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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Those, 1 and 4 hours, are base times. You can use GURPS rules for rushing or taking extra time, and taking extra time is of course very valuable if it can mitigate intrinsic difficulty penalties.

Also, it's very probable that a lot of things done in real life are done at +2 to +5 for Taking Extra Time, simply because the consequence of failure are thought to outweigh the costs of extra labour.

Hiring people who will have a lot of responsibility seems like it would be one of those things.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Also, I think it's fairly realistic. I'm no expert on H.R., "human resources", but my guess would be that the reason modern day companies often have huge H.R. departments is in order to comply with huge amouts of laws, including anti-discrimination laws created to protect minority applicants. Well, that, and maybe also screening hundreds or sometimes thousands of written applicants, many of which may have been submitted simply to meet a quota from welfare recipients, without the sender actually being genuinely interested in the job, let alone meeting even basic qualifications.

But if the huge government-iduced workload is removed (not that I don't sympathize with attempts to protect vulnerable individuals against discrimination and bias), and if there's no flood of perfunctionary "welfare requirements" applications, then I don't see why a qualified H.R. admin can't screen 25-30 applicants per week, on a 40-day work week.

Of course, the particular situation of the PCs and their allies is that they'll see a flood of 'applicants'* who are desperate to escape refugee camps or at least improve their position to something approximating their pre-war one.

There's a huge horde of qualified (mostly slave) scribes, accountants, administrators, translators, artists, servants, scholars, teachers and even spies and assassins out there, who are out of a job because their noble masters are dead, fled or at the very least in such straitened circumstances that they've had to leave slaves with valuable-but-not-immediately-so skills to fend for themselves.

For the purposes of my campaign, I want to see the PCs have established functioning institutions and organisations after the ca 2 month break in our game. We'd all like to see emerging military units develop their own traditions and espirit d' corps, the new type of adventures made possible by capable bureaucrats taking over boring jobs, an intelligence service with all the concomitant adventure possibilities, etc.

I just want to avoid having everything happen faster than plausibility allows. Yes, the PCs and their allies are probably as good as any empire-builders in history and in terms of finance, they may be better. And they have immense reserves of wealth, courtesy of some distinctly non-real adventuring and dragon hoards and such.

But I still want the base rules that they use to be realistic, so that their superiority is the result of having higher skills than most everyone else and certain Advantages that place them ahead, not of the base rules being skewed and alllowing everyone weird results.

Since the PCs and their allies have high enough skill to be able to afford not to use Take Extra Time, unlike most real administrators, I guess that it wouldn't be implausible, at least not to you, if the first week resulted in them hiring several dozen people who can, in turn, act as interviewers and recruiters.

So, after a month, it would make sense that they'd have thousands of employees. And in two months, as much as they'd like.

Of course, given security considerations, there would be a bottleneck for trusted employees.

*More like supplicants, in that they'll turn up and beg for alms, jobs, loans, favours, consideration for family members, etc.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That's hiring on the basis of intelligence tests, in a roundabout way (where instead of testing IQ directly, they test whether you've graduaded college), and looks a lot nicer than nepotism, but I do think nepotism may have a little merit. If you've hired one really skilled engineer or physician, you might be able to ask him for recommendations about who else to hire, in his field (just keep in mind that Albert would never recommend Bob, and vice versa).

The article also touched upon subjects such as loyalty and trust. If you hire your friend's nephew, and your friend knows about it, then there's a lot of pressure on the nephew to stay loyal. If he screws up, or even more so if he screws you, it'll reflect badly on his entire clan.

Oh, yes. Hiring on the basis of kinship and clan ties will be very common for the PCs. They'd very much like to be able to hire entire clans for warfare, for example.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

GURPS core already has a Loyalty score concept, intended to be used for hirelings, although much isn't done with it. And I haven't read SE closely so I can't say if the Loyalty rules are expanded on there. But even as just a basic stat, it's something you can roll for during difficult time, and your chose of hiring procedure can also skew the Loyalty tendence of your hirelings. Upwards or downwards. For instance, if you cast spells on the applicants, that may have an offputting effect.

The potential off-putting effect is why such spells are used by hidden wizards who try to keep it a secret that they screen people at all. Only if they get a sense that something is wrong will they cast spells directly on applicants, instead of using passive spell effects.