Stretch goals for skill specialists?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

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.

I tend to take more notice of margin of success than the rules strictly require.

I also tend to give skill experts more credit for attention to details than characters with lesser expertise. I'll give anyone credit for details that they role-play, but once a highly skilled character has demonstrated that they really can put their skills together and do difficult tasks effectively, I'll take that as read and let them get through challenges quickly. That gives the players more time to think about the scenario, express their characters' personalities and generally have fun.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

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.

A lot will depend on the skill and the scenario. A Stealth understudy can get close enough to a sentry to drop them with a suppressed weapon; the Stealth expert can get close enough to put the sentry in a blood choke, being overall stealthier (no weapon report to hear, body can be eased down rather than collapsing, no blood to clean up) as well as giving the option to interrogate the target, leave them alive, etc (you also conserve ammunition). Or alternatively the Stealth understudy may need to take a longer route that avoids guards, while the expert can sneak in right under their noses.

A Mechanic understudy can competently repair a machine with adequate spare parts and can jury-rig something with improvised parts that works well enough that the mission doesn't have to be scrubbed (EDIT: or maybe it does need to be scrubbed but the party makes it home alive, akin to the Apollo 13 mission), while a Mechanic expert may be able to make spare parts stretch further (soaking a penalty for not using "enough" spare parts*) and their jury-rigged improvisations may be nearly as good as using proper spare parts anyway. A Biology understudy can collect and catalogue specimens, while a Biology expert is more likely to be able to determine which specimens are worth collecting rather than just cataloguing (important if you have a limited amount you can bring back) or even make useful deductions on-site ("These creatures appear to be a eusocial species, rather than collecting them it may be more worthwhile to follow them with a drone back to their colony so we can get more data and perhaps get some otherwise-inaccessible specimens, such as their eggs"). And so forth. A lot of this is stuff the GM will likely need to come up with on the spot, however, as a lot of the skills you'd be looking at for, say, a scientific expedition don't get terribly in-depth treatment in GURPS books (as opposed to skills that are more directly adventurer-relevant).

*"Spare parts" would probably be represented as something that gives a certain bonus for using, but the higher the bonus you cash in the more rapidly the bonus goes down thanks to dwindling supplies (you can see something like this in the gadgeteering rules in After the End, although there it's monetary value). So if you have something that gives up to a +4, and drops by -1 every one use of +4, two uses of +3, four uses of +2, eight uses of +1, or 16 uses of +0 (which represents having some spare parts rather than just having to improvise it all), the expert with a relative +4 skill over the understudy can get 16 uses out of it before it drops to +3 at a given effective skill level as the understudy can get only 1 use before it drops to +3. That's probably a fairly extreme example, however.

[rkbrown419]

In the case of real world astronauts you often have limited resources for getting them where they're going. The space shuttle only had space and life support for so many people for example. In those cases you have to prioritize between positions that are literally life and death and those that are useful but if they fail we can try again on another mission. The people who get the ship into orbit and back fit into the first category. NASA often hired mission specialists for the second sort. The mission specialists got enough astronaut training to operate in zero g and keep from killing everyone by accident but are sent up for scientific or technical skill that the regular astronauts don't have. A NASA mission would have redundant pilots and astronauts cross trained for vital roles but only one mission specialists because they have limited life support and they can live (literally) without the mission specialists doing their job. While the mission might technically fail without the specialist it would be a success from the standpoint of getting the crew home alive.
Now if you don't face those sorts of crew restrictions you can afford to double up every role but even without going into space it's not always feasible. Sometimes, restrictions of space, time or other resources mean you do have to live with the potential of a single point of failure. Sometimes the best you can do is send a single specialist in with a team who's job is to keep them alive. Sometimes you can't send in a team where everyone has a fully qualified understudy. Sometimes the best you can do is have a backup with just enough training to keep things from completely falling apart if the primary person in the role can't do his job.

[RyanW]

I dislike putting the mission behind a door only one PC has the key to. But bonuses are a different story. You can provide optional objectives with brief but challenging obstacles and their own little rewards to let characters' talents shine. That can be especially valuable if you don't necessarily match the bonus to the one who got it.

If the swordsman's fancy new blade is courtesy of the thief's lockpicking skill, and the bard negotiated the trade for the wizard's spell book, it can create a bit of a mutual indebtedness that can make the party more tight knit.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by RyanW

I dislike putting the mission behind a door only one PC has the key to. But bonuses are a different story. You can provide optional objectives with brief but challenging obstacles and their own little rewards to let characters' talents shine.

That's a good option. Have the mission-critical instances that require the skill be ones where the understudy's skill level is sufficient but then have further instances that are beneficial to the party but not mission-critical. Alternate (and safer!) entrances to areas they need to access, more loot/samples/whatever, additional gear/supplies, gaining an ally, etc.

[Eric Funk]

Originally Posted by Varyon

That's a good option. Have the mission-critical instances that require the skill be ones where the understudy's skill level is sufficient but then have further instances that are beneficial to the party but not mission-critical. Alternate (and safer!) entrances to areas they need to access, more loot/samples/whatever, additional gear/supplies, gaining an ally, etc.

My suggestion here is may add more overhead but to build on previous suggestions -- require several actions be undertaken simultaneously. The Primary will have to judge which they should be present at and the Understudies work independently (while other PCs look on or have to do something with their skills ). E.g., the main Hacker hack a mainframe while others hack some smaller security things nearby, or the main hacker infiltrate the main guard post (-8 to -10 to skill) while the understudies and team snipers simultaneously take out lone sentries (-3 to -5) who could call the alarm to disable the whole "front gate" system .

Revisiting the original post you might be interested in the half-page of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy p. 11 "No I in Teamwork, No Profit Without It" which discusses this... Distilled: The Primary can get +1 per ally success (+2 on critical) on a Task. Alternately if the team are all needing to succeed (e.g., Camouflage), the Primary gets a flat +1 for each teammate who has at least 1 point in the skill, -1 per team member count...

Another factor may be tools; the Primary might get the FINE (+2) tool while the Secondary gets the +1 Good version. (B345)