Tinkering: Modern Occupation Random Tables

Occasionally, I wander down roads that lead to forks, more forks, and many side paths. Modern occupations are one with many strange journeys. The original parsing had over 100K entries. The details are hard to parse automatically so I stepped back and just hit the top categories. The minor preview fails to express the awesome level of detail I want to show.

Download (PDF, 30KB)

The data is crazily detailed. Far more than I originally suspected. It will allow me to delve into categories of employment within the major categories and drill down multiple levels. Yep, tables of tables. Pretty awesome to determine if a person is a CEO of a mining company or a truck driver in the mining industry.

I’ll likely double-dip on this data and generate not only the original table(s) for a random generator but also a PDF. Due to the detail, I’ll likely utilize a d1000 system since the significant digits drop into the noise with at the d100 level.

Scottish Jobs

I love lists of cool things. I’m always on the lookout for lists of cool things that can be applied to a role playing game. While the list of Scottish Occupations may fall a bit outside the date range for what I use in fantasy campaigns, it has some very cool entries.

Who knew a Beadman was a licensed beggar? Not I. How about a Chapper? That fellow was employed to issue wake up calls except it was door to door. Too fun.

Nothing like a random list to get the creative juices flowing.

Coding, Editing, and the Transit

Colorado has 300 beautiful blue sky days a year. Strange how one of the overcast days showed up during the transit of Venus. Luckily a few brief breaks in the clouds gave me an opportunity to check it out. I’ll be soil or something less pleasant by the time it happens again.

I’ve been hacking through the 6600 modern occupations in the occupation generator over the last few days. The editing is tedious. Given the classification origin of the list, I expected far fewer duplicates and variants. Once done, the database for the generator will be updated, which should produce more interesting results. I may also release the pruned list as a PDF. Six thousand possible occupations is a lot more interesting than the few dozen jobs most games include as interesting character occupations. The breadth of possibilities allows for more engaging NPC’s.

As my brain tired of editing, I got distracted and started yet another random treasure generator. This one is for Adventure Conqueror King (ACKs). The system is novel in a few different ways. If you want to expose the strange tendrils of a system, translate the tables into code. I mentioned a preview link on G+. Unlike most of my generators, I’m keeping this one stand-alone so I can toss it over to the fine folks at Autarch if they find it useful. It’ll have my ‘normal’ set of ajax related dependencies. Someday I should transition to jquery.

Finally, I chose to opt out of my original opt-in for the DNDNext playtest. The playtest launched while I was on vacation. During that time, I realized I just wasn’t that interested in yet another variant of the franchise. While I am certain the designers are working hard, nothing reported to date compels me to even bother reading the materials. Large corporations are not driven not by innovation, but by the bottom line. The crazy number of badly written polls regarding the release suggest the same. Far more interesting products are available from a plethora of small gaming companies.

Modern Occupation Generator Update

Previously, the Modern Occupation Generator was only a drill-down selection tool. The process was useful if the user possessed a general idea of the career desired. If not, drill-down selection could be tedious.

I added a second option on the same page, which allows purely random generation. Now users can merely click a button to generate up to 25 random job titles across all job sectors.

Raw Data: Fantasy Occupations

While working on a software project, I needed a decent list of occupations for non-player characters in a fantasy setting. After searching around, I discovered most of the lists available are relatively sparse. Most are quite focused on playable options rather than common careers. Other lists are condensed with only gross categories.

Finally, I just set about combining a variety of sources. The raw list contains over 200 occupations. The list contains numerous synonyms for the the same job. The list also contains a number of titles and fantasy rpg class names.

Before I consolidate it for my needs, I decided to publish the unedited list to save others the same work. Here’s a sampling of the data. The raw file and table differ slightly.

Feel free to add anything I’ve overlooked.