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

[Peter Knutsen]

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

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.