D&D 5E Reputation and social achievements

[One of my players asked for some kind of game structure around reputation and notoriety. Here's my quick version of what I think I'm going to try out this week.]

Reputation exists within a certain context which we'll call a peer group. Everyone in the peer group knows the reputation of everyone else in the Peer Group. A minor embarrassment (by the standards of that peer group) such as not getting invited to a party costs you 5 reputation (within that peer group), while a minor victory (getting a famous celebrity to attend) earns you 5 reputation. A major embarrassment (clothes catching on fire at a party) could cost up to half your reputation or 100 points (whichever is greater), while a major victory (saving the city) could double it. (DM's discretion here as to magnitude.) The only mechanical effects of reputation are that you can give it away to someone with less reputation, you can spend it to "attack" the reputation of someone who has less than you do (degrading both equally on a 1:1 basis), and everyone knows how much reputation everyone has. The additional roleplaying consequence is that people who want reputation within a certain peer group are likely to cooperate with those with high reputation, who therefore have the power to enhance or destroy other people's reputations. Toadies and flunkies, in-groups, out-groups, etc., all emerge naturally from this simple set of rules.

You can participate in multiple peer groups and have different reputations within each. I might have loads of street cred (Reputation: 500 among the Waterdeep Toughs) but be virtually unknown amongst the nobility (Reputation: 5 for once attending a certain party) and yet be hated and feared by chromatic dragons (Reputation: 200 for killing three dragons). Note that Reputation doesn't have to mean that people like you (the dragons hate me), but if I want to spend my credibility mocking a certain chromatic dragon he has to respond (likely by trying to kill me) or be shamed among his peers. A regular peasant wouldn't have that kind of leverage.

Notoriety is reputation with a peer group of bad guys.

The point of the reputation system is so that players can know in advance, some quantifiable way, what abstract effects their actions will have and thereby increase their feeling of agency. In my specific player's case, last week he rescued some peasants from gnolls and then threatened them afterward when they failed to give him any money. He ended up destroying their house, barn, and prized plow. In the proposed system, that might be -100 reputation among People Who Live Near Adarak, and +5 among Manly Psychopaths Who Live Near Adarak. The gnolls might even be peers within the Manly Psychopath peer group, and those of them who survived undoubtedly would lose reputation (-20 reputation?) if word of their defeat got around. How that affects their behavior depends on how important their reputation is to them, and what they think is the best way of getting it back.

Finally, I might build in some quick handles into every peer group that let you gain some starting reputation. E.g. Street Toughs might give you an initial reputation equal to your Intimidation passive score, and Nobility might let you gain 5 reputation with a week's worth of effort and a successful Persuasion check against 1/5 your current reputation. The purpose of the handles is, again, to empower the players with specific knowledge about their options.
 

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Look at the optional scores for Honor and Sanity in the DMG for some inspiration. A negative score in Honor could be respected among cutthroats who look for Notoriety, or just replace Sanity with Notoriety entirely.

Another resource to look at is the Factions and their rankings for Adventurer's League and the assorted threads that look into that. There have been a few good discussions about giving players some benefits for advancing their ranks on ENworld.



On the whole, I like your ideas. But keeping the numbers lower seems better, both for simplicity and in line with 5e's bounded accuracy. Rather than having -100 with one group, you need at least a +2 to even get their attention, and they try to arrest anyone with a -2, or even try to kill people with a -5 on sight. Unless you'd like to think of it more as XP and certain tasks can give you a large pool (is it a finite resource that you spend, or only change as you adventure?).

Backgrounds would be a good place to assign some base scores to reputations. Even classes and races could affect your starting reputation if you wanted people to have more defined scores earlier.
 

On the whole, I like your ideas. But keeping the numbers lower seems better, both for simplicity and in line with 5e's bounded accuracy. Rather than having -100 with one group, you need at least a +2 to even get their attention, and they try to arrest anyone with a -2, or even try to kill people with a -5 on sight. Unless you'd like to think of it more as XP and certain tasks can give you a large pool (is it a finite resource that you spend, or only change as you adventure?).

This. It's more like XP or gold than an ability score. Remember, unlike an ability score, you never, ever roll a d20 against your reputation.

Have you looked at Factions and Renown? DMG p22.


Not as detailed as what you are preoposing, but do you want that level of bookkeeping?

I remember skimming them, and they may have influenced what I came up. At any rate, "Renown" sounds vaguely familiar, but it didn't catch my imagination.

I don't want or need a lot of bookkeeping, but it is quite important to me that the rules be elegant, logical, and lead to plausible outcomes. I don't think the DMG rules did that for me.
 

This. It's more like XP or gold than an ability score. Remember, unlike an ability score, you never, ever roll a d20 against your reputation.

I don't want or need a lot of bookkeeping, but it is quite important to me that the rules be elegant, logical, and lead to plausible outcomes. I don't think the DMG rules did that for me.
Then to the victor go the spoils! Maybe come up with one single formula to calculate Honor, something like CR*10 or XP/5 or whatever works for you. As you assign XP from an encounter, you use that formula to give Honor/Notoriety as well. There could be some special cases like a high-Honor fighter with a lower CR than he should, but the one-and-done equation might be a good baseline.
 

This. It's more like XP or gold than an ability score. Remember, unlike an ability score, you never, ever roll a d20 against your reputation.

What you're describing, at least to me, sounds like you're consolidating treasure and HPs, and then requiring the expenditure of same to attack others; unless the gaining of reputation unlocks other benefits, it doesn't sound like Xp (at least to me).

What you propose doesn't sound like a bad idea. It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure how I feel about the whole losing reputation to attack another's reputation part of the concept. I definitely think I understand why you created it that way. If I'm right, you made it work in that manner so a small group of "nobodies" couldn't bring down a high-reputation character (whether PC or NPC) with repeated reputation attacks.



I remember skimming them, and they may have influenced what I came up. At any rate, "Renown" sounds vaguely familiar, but it didn't catch my imagination.

I don't want or need a lot of bookkeeping, but it is quite important to me that the rules be elegant, logical, and lead to plausible outcomes. I don't think the DMG rules did that for me.

Renown might also be familiar to you from the discussion we had some time ago over in this thread.
 

The only mechanical effects of reputation are that you can give it away to someone with less reputation, you can spend it to "attack" the reputation of someone who has less than you do (degrading both equally on a 1:1 basis), and everyone knows how much reputation everyone has. The additional roleplaying consequence is that people who want reputation within a certain peer group are likely to cooperate with those with high reputation, who therefore have the power to enhance or destroy other people's reputations. Toadies and flunkies, in-groups, out-groups, etc., all emerge naturally from this simple set of rules.

I'm not sure I like the idea of just spending renown to reduce someone else's or to bring another's up... I feel like if you want to raise someone's reputation then you should back them or help them (and thus bring your own reputation score to bear in asking for favors or influencing things) in activities that would grant or take away reputation (and thus also have a chance for both failure and success)... I don't think you should just be able to spend reputation points to do so though... but that's just my preference.
 

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION]
I don't think the specific reputation/renown system you use matters much, as long as it works and isn't too complicated.

What matters is what can you DO with reputation/renown.

For an example of my treatment of it in a recent game:

Renown (Cairngorm’s Hollow)
As the PCs accomplish quests (as determined by the DM) that improve the lives of the people in the village of Cairngorm's hollow, they gain renown among the villagers with the corresponding benefits thereof.

Renown 1: PCs get offers of free services, sporadic free room & board, occasional offers of marriage, and small gifts like a few chickens or a goat or a basket of apples and fritters.
Renown 2: PCs get consistent free room & board, preferential treatment from guards who overlook minor infractions, and access to special quests from Lady Nydaridien (e.g retrieving the land deed from Calrow Ruins).
Renown 3: PCs are treated as villagers and brought in on village ritual practices and allowed to vote. They gain a free modest lifestyle while in the village, and Lady Nydaridien grants free use of riding horses in the livery stables.
Renown 4: PCs receive 25% discounts on special purchases, and are afforded the same level of respect as village elders and Lady Nydaridien herself. They gain access to the dryad Wyra’s spellcasting service and special downtime activities involving the Wizening Tree rite.
 

What you're describing, at least to me, sounds like you're consolidating treasure and HPs, and then requiring the expenditure of same to attack others; unless the gaining of reputation unlocks other benefits, it doesn't sound like Xp (at least to me).

What you propose doesn't sound like a bad idea. It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure how I feel about the whole losing reputation to attack another's reputation part of the concept. I definitely think I understand why you created it that way. If I'm right, you made it work in that manner so a small group of "nobodies" couldn't bring down a high-reputation character (whether PC or NPC) with repeated reputation attacks.

Well, partly. But a even moreso because that's a way of modelling how reputation attacks work in real life. Mudslinging hurts both sides, you're just trying to make it hurt the other guy more. In real life you can in fact attack someone with a higher reputation than your own, and I can imaging making rules for that, but for now it's simplest to just stick to the simple case and say that the prom queen can spread catty rumors about nerd girl, but nerd girl can't effectively spread catty rumors about the prom queen because no one believes her. But the prom queen also has to watch out for "girl who cried wolf" scenarios, so she would rather hold out the threat of what she could do to nerd girl's reputation, without actually incurring the cost of a real rumor camapaign.

In short, I invented "lose reputation to attack reputation" to give both sides of the equation (potential attacker and potential defender) an incentive to stick to detente instead of actively going to war, because that's realistic and leads to a more fun dynamic, IMO.

P.S. And of course, the threat only works if nerd girl cares about her reputation among Popular High Schoolers. If she's busy reading library books on chemistry and planning for college, prom queen is totally powerless against her and there is no dynamic. They don't even interact. That's how I experienced high school anyway--I don't even know for sure who was popular back then and who wasn't, although I assume the cute girls were probably all reasonably popular because that makes sense.
 

I'm not sure I like the idea of just spending renown to reduce someone else's or to bring another's up... I feel like if you want to raise someone's reputation then you should back them or help them (and thus bring your own reputation score to bear in asking for favors or influencing things) in activities that would grant or take away reputation (and thus also have a chance for both failure and success)... I don't think you should just be able to spend reputation points to do so though... but that's just my preference.

I didn't make it explicit, but of course this is exactly what you are doing when you bestow reputation on someone else. "This is my very good friend Elpheba, I hope you'll all be very nice to her." It could also represent sharing credit for a victory with someone who helped make that victory possible for you.

If you bestow reputation too often you'll run out of reputation, but you can get a lot of flunkies to do you favors in hopes that they'll be the lucky person who gets your support this year.
 

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