CPFHB: News Management

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 10:46 pm

So here's one of the weirder things I've been working on for Asymmetric Threat: News Management. One of the key things you need to do as a lancer is to not become public enemy, and another thing you'll want to do is to do exposés of people and organizations you don't like. Scandals, in short, are created for, by, and against you. The basic question of whether a scandal gets into the news cycle or not has to do with the strength of the other stories it is competing for air time with. This is handled with a combination of 7 card stud and War.

The basic idea is that for simplicity's sake the front page has four stories on it. And the strongest stories lead. On an ordinary day, a story that you want (or don't want) to get attention is competing to be one of the four strongest stories vying for the front page. If there's a big story that absolutely must get space on the front page like the Fiscal Cliff showdown or something, then the story you're worried about is going to have to be one of the three biggest stories left to get noticed and not simply swallowed and forgotten by the news cycle.

The stories that are vying for page space are represented by playing cards. At the beginning of a story, seven cards are dealt out: four face up, and three face down. At the end of the story, the remaining cards are revealed, whatever virtual cards the players have generated by their actions are added to the pile, and for good or ill the four strongest stories run and everything else goes down the memory hole. Characters can do legwork to look at the face down cards (getting a jump on the news cycle), and characters can create wet noise or do rock concerts or celebrity hijinx to make virtual cards to force things off the news agenda. The character's missions will also generate cards that get bigger the sloppier they were. Getting paydirt on people or organizations gives you the potential to release a card signifying your exposé.

Stories persist or not based on what people do about them. Ace stories simply stay for the entire length of the plot arc (so if all four Aces come up, everything goes down the memory hole because the news is completely locked up with ruminations on some important issue such as the march to war, a pending corporate court final decision on some issue, a national election, or a young blond girl vanishing under mysterious circumstances.

The news cycle can also be used to determine NPC actions compared to being blackmailed. A simple heuristic similar to the House's rules of Blackjack can be used to determine whether the target will be concerned or not about information getting out. If a couple of big stories are visible, they may confidently attempt to "ride out the scandal", while if there is nothing big showing, they are more likely to panic. Basically, NPCs can have a confidence level of 1, 2, or 3, which represents the number of turned up cards that don't meet the threshold of the scandal they are potentially worried about. Thus, if the players do their research into what the news cycle is apt to throw at them, they can know that the NPC's confidence is misplaced or whether they are essentially bluffing with their dug up dirt.

-Username17

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:40 pm

Shouldn't some NPCs be sufficiently nervous that their confidence level is zero?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:51 pm

Here's a potential, but avoidable pitfall:
If I can generate exposes easily, I just hoard them until I dump them all at once. That's extra true if I can generate fake exposes. Iterative probability, go!

Separately, I personally don't like card-based mechanics. That's not really a criticism, just a minor datapoint.

Korgan0 · Post by **Korgan0** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:01 am

How long are you thinking that plot arcs and news cycles will take?

Roog · Post by **Roog** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 6:31 am

fectin wrote:Here's a potential, but avoidable pitfall:
If I can generate exposes easily, I just hoard them until I dump them all at once. That's extra true if I can generate fake exposes. Iterative probability, go!

If you do that, then your stories will just be competing with each other. Iterative probability only helps you if the rating of your exposes is sufficiently random.

You would expect your hoarded exposes to have a somewhat predictable rating, and that generating higher rating exposes to take more work in general. If that is the case, then the optimal use of the hoard would be to drip feed them over multiple cycles to achieve the effect that you want.

I would think that the bigger problem with being able to hoard a significant number of stories would be that you would need to have a way to determine what reserves of stories any organization has.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 6:57 am

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Shouldn't some NPCs be sufficiently nervous that their confidence level is zero?

Probably not. Some NPCs could have a confidence level of 4 - which means that they don't care what other people think. Such characters would just laugh and say "Do your worst" even if the story is definitely going to get on the front page.

fectin wrote:If I can generate exposes easily, I just hoard them until I dump them all at once. That's extra true if I can generate fake exposes. Iterative probability, go!

But the news cycle only has four slots in it. If you generate more than four exposés, the fifth and subsequent offerings are necessarily worthless. And in any case, every offering past the first is substantially less likely to run. The first exposé you drop is competing for the fourth slot of seven - which means that the average card to beat is a seven. But your second exposé only runs if your second highest offering beats the 3rd highest of seven - and so on.

Getting two or three stories to run in a news cycle would be possible of course, but hardly par for the course.

Korgan0 wrote:How long are you thinking that plot arcs and news cycles will take?

It's like a story/chronicle in World of Darkness. Your basic News Cycle surrounds a single mission. And that could be the only level you deal with it at. But if you have multiple missions that are tied together, those news cycles could be linked - and then it would matter whether individual stories persisted or not.

The news cycle can also be used as a random event generator (heart cards are "celebrity" events, diamonds are "economic", clubs are "crime", and spades are "politics" - natural disasters can fit into any of those categories), as well as a sandbox by which players can generate their own mission goals.

-Username17

Korgan0 · Post by **Korgan0** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 7:49 am

So, I don't know if this is the right place for this, but how are you thinking the PC's will get missions and get paid? Will you be adopting the standard Shadowrun structure of Fixer/Johnson? Will Lancers put themselves on some kind of organized open market, or is this entire business very hush-hush?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 12:20 pm

Korgan0 wrote:So, I don't know if this is the right place for this, but how are you thinking the PC's will get missions and get paid? Will you be adopting the standard Shadowrun structure of Fixer/Johnson? Will Lancers put themselves on some kind of organized open market, or is this entire business very hush-hush?

The idea is that several distinct and overlapping playstyles can be supported.

Deniable Assets - The lancers work for a government or corporation, but as contractors through a handler. This gives their ultimate employer plausible deniability about whatever it is the lancers do to achieve their goals, and it gives the lancers the kind of freedom that comes with a lack of oversight.

Private Detectives - The lancers do work for people and organizations who come to them on a walk-in or referral basis. This allows them to advertise their services, though they may or may not be able to advertise their results (client privacy and all that).

Freelance Journalists - The lancers do work on spec and then sell the results off to people and organizations who might want it. Note that if you sell your paydirt back to the people you are exposing rather than a news outlet, that is "blackmail" rather than "journalism", but it is structurally similar.

Political Operatives - The lancers support some political cause or another and then they pick targets of opportunity, getting kick backs from the financial backers of their chosen ideology for services rendered. Like Breitbart.

Criminal Syndicate - The lancers are part of a criminal syndicate and can run around doing GTA shenanigans. They pay kickbacks into the organization in exchange for the organization having their back and being allowed to use syndicate contacts like fences, smugglers, and lawyers.

-Username17

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 12:23 pm

I like this idea. The whole idea of having multiple chunks of game state running on different time frames to model different bits of the world - news, markets, combat, investigation - could be really interesting. (At least, I assume that's what this is going to end up looking like - every ongoing action has its own little chunk of tabletop devoted to it and they all evolve at the same time, though maybe at different rates.)

Is there any point to modeling NPCs' stores of stories? Additionally, is there a good way to handle two entities having the same story in storage for later without losing track of things? Does a single set of 7 cards handle all of the news all at once, or are there multiple news regimes with separate sets that have to be managed separately?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 1:26 pm

Maybe I don't understand the system.
If you have 7 cards pulled to start, and Lancing adds one more, then adding 44 exposés minimizes the chance that your lancing will run (to 1 in 13, i.e. only if you lanced up an ace).

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 3:00 pm

I assume exposes are not drawn randomly but instead card equivalents are generated by rolls of some sort.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:10 pm

Name Here wrote:I assume exposes are not drawn randomly but instead card equivalents are generated by rolls of some sort.

Yeah. When a virtual card is generated, it's not a random pull from the deck, it's a procedurally generated value from the game. When you do a mission, your wetnoise number is the News Cycle value of that mission's fallout. While it might conceivably be expedient to blow up an office building full of people in order to distract the public away from tax reform discussions or something, it will never be particularly useful to generate more than four media circuses simultaneously.

One thing I am fence sitting about is Poker Hands. That is: whether or not to make special high value poker hands be a thing that actually matters on the cards. Some people really like the thrill of a special hand feature like a flush or a straight, and the special five card hands would only come up a bit under 6% of the time. So while it's one more thing to worry about and some people would really like it, it wouldn't really come up that much. It's about equivalent to having special rules for a natural 20 on a d20 - but for a check you make only once per night.

Still, if straights or flushes could trigger, it would create a (pretty darn rare) possibility of having Aces fall off the news cycle because some confluence of events causes all non-Pokemon related news stories to become irrelevant (or whatever).

Verbyast wrote:The whole idea of having multiple chunks of game state running on different time frames to model different bits of the world - news, markets, combat, investigation - could be really interesting. (At least, I assume that's what this is going to end up looking like - every ongoing action has its own little chunk of tabletop devoted to it and they all evolve at the same time, though maybe at different rates.)

I freely admit to being influenced by Arkham Horror / Los Angeles Horror and Pandemic in that regard. One of the things I really like is having multiple fires to put out at a time and juggling what portions of the problem the different team members are working on at a given time. It's a good system for a cooperative game (as an RPG would generally be).

Now, board games have an inherent advantage here in that they have boards on which to place whatever doom tracks, outbreak counters, riot markers, and whatever else on. But TTRPGs still have open ended action declaration going for them. And I think that can at least potentially be a big enough advantage to make up for having to model the different frames of the story with abstract or absent "feelies".

-Username17

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:51 pm

Okay. Then that comes back to "why on Earth would you use cards?"

Declare a "news threshold". Anything that meets it makes the news. Anything that exceeds it raises the threshold by one. Tick down every week. Pictures of cats are an impact 2 item, so you'll never get lower than a threshold of 2.

That also lets you track regional or local feeds, so the grain silo exploding is front page in East Podunk, but a footnote in the region. Regional threshold is always at least (global - 2), and regional impact - 2 = global impact.

That non-system is simpler, has better flexibility, and doesn't add a new resolution mechanic. It also appears to have all the features of the card system. I must be missing something: what's the advantage of the cards?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 5:35 pm

fectin wrote:Okay. Then that comes back to "why on Earth would you use cards?"

Declare a "news threshold". Anything that meets it makes the news. Anything that exceeds it raises the threshold by one. Tick down every week. Pictures of cats are an impact 2 item, so you'll never get lower than a threshold of 2.

That wouldn't be the same at all. With cards you can get a nice and tactile tie-in to the legwork portion. You can literally uncover future events by asking around and doing investigations and putting your ear to the ground. This in turn allows you to plan. And it allows your planning to be affected by your research and vice versa.

Secondly, the inherently limited number of cards you're able to overcome and the fact that you essentially overcome the drawn cards from lowest to highest means that there are harsh and inherent limits to the very news-spam fuckery you were complaining about a few posts back.

Thirdly, while the news feeds are revealed at the beginning of the session and then later on during legwork sessions, they are actually used in the wrap-up section of the game. Cards have the magic power where they lie on the table without changing their value until they are needed. Dice do not. While you could in fact simply rescale things and roll a bunch of d20s in plain view and behind an MC screen and then write the numbers down, that would be a lot more inconvenient than drawing cards and putting them off to one side until they are needed again. Cards are both RNG and Record, which is a valuable property for something that is generated and used at such markedly different times in the evening.

That also lets you track regional or local feeds, so the grain silo exploding is front page in East Podunk, but a footnote in the region. Regional threshold is always at least (global - 2), and regional impact - 2 = global impact.

Now this is a genuine issue, which is that the system at its base treats the "Newscycle in New Egypt" as if it were the thing you care about, which might not be true. You could care about the news elsewhere or the national news or something. And you are right that static modifiers to the value of your stories when compared to other places or larger reference frames is a good idea. But there's no particular reason that the distant or larger news regions can't just be additional hands of cards. A single deck can handle up to seven hands at a time with little strain, so unless you want to run separate news attacks on New Egypt, The Commonwealth, Union Territories, Colorado, California Free State, Aztlan, Cascadia, Quebec, and Polaris all at the same time, it really doesn't seem like an issue. And if your current mission is that globe hopping, I think you probably need some kind of extra things to keep track of it all like a white board or something. So even then it is probably not an issue.

-Username17

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 6:54 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
That also lets you track regional or local feeds, so the grain silo exploding is front page in East Podunk, but a footnote in the region. Regional threshold is always at least (global - 2), and regional impact - 2 = global impact.
Now this is a genuine issue, which is that the system at its base treats the "Newscycle in New Egypt" as if it were the thing you care about, which might not be true. You could care about the news elsewhere or the national news or something. And you are right that static modifiers to the value of your stories when compared to other places or larger reference frames is a good idea. But there's no particular reason that the distant or larger news regions can't just be additional hands of cards. A single deck can handle up to seven hands at a time with little strain, so unless you want to run separate news attacks on New Egypt, The Commonwealth, Union Territories, Colorado, California Free State, Aztlan, Cascadia, Quebec, and Polaris all at the same time, it really doesn't seem like an issue. And if your current mission is that globe hopping, I think you probably need some kind of extra things to keep track of it all like a white board or something. So even then it is probably not an issue.

-Username17

If you're going to track multiple news zones, wouldn't you want some system where news stories from one area could spill over into adjacent (manhattan -> jersey) or higher level (township -> state) areas? Using 1 deck to model all of them seems to preclude this.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 7:38 pm

I think the idea is that there are, base, seven news stories per region, and that you consider all of those stories when deciding which ones show in a given region.

Example: (given my understanding)
The weight penalty to a news story for being from another region is -2. In the event of a tie, the higher base value wins; in the event that there is till a tie, the closer story wins.

Here are three regions and their news stories:


Region	Story 1	Story 2	Story 3	Story 4	Story 5*	Story 6*	Story 7*
Earth	3H	7S	8S	9C	14S	5D	4D
Mars	9S	10H	2C	6D	7C	11H	4C
Venus	8C	5D	12D	6S	3S	5C	8H

*: Hidden
Card number is 2-14;
Spade, Heart, Diamond, Club.

With no legwork, the Lancers expect the headlines to be:


Region	Story 1	Story 2	Story 3	Story 4
Earth	12D-2	9C	10H-2	8S
Mars	12D-2	10H	9C-2	8S-2
Venus	12D	10H-2	8C	9C-2

Which would mean that, in order to not be noticed, they would need to do at least as good as: (no more than)

7 on Mars
7 on Earth (but an 8 would have only a 50% chance of being noticed)
7 on Venus

Of course, it will actually be:


Region	Story 1	Story 2	Story 3	Story 4
Earth	14S	12D-2	11H-2
Mars	14S-2	11H	12D-2	10H
Venus	14S-2	12D	11H-2	10H-2

Which would mean that, they can actually get away with: (no more than)

9 on Mars (but a 10 would have only a 50% chance of being noticed)
9 on Earth
8 on Venus

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 7:44 pm

I'll be honest, I really haven't wargamed out multi-region or international news cycles at all. I probably should do that. My instinct would be to have news stories move in to other areas over the course of a story arc as a consequence of their triumph at their point of origin.

It has to be fairly simple, because whether you're dealing with die results or cards, you really don't want to be tracking meme spread across a dozen countries. That is the kind of thing that simply isn't going to be practical without a computer doing the heavy lifting.

For multi-regional campaigns, how about a continental news "community"? Rather than playing a straight 7 card stud, one could play a stud/holdem mix, where 3 of the cards were nominally local and 4 of the cards were community (or vice versa). Thus, a certain amount of news might be international at any given time, and the same stories could dominate in The Commonwealth and Aridoamerica.

That would have the advantage of not changing the math on the single city version, while giving continent hopping campaigns a sense of continuity. Also, revealing a face down community card could plausibly require different sorts of investigation than revealing a face down local news card. And that, in turn, would help differentiate different kinds of legwork abilities.

-Username17

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Wed Dec 12, 2012 10:39 pm

I like the idea with half of the 7 being local and half being community. As you mention, it adds new and interesting things for the players to do.

Instead of news communities being geographical, though, how about tying them to major intenet communities? I can't remember if we decided if the internet is broken or not, but it seems like the news cycle provides a game-mechanical reason for it to at least act like it is in this context. It doesn't even need to be particularly contrived: people from Megacorp A have their own Megacorp A Reddit and Blogosphere, and people from Megacorp B have their own Megacorp B Reddit and Blogosphere, and the two don't talk to each other because the internet connection is bad and nobody has any friends in the other megacorp and because the megacorp ministries of truth don't like you talking to people in other megacorps anyway.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Thu Dec 13, 2012 12:48 am

So, if I understand this correctly, the process works like this:

-At the begining of each session, draw cards from a physical deck until you have seven cards in each news region.
-Place four of them heads up and other three of them face down.
-Players can do investigation checks to look at the face down cards.
-As players do stuff, they roll dice and produce virtual story cards with a number value based on hits on a test and suit based on what type of action they did to get into the news.
-Sometimes these stories will go directly into the news pool. Other times, they will be given to the player to add or not add to the news pool as desired. Stories not added to the news pool yet can be used to blackmail whoever they're about.
-Each NPC has a Confidence of 1 to 4. If you try to blackmail them with a story, your story has to be better than the Confidence-th smallest visible story for them to care about your blackmail.
-Cards, both virtual and otherwise, count as virtual cards with a static negative modifier applied to them in other regions.
-At the end of every session, the top 4 news stories in a given news region get regional coverage and the rest drop out of the news.
-At the end of every session, the top four news stories globally
get global news attention.
-Additionally, NPCs and players can take actions of an ill-defined nature that will remove stories about them from the news.
-Finally, all stories go out of the news at the end of the plot arc.
-The ordering for cards is 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace.
-Heart cards are "celebrity" events, diamonds are "economic", clubs are "crime", and spades are "politics".
-Jokers get removed from the deck before playing.

Suggestions:
-Draw the New News Events cards at the end of each session, instead of the begining of each session.
-Reverse the order on (and possibly rename) Confidence such that in order to blackmail an NPC with a Confidence of N, your story has to beat at least the Nth biggest story. A Confidence of 0 means they don't care and will not respond to blackmail at all. A Confidence of 1 means you have to beat the biggest story. A Confidence of 4 means you have to beat any visible story at all.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Dec 13, 2012 7:11 am

Grek wrote:So, if I understand this correctly, the process works like this:

-At the begining of each session, draw cards from a physical deck until you have seven cards in each news region.

Seven in total in any region you care about. Which is normally going to be one.

-Place four of them heads up and other three of them face down.

Since some of the card can be international, that'll be 4 face up and three face down for the region, but if you're doing two regions simultaneously it only has to be 11 cards or so.

-Players can do investigation checks to look at the face down cards.
-As players do stuff, they roll dice and produce virtual story cards with a number value based on hits on a test and suit based on what type of action they did to get into the news.
-Sometimes these stories will go directly into the news pool. Other times, they will be given to the player to add or not add to the news pool as desired. Stories not added to the news pool yet can be used to blackmail whoever they're about.
-Each NPC has a Confidence of 1 to 4. If you try to blackmail them with a story, your story has to be better than the Confidence-th smallest visible story for them to care about your blackmail.

Sure.

-Cards, both virtual and otherwise, count as virtual cards with a static negative modifier applied to them in other regions.

This part I'm shaky on. I haven't really wargamed spreading news to other regions, and I'm not sold on any specific methodology for doing so. In most cases it won't matter, because characters will be undertaking missions within a region.

-At the end of every session, the top 4 news stories in a given news region get regional coverage and the rest drop out of the news.

Yes.

-At the end of every session, the top four news stories globally
get global news attention.

Probably.

-Additionally, NPCs and players can take actions of an ill-defined nature that will remove stories about them from the news.

Heh. Yes. News stories need to be suppressable just as they are creatable. Coverups for the win.

-Finally, all stories go out of the news at the end of the plot arc.
-The ordering for cards is 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace.
-Heart cards are "celebrity" events, diamonds are "economic", clubs are "crime", and spades are "politics".

Yes.

-Jokers get removed from the deck before playing.

I haven't fully decided what to do about Jokers. Like Straights and Flushes, they don't come up all that often (13%), and some people really sperg out on having special things happen when special cards come up.

Suggestions:
-Draw the New News Events cards at the end of each session, instead of the begining of each session.

Why? One of the points is that the characters can see that it's a slow news day and that they would therefore have an easy time getting bad press about an enemy - or that the news cycle is saturated right now and they can go in hot on a mission and have that not matter. If the cards aren't drawn until the end, the players can't interact with them with investigation during the course of a session.

-Reverse the order on (and possibly rename) Confidence such that in order to blackmail an NPC with a Confidence of N, your story has to beat at least the Nth biggest story. A Confidence of 0 means they don't care and will not respond to blackmail at all. A Confidence of 1 means you have to beat the biggest story. A Confidence of 4 means you have to beat any visible story at all.

Wait. What? Why would having a low confidence make them more nervous? I don't understand this inversion at all, it seems like AD&D "armor class" where having "higher armor" made you easier to hit.

-Username17

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Thu Dec 13, 2012 10:07 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Why? One of the points is that the characters can see that it's a slow news day and that they would therefore have an easy time getting bad press about an enemy - or that the news cycle is saturated right now and they can go in hot on a mission and have that not matter. If the cards aren't drawn until the end, the players can't interact with them with investigation during the course of a session.

No, I mean you draw the replacement cards at the end of the session, show the results to the players and then end the session there, giving both the MC and the players a week to think about what they want to do next session/come up with some actual stories that match the cards drawn.

Wait. What? Why would having a low confidence make them more nervous? I don't understand this inversion at all, it seems like AD&D "armor class" where having "higher armor" made you easier to hit.

You wouldn't actually call it Confidence anymore. I can't really think of a good name for it, but it would mean be something like "how much you care about PR". Maybe diffidence. As to why you'd do it, the current rule is "In order to successfully blackmail someone, the story you use to blackmail them with has to be bigger than the (4 - their Confidence) biggest visible story in order for them to care." and reversing the scale would remove the subtraction step.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Dec 14, 2012 7:44 am

How about just upshifting it by one and saying Confidence is the number of faceup cards you have to beat to make them care? Then people being "unmovable" would be Confidence 5 and there's still no substraction.

-Username17

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Dec 14, 2012 8:30 am

That's good too.