4. d.: I'm enjoying seeing community be a focus in this point you make. Building a community around RPGs is one of my main goals as well.
5.b.: Roleplaying (with ROLE) being emphasized, is one main reason I enjoy RPGs, whether I'm the GM (preferably) or the player. I too want folks to feel like they can do this without it coming across as an acting class.
I think a good majority of the folks in our sphere here on Substack feel the same way. I'm always on the lookout for collaboration, whether it's articles, games, design, etc. so if you have anything you've been ruminating on or you want in on something I'm thinking about let's definitely connect!
Funnily enough, a few weeks’ ago I fell in to a conversation about reputation in RPGs during which a major issue arose when it comes to mechanising it. The trouble is that reputations (beyond the highest level clichés) are not monolithic. The same character can have starkly different reputations depending on who they’re talking to. A Fagin-like boss of a group of pickpockets might have an excellent reputation among footpads and other low-life as ‘a good thief’, but will be thought of very differently by upright housewives, the local constables and business owners. Even among broad social classes, a character can acquire - deservedly or not - very different reputations as a result of previous actions or even mere rumours. What if our Fagin PC is usually fair but, for whatever reason, cheated (or is said to have cheated) one particular fence or pawnbroker? Now he has two opposed reputations among ostensibly the same category of people AND the variable between the law-abiding and the criminal class. I see no simple mechanical solution to this issue that can reflect what makes the nuance and possible contradiction that makes reputations actually interesting in play, at least not without creating an exercise in book-keeping that creates more headaches than it solves.
It feels (to me) that it depends entirely on what your objectives for the game are. If you want something akin to a simulation, I could imagine organizing it into larger categories (like criminals) and sub-categories (fences, pickpockets, assassins, etc).
That ends up feeling pretty granular and ultimately a lot of work for little payoff—after all, what's the real, tangible difference between a +1 with Assassins vs a +2 for Fences?
But one thing I do really like is decoupling reputation from the people who interact with the PCs and simply having it be a measure of the PCs actions. This morning I read a great post from Luke Gearing on the subject and I have to say I really like the idea of it, even if I do need to sit and chew on it for a while to see how I'd use it in my games.
I haven’t read the article you describe, so what follows is necessarily ill-informed. Perhaps I misunderstand, but I’m sceptical of the notion of “decoupling reputation from the people who interact with the PCs and simply having it be a measure of the PCs actions”. Because what is a reputation if not what other people think of the character? If one cuts out the element of how others feel about a character’s actions, how are those actions actually having any concrete impact or consequences? To illustrate the process, let’s say a character has, for whatever reason, acquired through their previous actions a reputation of ‘Lecherous 3’. That integer is meaningless until you place it in the context of the character when dealing with pimps (+3 bonus) or, when interacting with the mayor who has a teenaged daughter, a -3 penalty. Absent those interactions, ‘Lecherous 3’ has no meaning.
The idea is to create a reputation system where, instead of relying on a static reputation score, you maintain a blank table that gradually fills with the character’s exploits over time—whether those actions are positive or negative. When the character encounters a new NPC, you roll on this table to see if any of these exploits come into play, which then informs how the NPC reacts.
Let's say a character once cheated a fence, and this exploit is rolled when they meet a farmer. While the farmer might not be directly connected to the world of fences and thieves, they could have heard rumors about the character’s dishonest dealings, making them more wary and less trusting. The farmer might be reluctant to do business with the character, or they might warn other villagers to be cautious around them, reflecting the character’s tainted reputation even outside the original context of the exploit.
I haven't played with this in practice, so I have no idea if it ends up feeling different or more of the same. Reading it and ideating, it *feels* different.
So sorry. I would have replied to this sooner, but the app buried the notification and I’m only just picking this up. OK. I have a better handle on this now. The issue, I think, is that of managing how one goes about determining whether a reputation is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. In part, this is to return to my point about the subjectivity of reputations, but I think it also might have second order mechanical consequences.
One could say that to have a reputation as ‘dishonest’ is simply a PC quality that NPCs can have a binary reaction to, based on whether they value (dis)honesty, and work the reputation and reaction mechanic accordingly. That’s alright, but it does sort of seem to require something like a list of ethical propositions or traits for each character and NPC to determine how it all fits together.
In our example of the crooked PC and the farmer, you’d have to decide what the farmer’s reactions are to a PC with a reputation as a cheat and a liar. I agree it’s probable it would be as you say, one of distrust. But why? Because the mechanic tells us the farmer is ‘honest’ or even just ‘cautious’? OK. So now it seems like we need two ‘tags’, that for the PC’s reputation and one to explain the NPC’s reaction - whether they think ‘dishonesty’ is a good or a bad trait.
How long does this list of principles or opinions have to be? Because once you start mechanising it, one can’t simply decide to ignore it, presumably? At this point, I think I’d argue that it’s quicker and simpler to abandon any reputation mechanic and rely on GM intuition and adherence to the fiction. “It is reasonable, in all the circumstances of the game, that this local farmer has heard the PC is a cheat, and since this industrious fellow is poor and reasonably honest, he’s going to be slow to trust the PC.”
One could argue that this is highly subjective and vulnerable to GM fiat, and I would agree. Mechanisation can be a useful guard-rail against poor GMing. But it’s also true that, sometimes, mechanics contrive to be simultaneously both blunt tools and very complicated ones.
At the end of the day, I tend to lean in your direction a bit more than the full mechanization of the process. I think as long as a GM can coherently share the logic of how a farmer knows a PC is a cheat, you really don't need the rest.
Ultimately, I think my objective for the resolution mechanic is less to mechanize the process and more just create a repository of situations the PCs have caused because a) I'm a terrible note taker and b) I trend towards whatever I've prepped for a given area rather than remembering the PCs past actions.
Like most of my recommendations, it's really a long-winded way to organize my thoughts rather than make the PC-side better / easier. 😅
I revisited this topic the other evening and it was noted that in the game Yggdrasill the reputation system doesn't concern itself with value judgments as such, only with facts that might be known by others. So instead of saying a PC has a rep of 'dishonest' it confines itself to the factual statement 'The PC ripped off a fence'. This means that the reputation and reaction can then be decided on the basis of how the NPC perceives that fact. This seems to solve part of the problem and, indeed, was one of the things you mentioned earlier in the discussion which I now understand better.
4. d.: I'm enjoying seeing community be a focus in this point you make. Building a community around RPGs is one of my main goals as well.
5.b.: Roleplaying (with ROLE) being emphasized, is one main reason I enjoy RPGs, whether I'm the GM (preferably) or the player. I too want folks to feel like they can do this without it coming across as an acting class.
I think a good majority of the folks in our sphere here on Substack feel the same way. I'm always on the lookout for collaboration, whether it's articles, games, design, etc. so if you have anything you've been ruminating on or you want in on something I'm thinking about let's definitely connect!
Oh, and thanks for ‘The Tomb of Lime’ heads-up. Subbed.
It was a pleasant surprise on my feed, couldn't even tell you how I found it. Glad it's up your alley!
I’ve long since given up tried to grok what’s going on in the black box of various algorithms and so have to trust to serendipitous events like this.
Funnily enough, a few weeks’ ago I fell in to a conversation about reputation in RPGs during which a major issue arose when it comes to mechanising it. The trouble is that reputations (beyond the highest level clichés) are not monolithic. The same character can have starkly different reputations depending on who they’re talking to. A Fagin-like boss of a group of pickpockets might have an excellent reputation among footpads and other low-life as ‘a good thief’, but will be thought of very differently by upright housewives, the local constables and business owners. Even among broad social classes, a character can acquire - deservedly or not - very different reputations as a result of previous actions or even mere rumours. What if our Fagin PC is usually fair but, for whatever reason, cheated (or is said to have cheated) one particular fence or pawnbroker? Now he has two opposed reputations among ostensibly the same category of people AND the variable between the law-abiding and the criminal class. I see no simple mechanical solution to this issue that can reflect what makes the nuance and possible contradiction that makes reputations actually interesting in play, at least not without creating an exercise in book-keeping that creates more headaches than it solves.
It feels (to me) that it depends entirely on what your objectives for the game are. If you want something akin to a simulation, I could imagine organizing it into larger categories (like criminals) and sub-categories (fences, pickpockets, assassins, etc).
That ends up feeling pretty granular and ultimately a lot of work for little payoff—after all, what's the real, tangible difference between a +1 with Assassins vs a +2 for Fences?
But one thing I do really like is decoupling reputation from the people who interact with the PCs and simply having it be a measure of the PCs actions. This morning I read a great post from Luke Gearing on the subject and I have to say I really like the idea of it, even if I do need to sit and chew on it for a while to see how I'd use it in my games.
All food for thought, though.
I haven’t read the article you describe, so what follows is necessarily ill-informed. Perhaps I misunderstand, but I’m sceptical of the notion of “decoupling reputation from the people who interact with the PCs and simply having it be a measure of the PCs actions”. Because what is a reputation if not what other people think of the character? If one cuts out the element of how others feel about a character’s actions, how are those actions actually having any concrete impact or consequences? To illustrate the process, let’s say a character has, for whatever reason, acquired through their previous actions a reputation of ‘Lecherous 3’. That integer is meaningless until you place it in the context of the character when dealing with pimps (+3 bonus) or, when interacting with the mayor who has a teenaged daughter, a -3 penalty. Absent those interactions, ‘Lecherous 3’ has no meaning.
The idea is to create a reputation system where, instead of relying on a static reputation score, you maintain a blank table that gradually fills with the character’s exploits over time—whether those actions are positive or negative. When the character encounters a new NPC, you roll on this table to see if any of these exploits come into play, which then informs how the NPC reacts.
Let's say a character once cheated a fence, and this exploit is rolled when they meet a farmer. While the farmer might not be directly connected to the world of fences and thieves, they could have heard rumors about the character’s dishonest dealings, making them more wary and less trusting. The farmer might be reluctant to do business with the character, or they might warn other villagers to be cautious around them, reflecting the character’s tainted reputation even outside the original context of the exploit.
I haven't played with this in practice, so I have no idea if it ends up feeling different or more of the same. Reading it and ideating, it *feels* different.
So sorry. I would have replied to this sooner, but the app buried the notification and I’m only just picking this up. OK. I have a better handle on this now. The issue, I think, is that of managing how one goes about determining whether a reputation is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. In part, this is to return to my point about the subjectivity of reputations, but I think it also might have second order mechanical consequences.
One could say that to have a reputation as ‘dishonest’ is simply a PC quality that NPCs can have a binary reaction to, based on whether they value (dis)honesty, and work the reputation and reaction mechanic accordingly. That’s alright, but it does sort of seem to require something like a list of ethical propositions or traits for each character and NPC to determine how it all fits together.
In our example of the crooked PC and the farmer, you’d have to decide what the farmer’s reactions are to a PC with a reputation as a cheat and a liar. I agree it’s probable it would be as you say, one of distrust. But why? Because the mechanic tells us the farmer is ‘honest’ or even just ‘cautious’? OK. So now it seems like we need two ‘tags’, that for the PC’s reputation and one to explain the NPC’s reaction - whether they think ‘dishonesty’ is a good or a bad trait.
How long does this list of principles or opinions have to be? Because once you start mechanising it, one can’t simply decide to ignore it, presumably? At this point, I think I’d argue that it’s quicker and simpler to abandon any reputation mechanic and rely on GM intuition and adherence to the fiction. “It is reasonable, in all the circumstances of the game, that this local farmer has heard the PC is a cheat, and since this industrious fellow is poor and reasonably honest, he’s going to be slow to trust the PC.”
One could argue that this is highly subjective and vulnerable to GM fiat, and I would agree. Mechanisation can be a useful guard-rail against poor GMing. But it’s also true that, sometimes, mechanics contrive to be simultaneously both blunt tools and very complicated ones.
At the end of the day, I tend to lean in your direction a bit more than the full mechanization of the process. I think as long as a GM can coherently share the logic of how a farmer knows a PC is a cheat, you really don't need the rest.
Ultimately, I think my objective for the resolution mechanic is less to mechanize the process and more just create a repository of situations the PCs have caused because a) I'm a terrible note taker and b) I trend towards whatever I've prepped for a given area rather than remembering the PCs past actions.
Like most of my recommendations, it's really a long-winded way to organize my thoughts rather than make the PC-side better / easier. 😅
I revisited this topic the other evening and it was noted that in the game Yggdrasill the reputation system doesn't concern itself with value judgments as such, only with facts that might be known by others. So instead of saying a PC has a rep of 'dishonest' it confines itself to the factual statement 'The PC ripped off a fence'. This means that the reputation and reaction can then be decided on the basis of how the NPC perceives that fact. This seems to solve part of the problem and, indeed, was one of the things you mentioned earlier in the discussion which I now understand better.