Highly relevant to the use of oracles in solo.

Highly relevant to the use of oracles in solo.

Originally shared by As If

Zipf's Law is a fascinating glimpse at the outline of our own epistemology.  It shows itself not only in the classic "Zipfian Distribution" but even in the "80/20 Law" and even - whether you contrive it or not - in both the randomly-generated and the spuriously-improvized objects and inhabitants of your fictional worlds.  It will also determine how many - though not which - of your sessions will become the most memorable ones.

For GMs, Zipf's Law is most realistically (and simply) modeled by using a "Binary Tree" approach, coupled with the "Most Obvious Thing" principle.  This is laid out in the DayTrippers GameMasters Guide, so if you've read that book you can go home early.  For the rest of you, it works like this:

Deciding What a Thing Is:
- think of the most obvious or likely thing it could be
- roll a "Yes/No" die (high means Yes, low means No)
- if "Yes", that's what it is
- if "No", think of the next most likely thing
- repeat until you know what it is

Detailing a Thing:
- think of the most obvious or likely trait
- roll a "Yes/No" die (high means Yes, low means No)
- if "Yes", the trait is true; go back to step 1 for more detail
- if "No", think of the next most likely trait
- repeat until you have a useful number of true traits

Each time you get a "No" result, you will think of something less likely than the previous candidate.  And if you receive a "No" to that question, the following candidate will be even more unlikely.  But since you only end up stepping down that slope 50% of the time, the ontological distribution of things in your gameworld will follow a Zipf Curve just like things in the real world(TM), even though they're completely random.  The most likely things will be twice as frequent as the second-most likely things, which will be twice as frequent as the third-most likely things, and so on.

By structuring your fictional ontological queries this way and letting the dice do all the work, you are mechanically guaranteeing that the distribution of likely traits in your fictional world will fall along a Zipfian Distribution, emulating this stochastic law (paradox!) of the observable universe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE