are currently throwing money around at a rate no other faction is matching, partiallly because PCs are always in a hurry, partially because they've determined that as long as they can maintain naval superiority, they'll make up all they spend by winning the war and partially because they have several dragons' hoards and one treasury of a defeated court to burn.

*Through the heroic actions of the PCs and their fleet, actually, which doesn't harm their popularity.
**Which has only been a proper government for around two months and still has large internal divisions in addition to external threats, but is managing so far.

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

I discover that the leader PC has it at skill 14, which I agree is not high enough. However, he's a polymath and this is a newly acquired skill for him.*

*Having previously been well educated for rulership, as well as having natural talent, but not having experience at it.

So far, interviews have taken place off-screen, but we've established that they are performed by the spymaster PC, the military chief of staff and the chief of counterintelligence.

The two spies both know spells from GURPS Magic that can be useful in weeding out deliberate plants, madmen or liars, but they will not have the time or inclination to use Truthsayer on every recruit and rule out anyone who lies. We'll rather assume that they save that for those in sensitive positions, trusting in their high Body Language and Detect Lie skills for others.

I'm considering some such methods, yes, because I definitely don't want skill in the skills being evaluated being more or less irrelevant.

These people are masters, yes, but there exist in-setting people with skills up to 25 or even higher, even if they may not be in this part of the world.

There are individual commanders and generals on the other side that are equal to the PCs in tactical and operational expertise. Fortunately, however, the high command is politically chosen and the over-all strategy, while having been sound when it was chosen, will take a long time to change. And the other side lacks good TL4 naval commanders, which the PCs have, and are instead stuck with TL3 infantry commanders trying to default their Tactics, Operations and Strategy.

Actually, someone with skill 18 against a skill 12 is often able to trounce them with a far smaller force.

On the other hand, the foes that the PCs face usually have skill 14-18 at Tactics and Leadership, with Intelligence Analysis, Operations and Strategy at 12-16, being experienced commanders, if perhaps more used to smaller scale warfare. On the other hand, while there are plenty of people with high Administration skill on the other side, the size of the war effort means that each of these is trying to organise logistics for far too many people (and civilians) and they are operating at skill 12-15 rather than the 15-20 they should have.

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

In GURPS, though, you use the Leadership skill to organise and manage a team of people. It's not just for battlefield command, it's what a successful manager uses with his own team (as opposed to Administration, which is used for the organisation on a larger scale).

I don't disagree that Psychology (Applied) is important and good for this, but it seems odd that the skill for leading men, which is possessed by NCOs and officers both in official stat blocks (while Psychology (Applied) is generally reserved for confidence men or social engineers), would have no application for choosing good subordinates.

Agreed. Current Affairs seems fairly good for collecting rumours and Intelligence Analysis for interpreting them. For anyone they give even a moderately important position, it will be vital to judge which faction he supports, whether he has dark mysteries useful for blackmail, hidden debts to unfriendly interests, secret allegiances, etc.

There is that, of course.

On the other hand, the 50,000 soldiers present are to some extent self-selected for resourcefulness in staying alive, opposition to the invaders and experience of violence. They are those, out of an initial population of 10 million who still carry arms for their country after more than a decade of unsteady political situation (with all-out civil war in some parts of the country) and two years of being on the losing side of war against a massively rich and magically powerful invading force.

I'm quite sure that among the 10,000 or so career military men there, there will be a decent number of people with good Tactics skill. Even if the leadership of the army was wretched (and politically appointed) sixteen years ago, by now, only those who have genuine talent for getting soldiers to follow them under poor conditions will remain in command of them. Even if some nobles have prestigious names (and stores of wealth) in place of military talent, they'll have good unit leaders doing the actual commanding.

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

Having a couple of Contacts within the craftsmans' "mafia" could be very useful, in particular, I think. Even if that "mafia" is largely loyal to the PC party, it's not perfect, and one of the Contact may be able to warn the PCs about internal grumblings long before real problems arise.



Psychology (Applied) can perhaps also be used to identify or infer minor aptitides, ones that are below the level of resolution in GURPS, but which exist in the real world (and are simulated, although imperfectly, in one or more other systems) and which exert real influence over people, causing them to gravitate towards certain professions and hobbies and away from others. Some characters may have a small aptutude for interpersonal skills, or be well suited for repetetive work (which others function really poorly at), or be really good at coming up with lots of wild ideas very fast, albeit benefitting strongly from working with one or two more grounded partners who can help weed out those few wild ideas that are actually worthwhile. And so forth.

Although if such things aren't simulated in the system (or are simulated but make only a small difference, and are perhaps not even actively simulated for NPCs of "barely-named" grade), that may not be worthwhile.



One thing that skill can help with, when performing an evaluation, as opposed to doing a non-skill-based "intuitive" evaluation, is bias. Bias can come from various forms of intolerance or xenophobia or other prejudice (Sagatafl has a detailed "Animosity" psychological Flaw, with several different variants), or more generally disadvantages and other disabilities can act as noise to "mask" valuable abilities elsewhere in the individual

One of the NPCs in my Ärth setting, Eurielle of the Icy Land, is highly intelligent, and tends to hang out with others who are her equal. But she's gimped in the area of language. Very smart in all other regards, in GURPS terms he functions linguistically as if her IQ was merely 10. So whenever she tries to speak Norse or Latin or Irish, or any language other than her native British, she comes across as unimpressive, sometimes downright incompetent. Vocabulary and grammar is all messed up, and she is self-conscious about it (she's a former Druid - the Druids put great stock in poetry and eluquence) which makes it worse.

So, someone forming an opinion of her may well be unable to look past her distinctly pedestrian use of language (when she isn't speaking British - and even in British she's in no way beyond basic native Fluency, with a vocabulary only barely larger than that of the average person), and to dismiss her as relatively unimportant, whereas in fact, she is a highly competent individual. In GURPS scale terms, she's at least closer to 400 CP "Monster Hunters" grade than to 250 CP "Dungeon Fantasy" grade (one of many such individuals on Ärth - it's a bit like Icelander's setting in that regard), someone about whom you might suddenly have a stark flash of insight: "Wow, this person is really scarily competent. I'm glad she's on my side!"

Or see my thread over in Roleplaying, which Icelander replied to earlier, about people who look like they have a chromosome disorder, and thus are assumed to be of low intelligence, but aren't. That's another example of that.

The skilled approach to evaluation has a non-zero probability of overlooking that kind of bias, even in some cases where the evaluating character isn't aware that he has any bias. Whereas you'll go wrong, with great consistency, if you use unskilled "gut feeling".

Of course, one could make a Technique for Psychology (Applied) to perform such character evaluations or "vettings". It could start at Psychology (Applied)-3 and be improvably to no more than Psychology (Applied)+2. Since it's not dangerous to try, it is my understanding that it should be an Average Technique.

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

Normally, yes, but I think it can also be used to ask the person, openly or subtly, about professional competence, to get an impression of whether he knows what he's talking about. Although simulatively, that may rely on the interviewing character being hard to fool, being hard to impress with big words, with any kind of aptitude for logic being particularly helpful (in GURPS IQ+Mathematical Talent, although that's not a perfect fit). And a sceptical attitude, although presumably any such seriously conducted interview will involve a sceptical attitude.

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

I assumed he'd find it relatively easy to learn, with high IQ, or possibly good IQ plus some Talent that gives a bonus.

If you use the roll-for-the-lowest method, then you might also use the Evaluate Character Technique that I suggested a minute ago.

How much smaller? That'd be really valuable for me to know. And to be honest, I'm more thiking about a skill 23 vs skill 14 scenario, than skill 18 vs skill 12. If that makes a difference.

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

One important question, in terms of "choosing good suborbinates", is what tier of metal it is you're digging for?

Are you merely digging for something rare, like silver, or for something very rare and very precious, such as gold?

If it is the later, then you're going to have to look harder, and realistically, the gifteds you find will often be impure (rather messing up my analogy here...), with the qualities you seek being accompanied by deficiencies, so that you end up forced to make compromises, and having to assign workload0 carefully so as to avoid the specific ability or personality problems causing difficulties.

Your process might dig up Albert and Bob, both suitable for top posts in military engineering, but Bob has two issues:

He has a high natural aptitude (simulated with the most appropriate GURPS advantage, probably some kind of Talent, plus of course a good basis in IQ), even higher than Albert's, but he's barely trained, so you'll need to somehow educate him before you can make full use of him (he probably has 1 CP in the skill already, but you want to add 3 or preferably 7 more, plus 1 CP in at least a couple of secondary support skills).

And, rather more importantly, Albert and Bob can't stand each other, because 350 years ago, Albert's ancestors hesitated before sacrificing to the Goddess Hoola. So you're going to have to assign each of them to different projects, in different physical areas, all the freakin' time, or else the GM will make random weekly rolls to see if one of them shivs the other, and the most obvious solution to Bob's other problem, apprenticing him to Albert, is not going to work.

Albert is a gem. Bob is a piece of carbon that will turn into a gem if you spend the ressources (including management time) on a real hard squeeze.

1. Hire both.
2. Hire Albert, ignore Bob.
3. Hire Bob, ignore Albert.

?

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

As amatter of fact, Kehlynn Darkwater, the herald*, almost never reveals skepticism and if he is forced to turn anyone away, does so with an appearance of sincere regret. Part of it is public relations, part of it is his nature.

Even Kyros Nikandros, the military chief of staff, has been encouraged to carry out all recruiting interviews with sensitivity and respect for the locals, their cultural sensibilities and their self-respect. Of course, as a lifelong mercenary with long and negative experience of the convoluted intrigues of local factional politics, this means that he has been prevailed upon to minimise growling, cursing and accusations of treachery.

Meanwhile, the chief of counterintelligence and allied wizards use their magic (and experience) to determine if a recruit is a potential security risk from (magical) hiding.

In general, seeming competent and valuable when he comes to the attention of Kehlynn through his Current Affairs skill and the recommendations of local allies are what get people such interviews. Impressing** the guard commanders or the shift bosses of the public works projects is another way.

Increasingly, though, the PCs are seeking local employees of sufficient competence and trustworthiness so that rank-and-file people can be hired without having to involve the top-level people at all. While secure, that's also a tremendous bottleneck for recruiting. They've got one popular, brilliant and sensible political and religious leader already who is hiring for their public works, but need many more.

*And spymaster, though the latter is not shouted about.
**Or bribing. No system is perfect.

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

As a general rule, hire both. They've got long term plans and have more wealth than they have talented people.

The major exception is that since they are in a serious war which they could not survive losing, they cannot afford any genuine liabilities, no matter how useful they might become later.

But they have room for some 10,000 barely adequate people as long as they get enough competent people to carry out the tasks they really do need right now.

Someone who makes an adequate assistant, common soldier or even labourer, but may be expected to be more valuable later will be snapped up. Having to keep him apart from a particular personal rival would be easy. They can station the in different cities or even different countries.*

Basically, I'm looking for input on how much progress they've made with such tasks as improving sewage or changing a moribund refugee economy into a thriving one that delivers orders for their armies.

They've had two months of preparations and enough resources for maybe 300-500 people working and then two months of all out effort and ca $30,000,000 in goods and $10,000,000 in cash.

They want a city which three centuries ago was a great port metropolis of some 200,000 people but had dwindled to half that size and almost stopped trading to be great again. And they want to feed, house and employ the 200,000 refugees outside it and some 500,000 in the rest of the country.

Fortunately, there is enough space and even fallow farmland and infrastructure for that population, assuming the canals, irrigation systems, sewers, aquaducts, roads and other infrastructure are repaired of the damage done by centuries of neglect and decades of war.

On the other hand, economic revival cannot be done using vital military personnel or supplies, so instead of using their own perfectly capable naval and military engineers, they'll need to hire locals (and foreign non-military experts).

And find as many loyal elite** local troops as possible, to supplement their own. Healthy people who are not elite troops may be hired as labourers or logistics troops, but are probably more likely to be conscripted into the local forces for little or no pay beyond upkeep.

*While most of their men and operations are in the theatre of war, they do still retain some purely mercantile interests elsewhere, in addition to recruiting and training posts.
**Given the need for mobility in their strategy, the PC have no need of military units which are not elite. Substituting quantity for quality is pointless if you can only carry 5,000-10,000 troops on your troopships anyway and have no other sensible way to get men to the theatre where you intend to fight intime to make a difference.

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

The Hegemony of Artisans isn't actually all that mafia-like. A better analogy would be a miner's council, district soviet or the Paris Commune, with the caveat that their writ extends only over the artisan's quarter of the city. They are allied with the Wizards who control the city center, governor's palace and most official buildings. What primarily distinguishes them from a mafia is that they lack any secrecy and their citizen's militia is usually fighting to enforce recognisable (if unofficial) law and order.

Lord Dama's Non-Slaves, however, which started as a movement against slavery and social injustice, now exerts mafia-like control over most of the docks. They are allied with the thugs of the White faction of charioteers and fans and count many former gladiators and charioteers among their leadership. It's that organisation which will supply street fighters that the PCs aim to turn into soldiers.

The Reds, Greens and Blues have their own territories, with the Greens having by far the most power due to their recent allegiance with the foreign mercenaries/mafioso/religious thugs of the Zhentarim, who are importing valuable food and using the Greens to extort protection money from independent importers.

The Blues traditionally support the clergy of Tiamat, the Nemesis of the Gods, which used to be a dangerous accusation against them, but now accords them a fair bit of underworld respect. They lack any territory on the docks, though, and instead have to try to make money through extortion of poor refugees in the camps. They also clash with Hegemony militias, over issues of craftsmen refusing to pay protection money.

The Reds are the least political and least business-like of the bunch, but have a lot of traditional supporters. They currently seethe and even occasionally riot over the fact that a year has gone by without even a single chariot race. Now that shipping is restored, they think that the city 'government', such as it is, ought to buy some good horses and donate to the teams, as a reward for the loyalty and persistence of the people. The shibutuu (council) has other priorities for their limited resources, seeing as they are still at war with an overwhelming invader.

Sounds good. Is there any specific reason why this starts at a penalty?

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

I'm sure the player will argue that his Planner Talent really ought to include Psychology (Applied) if that turns out to be the most important skill for what he wanted his character to be good at, i.e. being a statesman, organiser and ruler. After all, most of what a ruler does, at any TL past the small clan system, is picking good subordinates.

If picking good subordinates is not a function of Administration or Leadership, that would make Administration and Leadership skills possessed by good middle-managers, not actually be the supreme head of the organisation itself, who'd instead rely nearly on Psychology (Applied). Which seems odd.

If you outclass the opposition that badly, in intelligence, organisation and battlefield command, I'd think that being only 20% of his TS would still leave you a comfortable margin of victory. Remember, the opposite Strategy rolls are only a part of the picture.

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

Personally I'd use Administration in the first place for organizational level staffing and Leadership for small team leaders able to choose teamates from a pool. Pyschology might be used as a complimentary skill, I suppose.

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

That does seem more in line with how GURPS usually stats managers, leaders and commanders.

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

Not much of a reason, but performing a "character evaluation" does seem tricky to me, especially when hiring for critical or semi-critical job positions.

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

Does that "vet" the potentials/applicants thoroughly, for problems and for complications?

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

Just a stray thought I had, that may be helpful to Icelander:

One can try to define a formal system of tiers of an administrative hierarchy, each higher level having more power and therefore needing to be more trustworthy. To borrow a term from a famous UK comedy show, the higher the administrative level we're talking about, the more important t is that the applicant is "sound". I use mostly military terms, but of course it applies to all kinds of organizations.

So:
Minister
General
Captain
Lieutenant
Soldier
Warrant Officer

Minister is the highest level. You're essentially looking for someone to take responsibility for an entire area of endavour, e.g. All Military Matters, or All Public Health.

General is nearly as high, that's a leader of a powerful organization or unit, with vast resources, typically commanding thousands of underlings.

Captain and Lieutenanet are lower sub-divisions of the same.

Soldier is the lowest level, the one who does the actual work, supervised by the higher ups. And of course of you're building a nation-state or leading a huge revolution, or whatever, then you'll be concerned with the higher levels, usually never further down than Captain, and let the leaders you've selected select their own underlings, whereas if you're operating on a much smaller scale, there'll probably be only 1-2 Captains, or perhaps none, and a dozen or so Lieutenants.

Warrant Officer is the odd man out, in that it's a highly skilled individual who has little or no administrative power. A field engineer, for instance, or a physician. They'll often work under a Captain or General, and may in fact be in charge of underlings such as craftsmen or labourers or nurses, but their poltiical and economic power is very limited in nature.

I'm not sure how useful that is. I see it as a "model of thought".

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

On a sufficiently good roll, sure. Acting skill might confound it, though, as Administration and Leadership are skill meant to select the best people for jobs assuming that personal conflicts, occasional dishonesty and the desire to appear better that one is all exist, but the people being chosen don't have perverse ulterior motives. People who pretend to be normal employee but are actually treacherous plants would probably still pass muster as 'able and competent' subordinates, unless a seperate roll to see through their act was made.

As such, Administration and Leadership are not the skills necessary for true counter-intelligence. For that, employ people with Accounting, Body Language, Current Affairs, Detect Lie, Interrogation, Intelligence Analysis, Psychology (Applied), Research, Shadowing and other skills.

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

What I have had trouble in GURPS is with having a big bunch of suitable skills that can be all useful for a certain task.
For current example finding a good hireling for a post. Lets say we have current affairs, streetwise etc. for knowledge of stories of feats to check out potential candidates. Then psychology and detect lies etc. for personality evaluation and truth-fullness, then your own skills in area to evaluate competence.
Do you fire off rolls for each steps sequentially? Then the more skills you have or use the LESS likely are you to succeed! Make them give bonuses/penalties to subsequent rolls? What if you skip one of them completely?
Or do you require a roll. vs. lowest of skills? What if you don't use then one of those? Coould still be possible to accomplish but at what penalty?
Lot of tasks in real world would require several skill rolls subsequently or concurrently but both rolling several rolls or rolling vs lowest have some troubles. One issue is that oftentimes there are are several options of using skills or not using and they are all penalized in different measures in real life. Sometimes it is impossible to do something without a complementary skill, sometimes it just makes it harder. Sometimes you need to finish something before other step, sometimes it just makes the other step more or less likely to succeed.
Can anybody point out book page numbers or discussions in forums etc. where all the multiple skill rolls and complementary skills etc. stuff has been dealt with.

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

On general GMing principles, situations will often arise where one out of several skills can be used, but with all of them not being equally suitable. If so, you simply give penalties to the unsuitable ones, say the most suitable one no penalty, a -2 penalty to a fairly suitable one, and a -4 penalty to one that's not very suitable.

Of course, in GURPS you may sometimes don't need to do that, because the skill defaults system already does it for you.

There were many oversights in the development process of GURPS 4th Edition, due to clique-based playtester selection, many missed oppurtunities, many worthwhile questions that never got asked, but the greatest of them all is quite probably that the core books do not contain any rules for Complementary Skill Rolls. You'll only find those in an obscure supplement called GURPS Action, published many, many years after the core books.

As for multiple skill rolls, you can't just make that optional on the character level and that's it. Either multiple skill rolls or roll-for-lowest-of are mandatory, forcing those who lack a skill to use default (and being unable to proceed if one of the required skills lacks a default), or else it is something that can be chosen in the given situation and which gives extra benefits on a success.

The later is a bit complicated, and seems to me better handled by some kind of generalized CSR rule, rather than by special case rules design or GM ad hockery. The former, multiple skills, is something I think works best if you opt for the roll-for-lowest-of out of 2 or 3 skills. More than 3 should only ever be used for a character who is trying to do something spectacularly difficult and highly unusual..

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

True, but note that Psychology (Applied) is a Hard skill that is apparently fairly rare. And success just means that you'll have a basic idea of the psychological suitability of the candidate, with increasing margin of success giving you more details. Of course, any attempt by the recruit to delibarately deceive* you will mean a Quick Contest instead of an unmodified roll.

Personally, I'd allow an Administration roll to evalulate their fit for the corporate culture in your organisation and Leadership (without Charisma bonuses) to evaluate their capabilities as part of a team of individuals. And IQ-based skill roll against their skills within their fields or specialities would always be good for estimating their expertise.

But I don't exactly know which if these skills ought to be most important in selecting a good team of subordinates. And I don't know how much time a character needs to make an unmodified skill roll. That's crucial for estimating how quickly an organisation can be put together.

For example, Just Hand Tiglath, Lady of Thunderous Vengeance, High Priestess of the Three Thunders, Atoner of the Highest, has recently dedicated herself to making the lot of the common people more tolerable. To that end, she has accepted a position where she uses her local contacts, formiddable personality and awesome (if not fearsome) reputation to hire workers for the public work projects of the PCs.

She has been the leader of a secret religious society for two decades and led a full-scale rebellion against Gilgeam, the former God-King of Unther. While she was born elsehwere in Unther, she has spent the past two years as one of the most respected people in the patch-work of factions that serves as the government of Free Unther in Messemprar.

Now she has abandoned her goddess and taken up the service of a new (slightly less terrifying) god, but is quite irregular in that she views her service as consisting of atoning for the ways the Assuran, and all other gods, have abused the trust of their followers and caused the common people to suffer. As such, she will use the powers granted to her to punish those who oppress or victimise people in the name of religion.

She will also use her strong will, authoritative personality and long experience of command to try to stop the famine and plagues of the refugee camps by repairing and rebuilding the sewers of Messemprar and the qanaths and irritation systems outside of it, not to mention improving the hygiene in other ways.

She is actually not a terribly inspiring and charismatic leader, given that people are more likely to fear her than follow her, but she is nevertheless frightfully competent and sensible. In game terms, she has high IQ, some Talents related to being strong-willed and forceful and lots of skill points in her fields, but neither Charisma, Voice nor Appearance (in fact, she's Ugly).

She has Administration -20, Diplomacy -12, Intimidation -25, Leadership -20, Politics -14, Psychology (Applied) -20 and Public Speaking -12. She doesn't have Engineering (Civil) or any advanced mathematical or technological skills, but she has Engineering (Combat) -13, Savoir-Faire (Military) -15, Operations -15, Soldier -15, Strategy -14 and Tactics -18.

What I'm wondering is how long would it take her, assuming that she was provided with good cash flow, but little assistance beyond a few crowd-control bodyguards** from the Artisans' militia and the Purple Reign marines, to organise effective public work projects from the huge (tens of thousands) refugee camps?

She'd have to find local engineers, local overseers, local accountants, local suppliers, etc.

And assuming that she was asked to keep an eye out for people who were not already serving one faction or another but would obviously make better soldiers than labourers, how rapidly could she spot people who'd make good recruits for a military force?

How long would it take her to have a training cadre set up that could handle providing good intensive training, assuming*** she was allowed to use all three hundred of the Artisan's militia and some ten marines?

And, assuming that the PCs were allowed to pick some five hundred already serving soldiers from their allies as a cadre, how long would it take her, the 300 militia and those ten marines to make a selection that would be mostly free of destructive factional allegiances and also result in some of the best and most mentally flexible soldiers?

She'd have the freedom to contact the Kehlynn Darkwater, the herald spymaster, and make use of his rumour mill for the duration. For the military aspects, she'd be working closely with Kyros Nikandros, the military chief-of-staff. On the other hand, in both cases, they'd be busy enough so that they could only give her projects maybe an hour or two per day.

She'd have an easy time arranging joint training with a couple of thousand friendly mercenaries, though, as well as battlewizards of the Northern Wizards and their mystic knights and militiamen. As long as she could arrange this herself or with no more assistance from Kyros and Kehlynn than represented by an hour or two per day, because they each had dozens of other projects going on, many of them vital for the success of her public work projects in the future.

Assuming that the other PCs, their naval organisation and their other mercenaries, were mostly busy during this time, what ought her projects look like after two months?

How many people has she selected as trusted lieutenants? How many labourers does she employ after two months of recruiting, selection, organisation and preparations (her finances would support 10,000 people at maximum)?

How many people has she recruited as soldiers?

*Beyond the largely unconscious deception that goes on in all social situation, as people try to minimise their flaws and appear in the most favourable light possible.
**Or overseers or trainers, depending on how she wanted to use them.
***And further assuming that she spent no more than 20% of her time on such military work (instead of more useful work) and that only because she knew that without victory in the war, none of this would matter.

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

I do envision Sagatafl's Psychology: Practical to be rare, at least in terms of high skill levels. Probably most who are social engineers, beyond the hobby state, have some of it, but usually only a little. In GURPS terms (and you know I hate most GURPS Talents, including this one) it would make sense to have Smooth Operator give a bonus to Psychology (Applied) if it doesn't already.

Well, yes, but I think the "risk" here is that you're only vetting for "squareness". For the person's ability to fit in and become a good drone. You risk overlooking instances of great potential, especially unusual potentail.

That's where I see Psychology: Practical (or (Applied)) as being of value: you'll actually get the gold nuggets. You'll get the rare individuals that TvTropes refers to as Bunny Ears Lawyers, whereas a "squareness"-based vetting/hiring doctrine, typical of 2dumb corporate culture", will turn away such individuals.

From that point of view, it makes perfect sense that Psychology (Applied) is a Hard skill. It'll be high-Difficulty to learn in Sagatafl too.

Based on what I've outlined above, it seem to me that it should be faster to do a quick superficial check for squareness (or "soundness"), than to do a more thorough check that gives you a non-zero probability of identifying and subsequently hiring the eccentric genius, rather than dismissing him because he doesn't fit your preconcieved and highly specific notion of what it is you're after.

Base time 1 hour for Administration. Not sure about Leadership since you've usually already had someone under your command for a while, so it makes more sense to use that skill to evaluate an already-existing underling for possible promotion, than to evaluate a stranger applicant. But say 1 hour again and giving a (potentially generous) bonus for being familiar with the applicant, having seen how he functions under pressure, how he copes with the novel and unusual.

Compared to that, I'd say 4 hours to use Psychology: Practical or (Applied). It's a more thorough check, looking deeper, actively trying to be aware of and work around one's biases. Trying to look beyond the bunny ears, to see if there is unusual ability, or exceptional potentail, in there.

In all cases the standard rushing-or-using-extra time options can be used, and I have a vague idea that some of that 1 or those 4 hours may involve reading a dossier or CV or a written application, or reading recomendations from previous employers, rather than all the time being spent on a person-to-person interview.

Although of course in GURPS, someone with Empathy will get more use of his bonus if he spends most of the time on the interview. IIRC the bonus is +3, so full bonus if 3/4 of the time is spent on the interview, 2/3 bonus if at least 1/2 of the time is spent on the interview, and 1/3 bonus if at least 1/4 of the time is spent on the interview.

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

Well, I was assuming that this was for people who one did not have time or ability to supervise directly: treasurers, garrison commanders, shop bosses, and so on. I would allow a roll against Leadership at a penalty for choosing people who will work under you, and lump in routine hiring (if the hiring process takes more than 5 minutes real time, it is not routine) under Administration.

I see Leadership as about getting subordinates who you know personally to do what you want, whereas Administration is for getting things done inside a bureaucracy, and Politics for persuading peers and the public. The core role of Psychology (Applied) is predicting people's behaviour, so that seems the most appropriate skill.

Do the rules for hiring people offer any advice? Regardless of the skill, I would give a penalty for the length of your contact with the candidate, and another based on the type of responsility. And it would be a Quick Contest against the candidate's subterfuge skil (Acting for interviews, Forgery for faking documents, something else for creating imaginary references).

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

Ideally, all of them ought to be applicable and it ought to be useful to have skill 15 in all three, rather than simply skill 18 in one of them.

GURPS instructs us that true experts ought to have broad skill lists, but the picayune 'benefit' of Complementary Skill use don't really support that. I think I'll call for rolls against all of them, with success and failure on any meaning different things.

The rules for hiring people in SE, like most rules written by Stoddard, are less than satisfactory. The text tells me nothing I didn't already know and if I try to use the mechanics, the results will rarely match the colour text or common sense.

Using those rules, a sufficiently skilled recruiter might turn up six veteran mounted archers per week he spends recruiting in an Icelandic village of fifty people, until, presumably, having signed up everyone in a couple of months. Increasing the population base of his recruiting area to 500,000 people will, however, merely result in a doubling of the pace of his recruiting.

Not exactly helpful.

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

It would make a tremendous amount of sense, but unfortunately, it doesn't. Which probably explain why the ultimate social engineer and smooth operator in my campaign has it at skill 12, while he has Fast-Talk -20, Propaganda -23, Politics -20 and Merchant -27.

Why would highly skilled administrators, managers and team leaders be screening for dumb criteria which don't actually affect the job performance?

I'll grant that adopting a criteria which screens out the occasional eccentric genius, but otherwise performs adequately, might make sense if it takes much less time to perform. But if not constrained by that, I think someone with high Administration or Leadership ought specifically be adept at innovative utilisation of manpower and talent.

Granted, the best recruiters have all of Administration, Detect Lies, Leadership, Psychology (Applied) and Teaching. But if you had to choose just one, it would have to be IQ-based Leadership or Administration, depending on the scale, I should think.

That's fair enough.

In general, for the PCs, assume that building teams, organisations and institutions quickly is more important than not missing the occasional nugget of quality.

On the other hand, some of their requirements call for very special skill sets, personalities, loyalties and experiences.

And, in any case, for the first weeks, recruiting people who can function as middle-managers and independent recruiters, would be the most crucial step.

Using those numbers, you could potentially evaluate and hire a lot of people in a month.

Probably the time should vary quite a bit by how simple or complex your skill and personality requirements are. Do you need to establish that someone would make a decent deck hand? Or whether he could be the chief architect and desginer over a public works project where he'd employ five thousand men, including a multinational team of inventors, engineers and other experts?

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

Those, 1 and 4 hours, are base times. You can use GURPS rules for rushing or taking extra time, and taking extra time is of course very valuable if it can mitigate intrinsic difficulty penalties.

Also, I think it's fairly realistic. I'm no expert on H.R., "human resources", but my guess would be that the reason modern day companies often have huge H.R. departments is in order to comply with huge amouts of laws, including anti-discrimination laws created to protect minority applicants. Well, that, and maybe also screening hundreds or sometimes thousands of written applicants, many of which may have been submitted simply to meet a quota from welfare recipients, without the sender actually being genuinely interested in the job, let alone meeting even basic qualifications.

But if the huge government-iduced workload is removed (not that I don't sympathize with attempts to protect vulnerable individuals against discrimination and bias), and if there's no flood of perfunctionary "welfare requirements" applications, then I don't see why a qualified H.R. admin can't screen 25-30 applicants per week, on a 40-day work week.

Yes, of course.

I read a BBC news article a day or two ago, about the transition in the UK from nepotism to merit-based hiring (they called it meritocracy, but I use that word in a different sens), inspired by the Confucian Chinese examination system.

That's hiring on the basis of intelligence tests, in a roundabout way (where instead of testing IQ directly, they test whether you've graduaded college), and looks a lot nicer than nepotism, but I do think nepotism may have a little merit. If you've hired one really skilled engineer or physician, you might be able to ask him for recommendations about who else to hire, in his field (just keep in mind that Albert would never recommend Bob, and vice versa).

The article also touched upon subjects such as loyalty and trust. If you hire your friend's nephew, and your friend knows about it, then there's a lot of pressure on the nephew to stay loyal. If he screws up, or even more so if he screws you, it'll reflect badly on his entire clan.

GURPS core already has a Loyalty score concept, intended to be used for hirelings, although much isn't done with it. And I haven't read SE closely so I can't say if the Loyalty rules are expanded on there. But even as just a basic stat, it's something you can roll for during difficult time, and your chose of hiring procedure can also skew the Loyalty tendence of your hirelings. Upwards or downwards. For instance, if you cast spells on the applicants, that may have an offputting effect.

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

Also, it's very probable that a lot of things done in real life are done at +2 to +5 for Taking Extra Time, simply because the consequence of failure are thought to outweigh the costs of extra labour.

Hiring people who will have a lot of responsibility seems like it would be one of those things.

Of course, the particular situation of the PCs and their allies is that they'll see a flood of 'applicants'* who are desperate to escape refugee camps or at least improve their position to something approximating their pre-war one.

There's a huge horde of qualified (mostly slave) scribes, accountants, administrators, translators, artists, servants, scholars, teachers and even spies and assassins out there, who are out of a job because their noble masters are dead, fled or at the very least in such straitened circumstances that they've had to leave slaves with valuable-but-not-immediately-so skills to fend for themselves.

For the purposes of my campaign, I want to see the PCs have established functioning institutions and organisations after the ca 2 month break in our game. We'd all like to see emerging military units develop their own traditions and espirit d' corps, the new type of adventures made possible by capable bureaucrats taking over boring jobs, an intelligence service with all the concomitant adventure possibilities, etc.

I just want to avoid having everything happen faster than plausibility allows. Yes, the PCs and their allies are probably as good as any empire-builders in history and in terms of finance, they may be better. And they have immense reserves of wealth, courtesy of some distinctly non-real adventuring and dragon hoards and such.

But I still want the base rules that they use to be realistic, so that their superiority is the result of having higher skills than most everyone else and certain Advantages that place them ahead, not of the base rules being skewed and alllowing everyone weird results.

Since the PCs and their allies have high enough skill to be able to afford not to use Take Extra Time, unlike most real administrators, I guess that it wouldn't be implausible, at least not to you, if the first week resulted in them hiring several dozen people who can, in turn, act as interviewers and recruiters.

So, after a month, it would make sense that they'd have thousands of employees. And in two months, as much as they'd like.

Of course, given security considerations, there would be a bottleneck for trusted employees.

*More like supplicants, in that they'll turn up and beg for alms, jobs, loans, favours, consideration for family members, etc.

Oh, yes. Hiring on the basis of kinship and clan ties will be very common for the PCs. They'd very much like to be able to hire entire clans for warfare, for example.

The potential off-putting effect is why such spells are used by hidden wizards who try to keep it a secret that they screen people at all. Only if they get a sense that something is wrong will they cast spells directly on applicants, instead of using passive spell effects.

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

Well, that's the other side of the coin. GURPS (like Sagatafl) has a rules option for how you can rush an activity, performing it faster than normal in exchange for a penalty to effective skill. I don't recall GURPS exact rules for it, but they struck me as decent.

A highly qualified screener could use those rules to quick-screen a lot of people, e.g. by working 4 times faster than normal, and still be able to roll at a decent effective skill. He'd be doing that as a 1st-layer-process, to screen out the clearly unsuitable, those who lie about their qualifications, those with stark disabilities, or with serious mental problems (ones that are far worse than the wearing of bunny ears). Then everyone who didn't get weeded out can be made subject to a 2nd screening process.

Or perhaps a 2nd process at normal speed (no modifier) to weed out even more, or to "sort" those off to lesser jobs, designated as "usable but not gold", and finally a 3rd process done using the taking-extra-time rules to find your generals, your university headmaster, your chief physician, and so forth.

If the PCs in your campaign are going to hire NPCs to take over the hiring process, though, there'll need to be laid down some guidelines, for each kind of hiring process. Maybe the spy service hiring process is quite tolerant of eccentricities, while the military engineering department only wants absolutely square pegs? Although I'm not sure how easy it is for the PCs to influence their H.R. underlings, except perhaps by setting an early precedent.

Well, that's not my sort of campaign. While I have an interest in something a bit like that, as seen in the threda over i Roleplaying some months ago, about economic simulation, my intersted would be in a lower level of detail, where most such subordinate NPCs are defined by perhaps only two values, their Primary Skill and the Loyalty.

Going for a much higher level of detail, I think you'll end up with a hierarchy of definedness, where the top NPCs have full character sheets, at one end, and the NPCs who just barely have names have very sketchy character sheets, probably with intermediate 1-3 tiers of decreasing detail.

Top recruiter NPCs can bring in more manpower faster, or bring in better manpower. I don't actually think GURPS CPs are ideally suited for that (nor are Sagatafl's GPs), but as a better-than-nothing solution, you could define that a recruiter at skill level X, working full-time (45-60'ish hours/week in a medieval setting), can bring in Y CP per week, that Skill level X+1 can bring in Y+Z CP/week, Skill level X+2 can bring in Y+2X CP/week, and so forth.

You'd be better off devising some simple point buy system specialized for this purpose, I think, and including disads that will have to be accepted, because they weren't seen as being partiularly harmful during the vetting process, or weren't discovered during the vetting process, and because flavourful underlings are more fun than problem-free drones.

I don't know how much historicity you want to have in your campaign. Maybe not much. But if you do, it was often extremely difficult to fire someone, in many medieval or iron age cultures. Jobs were usually undersood as being for life, at least at court and in rural settings, although not so much in towns and cities. Even if it is possible to fire someone, it's not an every day occurence, it's hard to get a new job without good references, and many might view it as a personal insult. Or even as an insult to the clan, as in a blood feud that'll last for many generations.

On the other hand, people who have hard time fitting in, people who have high ability but als features (such as certain disads) that make potential employees reluctant to hire them, can sometimes react very positively to actually being given a chance, as in a much-higher-than-usual Loyalty score.

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

Those rules might be legacy material from 3rd Editon. I remember there were some finding-hirelings rules, probably in GURPS Basic 3rd Edition Revised. Maybe that material was just copied over, without any revision or scrutiny?

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

What you'll have to do is come up with some system to define how rare different tiers of hirelings are in in-world terms. Or not necessarily a system, you could wing it, but I doubt you'd want that.

Sagatafl has the benefit that a lot of stuff is nailed down, as Human biology. Charisma 4, 1 step above average, is defined as being 1 standard deviation above average, thus roughly 1-in-6 has that. Intelligence 4 is likewise +1 SD, and since the two don't correlate (generally, attributes don't correlate), you can just multiply the fraction, and find that 1/6 times 1/6 = 1/36 of the (healthy and adult) population has both Intelligence 4 and Charisma 4. So if that's all you want, your "recruitment base" is roughly 3% of the population. That's extremely doable, although of course since skills start at zero in Sagatafl, most of those 3% you can dig up won't have the skills you want at all, although they'll be trainable.

If you want something rarer, like Will 4, Charisma 5 and Intelligence 6, that's 1/6 times 1/44 times 1/700 = roughly 185k. So in a population of 50k healthy adults, you can find about 1.3k of the first type and you have a roughly 1/3.5 chance of finding one of the second kind (or 1/7 if you absolutely want a man, or absolutely want a woman). But if you do, you can train him to be your spymaster.

Likewise, educations can be measured in Skill Points. An apprenticeship as a craftsman can be defined as a certain number of Skill Points, derived from the quality and amount of teaching, and the length of it. A university education likewise. And those, and other "training regimes", can then be assigned rarities. Although at that point you're going to have to make some assumptions about the extent to which people gravitate towards apprenticeships, educations and professions that they are suitable for. Clearly it's greater than 0. I think it's quite large, but you as the builder of your world may think differently.

Potentially relevant disabilities can also be assigned demographic occurences, e.g. 1/20 might be Hard of Hearing (thus 19/20 are not Hard of Hearing), so that even if you go looking for NPCs with high Perception and high Thinking Speed, you'll have to weed away 5% of those for not being good body guards or good scouts.

Sagatafl isn't published yet, so you can't crib off the material there.

But you can try to apply the same method to GURPS. It's a big problem that DX and IQ are trainable, and you're going to have to cope with Talents too. Presumably for every NPC who has IQ 12, there's at least a dozen with IQ 11 and 1 level of a Talent. Quite possibly 2 or 3 with IQ 11 and 1 level of a Talent that almost completely fits what you're looking for, so that in your eyes, the IQ 11+1 guy is no less desirable than the IQ 12 guy (or is actually more desirable, if you take the learning speed bonus from Talent into account).

So you're going to have to nail down some demographics. How many in the setting are IQ X? DX Y? IQ X and DX Y? How common are Talents? How often are people much more Perceptive or much more Strong-Willed than their IQ? How often are they much more Manually Dextrous than their DX?

Also with skill levels. Since attributes are trainable, you can't just say that an apprenticeship as a craftsman is X CP while an apprenticeship under an engineer is Y CP. But you can try to nail down some definitions anyway. Skill 11 for a freshly graduaded journeyman, 13 for a craftsman qualified as master, 15 for a "true" master, and so forth. Or whatever fits. you know GURPS better than I do.

There's a lot of questions you'll have to deal with. And you'll have to wing a lot of figures.

But once you have those figures, you can start applying them to your recruitment base, divide the size of the recruitment base by the occurence, e.g. if the grade of metal you're digging for is 1-out-of-5k, then 5k is your divisor.

Characters can't actually see the stats, of course. Sagatafl is coarsegrained enough that it makes sense to treat attribute X and attribute X+1, or skill Y and skill Y+1, as being clearly observably different. GURPS is about twice as fine-grained, so that may or may not affect in-character speech.

A bigger problem, for either system, is that when you're looking for a top official, such as your spymaster, you're rarely looking for a very particular combination of traits. Int 6 Per 5 Will 4 might be what you have in mind, but what if you find a guy who's Int 5 Per 7 Will 7? some recruiters do have a very rigid idea of what they're looking for, and for low level hirelings, like common soldiers or workers, I think it's best to not simulate in detail, but for top level functionaries, overly rigid recruitment targets are harmful. I hope that's obvious.

I don't have much of an idea for how I'd cope with that.

In a Sagatafl campaign I might just show the player of the recruiting character half a dozen sketchy character sheets, showing relevant attributes, sub-attributes and skills, and asking which ones the player's character wants to hire, cautioning that there may be hidden information (disads, e.g.) and that what's shown reflects the player's character's impression of the NPC, rather than what the NPC is truly like.

For GURPS, you could do much the same, but state that all skill values are rounded down to the nearest even number, e.g. Intelligence Analysis 13 becomes 12, and so forth, just for the sake of simplicity. You might also want to conceal attribute values, or just give a very coarse-grained indication of "average", "above average", "high" and "impressive" (or just rounded down to nearest even number, again). And you're going to have to decide how to indicate Talents. I'd suggest you can safely neglect to indicate single-level Talents, but I don't currently have a recommendation for what to do with potential hirelings who have multiple levels of Talents.

Another option, in GURPS, is to define most potentail hirelings by just one attribute, along with relevant skills. In most cases, it's a mental job or a physical job, so you define only IQ or only DX, some cases adding in all levels of Talent if the Talent is strongly relevant to the job. Some jobs, such as your court assassin, require both, in which case you define both. In many cases, HT and ST are irrelevant. Fit/VF can be subsumed into HT, showing a higher HT, or you can re-name it as Constitution to make it clear it's a combination trait that takes into account HT and Fit and perhaps also Extra Fatigue.

Or you can combine ST and HT and a lot of physical advantages into a single simplified Physicality attribute. I do a bit of that in Sagatafl, where 9 Primary Attributes, many sub-Attributes, and several Secondary Attributes are simplified into Body, Mind and Spirit stats, for use in some cases when simulating NPCs that aren't fully "individualized".

Regardless of system, you also need a way of dealing with potentail hirelings who far exceed what is being asked for. If you're looking for a guy with Charisma 4 and Intelligence 4, but you find one with Charisma 7 and Intelligence 6 and Dexterity 6, what do you do? If you offer him the pay (or, more medieval-appropriate, the supported-lifestyle) that you had in mind for the run-of-the-mill 4/4 guy, the 7/6/6 guy might take that as a strong personal insult, or he might say yes to the job but see it as a temporary thing, and spend a lot of time looking for a better paying job, one that better suits his personal qualities. Or maybe he doesn't give a hoot about pay/lifestyle as long as he's not starving, but he's dangerously likely to get bored if you only or mostly give him routine tasks, tasks suitable for a 4/4 kind of guy, but trivially easy for a 7/6/6 person?

To be continued...

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

... continued from previous post

Anyway, for starters, try to think in terms of demographics. How rare is that which the PC is looking for?

How rare are those veteran mounted archers?

You might be able to do it in stages, thinking in terms of GURPS' "Lens" concept.

You start with "archer" (as that's the "Template", rather than being a "Lens"). How rare is that?

X?

Okay. Next you apply the "mounted" Lens. How rare are archers who are skilled enough to quality as "mounted"?

Y?

Okay. Finally you apply the "veteran" Lens. How rare are mounted archers who have achieved veteranhood?

Z?

Okay. What's your recruitment base?

W?

Okay. Then your answer is:

W/(X*Y*Z)

That's how many potential recruits there are. You're not going to get 100% of them, but with skill, persistence and offers of generous pay (or support for an attractive Cost-of-Living) you can get close to it.

At some point, you might get fed up with the fiddly details, and just nail down some very coarsegrained tiers, like 1-in-20, in-in-400, one-in-8000, one-in-160k and one-in-3.2M, and then whenever one of the PCs wants to hire an underling, you estimate which "tier" the underling alls into, depending on how outrageous the PC's demands are.

"Dude, you're asking for a lot. What you want is a six-in-a-milion. I'm not saying you can't find one of those, I'm not saying it's completely pointless to roll for it, but if you lower your standards, maybe if you say you might be willing to compromise [here] and also compromise at least slightly [here], I'll lower it to the 1-in-8-thousand grade, which is much more doable. Yes or no?"

Sagatafl has formal area designations, Village, Town, City, Megapolis, et cetera, but they don't correspond to population sizes (although if you divide them up into urban and rural, and include Tech Level, then they could be used like that). You could define a scale of population size categories, or just use GURPS PR system, which I understand is logarithmic or something. Each time PR goes up by 1, the recruitment bases increases by a factor of 10.

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

They are simple, but perhaps not ideal. A flat -1 per -10% of time taken. Which is very much not worth it for -1 to -4 or so, prohibitively difficult at -5 to -8 or so, but for people who can afford the penalty, awesome in that perfoming at -9 is twice as fast as -8 and five times as fast as -5. And, of course, -10 is effectively instant, i.e. probably a minute or so in this case.

All in all, much more sensible to use the base time as the fastest their recruiters are prepared to work. That's already a huge speed increase over the Take Extra Time process that's probably standard in normal corporate recruiting.

Or, you know, hire four times as many 'ordinary' screeners to perform the first layer of the process as you have highly qualified people to do the second layer. People with Administration -12 are probably much more than four times as common, not to mention much cheaper, as those with Administration -19 to -20.

Of course, given that Administration -12 people probably prefer to use Take Extra Time to get to at least skill 14 and more likely skill 16 for important recruits, they'll take between x4 to x15 base time for a standard recruiting process. From that point of view, being four times faster than standard means having Administration -14 instead of Administration -12.

Instead of using Take Extra Time for the top jobs, potential hires for them are passed on to one or more of Ankhapet (Administration -19, Intelligence Analysis -16, IQ-based Leadership -17, Psychology (Applied) -14, Teaching -16), Tiglath (Administration -20, Area Knowledge (local) -14, Current Affairs (local) -14, Detect Lie -20, Interrogation -23, Intimidation -25, Leadership -20, Psychology (Applied) -20, Teaching -20), Kyros (Administration (Military) -18, Intelligence Analysis (Military) -18, Leadership -18, Teaching -16), Kehlynn (Administration -18, Current Affairs (Headline News) -14, Current Affairs (People) -15, Current Affairs (Politics) -20, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -19, Psychology (Applied) -15, Teaching -15) or Murlak (Administration -26, Current Affairs (Business) -16, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -14, Leadership -16, Merchant -27 and Psychology (Applied) -17*).

The political implications of the hire of high officials are dealth with by Politics -20 (Ankhapet), -20 (Murlak) and -21 (Kehlynn). And the recruiting campaigns are masterminded by Propaganda -17 (Ankhapet), -19 (Kehlynn) and -23 (Murlak).

Any hints of potential disloyalty, plants or other deception is ferreted out by Waelstar (Administration -14, Area Knowledge (local) -16, Current Affairs (local) -16, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -15, Interrogation -17, Lip Reading -17, Observation -19, Pscyhology (Applied) -12, Search -17, Shadowing -19, Streetwise -18, Urban Survival -19) and his small band of loyal spies.

Waelstar (Magery 2, magical espionage spells at 13-15), Kehlynn (Magery 3, wide range of spells at 15) and a small number of other trusted mages (with up to Magery 3), as well as mages from a firmly allied** faction who are even more powerful (up to Magery 5 and skill 22 with spells) will also screen applicants in potentially dangerous positions of trust, by casting passive detection spells from hiding and occasionally even interrogating them actively with magic, should cause be given.

The actual interrogator, as opposed to the spellcaster, in such interviews is usually either Waelstar (for inner company issues) or Tiglath (for local political issues). Should they be otherwise occupied (common for Tiglath), there are also several military men among the semi-retired veterans who provide headquarter security who have Interrogation -12 to -15.

*I decided that Smooth Operator ought to apply to it.
**For recruits to positions up to a certain level of trust.

They'll want to hire NPCs to take over the hiring of labourers, at the very least. And I doubt they want to actually hire every scribe, craftsman, overseer, servant or guard themselves, either.

For the fleet, naval captains and their officers manage the recruiting of new sailors for their crews, to make good losses. Several of the newest captains will be assigned a newly captured ship with a skeleton crew and a squad or two of marines and told to sail to an allied city with a decent population of sailors* and assemble a crew. They'll offer very good wages and benefits, as well as having handbills and pre-written town crier messages prepared by someone with Propaganda 19+.

The soldiers are already recruited by NPCs, very carefully chosen and firmly loyal for a long time, but I imagine that since the PCs want to expand locally, they'll have to have more than one or two recruiters on site.

Tiglath can choose a few people to recruit soldiers, I imagine.

In the two months I'm 'fast-forwarding' over, I'm trying to determine how far along the local recruitment of soldiers will come.

*The city where the fleet is based mostly lacks sail-handlers for the kind of advanced rigging the PCs are using. In game terms, TL2 to TL3 ships are what what most of the locals use while they are using firmly TL4 ships and rigging, with early TL5 (not too different from TL4) in prototype use.


[rest of post answered later]

What the PCs want, in terms of military recruits
 

What the PCs want in military terms

I'm fast-forwarding the time line in the campaign ca two months. Prior to that, we've dealt with a lot of administrative, training, financial and organisational issues by making a few skill rolls and a few statements of intent, without establishing precise details, which is what I'm doing now.

Ankhapet's player has stated that he is willing to find a way to pay for anything up to a legion of locals. He did not specify the size of 'legion', a very storied term with very different meanings depending on eras. But I know that he's much more interested in quality than quantity, seeing as they aim to move their soldiers around on ships and boats and anything over a few thousand would introduce terrible supply problems as soon as they left the coast.

First and foremost, Ankhapet needs someone trained in the three hundred new wheellock carbines that the PCs now own from converting their prototype matchlocks, to supplement the 300 magelock calivermen they already have. These may or may not be the same soldiers as the ones he wants chosen for loyalty and trained as 'military police', i.e. enforcers of discipline, military law and good order.

For that role, I was thinking that the 300 Artisans' militia were perfect, as they were already experienced 'cops', peacekeepers, security forces and barricade fighters, who had also been through two sieges and even a field battle, fighting as spear-armed militia infantry. And they've been training for sixty days in the service of the PCs even before this two month period, without us having established in what, and given the high organisational skills of the PCs and their allies, it makes sense to say that they were training with a few spare carbines as well as mockups of them.

Aside from these three hundred people whom the PCs have already secured, most males with any kind of military aptitude would already be conscripted into the armed forces of various factions. This includes many slaves, but to a lesser degree than free men. Slaves, however, other than gladiators and slave-guards, both of whom are already conscripted, are very unlikely to have weapon skills, Soldier or other useful skill sets for military recruits.

So the potential recruits would be those from factions who don't have conscription and people newly arrived, as refugees. That would include a lot of rural people who were too far away (or too valuable as food providers) during the winter to bother, but are now starting to arrive near the city bringing the first gleanings of the spring harvest to sell.

Given that there are a lot of shepherds in the surrounding countryside, it makes sense that slingers would be easy to obtain. They might not have Soldier, but they can have Sling -12+, Survival (Plains and/or Mountain) -12+ and even Camouflage, Stealth and Observation, given how many 'shepherds' have turned to banditry (or just have to defend themselves from said bandits).

Ankhapet is interested in a unit of fustibali (staff-slingers) who could deploy incendiary or explosive alchemical grenades. He also wants scouts and skirmishers, but they have to be very elite ones, to make it worth carrying them on ships, since they take up almost as much volume as the discplined heavy infantry that they could carry instead.

He's arranged for being allowed to select 500 prime veterans from among the tens of thousands of armed men under the remnants of the army high command of the former regime. This cost him a lot of money, but is worth it to him.

He also has access to some 3,000 volunteers from Lord Dama's Non-slaves* and their allies of the White faction of chariot-fans, of whom around 500 from Lord Dama's Non-slaves are not only actually very dangerous street-fighters, but also fight in units and appear to obey military discipline**, or at least their own version of it. There are maybe 200-500 of the others who might do in a fight, being murderous thugs who have fought street-to-street as the city was invaded, as well as fighting for territory, but their discipline is non-existent from a military point of view.

One thing that Ankhapet wants to do is circumvent the problem of the best male recruits being already serving someone else is to recruit women. Sure, they are much less likely to have the necessary skills and Attributes (primarily ST), but when you're recruiting from a pool of 1-2 million people (depending on how fast word spreads), even 1% of 1% of the abnormally strong, aggressive and otherwise qualified is still a number you notice. And it's not as if their other career prospects are bright.

Added to which, many shepherd women will already have at least Sling and Survival, with scouting skills not being impossible. Some might have hung around with bandit groups or fought as partisans.

In two months, what what is plausible?

How far along will the Artisans' militia be, assuming that they are been trained as TL4 line infantry, in addition to being trained as staff-wielding security and police? With sixty days of training in unit tactics and service culture of Purple Reign having preceded these two months and them being chosen, for quality and loyalty, from among a very experienced militia already.

What kind of units could the 500 prime veterans, 500 disciplined street fighters and 500 undisciplined street fighters be formed into? At least the veterans would be used as a cadre for recruits, but it might make sense to keep the street fighters together and have them be in the front lines when the PCs carry out their insane scheme of landing on the docks of a fortified city and taking it.

How many other recruits are plausible? And which of these would be useful after only a month or two of training?***

How many women who could make prime soldiers would have been gathered in that time? Would any of them be useful right now? As fustibali, perhaps, assuming they already had Sling -12+ and just had to learn Soldier (and that only the best, most intelligent and adaptable women were accepted, since there were so many potential recruits there)?

*Revolutionary anti-slavery organisation, mostly consisting of former slaves, who now rule most of the docks as a mafia-like organisation.
**Ex-gladiators or trained by ex-gladiators, mostly. Also have the luxury of having been shaped as fighting organisation by 20 'NCOs'/underbosses who are military veterans trained by a gifted general, with fifteen years of hard service behind them.
***Meaning that they already were veterans or at least bandits (or shepherds defending from bandits) with most of the required skills already.

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

That might explain GURPS Basic Set. For GURPS Social Engineering, I would have expected that the fundamental paradigms of the rules were examined before they were built upon and that actually useful addition rules were added.

As it stands, those rules might do for one PC who wants to find one* more-or-less common hireling in a setting and locale where they might be more-or-less available. They are not generic and universal and they don't lend themselves well to other situations.

It wouldn't have been all that hard to add in some guidelines for modifying the rolls for rarity of skills sets, local culture, job market, etc. Instead, the rules for hirelings are more or less a copy paste of the simplistic Basic Set chapter.

*Though they include rules for seeking more than one hireling at a time, those rules are not good ones. Given that for a skilled recruiter, raising your pool of applicants by four orders of magnitude reslts in a doubling of the recruitment rate, something has to be off.

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

The whole point of playing that sort of thing out in an RPG is that everyone is people, not merely statistics, and that PCs can get to know characters who range from their top military or civilian executies down to their kitchen help or a common soldier whose life they save (or vice versa).

A great majority of NPC retainers have only a single skill score (or even just a descriptior, such as 'competent') as their stats. But I'm always trying to provide some way for the PCs to notice and remember them. Whether that's personality, a catchphrase, relationship with someone they already know, etc.

Even very important NPCs are usually only 'statted' to the extent that it has become necessary to nail down one or more of their skills or attributes for some reason, but may have detailed descriptions, personalities, history, lists of relationships, goals, etc. Mostly in my head, of course, but I try to keep notes.

While it may on occasion prohibit serving in certain roles, Disadvantages like Broadminded, Charitable, Code of Honour, Honesty, Selfless, Sense of Duty (friends, comrades-in-arms, anything allied to the PCs), Truthfulness, Workaholic and Xenophilia are usually a net benefit. So point values are more or less meaningless.

The campaign isn't historical, but as historical analogies, the PCs might be viewed as the Dutch East India Company, coming from a more-or-less Dutch 17th-18th century culture. The local culture would be an ahistorical Mesopotemian (Sumer-Akkadian) analogue that never fell, but instead conquered the Greek world and reached Byzantine/Ottoman (Ottoman in feel, TL2-3 in most actual technology) levels of technology and organisation, but has now lost all of its colonies and is nothing but the ruins of a polity now, about a TL behind the cutting-edge.

The PCs are counting on that happening, given their high Reputations, Status and often good Charisma and Leadership scores. They are shamelessly targeting disenfranchised groups under the prior regime as well as victims of the wars, giving them new opportunities and judging them based on merit instead of birth.

This includes former slaves, with the PCs having decided to cast themselves as liberators and opponents of slavery. This is from ideological motives in many cases, but for at least three of them, it is to some extent purely guided by their assessment that the old system of slavery, serfdom and a privileged clerical and noble class cannot survive the war and that it is better to be on the forefront of social change than fight it.*

*High Politics and Propaganda skill.

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.

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

The early levels are generous compared to the existing system, in that it no longer requires being twice as good to work slightly faster. The later levels are actually restrictive compared to the existing system, in that instead of a -1 serving to halve the time required at the last levels for the RAW, it requires a -2 to halve the time at all levels.

It seems off to me that with the same level of quality of work, a skill 12 character is slightly faster than a skill 10 character (+25% speed), but a skill 19 character will be twice as fast as a skill 18 one.

Also, a -2 penalty is huge for regular people. A -5 penalty makes something more or less impossible at normal human skill levels. Do you really think that being twice as fast a worker than someone else requires skill 15 to his skill 10?

I find it much more plausible that this is the difference between an expert of skill 14 and a normal professional at skill 12.

I'm not familiar with a time-reduction Technique, so if you know where I'd find it, please share. As for Efficient, I'm not sure I would change it. A lot of Perks are extremely useful for sedentary non-adventuring types, but still only cost 1 point.

I don't see that doubling the output of a character for a single skill is any more or less unbalancing than having him get a +N to most grappling rolls for Power Grappling or get a +5 to all skill rolls within his narrow professional niche for Hyperspecialisation.

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

Assuming that an untrained person rolls IQ-5, or roughly 5, while a professional beginner rolls at IQ+0, or 10ish, the comparison seems okay - a beginner can be twice as fast as someone who's not trained. Seems okayish. Of course realistically, each task has its own curve of skill and time modifiers, but we can't afford that.

I think the Technique can be found under the hood of some DF supplement. As for Efficient, that makes me want to take it much more eagerly for many adventurish skills.

Speaking of Hyperspecialisation, people seem leery of it even when it is a specialisation in a single person for a skill which can be used on anyone (e.g. Psychology).

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

Thanks! But why not expand the concept to cover the other side of the zero, the taking-extra-time choice, as well? Or are you happy with those rules?

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

No, you can't extend this down to untrained people, because both by the rules and realistically, they simply can't do as good a job as professionals. By taking a lot more time to do their work, they might reach 'okay' levels of quality, but that's not the same as being able to do as well as someone who knows the skill, but merely operating at half the speed.

I was assuming a fairly easy job, above, so that you'd get a TDM of ca +4 to +5 and you'd need 14+ effective skill so that you were working steadily and not failing a significant percentage of the time. This allows anyone better than a beginner (skill 10) to use the rules for reducing the Time Spent. Anyone with less than skill 10 can't really do that, because that would mean failing far too often. With skill 5, forget about it.

Realistically, someone who knows how to type can type far more than twice as fast than someone who has no idea how to do it. And a really good typist really can get speeds that are more than twice as fast as normal person, even if that person can be assumed to have a skill which includes typing at TL8 at professional levels. The same applies for sewing, carpentry and pretty much any skill where progress can easily be measured in how much you accomplish over time.

I get that a lot of this will be lower skill people spending twice as long or even thirty times as long as they really have to on tasks in order to justify a bonus of +1 to +5. But it seems odd to me that penalties stack up so much faster than bonues at the first few levels of trying to improve speed and then, instead of further speed increases being progressively more difficult to achieve, they get easier again.

The simplistic rule for -1 for every -10% yields results that don't seem to match real-world experience and it doesn't fit very well with the scaling of the rest of the system either. If -2 to skill means a doubling of speed or distance with anything else, why does it only mean a +25% increase of working speed at normal human levels of skill? And why does it suddenly go up to +100% working speed at top human skill levels?

Is the difference between the two best people at their craft huge and easily noticable even by amateurs, but the difference between a journeyman (skill 12) and a master (skill 14+) not really worth measuring? I think that goes against how skill levels are defined in GURPS.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a feature, not a bug. Efficient, as it stands, is not worth 1 point. Going from 60 seconds to 48 seconds for a First-Aid attempt, for example, does not usually make any practical difference in most adventuring situations. In both cases, you can't do it in combat, but you can do it afterwards.

I don't think it's unbalancing or out of tune with what many other Perks do to allow someone with Efficient to go from 60 seconds to 30 seconds instead. At that point, it starts to be noticable, which is good. If no one ever notices a character has a given trait, that trait doesn't serve much of a purpose.

Well, I'm not those people. I think Hyperspecialisation for Pyschology on a single person is perfectly reasonable.

Potentially useful? Sure. Why else would someone take a Perk? But there are Perks that are much more useful to typical adventurers, such as Power Grappling, Strongarm or Weapon Adaptation.

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

I'm happy with those rules. They reflect the fairly realistic idea that you rapidly run into diminishing returns when you spend more time tinkering with a task in order to do the absolute best you can. You can do it, of course, but it's not all that efficient and not supposed to be.

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

So far throughout this half-year, I've seen opportunities where it would be useful for:

• Propaganda and Expert Skill;
• Psychology;
• Research and/or Intelligence Analysis;
• Computer Hacking, Operation and/or Programming;
• Interrogation;
• Forensics;
• Mechanic and Electronics Repair.

The only reason I haven't took it for my character's skills is that my concept was IQ- and Talent-driven, with too little points spent on skills (thus it's to early to invest in such Techniques or Perks).

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

Note, I want Efficient to be useful for such skills and to be competative with other traits when it comes to spending points.

But in the RAW, particularly if you go by the written text and rule that it only helps when you perform a task at 80% speed (and not if you want to reduce it more), it's not worth taking. If you extend it to removing -2 from all haste penalties, it's worth it, but only if your character regularly expects to perform tasks at -50% or faster and has the skill for that. That is, only if he has skills near the human maximum.

It's generally not worth it in a realistic campaign to take a trait which helps you with removing -10% or -20% of the time requirements, because those penalties are so steep to beging with that no realistic character will attempt them.

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

"This lets you ignore up to -2 for haste;"
I read it as providing a compensation of two levels for rushed tasks, whether this is a task rushed by -9 or by -0.
I'm considering buying it if I eventually reach a state of having 4+ points in appropriate skills.

Cutting your work time by 20% under most circumstances (since, e.g., GMs are frequently leery of spending 30-120 hours and getting +5 to Psychology) is a non-ignorable benefit for [1].
Spending -50% time is temptation enough to buy it for any sort of skill where the outcome depends only on you - you get the same output through ½ the workhours! At this point, it would become a temptation for Caine to abandon his work as a negotiator/analyst and become a freelance analyst only, despite lower skill level, as it would let him do twice the jobs with only a 10-20% reduction in salary per job done.

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

I read it that way too, because the other interprentation would make it nigh-useless, but I note that 'ignore up to -2', strictly speaking, means that you can ignore any penalty of -2 or less, but it has no effect on any higher penalty.

But that's a matter of unclear wording. I'm quite sure it's not meant to be that useless.

Perks are supposed to give benefits. Keep in mind, though, that this is a benefit which effectively grants +2 to a single skill in certain, usually non-adventuring, situations. As such, it's pretty much a textbook Perk.

The fact that it would really help his career does not make it too good to be a Perk. After all, Hyperspecialisation can be the foundation for a lucrative career in a specialised field, but it's not worth multiple points because points measure adventuring utility.

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

I disagree that it's a mostly non-adventuring purpose. IMO it's actually quite useful under adventuring conditions, since that is when you're often forced to take haste penalties.

Hmm. Do you think [1] is a fair cost for +5 to Job Rolls in a given career? Because +5 to Job Rolls is either a boost of a promotion chance (assuming below-16 non-freelancer) or a +50% earning potential (any freelancer).

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

I don't object that it can be useful. I just think that by the RAW, it's very rarely worth it to accept massive penalties for a modest improvement in haste. And when you actually start to see real improvements in speed, i.e. after -5 and particularly after -8, well, that's just outside the skill range seen in most realistic characters. When performing a challenging feat under adventuring conditions, very few characters can afford a further -5 or -8 penalty.

Accepting a skill penalty for haste is both dramatic and interesting and I wish to encourage it in my campaigns. But a flat -10% per -1 is not a good way to do so. Nor does it appear to reflect reality, at least not my experience of it.

In my experience, having higher skill than someone allows you to do the same thing much faster, not merely +11% or +25% faster. The difference between skill 12 and skill 14 is meant to be journeyman and master. That's not reflected by the master being able to work 25% faster. That's just the difference between two journemen with a modicum of variation in intelligence or diligence, in GURPS terms, maybe a single point of skill.

Remember, in everything else, +1 or +2 to skill are a huge deal. With skill 14, you can hit a target at twice the distance as someone with skill 12. Why would it matter so little for this?

As for Efficient, I agree that it would be very valuable to people intending to perform long tasks under fire. But how is that a negative?

Anyone who intends to be a grappler ought to take Power Grappling. Anyone who wants to be a combat archer ought to take Strongarm. Anyone who intends to use two weapons would be stupid not to take Off-Hand Training.

Yes, some Perks are vital to any character whose role calls for a certain use of the skill the Perk augments. No, that doesn't make the Perks unbalanced.

For any game not focusing on Job Rolls and/or that particular career, I mostly do, yes.

In particular, if that +5 is to such a narrow niche that it also serves to limit your employment prospects sharply. You can be among the best in the world in something, but that won't help you get a job anywhere outside that narrow niche, which might entail living somewhere that's inconvenient or working within academia rather than higher paying areas which are covered by the base skill.