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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

"This lets you ignore up to -2 for haste;"
I read it as providing a compensation of two levels for rushed tasks, whether this is a task rushed by -9 or by -0.

I read it that way too, because the other interprentation would make it nigh-useless, but I note that 'ignore up to -2', strictly speaking, means that you can ignore any penalty of -2 or less, but it has no effect on any higher penalty.

But that's a matter of unclear wording. I'm quite sure it's not meant to be that useless.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I'm considering buying it if I eventually reach a state of having 4+ points in appropriate skills.

Cutting your work time by 20% under most circumstances (since, e.g., GMs are frequently leery of spending 30-120 hours and getting +5 to Psychology) is a non-ignorable benefit for [1].

Perks are supposed to give benefits. Keep in mind, though, that this is a benefit which effectively grants +2 to a single skill in certain, usually non-adventuring, situations. As such, it's pretty much a textbook Perk.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Spending -50% time is temptation enough to buy it for any sort of skill where the outcome depends only on you - you get the same output through ½ the workhours! At this point, it would become a temptation for Caine to abandon his work as a negotiator/analyst and become a freelance analyst only, despite lower skill level, as it would let him do twice the jobs with only a 10-20% reduction in salary per job done.

The fact that it would really help his career does not make it too good to be a Perk. After all, Hyperspecialisation can be the foundation for a lucrative career in a specialised field, but it's not worth multiple points because points measure adventuring utility.