Stretch goals for skill specialists?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

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.

...That's not solving the problem, though, which is not 'how do you organize an effective team' but 'how, once you've organized an effective team, do you allow player characters to still be cool with their roles'.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Reliability: The 74% success rate (say) of the understudy may be enough for a mission to succeed, but the 98% success rate of the expert has a better chance of exceeding expectations. Say it's a mission to salvage valuable artifacts; the understudy manages to get most of them out intact, which is enough for the mission to count as a success, but the expert would get basically all of them out intact, making it a spectacular success.

Speed: For tasks where you can make multiple attempts, the expert will succeed sooner than the understudy (with 7 tasks that each take an hour per attempt, and assuming the same 74/98 split, the understudy will probably need 10 hours while the expert will likely get it done in 7). For tasks where this isn't the case, the understudy may need to Take Extra Time to reach an acceptable success rate, while the expert can simply work at normal speed - or even use Haste (if the understudy has effective skill 12 but an acceptable success rate is 90% they'll need to take 4x as long to get it to skill 14; meanwhile, if the expert has skill 16, they could use haste to get it done in 80% of the normal time at the same skill 14... meaning all told, the expert would complete the task in 1/5th the time of the understudy).

Degree: For tasks where Margin of Success matters, the expert will generally have a larger Margin. In the salvaging example, maybe the margin determines exactly how good of condition the items are extracted in (and thus how much the client is willing to pay). With skill 12 vs 16, the expert has a +4 to margin compared to the understudy, which may be significant. Note that, depending on how the skills are spread out, critical success rate can also be a factor here - that skill 16 expert is 5x more likely to get a critical success than that skill 12 understudy.

What I was mostly thinking in terms of is the great scarcity of cases where degree matters or (similarly though not equivalently) you have useful voluntary penalties to get value from skill. Though in some cases haste does fit in there.