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

[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.