For rumors about a dungeon that the DM gives to the players before they go: if they could be a lie
Then I’m inclined to disregard them all. I’d rather not indulge any of them if one could be a lie.
This is an overly pessimist view.
How do you do rumors and what are your thoughts about them and what have you learned in using them?
Do you have a philosophy about them? 30% true, 50% half true, 20% lies?
I think of rumors as a way to get the players info and something they might be interested in checking out. I agree that if most of the rumors are lies then the players might tend to ignore rumors so I would lean towards most rumors being partially true, some being completely true, and leave out lies. I don’t think there’s any benefit to having lies in your rumor table. One could argue “realism”, but I don’t think that’s a good reason.
For me, the half truths are more interesting so maybe 80%/20%.
I think lies always fall flat in play. They’re a waste of time. As a GM, I try to only pass on rumors that contain at least a nucleus of truth, some kind of hint that may become useful later.
that’s helpful. thanks!
helpful. I can use that. thanks!
I don’t tend to include outright falsehoods among my Rumors, there’s usually a grain of truth to each of them, but it might be a bit distorted through re-telling or exaggerated sometimes.
I find the best ones intrigue the Players by sometimes contradicting their expectations or contain sometimes tempting inconsistencies. “There’s a Wizard in the Scabrous Swamps that can cure any known Disease” is like this (in a Setting where Wizards don’t have Healing Magic) because it plays with some of that knowledge in addition to being something that might be “useful” later.
I always found the rumors included in module descriptions to be rather silly. Whether true or false, so many of them included information of a sort that the person relaying the rumor couldn’t possibly know without having been to the dungeon site, inside, it, and lived to come back. Um…the local cobbler drinking at the pub definitely hasn’t been into the Necromancer’s tomb complex and lived to tell the tale.
Then I realized that rumors that include info the teller couldn’t possibly know can be easily identified as false, if the players pay attention. Couple that with evaluating the credibility of the source – a caravan guard who recently traveled through the hills where the tomb is, for example – and rumors can be interesting. Figuring out which rumors are useful is part of the challenge for players.
So make false rumors freely, and even that contradict each other, even. Make the players sort out which are useful and which aren’t.
I like the approaches above and would probably use one of those. But here’s another idea, stepping into a more story game-ish mode than normal OSR:
Give false rumours, but tell the players that they’re false up front. So the fun is roleplaying with a sense of dramatic irony.
I think rumors should all be at least partially true - they my represent a misunderstanding or something less then useful, but false rumors don’t work unless there is an expectation that rumors can/will be false and with time and effort available to determine their truth. This is rarely useful in a game that isn’t investigation based, because there is usually little space in the game/session or support for tracking down the veracity of rumors.
Classically for older style location based adventures/games the rumor is something from a table that is handed to the players without much interaction and detail (this is good - it saves valuable game time), so making this a truthful rumors is also a matter of encouraging referee trust. Rumors are spoken in the “referee voice” in this scenario - not as part of world description open to player interrogation.