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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.

They are simple, but perhaps not ideal. A flat -1 per -10% of time taken. Which is very much not worth it for -1 to -4 or so, prohibitively difficult at -5 to -8 or so, but for people who can afford the penalty, awesome in that perfoming at -9 is twice as fast as -8 and five times as fast as -5. And, of course, -10 is effectively instant, i.e. probably a minute or so in this case.

All in all, much more sensible to use the base time as the fastest their recruiters are prepared to work. That's already a huge speed increase over the Take Extra Time process that's probably standard in normal corporate recruiting.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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, you know, hire four times as many 'ordinary' screeners to perform the first layer of the process as you have highly qualified people to do the second layer. People with Administration -12 are probably much more than four times as common, not to mention much cheaper, as those with Administration -19 to -20.

Of course, given that Administration -12 people probably prefer to use Take Extra Time to get to at least skill 14 and more likely skill 16 for important recruits, they'll take between x4 to x15 base time for a standard recruiting process. From that point of view, being four times faster than standard means having Administration -14 instead of Administration -12.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.

Instead of using Take Extra Time for the top jobs, potential hires for them are passed on to one or more of Ankhapet (Administration -19, Intelligence Analysis -16, IQ-based Leadership -17, Psychology (Applied) -14, Teaching -16), Tiglath (Administration -20, Area Knowledge (local) -14, Current Affairs (local) -14, Detect Lie -20, Interrogation -23, Intimidation -25, Leadership -20, Psychology (Applied) -20, Teaching -20), Kyros (Administration (Military) -18, Intelligence Analysis (Military) -18, Leadership -18, Teaching -16), Kehlynn (Administration -18, Current Affairs (Headline News) -14, Current Affairs (People) -15, Current Affairs (Politics) -20, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -19, Psychology (Applied) -15, Teaching -15) or Murlak (Administration -26, Current Affairs (Business) -16, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -14, Leadership -16, Merchant -27 and Psychology (Applied) -17*).

The political implications of the hire of high officials are dealth with by Politics -20 (Ankhapet), -20 (Murlak) and -21 (Kehlynn). And the recruiting campaigns are masterminded by Propaganda -17 (Ankhapet), -19 (Kehlynn) and -23 (Murlak).

Any hints of potential disloyalty, plants or other deception is ferreted out by Waelstar (Administration -14, Area Knowledge (local) -16, Current Affairs (local) -16, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -15, Interrogation -17, Lip Reading -17, Observation -19, Pscyhology (Applied) -12, Search -17, Shadowing -19, Streetwise -18, Urban Survival -19) and his small band of loyal spies.

Waelstar (Magery 2, magical espionage spells at 13-15), Kehlynn (Magery 3, wide range of spells at 15) and a small number of other trusted mages (with up to Magery 3), as well as mages from a firmly allied** faction who are even more powerful (up to Magery 5 and skill 22 with spells) will also screen applicants in potentially dangerous positions of trust, by casting passive detection spells from hiding and occasionally even interrogating them actively with magic, should cause be given.

The actual interrogator, as opposed to the spellcaster, in such interviews is usually either Waelstar (for inner company issues) or Tiglath (for local political issues). Should they be otherwise occupied (common for Tiglath), there are also several military men among the semi-retired veterans who provide headquarter security who have Interrogation -12 to -15.

*I decided that Smooth Operator ought to apply to it.
**For recruits to positions up to a certain level of trust.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.

They'll want to hire NPCs to take over the hiring of labourers, at the very least. And I doubt they want to actually hire every scribe, craftsman, overseer, servant or guard themselves, either.

For the fleet, naval captains and their officers manage the recruiting of new sailors for their crews, to make good losses. Several of the newest captains will be assigned a newly captured ship with a skeleton crew and a squad or two of marines and told to sail to an allied city with a decent population of sailors* and assemble a crew. They'll offer very good wages and benefits, as well as having handbills and pre-written town crier messages prepared by someone with Propaganda 19+.

The soldiers are already recruited by NPCs, very carefully chosen and firmly loyal for a long time, but I imagine that since the PCs want to expand locally, they'll have to have more than one or two recruiters on site.

Tiglath can choose a few people to recruit soldiers, I imagine.

In the two months I'm 'fast-forwarding' over, I'm trying to determine how far along the local recruitment of soldiers will come.

*The city where the fleet is based mostly lacks sail-handlers for the kind of advanced rigging the PCs are using. In game terms, TL2 to TL3 ships are what what most of the locals use while they are using firmly TL4 ships and rigging, with early TL5 (not too different from TL4) in prototype use.


[rest of post answered later]