[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Has anyone done anything more exciting with it?

In the thread Favourite Realm Management System, over in the Roleplaying subforum, I talked a bit about how GURPS defines Economics and perhaps also Finance as TL skills, opening up the possibility of simulating people and cultures with a more primitive and less sophisticated approach to such things, i.e. by, in GURPS jargon, to define some cultured as retarded (or advanced) in certain TL-based skills. Specifically I proposed that medieval Christiann Europe could be severely retarded in Economics, having Economics/TL1 since they were clearly less clued-in about such thing than the Romans were, and they were tL2.

I also talked a bit about labour/personel management, and wrote this:

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

And one could well posit that most people in the slave-owning societies of my Ärth setting, primarily the Norse and Keltic ones (slavery is common in the Moslem lands too, but they're no longer slave-based economies), are retarded in terms of labour management. Sagatafl doesn't have a skill for that, and I don't think GURPS does either, but it's still a thing that it can - probably - make sense for societies and cultures to be retarded or advanced in.

Forum user Sindri then suggested that GURPS' Administration skill could be relevant for that.

I'm not sure if he meant in the sense that cultures and individual characters could have different TLs in Administration (that's what I'd assume he meant), or if he just meant that lordly characters with higher Administration skill would be better able to manage their labour pool, e.g. treat slave better so that in the longer term they'd be more productive, less likely to rebel or run away, and so forth, and generally design the entire work process and the surrounding structure so as to achieve greater motivation for the workers. (Much of the thread was about long-term thinking, and how the medieval mindset usually wasn't inclined in that direction.)

I'm sceptical. But I thought I'd throw it in here, ask what you people think. Does that fall within the scope of Administration? And is it somewhat - or very - sensible to treat Administration as a TL-based skill for this purpose?