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

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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?

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.