One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to get more of the ATGMs backlog dealt with – which has been the case for a few years now. Each year, I’ve done better at satisfying it, but not well enough. Things improved when I started asking the other GMs that I play with, but that also became a problem at times when I couldn’t get an opportunity to pose the question. To do still better at answering this requirement, I’ve decided that if I have a clear answer to offer, from time to time I will go ahead without waiting to consult others. After all, if they have anything to add, there is always the comments space.

Today’s question is all about resource management in RPGs, at least in the opinion of the person asking the question – and that’s where his problems really start…
	This question comes from Tchaico, who wrote: “Hello, GM’s of the world. The game world I DM is heavily militarized. One of the players managed to became the commander of a small base, and is working to expand it. I wanted to know how can I handle this situation, since the core rulebook doesn’t have any guidance on finances, recruitment and overall base management.”
It’s said that every problem is an opportunity in disguise, and certainly that’s the case this time around. This is a classic case of not needing to be an expert in everything, just being an expert in faking it!

What Do You Need?

Okay, so your base commander wants to expand his base. What does he need? In order, from the top of my head:

• Justification
• Authorization
• Accommodation
• Supplies
• Support Infrastructure
• Budget
• Administration
• People

Let’s talk for a minute about each of these, because they each present an opportunity for roleplay, even for entire plotlines. And that’s the key; you don’t want the game to bog down into resource management, you want to use the player goal as a vehicle for plot. Doing that doesn’t require you to be an expert in finances, recruitment, or base management.

Justification

The first thing that he has to do is get authorization for expansion, and that means making his case to one or more superiors in the chain of command. These people will be aware of a much bigger picture than the PC will, and decisions will have been made on the basis of administration priorities within the context of that bigger picture. Whatever the size the base currently is, both physically and in terms of manpower, that’s considered to be as much as can be provided in terms of accomplishing whatever the bases’ mission is.

Every facility has a purpose, and that purpose defines how many people are required, what resources are provided, and so on. There are only so many to go around, and command will want to know why the manpower he already has is not enough.

This puts the onus on the player to be the expert, not the GM. He needs a convincing reason to expand the base (beyond his own ambitions).

So, if he makes a good case, the dominoes start falling to deliver him what he wants, right? Oh, if only the real world worked that way. I suggest you start by trying to track down a copy of the Season 5 West Wing episode, “Full Disclosure” and pay special attention to the plotline regarding the Base Closure Commission.

What that story illustrates is that politics plays at least as important a role in military decisions like base expansions as strictly military considerations. It has probably done so since the time of the Romans, if not longer. So let’s say the Base Commander comes up with a reasonably convincing military justification for the expansion of his command (and submits all the proper forms, filled out correctly, to his military superiors). The Base Commander has just volunteered himself to become a political pawn in Government Politics.

Rather than stick their own necks out, especially if such military expansion is going to be politically sensitive (and there’s no fun if it’s not), they will instead simply make an appointment for him to try to convince someone outside of the military. Even if they are not convinced, his command might send him to make such an attempt anyway, because the attempt serves their own political purposes, even if it’s just a distraction or a bargaining chip – something that they are willing to trade away in return for something they want even more.

And so, one plotline naturally evolves into another, as the PCs have to get involved in the murky world of politics. Even though the world is described as being more militarized, that does nothing to mitigate the politics; it simply means that there is likely to be another service branch or two for the actual military forces to compete with for funding and dominance, because there is never enough for everyone to get everything they want.

Bearing in mind that you never want to say “no” outright to the player, this is the story of how they come to get an in-game “yes” (I would make it clear out-of-game much sooner that they will get a “yes” if they don’t absolutely stuff things up). That’s when the fun really starts.

Authorization

Once a “yes” comes through, it’s almost certainly not going to have an immediate effect. It will be a matter of an increase in appropriations in the next annual budget. Military commands, on the other hand, don’t work like that; it’s almost certain that an increase in base size will also mean an increase in responsibility. Perhaps so much so that the PC will be replaced by a more senior Commander. It wouldn’t be the first time that it has happened.

From a plot point of view, this is a great way to fill in the time before the next appropriation – with the increased funding for the Base – comes through.

Of course, “more senior” doesn’t necessarily mean “more competent” – or “honest”, for that matter. You want to make it completely clear to the players that this is a political appointment, and that accepting the new Commander is not a valid option.

There are three ways to get rid of an unwanted commanding officer: Force them to retire, force the military command to retire them, or arrange a “health problem”. Investigation, conspiracy, politics, intrigue, and even subterfuge are all tools that the PCs may need to employ.

Accommodation

Once the PC is back in command, and the appropriations have come through, he has a delicate tightrope to walk – there will almost certainly be an increase in operational demands, effective immediately, even though the expansion in capability required to meet those demands has not yet occurred. But that’s not considered to be an acceptable excuse for failure to complete the mission for which you were placed in command. So if the demands are impossible, the PCs only escape is to convince his CO’s superiors that it’s the CO’s fault.

But it’s easy to complicate this situation. That immediate CO might well be the biggest supporter of the decision to expand the base – lose him, and what one budget giveth, the next can take away.

The best answer is to achieve the impossible, or so it might seem. These are PCs, after all. Well, if they do, that’s a persuasive argument that the expansion isn’t necessary, after all. No, the PCs have to deliberately fail but do so in a manner that protects their political support within the command structure – and that’s not all that easy to achieve.

In the meantime, before any new troops can be sent, they will need somewhere to sleep, and that means that new barracks and officer accommodations will need to be built, and that means that land may have to be appropriated from outside the existing base. That makes the expansion plan, and the base CO, new enemies.

And, of course, the construction of new buildings will have to be completed, but that’s a relatively dull activity, so keep it in the background.

Supplies

Before new people can be sent, the base will need to receive the necessary supplies to keep them equipped and ready. At first, it might seem as though there are no plot opportunities here, but there are – hijacked shipments, for example, or smuggling contraband into the base. Also, this will be the first brush with the military bureaucracy within this grand plotline; and they a mythically incapable of delivering what you order. Ask for field manuals and you get toilet paper; ask for mosquito repellent and you get arctic-weather gear. That might not be the stuff of a major plotline, but it would make a reasonable subplot.

Or you could have something really suspicious delivered by error as the hook into a more substantial plotline…

Support Infrastructure

Four tons of potatoes have just shown up at your front door. The problem is that you don’t have enough room to store them. Or cook them. Or serve them to the men if you have the increased manpower that you’ve requested. Heck, you probably don’t even have enough garbage disposal services to deal with the aftermath.

Every element of infrastructure from parking to portaloos will need to be increased. And there needs to be room for that. It’s also not good enough to simply add space somewhere else; the facilities have to be positioned where they are going to be needed. You might need to move the rec halls to make room for a larger mess hall, and move the parking lot to make room for a bigger sick bay.

A military base is essentially a small, self-contained town, one in which nothing is produced and everything has to be trucked in. So take your typical small town and imagine the strain if the population were to increase 30, 50, 100% – overnight. Everything from the brig to the barber shops will have been constructed with a specific base population in mind, and you now have to keep everything functioning while expanding that infrastructure to cope with the anticipated influx. The bank may need a bigger vault, and more security, simply because there are more paychecks that have to be cashed.

On top of all that, there can be knock-on effects. Power usage and water needs can increase more than a simple numeric increase. Officers often bring families with them, for example. That may require anything from preschools to swimming pools. Some of these facilities may be located outside the base and made available for the general public, easing any lingering tensions that resulted from displacing people from their homes to acquire the needed space for expanding the base.

The problem is that not a lot of this makes for an interesting adventure. Achieving that requires you to view these changes as a trigger, or as an opportunity for someone. For example, security is necessarily compromised when you have outsiders coming into your secure facility. I’m sure the military organization / government has enemies; why not have one of them exploit the opportunity? Or maybe it’s simply some criminals who see the bank as a softer target as a result of the continuing development of the facilities?

Such ideas are a great way of “name-checking” this phase of the expansion.

Budget

How many businesses fail because they don’t get their budgets right? Or expect their costs in Month 12 to have any relationship to their costs in Months 1, 2, or 3?

A lot of them, is the answer. Possibly too many. 70% of new businesses fail within their first 12 months of operation, here in Australia. While there might be some variations in that number from one nation to another, I doubt that those will amount to more than ±5 or 10%, barring extraordinary circumstances like being in a war zone. While there are a number of reasons for this, including being insufficiently distinguishable from the competition, or expecting things to always stay the same, one of the big 5 is the inability to lock down a profitable business model.

Well, a military base isn’t expected to turn a profit, but it’s also not supposed to make a bigger loss than has been budgeted for, and it absolutely cannot be permitted to fail. But budgets are frequently drawn up on the assumption of efficient usage; not many bake in any margin for getting systems up to speed. That means that any mistakes made early on have to be balanced out by savings somewhere else in the operational budget – and that means taking shortcuts to get back on budget.

Quite often, these decisions are taken at a departmental level, well below the actual commander, who has no idea that one (or more) of his administrations has flubbed their budgets and are cutting corners – not until that corner-cutting has an adverse consequence, anyway. All he knows is that they have reported that they are within budget.

Note that it’s almost as big a sin to come in under-budget as it is to exceed your budget – do that, and your appropriations might be reduced next time around. So there is a limit to how conservative someone can be.

It’s a recipe rife for a train-wreck to come out of nowhere and land on the Commander’s desk for solution. And remember, it’s not good enough for him to claim ignorance; it’s his responsibility to know, and he is deemed to know under military law; unless he can pin a deliberate deception on someone, he is likely to be held responsible for anything and everything a subordinate does.

That gives you two avenues for a plotline: the first is paranoia on the part of the Base Commander, with or without good reason; the second is for just such a budgetary land-mine to fall into his metaphoric lap. You don’t have to be an expert in administration or management; simply finding out what corners the Commander is going to cut, and judging by feel whether or not that’s enough, is all you have to do. The idea is not to focus on the problem, but to focus on the consequences of the response. Don’t get caught up in bookwork and accountancy!

People

Finally, everything is set up and ready, and people start to arrive. You aren’t an expert at recruitment? Who cares? The PC isn’t doing the recruiting, these are generic military people who have been recruited and trained elsewhere, and will number all possible personalities who are drawn to this occupation. Most of them are just going to be faceless and generic NPCs; but there will be a few who are more interesting, and who you create in greater detail.

The important point here is to make them interesting characters first, anything else second. Give them lives, give them personalities, and let those personalities emerge in the course of interacting with the PCs.

There might be someone who was given a choice – the military or jail. There might be an enthusiastic jar-head. There might be someone with strong Republican views and someone who is just as passionately liberal. There will be someone who’s geeky, and someone who doesn’t want to be there, and someone who sees the military as their only escape from a bad situation of some sort. There will be someone with serious personal problems and someone who is unfit to be there as a result – alcoholism used to be the go-to for that sort of thing but these days it could be anything from domestic abuse to being addicted to porn to gambling debts. Someone will probably be a mole for one of the superiors or political figures involved earlier – because the new Commander is either an up-and-comer and threat to his job, a possible protégé to be used as an asset to further one’s own career, or in over their heads and a potential liability through the connection to that authority figure.

Create mini-stories built around these individuals that can spill over into actual game-play. It might be nothing more than a bit of filler (two of them coming to blows over something trivial) or it can be something altogether more serious (a General’s son being caught DUI after a hit-and-run – did he do it? The PCs want to exonerate him if they can, or find absolutely iron-clad proof of guilt. Anything less places the career of the CO at risk).

Administration

Remember that every subordinate’s problem is also his boss’s problem if it starts to affect his work. And that mistakes and problems when there are lots of weapons around can be fatal to someone. That’s how NCIS, and JAG before it, keep replenishing their stocks of stories. Every NPC that gets brought into the base as a result of the expansion is potentially the hook for a new adventure. Like any other small town, there will be crimes, and accidents; there will be cases of murder, and corruption, and arson, and fraud. You don’t need to know anything about Command; the Commander is essentially the Mayor and the Judge in a small town full of armed people.

Going Forward: Expectations

So that’s how to handle the request to expand the Command. The real fun can start once that request has been approved and implemented. Aside from all the personal stories that will intersect with the Commander’s Desk simply because he is the Commander, there are four specific areas that will be fertile adventuring ground in years to come.

The first of these is expectations. The command who approved the enlargement of the base will expect the base to be able to carry out a specific ongoing mission as a result – and that can be the foundation of adventures because expectations are not always realistic.

So far as his superiors are concerned, that mission gives the Command capacity to do certain things, and that makes them a resource – one that can be borrowed or usurped for their own needs.

Going Forward: Internal Reactions

Every ally you make tends to earn you at least two enemies, at least when politics is involved. Some of those enemies will be nominal allies – for example, if the base expansion has come at the expense of some other base’s needs, there may well be resentment or outright hostility. If the base commander convinced a political figure to champion the cause of expanding the facility, the enemies of that political figure become your enemies – and you will be tested to determine whether or not the association can be rendered a mistake.

Your allies will seek to take advantage of you. They may seek to test you. With friends like that, who needs enemies? But enemies you will have, anyway.

Going Forward: External Reactions

No militaristic government can stay in power without an enemy. Enemies pay attention to what their enemies do, and are prone to assume the worst. They will have noted the expansion of the base and will want to know why – and will have very dark suspicions about it all. They will want to do something about all that…

Going Forward: The Peter Principle

It was in 1981, I think, that I first encountered The Peter Principle, and was immediately captivated by the elegance of the concept. In a nutshell, if you are good at your job, you get promoted out of it into a new job. When you are no longer competent enough, those promotions stop; and, provided that you aren’t absolutely hopeless, you will get stuck in that position.

Now think of the Peter Principle as applying to the subordinates within your command. If they are any good at their job, they will get promoted and taken away from you, to be replaced – by definition – with someone not as competent. If they are being promoted into the job from elsewhere, they aren’t going to be as competent or experienced as you would like (though they may improve once they find their feet – in which case, they, too, will be taken away from you. The personnel bureau – or its military equivalent – will keep trying until they do find someone incompetent.)

Of course, you are still expected to complete any missions assigned to you successfully and in an expeditious manner. Having newly-promoted people is not an excuse.

There must be a constant temptation to undersell the value of your good people in their fitness reports so that you get to hold onto them. But that’s a serious offense under military law – if any of your subordinates complain about their fitness reports you will be investigated, and if there’s any merit to the complaint, you can and will be court-martialled. “Conduct Unbecoming An Officer,” or its’ equivalent, is the most likely charge, and that’s a command-ender if proven. Even the accusation can be enough to stifle a career. Most officers quite rightly recognize that the risk is not worth it.

The Bigger Picture (for the rest of us)

As you can see, opportunities abound in the situation described by Tchaico. So why couldn’t he see them, and what are the real challenges that he faces?

I think the clue is in his final sentence, when he states, “…the core rulebook doesn’t have any guidance on finances, recruitment and overall base management.” I think the perceived need to know what he was talking about without any guidance from the rulebook intimidated him into thinking that this was a serious problem, when it really isn’t.

No rulebook will ever have all the answers. GMs need to be able to fake expertise when they don’t have it – see ““The expert in everything“. If your rulebook doesn’t cover a situation and you aren’t confident enough to improvise a solution, look for some other sourcebook or adventure that you can use as a resource. Do a Google search for RPG “In command” and see what you find. A similar search for “RPG Military Base” might also find useful reference sources. And check out my advice in A potpourri of quick solutions: Eight Lifeboats for GM Emergencies – some of it is directly relevant to what I think the real problem here is (or was).

The real challenge, in my book, is making sure that the other PCs have something relevant to do, making sure that it’s not “The Base Commander and supporting cast show”. There are two real solutions to this problem, which is far more difficult, and which can afflict any campaign in which one PC decides to construct a stronghold. The first is to make sure that each of the other PCs get caught up in the major plotline – there are some plotline suggestions above in which the Base Commander will need to employ every resource he can trust. The second is to make sure that each of the PCs have their own plotlines that run concurrently with those of the Base Commander. I suggest you look at my article Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign? for further guidance.

GMs should NEVER permit themselves to feel intimidated by any plot situation engineered by either themselves or the players. It’s better to do your best, and fail – and learn something – than not to try at all. If there’s a situation you aren’t sure how to handle, look for the opportunities inherent in it and focus on them, ignoring the situation itself as much as possible; then it doesn’t matter how little you know about that situation.

Next in this series: Iceberg plotlines – can they work in an RPG?