The Company

We're skipping gaming this week, so I'm putting off the recap of our April 17 session until next weekend. That doesn't mean I can't post something sooner. It's time to play Rate That Agent! This exercise should be useful to my players for determining who to send to do what – and also to any readers curious about which characters in these adventures are best at what tasks.

This time around, I've come up with six broad areas of activity, each containing five narrower skill sets. All six major categories and the 30 minor ones they encompass are a bit arbitrary – as is my assessment as to which skill sets go with what kinds of activity. Still, there's a method to this madness, because I've grouped activities on the basis of traits that influence them in game terms (e.g., a common controlling attribute or Talent).

Likewise, the scoring is arbitrary in the sense that the algorithm is designed to give numbers between 0 and 10. However, the ratings are figured from character-point investments in relevant areas; they aren't eyeballed, and everybody's report card uses the same rules. Each +1 corresponds to a factor-of-two increase in versatility. This doesn't mean that +1 is the same as "twice as good" or "as capable as two other people." For those who like numbers, it's closer to saying that if an Agent scores N and you want to compare her to someone who scores M, the odds of N prevailing are close to 1/[1 + 2^(M-N)] .

Not all the scores have the same metric, so comparing unlike scores is a bit dodgy (not that this stops me!). For a task that depends on two or three things, it would be smartest to go with the person who rates highly in most or all of the relevant categories. That said, a person who really likes numbers could compare composites. As I used a base-2 log scale, the composite of a score of M and a score of N would be ugly: log(2^M + 2^N)/log 2. I'd just go by feel!

( Without further ado, here's the breakdown . . . )