Stretch goals for skill specialists?

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

No planner ever: What I want for this job is 3-5 single points of failure.


I was thinking about astronauts, but this applies to a lot of kinds of better-organized adventure. Unless doing so is absolutely infeasible, every necessary task should have at least one understudy who is good enough to comfortably carry that task for the whole mission.

(That is, I'm rejecting the idea of pushing up the baseline difficulty so that only the ace is good enough. You can do that, but it's not what I'm looking for.)

However, if the understudy is good enough, what does the actual specialist add? What do they do to, bluntly, flex the fact that they're not just good enough to do this job but good enough to be the top pick for it? It's often not obvious, often, how to trade on a surfeit of skill for impact beyond the pass/fail check.

Possibly nothing. Instead of astronauts, let's suppose a special ops team that has five members and five roles to be covered: command; transportation; communications; support weapons; and intelligence. Each member has two primary roles and one backup (understudy) role. It isn't the case that the primary is better than either understudy at that role, he isn't. They all have the same degree of training for that role. Where it gets interesting is when the primary goes down, if the proper redundancy was planned for, two of the remaining team members will each take on half of his former primary roles, thereby allowing the team to continue with minimum work overload. Ideally, the understudies should be broken up so that it isn't until three members of the team are down that the workload starts to be problematic.

If we then go back to the original problem, this solution could also work for our astronaut team.