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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6884041" data-attributes="member: 6787650">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.</blockquote>

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