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

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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.

Well, that's your problem. Fortunately, you're the GM, so you can change those rules if you want to.

Sagatafl uses a Time Step Scale, everywhere in the system. It's one of (many) components used system-wide (I allused to the Extent Scale earlier). An excerpt of the TSS:

1/10 Second
1 Second
6 Seconds (one combat Round)
1 Minute
6 Minutes
1 Hour
4 Hours
1 Day
1 Week
1 Moon (4 Weeks)
6 Moons
3 Years (almost exactly 39 Moons)
15 Years.

The steps are chosen so that they'll be easy to memorize, rather than for arithmetical elegance, so the smallest steps are x4 while the largest are x10. Also, you'r supposed to use /10 and x10 beyond the "ends" of the scale (the low "end" is 1 Second, the high "end" 6000 Years).

To rush an activity so it is 1 TSS faster, increases the Roll Difficulty by 2. That's painful and dangerous, and only for the highly skilled, an effect of Sagatafl's roll mechanic (where skill is orthogonal to difficulty).

To rush an activity by 2 TSS, the fastest possible (and the closest to GURPS' RAW "-10 for instant") increases RD by 5, and is an insane option to choose unless you are extremely skilled and have something to lower your RD, such as high-Quality equipment, or magical equipment, or both, but it does mean that something that normally requires 1 Hour (or 1 Hour per roll cycle) can be done in 1 Minute (or 1 Min/cycle). It's also possible to rush by half a TSS step. That always halves the time, and increases the RD by 1.

Taking extra time slows time by 1 TSS for a -1 RD bonus, or 2 TSS for a -2 RD bonus. No more than that is possible.

I get the impression GURPS has the rush/slow rules it has (although having such rules, and in the core book, is always better than not having them) due to some desire to empower characters to precisely "dial" what kind of penalty they want. I don't think that's good, though.

GURPS' RAW says that you can do something at double speed for -5.

Why not change that to double speed for -4, x4 speed for -8, and x8 speed for -12? It breaks with the principle that you're supposed to use -10 for "almost impossible tasks", but I'm not sure I like that anyway.

Another option is -3 for double speed, -6 for x4 speed and -10 for x10 speed. Either way, using that as a house rule means you take away the ability of characters to precisely choose the degree of rush, but in exchange, you make rushing somewhat more attractive (except -10), and somewhat more powerful (again, except -10). Rushing also becomes accessible to less wildly skilled characters, compared to the RAW, but is still an unwise choice for those with pedestrian skill levels.

Or you can build a Time Step Scale to use with GURPS, perhaps inspired by the Range/Speed chart?