New Technique of the week: <Specific organisation> (Administration)

[johndallman]

Edit: This thread is part of a series where I intend to invent a lot of Techniques, to fill out the support for non-combat skills. There's more about my plans and objectives here.

<Specific organisation> (Administration). Average, cannot exceed Administration.

This allows buying off the penalties to deal with an organisation that works in a strange way. First, buy the appropriate Cultural Familiarity if it's part of an alien culture, then buy up this technique.

The prototypical organisation that needs this is the modern US Department of Defense, which has found the need to operate Defense Acquisition University to teach people how to run its spending programs. These work in ways that make no sense to foreigners at first sight, such as the Foreign Military Sales program. It probably imposes a penalty of -2 to Administration for people who don't know how to work with it.

[weby]

Many organizations in my games have strange or arcane methods of doing things that cause a penalty to administration that could be bought off with this, but so far none of the PCs have bought it, though at least two though about it in a campaign where the PCs became members of such an organization.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by johndallman

<Specific organisation> (Administration). Average, cannot exceed Administration.

This allows buying off the penalties to deal with an organisation that works in a strange way. First, buy the appropriate Cultural Familiarity if it's part of an alien culture, then buy up this technique.

The prototypical organisation that needs this is the modern US Department of Defense, which has found the need to operate Defense Acquisition University to teach people how to run its spending programs. These work in ways that make no sense to foreigners at first sight, such as the Foreign Military Sales program. It probably imposes a penalty of -2 to Administration for people who don't know how to work with it.

Is this published somewhere or does this series present new techniques?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Is this published somewhere or does this series present new techniques?

New techniques. I had better put that on the subject lines from now on.

[roguebfl]

I would note this technique is not need for members of that organizations. Any such penalties from complication for member of the origination are familiarity penalties. This is for "outsiders" working with the origination, for example Defense contract working with the Department, or a policy holder working with an issuance company.

[weby]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

I would note this technique is not need for members of that organizations. Any such penalties from complication for member of the origination are familiarity penalties. This is for "outsiders" working with the origination, for example Defense contract working with the Department, or a policy holder working with an issuance company.

In many cases they are definitely not familiarity penalties, instead being really arcane/strange methods of doing things. I guess you could buy the normal administration as being learned for that organization, but then you would have a penalty for dealing with other more sane organizations.

[weby]

A note: I have a generic:

Specialized learning: Allows you to add up to +2 over skill when dealing with ONE named organization/thing in skills below or to buy off a penalty for the special aspects of the thing, up to +4, cannot exceed skill in this case.

And the "Administration: Dealing with the bureaucracy of that given organization" is one of them.

You can see more of the list in: https://hups.kivinen.iki.fi/k2011:me...tal_techniques

[whswhs]

Somehow this doesn't look to me like a proper technique. On one hand, it might be a familiarity. If that doesn't seem substantial enough, I might call it a perk, comparable to a Craft or Tech Secret perk. I just don't see buying off the -2 penalty for dealing with some arcane administrative procedure as the kind of thing that it would be rational to spend multiples of 200 hours of study on, or that a player would want to spend more than 1 point on.

[ericthered]

I'd argue that this is appropriate, but its more appropriate for normal cases than unusual ones.

If the is a weird structure, its going to be familiarity or a specialty. Technique for a specific organization probably refers to knowing all the little quirks of how things work in that organization: which secretary is the gate-keeper, times when you can find people not busy, exact corporate culture, and so forth.