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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Those rules might be legacy material from 3rd Editon. I remember there were some finding-hirelings rules, probably in GURPS Basic 3rd Edition Revised. Maybe that material was just copied over, without any revision or scrutiny?

That might explain GURPS Basic Set. For GURPS Social Engineering, I would have expected that the fundamental paradigms of the rules were examined before they were built upon and that actually useful addition rules were added.

As it stands, those rules might do for one PC who wants to find one* more-or-less common hireling in a setting and locale where they might be more-or-less available. They are not generic and universal and they don't lend themselves well to other situations.

It wouldn't have been all that hard to add in some guidelines for modifying the rolls for rarity of skills sets, local culture, job market, etc. Instead, the rules for hirelings are more or less a copy paste of the simplistic Basic Set chapter.

*Though they include rules for seeking more than one hireling at a time, those rules are not good ones. Given that for a skilled recruiter, raising your pool of applicants by four orders of magnitude reslts in a doubling of the recruitment rate, something has to be off.