Another Job for Penny: Detailing Jobs for Thieves, Interpreting the Value of Favours, and the Concept of Notoriety

Last time, I wrote about how hacking a sci-fi OSR mission generator for a tabletop duet game led to discovering a recursive random table that alters itself.

This time I want to flesh out in more detail how several random tables combined to generate interesting jobs for Penny the thief, and try tweaking the way some of the tables work.

The results of rolling on the job tables gives you only this information: a type of patron, a type of job, and its risk, distance, and reward. The patron table was detailed last time, but I'll include it here with the other tables (which I hacked from the sci-fi generator):

***

Thief Job Generator 0.2

Patron: 1d6
    1-2: criminal
    3:  noble/merchant
    4: government
    5: military
    6: former patron

    (if 6, roll on Former Patrons subtable. every time a job is accepted from a new patron, they're added to the Former Patrons subtable.)

Job Type: 1d10 (criminal: -1 to roll; military or government: +1 to roll)

   

    1: piracy

    2: theft

    3: confidence scam

    4: smuggling

    5: bizarre

    6: bounty

    7: escort

    8: delivery

    9: rescue

    10: disaster relief

Risk Level (ie; Number of Encounters/Challenges): 1d6

    1-2: three

    3: four

    4: five

    5-6: six

    (add Notoriety level to the roll)

Distance from Current Location: 1d6

    1: current location

    2: nearest village

    3: nearest city

    4: 1 weeks' travel

    5: 2 weeks' travel

    6: a months' travel

Reward: 1d6 & based on Risk & Distance rolls & Notoriety of thief:

        X = (risk+notoriety)*distance

    1-2: wealth worth X*40g

    3-4: favour (proportional to X)

    5: gear worth X*60g

    6: add 1 to Notoriety and roll again

***

There's a couple of things I want to point out and work on:

Changing the range of results on the Patrons table so that "criminal" happens on 1 and "former patron" happens of 5-6 would make jobs from existing patrons more likely, which can allow fleshing out those characters from interacting with them more often--which seems like it would be pretty fun.  In practice when using the table, sometimes a new patron would be generated that seems similar to an existing one, and so I'd just make it a job from that existing patron.

Shifting the range of outcomes on the Job Type table by just adding or subtracting 1 from the roll to make the extremes unavailable is a cool idea. I wonder what it would be like if it was a roll with a "normal" distribution like 2d6?  That would be a way to make certain types of jobs more likely and certain types of jobs more rare. I might do this and set "theft" to the centre of the distribution at 7 to make it the most likely kind of job.

You could make certain types of jobs -only- offered by certain patrons by assigning them an outcome outside of the normal range and using the +1/-1 trick. For example, 2d6 can give you outcomes ranging from 2 to 12. If you want only criminal patrons to offer an assassination job -and- make it really rare, you can assign that to an outcome of 1, and give the criminal patron a -1 roll modifier on the Job Type table.

The Risk Level can be interpreted differently based on the type of job. If it's a dungeon delve to retrieve an item, then the number of encounters could be the number of "interesting" rooms in the dungeon (ie a fight, a trap, an environmental challenge, etc). If it's a mission involving navigating the treacherous relationships between a number of gangs, then it could be the number of parties involved. It could be the number of locations that must be visited to collect parts of a document.  The Risk number could even be more abstract and refer to increasingly dangerous random encounter tables (ie; if it's Risk 1, roll on the Basic Encounter table, 2 roll twice, if it's 3, roll on the Challenging Encounter table, 4 roll twice, 5 roll on Deadly Encounter, 6 roll twice--or something like that). Note that the roll is added to the thief's Notoriety level--more on that later.

The Distance table is interesting. I adapted it for the kind of travel scale that made sense for a game where a thief goes from place to place doing jobs for patrons. This encourages travel from point to point on the world map, and this travel can either be abstracted away entirely, made into a ration-using navigation minigame, or turned into a full hexcrawl, as per the preference of your duet.

The Reward table needs tweaking to help with interpreting the results. I really like that it's based proportionally on the Risk and Distance results (and Notoriety--we'll get to it!). This is easy to understand for wealth and gear worth some multiple of the number, (and this multiplier should be set sensibly for the currency of your game: probably some fraction of the cost of a sword or potion, or of the debt your thief is paying off) But what does it mean for "Favour Owed"--the most interesting result on the table?

Before tackling that, I wanted to understand the way the results work. The result of multiplying Risk by Distance ranges from 1 to 36, but it's skewed--the most likely results are 6 and 12 (rather than the 18 you'd expect from a balanced distribution). On a graph, the peak is to the left and there is a long tail to the right.  This means that our thief can regularly expect low-to-middling value rewards but allows for a wide range of surprises to occur. You can get a little as 40 g, which is a job a thief probably wouldn't take just for the money, or as much as 2160g worth of gear, which could completely re-outfit our thief--but most likely you're looking in the 200 to 900 g range. However, a bunch of results just aren't possible to get, because you're multiplying two d6 rolls--you can't get 35, or 19, or 7... this results in less round numbers for currency value rewards, which is great for avoiding round numbers. Why offer a reward of 250 g when you can offer 240 g? And if you end up with 480 g worth of gear, some if it will be fun weird filler stuff because most equipment lists cost round numbers.

The question then becomes how to interpet this result as the value of a favour. An easy way to get around that is to treat it just like wealth or gear, but delayed or specific to certain context. Ie; the patron can pay off a bounty on your head worth X*50g, or source a special potion you need, or get you a specialist hireling for job you're doing, or a place worth that much to use as a safehouse, or perhaps a permanent discount at a particular merchant.

But the thing that makes favours interesting as a reward is their potential non-monetary value and their flexibility.  You can forsee our thief calling in a favour to arrange a meeting with an elusive clan leader, or to get safe passage through a warzone, or to hide in the secret basement of the shop when the royal guard is sweeping the town, or store something in the count's personal vault. And the thief will certainly come up with unexpected favours to ask of their patrons. Ultimately it might not be possible to "quantify" the value of such a favour, so probably the best we can do is ballpark the range of outcomes, provide some examples and leave it to the GM's discretion.

Lets say for now we carve out the range thus:

  

Patron Favour Value:

    1-6: Small Favour

    7-19: A Favour

    20+: Extraordinary Favour

This is probably the thing that needs the most work. It would probably be easier to just add Risk+Distance and centre this on a normal 2d6 distribution. OR I could just collapse it entirely! A result of "favour" is exactly that, no monetary value considered, and it's up to the duet to figure it out.  I kind of like the simplicity of that, but maybe there's an equally elegant way of still using the Risk*Distance number.

Finally: Notoriety.  Notoriety was my way of figuring out what "Reward Risk" meant in the original sci-fi mission generator I hacked for this. The really interesting recursive result on a 6 to "roll again and add 1 to Reward Risk for all future missions" felt like an abstraction that could be made specific and meaningful in the world of thiefy adventuring. We could take that number and store it separately from the Reward table and make it matter elsewhere. My solution was to make it a kind of reputation mechanic: as the thief does more jobs throughout the world, their Notoriety increases. As they become more Notorious, the jobs that patrons offer are more dangerous--and more rewarding. Not only that, but successfully completing a job gives a chance of Notoriety increasing, as part of the reward!

There is scope for Notoriety to interact with other game mechanics. If there are morale checks, perhaps rando bandits are less likely to stand their ground against a notorious thief. If there are recognition checks, perhaps merchants are more likely to provide a discount, or share the secret menu--but so too are town guards more likely to see through a hasty disguise. Depending on the amount of record-keeping you want, Notoriety can vary in different regions of the world based on where jobs are completed.  Perhaps certain patrons no longer want to offer jobs to a thief that everyone has heard of. And of course, depending on your particular thiefy exploits, GM fiat can award a point of Notoriety as the result of doing something particularly public. There's even the opportunity for the thief to do things to -lower- their Notoriety because it's making things difficult for them.

It turned out to be quite a meaty way to use a single number!

Anyway: here's a sample set of outcomes from rolling on all these tables:

> criminal, piracy, risk lvl 6: six encounters, two weeks travel, gear valuing 1800g

> noble/merchant, bizarre, risk lvl 5: six encounters, next village, +1 Notoriety and a favour

>noble/merchant, theft, risk lvl 1: three encounters, current location, a small favour

These starting points leave quite a bit of fleshing out to do. Who actually is the patron, and what is the specific nature of the job?

Next time: MORE TABLES

A Job for Penny: Discovering Recursive Random Tables

In a period of time in which it was difficult to play tabletop games with our friends due to time and distance, my partner and I made up a game where I GM'd her adventures as Penny, a master thief who would take jobs for fun and profit. We used Scarlet Heroes, whatever maps I could find, and a large amount of random tables to allow Penny to play in a fairly open sandbox.

The name of this blog comes from this game.

Many of my interests in RPG design and GMing were developed, if not sparked, by Penny's Ventures: one-on-one games (which Kirk Johnson-Weider, in his excellent series of columns on RPGnet, called -duets-), player-focused prep (ie; trying to create only what would matter to the player--especially important when there is only one), timer mechanics for pacing (very much related to fronts from Dungeon World and the clocks in Blades in the Dark) and--most enduringly--the use of several random tables mashed together to quickly generate a number of hooks and encounters.

Penny would receive criminal job offers in dead-drops she had secreted throughout the world. Each job would be from a patron (that she either knew already or was someone new) and included broad details of the nature of the job, potential rewards, and how far it was to travel from her current location. She could choose whichever one caught her interest, at which point we would use the selected job, a few more random tables, and the current context of the gameworld to set up the details of the game session--either right there at the table (in a quick and dirty manner), or well beforehand if I had texted my partner with a list of jobs and they picked one for the next session.

I want to dig into how I generated Penny's job offers, because it was key to make them interesting and fun as well as tie in to Penny's background and the gameworld.

It started with researching patrons and jobs as used in sci-fi freelancer games like Traveller. The patron-job structure needed for Penny was a clear analogue and I figured I didn't need to reinvent the wheel when I could just reskin a sci-fi one for the generic fantasy realm Penny played in. I ended up choosing the Mission Generator from Thunderegg's OSR Sci Fi GM Screen they made for running White*Star--it was freely available (at the time--I'm unable to find the pdf they offered now but the blurb on the RPGGeek page confirms my memory), very simple, and very hackable.

It boils down to 5 random tables:

1d4 to get a patron. (Corporate, Criminal, Government, or Military)
1d10 for what they want. (ie; Smuggling, Escort, Con, etc)
1d6 for the risk (how many encounters it will entail).
1d6 for how distant the job is. (your current planet, in the next star system, etc)
1d6 for the reward.

I liked that the "what they want" roll was modified by the type of patron. -1 for Criminal, +1 for Military or Government. The table is written so that the extreme outcomes (and therefore, certain kind of jobs) are more or less likely depending on the patron. Some of the tables made certain outcomes more likely by giving the same result for a range of rolls (ie; a roll of 1-3 gets a certain result).

Also, the reward was a) not always monetary (one outcome was "favour owed" which I LOVE), but also b) proportional to the Risk roll+Distance roll, which is a neat way to automatically ensure that harder jobs are worth more.

The thing that -really- caught my attention was the reward table result for rolling a 6: "Roll again, plus add +1 to Reward Risk for all future missions". Over time, missions get more difficult and take a longer time, in a way that is disconnected from the PC's level. That is, on the assumption that this is actually permanently increasing the Risk roll (AKA nudging upward the likey number of encounters the mission will entail), and not just inflating the Reward on its own (because "Reward Risk" is not explained).

In any case, the idea that the result of a roll on a random table could alter future rolls on that table is -very cool-. The use of nested random tables is long-established, where a certain result on a top-level table gets you to roll on a different sub-table. There are also results like "roll again on this table" or the more interesting "roll again and combine". But here we have random tables that are -recursive-; that not only refer to themselves but can -alter- themselves.

Has anyone seen recursive tables before? Let me know--I couldn't find any in a cursory skim of bookshelf.

***

The table determining the patron offering Penny a job is as follows:

1d6: Patron
1-2: criminal
3:  noble/merchant
4: government
5: military
6: former patron

If the result is 6, we roll on the Former Patrons subtable. Every time Penny accepts a job from a new patron (1-5), they're added to the Former Patrons subtable.

As the game progresses, Penny's list of former patrons grows, and she will receive job offers from people she's worked for before. This gives a nice sense of continuity, and the potential for some interesting decisions and mechanics. What if refusing to take enough jobs from a former patron culls them from the table? Or if choosing between two former patrons will cause conflict between them--say, if one patron asks Penny to steal from another?

Next time, I'll talk about how I flesh out the patrons and their jobs, and experiment with the structure of the tables.

Dice and Things

I'm catching up on #RPGaDay2016. Today's prompts are: Aug 1-real dice, digital dice, or diceless system? and Aug 8-hardcover, softcover, or digital books?

I love the feel of well-made, wonderful physical objects. I must have weighty dice, or ones with interesting designs, and I'm a sucker for beautiful hardcovers (Maze of the Blue Medusa anyone?). Also, having a book at the table with bookmarks in is very handy as a reference.

That said, having dice and reference sheets on my phone is great, especially for pick-up games while out and about. But if I have an in-person game prepared in advance, nothing beats the semi-organized clutter of dice and papers and books at the game table.

I might change my mind once more PDFs have really good bookmarking and linking systems. It's easier to print out sheets and keep them in a file folder than to flip through a pdf and hope to get the right page with ctrl+f.

Most of the references I print out are random tables. I love randomizers of all kinds--dice, cards (playing, tarot, other oracle...), coins, tops, spinners. I like their unpredictability, I like giving them meaning and structure. I've played diceless systems before (and I don't mean like Minds Eye Theatre--I've LARPed Vampire and rock-paper-scissors is a great randomizer), online in free-form roleplaying chatrooms and PbP forums. They did not go anywhere. I think a randomizer is the quickest way to settle conflict resolution in a game, and descriptive, diceless systems I've seen have never satisfied. If someone could run a game of Amber or, like, The Window or something, that really showed me how if works that would be great. But til then, give me my tables and dice!

On-the-Job Training

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: what's the best way to learn a new game?

When I get interested in a system, my first step is to look for a set of free quick-start rules. A read-through of these is usually quite short and gives a good feel for the core elements of the system, as well as the tone and key themes of the setting. This is an option for a good amount of systems, and sometimes the free rules are quite extensive (like with D&D 5e Basic). Even if there's no quickstart, the full rulebook might contain a sample session, or lots of sidebars highlighting key concepts. Probably the best way to learn a game thoroughly is to start with a well-designed rulebook!

Unfortunately not all systems have a quick-start, sample adventure, or particularly helpful design. In these situations, I look for a cheat sheet of the most important rules. Often these will be created by players rather than included in the rulebook, so the first place I look is G+ communities for the game or in the files section on RPGGeek. I also find that the cheat sheet gives a quick visual overview of how crunchy a game system is, and similarly I can get a sense of how much there is to learn by seeing the number of rules questions/clarifications I can find for the game on rpg.stackexchange.

More often than not, after a look at a quickstart and/or a cheat sheet we should just start playing and see how it goes, though this can be difficult if the players aren't comfortable with winging it. Sometimes I'll solo a session of the game to get a feel, and make notes of details to look up later for clarification. Ultimately, it's desirable to pick it up as we go, and handwave anything we're not sure about. I'm not overly concerned with running the system exactly as written, and the more rules there are to learn the less likely I am to want to learn it in the first place. Perhaps particularly complex rule systems can't be learned just through play--I can't imagine just picking up Rifts--but who's got the time for that anymore? Rules-lite and good summary design is the way to go!

Pacing Back and Forth

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: what innovation could RPG groups gain the most benefit from?

This is a pretty big question, so the prompt includes a further clarification: whether it is technological, related to game mechanics, or to social dynamics, what could best help improve the play experience?

More and more often in the past five years or so, I've seen narrative mechanics taking a central role in games. Now that's not to say that game mechanics haven't always directed the kinds of stories that could be told. Usually it's done implicitly, by what kinds of classes and subsystems are included--for instance D&D in its various forms is pretty focused on swords & sorcery adventures with action-oriented danger and combat. The stories emerge out of players following the through-line of "I think this is what my character would do". But there can be mechanics operating at a different layer, outside of the story. These are explicit subsystems built into the game that directly influence the direction of the narrative.

One tactic is to make character motivations have mechanical effects. Even original D&D did this, with DMs awarding XP for good roleplaying, or paladins and clerics losing abilities for behaving against their alignment. Games like Burning Wheel make motivations a core part of gameplay, turning "I think this is what my character would do" into an explicit mechanic to drive decisions. Similarly, characters in Fate have aspects, and not only can players make decisions in line with their aspects to get bonuses to their rolls, the GM also makes decisions based on character aspects to drive the plot.

The plot can also be influenced by narrative mechanics outside of character motivations: consider the example of fate points or bennies.  Players get a limited amount of tokens, and can spend them to make changes to the story, like in Savage Worlds or Mutants & Masterminds. The GM can award tokens to players, for good roleplaying or reaching key moments. Fate takes this a step further, turning it into an economy where narrative control is constantly traded back and forth between GM and players. The decisions aren't just about "I think this is what my character would do" anymore; now there's also "I think this is where the story would go".

I'm not sure we could really call these "innovations", as it's clear they're well-established and varied in style across different game systems. So let's narrow in on one narrative mechanic that I think is yet to be fully explored: pacing.

One of the problems I have consistently had as a GM is moving the story along without simply railroading the players (and I doubt I'm alone in that). The PCs flounder in a scene, a battle takes overly long, random wilderness encounters seem unrelated and uninteresting... part of this for sure is avoided by good session prep and PCs who have clear goals--by having direction. However, how do you decide when to end a scene, or whether or not to skip over some travel or downtime, or even which PCs to focus on? How do you decide when the monsters attack, or if the villain uses the device? These are decisions about the -pacing- of the story, and most of the time it just comes down to the intuition of the GM (with some player input) about when to move things along.

Just like the other narrative mechanics above, pacing has always been there, implicit in the rules. D&D had random generation tables for encounters and stocking dungeons which set up how often certain types of events would occur in the stories generated by playing D&D. Justin Alexander has written about the pacing inherent in dungeon-crawling over at The Alexandrian, and a great series on pacing in general. It has rock-solid advice for how to structure scenes in your games to keep things moving, and can really help you develop your intuition about when to end a scene or what sorts of events to focus on.

So, the innovation: we can make explicit narrative mechanics for pacing as well. My favourite example is the concept of Fronts, in games derived from D Vincent Baker 's Apocalypse World. Fronts are a way for the GM to keep track of the big dangers in their game and ensure that they're all moving forward.  Each front is a threat or potential threat to the PCs and their world. The GM develops a track of events on each front: things that will happen if the PCs don't intervene. Throughout the game, the GM can move a front along its track, mechanically, in response to things the PCs do and by using their own GM moves. It keeps the game focused around specific dangerous situations that are moved along directly in response to the PCs actions!

Pacing is a tricky thing to get right, and having an explicit mechanic to structure it is a powerful tool we can use in our games. I feel like this is just the beginning, and I'm looking forward to seeing how designers play with pacing mechanics now that the box has been opened.