NPC Officer Quality

As is the case with her crew, a ship's cadre of Commissioned and Warrant Officers can directly affect day to day ship operations solely by their inherent qualities...or lack thereof. A solid corps of officers can inspire, or drive, their crews to extraordinary feats. Lazy, corrupt, incompetent, or exceptionally brutal officers can destroy morale and even, in the most dire cases, incite mutinies in even the most passive and cowed crewmen. Officers fall into four rough categories: Command, Administrative, Signals, and Engineering. Command and Administrative officers like Lord-Captains, Lieutenants, Boatswains, and Pursers directly affect morale. Signals and Engineering officers like Choir-Masters, Navitators Primaris, and all flavours of Tech-Priest directly affect the performance of the ship. The Officer Ratings Table below lists a number of competence levels for NPC officers and their corresponding number value. The numbers reflect an officer's Skill and Characteristic levels. Whenever an NPC officer is encountered (either as part of a ship, promoted from the ranks, or pressed out of another ship) the GM should roll on the Officer Rating table to determine the quality of the officer. The GM should make a note of it, but not make the result immediately clear unless the Rogue-Trader spends some time interviewing the new officer. Liberal and successful application of Awareness, Perception, Command, and Scrutiny should help a Rogue-Trader suss out a new officer's character, but only if he tries. Officers will typically impart their bonuses unless a large enough number of them are of poor quality. If more than half of a category's officers are of Incompetent quality, that officer category imposes a penalty equal to their regular bonus, and the individual officers who are Incompetent do not impart their individual bonuses.

Example: Lidiah Yefremova is a conscientious Lord-Captain and a solid leader, but her First Lieutenant is a brutal hard-horse, her Boatswain a sadistic bastard, and her midshipmen are largely uncontrollable little monsters. Each has a rating of Incompetent (the Midshipmen are rated as a whole group) which makes the majority of her Command Officers incompetent, imparting a serious penalty to the crew's morale. Lidiah will need to get a handle on this if she wants to avoid a mutiny.