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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

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?”

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.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

One might use skill X, or Current Affairs, or Research, or a Contact to judge someone's competence at skill X.

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.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

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.

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.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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).

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).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

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).

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.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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.

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?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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?

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.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by Icelander

*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 results in a doubling of the recruitment rate, something has to be off.

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.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

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.

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.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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.

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...

[Peter Knutsen]

... 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.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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

[...]

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.

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?

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

"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?"

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).