If they care. Most likely - and odds are high that as a player I'd have my character do this too - they'll book it to some distant lands where that reputation will never follow, and carry on as if nothing happened. No diminishment of fun whatsoever, and no lasting loss conditon.
Interesting! I have to say, being willing to abandon my reputation in the lands I'm familiar with is pretty far down the list of how I'd personally approach it.
Unless I'm playing a character who intends to do big things in the realm after its adventuring career is over e.g. go into politics, I usually don't give much of a flying fig about my character's reputation among anyone other than who I'm dealing with at the moment. Gate guards and innkeepers? Sure, I'll treat 'em well while I'm there, but it's no skin off my nose if I never see them again because I'm somewhere else.
what reputation? There's no mechanics for that and nothing left for it to impact unless the gm declares rocks fall or flips the table by simply declaring that there is no adventure for your pc while refusing to let you make some effort at repairing it doing adventurer things.
Reputation is such a personal and individual thing that I don't know that hard mechanics are the best way to model it, but at my tables that certainly wouldn't be an impediment to including the fallout of positive or negative reputation as an interesting factor of fiction. Failing the request of a royal seems like it would be important enough to fundamentally alter the status quo. It wouldn't be engaging gameplay to make it entirely beyond their abilities to change if they so desired, and admittedly, I struggle to think of any action any of my parties would be likely to take that would be unforgivable to that level, so I would hopefully avoid the worst of what you suggest there.
I think it was a combination of not wanting to start the campaign off that way and not wanting to have to deal with trying to introduce a brand new PC straight away. That said, I don't normally shy away from PC deaths. That very same campaign continued through The Forge of Fury, which resulted in one PC dying at the hands of the succubus, and then segued into Tomb of Annihilation, during which ~9 PCs died (most of them in Omu, including one that lasted half a game session).
I'm currently running Mad Mage, and the intellect devourers on level 1 killed one of the PCs in my game as well. I don't think they reached that room until the second or third session, though, so it wasn't quite as sudden as it was in that other campaign.
While death is never off the table in my group, I don't have a high rate of death in my campaign. It's something we discuss in our session 0. But there are a lot of penalties that are not mechanical, in many ways perma-death is the least interesting option. Dying just ends a specific story arc for a PC it doesn't stop the player from playing. I think there are other in-game consequences that are just as relevant, even if it means house rules around being touched by death.My question, then, is other than death what fail states are left in the game that actually long-term negatively affect the mechanics of a character?
Permanent stat loss - almost gone (is Feeblemind still a thing?).
Level drain - gone.
Limb loss and-or permanent scarring/wounds - gone.
Destruction of magic items (which affects a characters effective power level) - gone.
That don't leave much of a spectrum.
I agree that they're not (necessarily) competing ideas, but if humans will find a narrative anyway, then there's merit in the idea of giving the "game" aspect primacy and trusting that the people playing it will turn things into a narrative on their own (likely after the fact):
grognardia.blogspot.com
So which is it? Moving on & choosing to abandon the negative problematic reputation would be a big deal or it would be a total non-issue because there's no good way to model it?
Well those are two disconnected concerns, that depend on the table. Some tables, running away would say something important about the character's character. Others, a smart and logical response because they can outrun their problems. Still others, something the party would never do because they want to deal with and rectify this problem.
