Game in the Brain

You have 2 professionals who are both highly skilled. They can command a wage of Php100,000 a month. Both are very hard working, and will pull off 40 hours plus 15 additional hours worth of his own time for projects for the company.

Now take one of these 2 professionals, and say that he has the ability to train and teach others his attitude and his skill set. What is his worth?

In the real world, a skilled professional asset that can efficiently self-replicate is worth more than just his or her core competence skill.

in gaming, like in GURPS, a skill-12 in teaching for a Ship Board Traveller Naval or Merchant officer has no impact. Nor is an amicable or easy to work with attitude. Especially an infectious and positive attitude that naturally raises morale and approaches challenges optimistically.

Dillema of the Skilled Professional. Any professional that meets your skill criteria for your opening perfectly will cost 50-200% more than a professional you cultivated within your own ranks. You can ignore this in a medieval game, but I don’t think you can ignore this is a modern or sci-fi game with modern-like standards of employment and competence.

the Open Source Attitude. Professionals that have a shared sense of community, those who also are ready to share their skills grant their group the ability to quickly meet the manpower and skill set requirements despite the many challenging tasks they have to juggle.

Its an environment that seeks to be near homogeneity in capability, allowing people to constantly improve (if there is any opportunity to self improve). Interestingly, in a well managed group, they are very open to both skilled and unskilled new members.

Those who can contribute new and different skill sets are worth while for the diversity and versatility they inject, while the unskilled new recruits bolster their number giving upward mobility as the group seeks to organize and fully utilize and create redundancies for their responsibilities.

For a game. the new skill maintenance rules will be coming up in one of the new gurps products. Although, if you are aware of the shifting and training in your own work experience, then making up your own rules and skill maintenance spreadsheet should be no problem, not to mention you are basing it from your own observation and best practice of an empirical method (if your company is into that sort of thing). 

Such skill maintenance is an accounting of all the hours and tasks in a day in the life of the character. The skill to do this is valuable at work, because technically it is the understanding of how to create a job loading accounting sheet. 

These meticulous accounting of character’s time and efforts is one of those key underlying details that have strategic importance to the game. It is where you are at what point of time. given the rules of concentrated action, you can only spread yourself so thinly and Murphy gets to pick and choose the worse time to show up. 

Fire Fighting vs Planned Action. Now these Ideals don’t measure up to the urgency of a situation that is called Fire Fighting. Some GM may think causing the PCs to Fire fighting is part of the fun. This advice is not for the GMs that never let the PCs to work through situations with deliberation and planning. On the otherhand, and the other extreme Players or GMs that don’t have Murphy play an active role in their game stretches the believably and diminishes the level of challenge in the game.

My Boss asks me to be professional, always confronting and verifying a situation that would disrupt a working relationship. I realize that from that advice springs a wealth of Role-playing opportunities. The drama and interesting aspect of internal conflict between characters is the little stuff that can make the gaming experience more engaging.

Growth, economies of action, and variable of so many situations can be an interesting seed for kick-ass adventure.