General Creating Information for Players?

[Spinward Scout]

So I'm working on tables for making Information for Players. To go along with Rumors, I guess.

Does this look right to you?

Information (1d6)
1.) Newsworthy Events
2.) Politics and Law
3.) Weather and Orbital
4.) Sports and Adventure
5.) Accidents and Disasters
6.) Nature and Science

Location of Information (1d6)
1.) Local or Planetary
2.) TAS
3.) Off-world
4.) Subsector or Sector
5.) Imperial
6.) Known Space

Or is this too much trouble?

 

[Grav_Moped]

So I'm working on tables for making Information for Players. To go along with Rumors, I guess.

Does this look right to you?

Information (1d6)
1.) Newsworthy Events
2.) Politics and Law
3.) Weather and Orbital
4.) Sports and Adventure
5.) Accidents and Disasters
6.) Nature and Science

Location of Information (1d6)
1.) Local or Planetary
2.) TAS
3.) Off-world
4.) Subsector or Sector
5.) Imperial
6.) Known Space

Or is this too much trouble?

Not bad. Might consider biasing the results toward more local events, and scaling them appropriately. A car crash in downtown will get as much coverage as a bus crash in another city, and as a plane crash a few states over, and as a massive natural disaster on the far side of the world.

Edit to add: That's if you're trying to emulate real-world news. You may want small distant odd things to show up for game purposes, which wouldn't make the local news in the real world. And if you're trolling starport bars for information, you're pulling from a different data set than general media.

 

[Grav_Moped]

More:
Some Traveller Adventures had rumor matrices (6x6) with letters corresponding to rumors at each intersection. Some letters occurred more than once.
DMs might apply to each die individually (for example, SOC on the horizontal axis and maybe EDU or terms of service in a particular career or something on the vertical axis) so as to have the character's traits affect which rumors they're likely to encounter.

For example, a noble is going to hear about different things than a hood rat, and a merchant might encounter different information sources than a naval officer.

 

[Spinward Scout]

Not bad. Might consider biasing the results toward more local events, and scaling them appropriately. A car crash in downtown will get as much coverage as a bus crash in another city, and as a plane crash a few states over, and as a massive natural disaster on the far side of the world.

Edit to add: That's if you're trying to emulate real-world news. You may want small distant odd things to show up for game purposes, which wouldn't make the local news in the real world. And if you're trolling starport bars for information, you're pulling from a different data set than general media.

Those are great ideas!

I think I was going for just something extra to make it seem more real. I'm not sure it has to be accurate as far as statistics and chance of something happening. I would probably have to redo the Location table to make it a 2d8 table to use Craps odds.

How's this?

Location of Information (1d6)
02.) Imperial
03.) Subsector or Sector
04.) Off-world
05.) TAS
06.) Local or Planetary
07.) Local or Planetary
08.) TAS
09.) Off-world
10.) Subsector or Sector
11.) Imperial
12.) Known Space

And here are the odds of each slot:

2 - 1 in 36 chance
3 - 2 in 36 chance
4 - 3 in 36 chance
5 - 4 in 36 chance
6 - 5 in 36 chance
7 - 6 in 36 chance
8 - 5 in 36 chance
9 - 4 in 36 chance
10 - 3 in 36 chance
11 - 2 in 36 chance
12 - 1 in 36 chance

 

[Condottiere]

Depends on who the players pump for information, or what their favourite news sources are, and that depends on what possible agenda those have or who their original source is.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Those are great ideas!

I think I was going for just something extra to make it seem more real. I'm not sure it has to be accurate as far as statistics and chance of something happening. I would probably have to redo the Location table to make it a 2d8 table to use Craps odds.

How's this?

Location of Information (1d6)
02.) Imperial
03.) Subsector or Sector
04.) Off-world
05.) TAS
06.) Local or Planetary
07.) Local or Planetary
08.) TAS
09.) Off-world
10.) Subsector or Sector
11.) Imperial
12.) Known Space

And here are the odds of each slot:

2 - 1 in 36 chance
3 - 2 in 36 chance
4 - 3 in 36 chance
5 - 4 in 36 chance
6 - 5 in 36 chance
7 - 6 in 36 chance
8 - 5 in 36 chance
9 - 4 in 36 chance
10 - 3 in 36 chance
11 - 2 in 36 chance
12 - 1 in 36 chance

Nice. Good use of the 2D6 distribution there.

 

[Spinward Scout]

Depends on who the players pump for information, or what their favourite news sources are, and that depends on what possible agenda those have or who their original source is.

True. But how do I incorporate that into a table?

 

[Grav_Moped]

True. But how do I incorporate that into a table?

I see what you're getting at, I think. You want procedurally-generated rumors (that is, toss dice and get at least the category of the rumor), rather than plotting out which rumor the party gets at specific narrative waypoints -- at the downport bar they hear X, at the TAS hostel they hear Y, the passing Free Trader they run into on the way out tells them Z. A pretty good way to run a spontaneous campaign, and the way to run a solo sandbox one (unless you're very good at switching between your Referee hat and your Player hat).

 

[Condottiere]

Human sources, or other sophonts, probably are easy, since the plot would indicate if they are lying, or are relaying false news that they believe is true.

Or are telling the truth, but selectively.

News organizations would be more difficult, since it gets filtered at multiple levels, such as the original source, the reporter, his editor, their publisher, and so on.

 

[Baroun Tardis]

True. But how do I incorporate that into a table?

I can think of one way to do this.... but it would be ugly

I wrote code years ago for a "Guess the animal" pseudo AI thing.
There were a bunch of records in a file, and they had an animal name and a hash code - basically, a bunch of binary flags (Wings? Fly? 2 legs? 4 legs? fur? Scales? milk?) and then turned all the binary flags into a number and sorted them. When the player typed in a description of an animal, the program would look through the text, and anytime a keyword was found it would turn on the appropriate flag. When it got done parsing the text, it had a number that should match an animal... or at least be close to one and it would return the closest thing in the list.

So...
If you made a table with a bunch of columns (Starport bar? TAS? Local news? ....) and flagged them, you could do something similar. You'd take the player's points of access, hash them the same way, and get back which item in the rumor table they'd get hit with often enough to have confidence in, and the farther away from that entry on the table the less confidence they'd have in the rumor.

Say it's just the three columns above, but ranked in 'reliability' as TAS, local news, starport bar. The rumors are:
001 - 1 - Overheard in bar: The captain of the Didn't Crash Yet is an idiot
010 - 2 - Local news report : Merchant captain fined for severe saftey issue. Film at 11.
100 - 4 - Traveler's Aid Society strongly suggests not to take passage on the Didn't Crash Yet

Then you've got the intermediates:
011 - 3 - People are saying that the Starport is fining Captain Numnuts because the #3 inverter actually fell off his M-drive when landing
101 - 5 - While sitting in the TAS bar, a drunk employee is arguing with another employee that they should stop accepting high passages for the Didn't Crash Yet
110 - 6 - An article on the local news website has info abou the Didn't Crash Yet and the engine trouble
111 - 7 - After collecting all the info, here's the real story....

Ugly for 3 bits, but hideous at 8 bits resolution in making the table

Anyway, the way this would be played is you ask the player what their information sources are, and potentially have a skill roll to turn on a bit (Carousing 8+ for the Bar Bit, for example) . After all the players try, you end up with an entry on the table...or go with whichever entry is close enough.

Like I said, it's an ugly solution. Presented here in hopes it inspires something prettier

 

[kilemall]

Pretty sure TTB had a thorough rumors table that had sliding results, along with whether the rumor was true or not.

 

[Spinward Scout]

This isn't for Rumors, but in addition to Rumors. More like News, but also general information the Players might find along the way.

 

[Condottiere]

Chinese whispers.

Every subsector distance from origin, you could change or slightly alter a word.

 

[Grav_Moped]

This isn't for Rumors, but in addition to Rumors. More like News, but also general information the Players might find along the way.

Ah, randomly-dispensed campaign background/setting information. Cool.

 

[Hairy Jim DeGriz]

Why not just create a "Breaking News" random table? I just scanned the Washington Post and found these gems. Most probably don't impact the players, but you could insert a news story that matters to the campaign.

1. President and Assembly Spar Over Budget (Debt Ceiling)
2. Business Group Seeks to Employ Younger Workers (Child Labor Legislation)
3. Government Evacuates Diplomatic Staff From Civil War Country/Planet (Sudan)
4. Media Executive Fired Over Relationship. (NBC CEO)
5. Bank Executives Make Profit During Failure. (Bank Failures)
6. Scientists Find Unknown Viruses In Diapers. (Random Science Article)

Tabloids probably have more proletarian stories.

Daily Mail UK
NY Post

 

[Spinward Scout]

Why not just create a "Breaking News" random table? I just scanned the Washington Post and found these gems. Most probably don't impact the players, but you could insert a news story that matters to the campaign.

Well, it's not just "Breaking News". It's similar to Rumors, but not the same. This could be anything from "Breaking News" to some tidbit of Info they accidentally saw on a computer they were hacking. Just in addition to Rumors.

 

[frankm]

I love the idea of a random breaking news table... it doesn't matter if any of it's recent, it'll just serve as filler (until the holostar accused of rape tries to bribe their way off planet...) Tossing in some random bits of background from your universe, etc, and it becomes real to them. It would certainly let you set the stage for an adventure without doing so obviously.