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

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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.

Well, that's the other side of the coin. GURPS (like Sagatafl) has a rules option for how you can rush an activity, performing it faster than normal in exchange for a penalty to effective skill. I don't recall GURPS exact rules for it, but they struck me as decent.

A highly qualified screener could use those rules to quick-screen a lot of people, e.g. by working 4 times faster than normal, and still be able to roll at a decent effective skill. He'd be doing that as a 1st-layer-process, to screen out the clearly unsuitable, those who lie about their qualifications, those with stark disabilities, or with serious mental problems (ones that are far worse than the wearing of bunny ears). Then everyone who didn't get weeded out can be made subject to a 2nd screening process.

Or perhaps a 2nd process at normal speed (no modifier) to weed out even more, or to "sort" those off to lesser jobs, designated as "usable but not gold", and finally a 3rd process done using the taking-extra-time rules to find your generals, your university headmaster, your chief physician, and so forth.

If the PCs in your campaign are going to hire NPCs to take over the hiring process, though, there'll need to be laid down some guidelines, for each kind of hiring process. Maybe the spy service hiring process is quite tolerant of eccentricities, while the military engineering department only wants absolutely square pegs? Although I'm not sure how easy it is for the PCs to influence their H.R. underlings, except perhaps by setting an early precedent.

Originally Posted by Icelander

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.

Well, that's not my sort of campaign. While I have an interest in something a bit like that, as seen in the threda over i Roleplaying some months ago, about economic simulation, my intersted would be in a lower level of detail, where most such subordinate NPCs are defined by perhaps only two values, their Primary Skill and the Loyalty.

Going for a much higher level of detail, I think you'll end up with a hierarchy of definedness, where the top NPCs have full character sheets, at one end, and the NPCs who just barely have names have very sketchy character sheets, probably with intermediate 1-3 tiers of decreasing detail.

Top recruiter NPCs can bring in more manpower faster, or bring in better manpower. I don't actually think GURPS CPs are ideally suited for that (nor are Sagatafl's GPs), but as a better-than-nothing solution, you could define that a recruiter at skill level X, working full-time (45-60'ish hours/week in a medieval setting), can bring in Y CP per week, that Skill level X+1 can bring in Y+Z CP/week, Skill level X+2 can bring in Y+2X CP/week, and so forth.

You'd be better off devising some simple point buy system specialized for this purpose, I think, and including disads that will have to be accepted, because they weren't seen as being partiularly harmful during the vetting process, or weren't discovered during the vetting process, and because flavourful underlings are more fun than problem-free drones.

I don't know how much historicity you want to have in your campaign. Maybe not much. But if you do, it was often extremely difficult to fire someone, in many medieval or iron age cultures. Jobs were usually undersood as being for life, at least at court and in rural settings, although not so much in towns and cities. Even if it is possible to fire someone, it's not an every day occurence, it's hard to get a new job without good references, and many might view it as a personal insult. Or even as an insult to the clan, as in a blood feud that'll last for many generations.

On the other hand, people who have hard time fitting in, people who have high ability but als features (such as certain disads) that make potential employees reluctant to hire them, can sometimes react very positively to actually being given a chance, as in a much-higher-than-usual Loyalty score.