Social Currency Outline

[virgil]

Prestige: Social Currency
Functions in many ways as gold, but is essentially only transferable with a specific organization or social structure. Goods, services, and bargaining for your release from imprisonment can all be exchanged for prestige. You earn prestige by performing actions on an organization’s behalf (for which they place value); which can range from defeating their enemies, protecting them from disasters, to outright bribing them with resources (such as food to a famine-ridden town). Spending prestige isn’t commonly done as a standard transaction. Commonly, the player asks their DM for something the organization can provide, and the plot is then decided such that the organization independently rewards them with.
Some items can only be bought with prestige, such as access to certain areas under the control of the organization. The most important one is having them send diplomats to negotiate your release from hostile factions in the event of defeat and capture.
It is possible to garner negative prestige, usually through committing crimes or other hostilities toward the faction. If captured for committing a crime, the organization’s goodwill is damaged in addition to the fines from organization’s laws. The fine value and the prestige loss are usually equal, but not always. With sufficient skill, bribes can be made to mitigate the value of the fine and loss of prestige; either to negate the loss of prestige by keeping the crime secret or to pay a smaller fine outright by giving it to the representative of authority directly.
If captured by an enemy, you will more than likely have a purely negative prestige total with them (crimes of killing their own, entering their territory as an enemy, etc). Having an allied organization negotiate your release will mechanically cause your prestige transfer until you have a zero balance with the hostile faction.
An important trait of this is that as prestige is social in nature, disguising oneself as another gives you access to that person’s prestige. While the loss of prestige is negated if/when the deceit is revealed, being the victim of identity theft is itself an event that causes the loss of some prestige (proportional to prestige ‘stolen’?)
Prestige Rewards (all per Level/HD)

• Slain Civilian of Warring Faction - 5gp
• Slain Warrior of Warring Faction - 10gp
• Captured Warrior of Warring Faction - 20gp
• Captured Civilian of Warring Faction - 25gp
• Rescued Faction Civilian - 10gp
• Rescued Faction Soldier - 20gp
• Rescued Nobility - 100gp
• Generous Donations - 1gp per 2gp physical
• Friendly Social Interaction w/Community - 5sp/day

Prestige Purchases (all per Level/HD)

• Release from Warring Faction - 25gp plus negative balance
• Incarceration Reduction - 5gp/day removed (not HD dependent)
• Free Ale (single tavern) - 1gp per night (not HD dependent)
• Requisitioned Gear for Faction Mission - 1gp per 1gp physical

[PhoneLobster]

This looks like a stupidly elaborate way of saying "It's cool to, like join a faction or something like that and do, like... things... for rewards pulled out of the GMs ass!".

And indeed with NO PRICING MECHANICS and almost no actual mechanical details at all it IS just saying "GM's ass pulling faction, like... things... is coolz!".

I expect a lot more from a "Social Currency Outline" than "Social Currency, I gonna has it!"

About all we learn from this is social currency is tracked by Faction, which is sorta a bad thing, can be a negative number, cannot be positive with enemies (which sorta sucks), and can be traded for gold at what looks like shifting purely arbitrary rates (really really bad thing). And the way the write up is we seem to pretty much learn those things by accident.

[virgil]

It is an outline/concept scratch. Tables are intended to be posted later when I'm off work (that was during lunch break)

[ModelCitizen]

This seems more concerned with individual kills than with whether your faction knows or cares about them. The only people who build their reputations on body count are assassins, fighter pilots, and serial killers. For anyone else kills are almost impossible to track and more importantly don't matter. The mayor of Crappington Hamlet doesn't know if the PCs killed 20 kobolds or 30 kobolds because he wasn't there, and he doesn't care either. He cares whether the kobold problem was solved.

I'd limit kill/capture rewards to verifiable kills and enemies the faction would recognize by name. Points for killing the dragon, no points for Dragonwrought Kobold #14. Most of the PCs' reputation awards should be for completing missions.

For all the stuff tied to the NPC killed/captured/rescued, I wouldn't use level. Crown Prince Inbred McFlipperhands is probably level 1 but rescuing him should be worth more than rescuing some random knight (level 4 fighting man). When you assign an award based on a creature, maybe use a fraction of that creature's own reputation. Prince McFlipperhands has 50000 rep with the nobility so rescuing him is worth 50000 / 5 = 10000 rep. The dragon has -12000 rep with the Village of Crappington so killing him is worth abs(-12000) / 2 = 6000 rep. Something like that.

[PhoneLobster]

Most of the PCs' reputation awards should be for completing missions.

I am not sure I agree. I suspect that going at reputation rewards from a factional basis is a non starter on several levels, the first of which is accounting.

I think it would be better if you tracked a small number of reputation "themes" like "Niceness" and "Badassness" and then what a faction thinks about you is based on which of those things they value the most. And even that's only if you want to focus on peoples Badassness ratings with excessive accounting and book keeping to a degree I think is far from necessary.

Faction specific allegiance rewards should be based on "Do you have a membership card and what level are you?" while faction MISSION rewards should be flat out the pay you are offered for a job on a simple contractual basis, getting potentially non-exchangable bullshit "faction dollarz" is an utterly needless obfuscation. And the first time you tell PCs they get "Dragon Cult Dollarz" they will not be impressed. Even if you say "but you see it's like cash, you can use it to CHOOSE your reward!" they will then say "Then why didn't they pay us with fucking actual cash?".

For all the stuff tied to the NPC killed/captured/rescued, I wouldn't use level. Crown Prince Inbred McFlipperhands is probably level 1 but

So you are pay for jobs should be determined by the value of the job to the employer and the resources available to him according to HIS level?

Or in other words it SHOULD be level based, as soon as you get around to realizing who the hell is paying you for what.

The dragon has -12000 rep with the Village of Crappington so killing him is worth abs(-12000) / 2 = 6000 rep. Something like that.

Oh boy, no.

That's a "Let's give the dragon an extra week to trash the country side, maybe even see if it wanders over and racks up some points against the elf kingdom too. THEN we will harvest it, but not before it is ripe!".

PS... you know what a Social Currency system usually is in most games and much of the real world? Just plain old Currency. If your "social currency" system is more math to do the same thing as factions giving out actual cash only worse then it needs a rethink.

[ishy]

You seem to have mixed a reputation system with currency.
I don't really like it that much.

Let's say you have an organization in multiple towns, would they really track the 'free ale' option that happens in each and every town?

I'd prefer something like: reach reputation x with faction and get free ale in every single tavern they own.
If you really want currency give out a 'weekly budget' or something. Is slightly less insane to track imo.

[ModelCitizen]

So you are pay for jobs should be determined by the value of the job to the employer and the resources available to him according to HIS level?

That would work too, assuming NPCs are required to have their "resources" determined by level. Which they shouldn't be because then you have a world where rich people are automatically better at fighting than poor people, and it is impossible for (for example) a homeless bandit to rob a wealthy merchant.

Oh boy, no.

That's a "Let's give the dragon an extra week to trash the country side, maybe even see if it wanders over and racks up some points against the elf kingdom too. THEN we will harvest it, but not before it is ripe!".

"The baron wants us to kill the bandits robbing merchants in the pass, but let's give it a few weeks so when we kill them they'll have more gold."

That's the same thing and players can do it now, but they don't so it's not a real problem.

[TheFlatline]

"You should totally give me that sword. I need it and I killed the orc hordes off."

"I'm sorry, but I don't quite respect you enough. If you go kill the bandits, I will respect you enough to give you the sword, and then you can take the rest of my respect to the other shops or acquire something from this other bin of lower quality items."

I think I'll pass.

[PhoneLobster]

a world where rich people are automatically better at fighting than poor people

Say hello to Feudalism.

And regardless of the fact that the standard D&D scenario IS one of rich feudal ass kickers there are actually numerous and very good reasons to assume a "standard" amount of wealth/resources typically accessible to characters of any given level and what sort of rewards for jobs characters of any given level are likely to expect (and what expected level their employers then will typically be).

That's a useful thing to have and crying about ass kicking beggars is kinda stupid because it's an edge case and isn't even excluded by any sort of wealth by level guidelines anyway.

"The baron wants us to kill the bandits robbing merchants in the pass, but let's give it a few weeks so when we kill them they'll have more gold."

Bandits run an extremely marginal system where their cash profits are probably nothing compared to the Reputation Damage they deal to gain them.

This in turn means that the inclusion of the Reputation Damage for Reward system MASSIVELY exaccerbates the bandit problem because.
A) Instead of the reward for the bandits growing by like 10 gp and a rusty sword it grows by 10 gp, a rusty sword AND huge pile of reputation equal to ANOTHER 10 gp, ANOTHER rusty sword AND all the reputation damage for attacking, robbing and killing however many faction members they attacked and robbed and killed.

B) Other "bandits" that DON'T rob gold, like a bunch of hungry crocodiles, are now on the "lets farm them a bit more" treadmill because even if they don't actually EVER steal and accrue REAL cash value they steal and accrue real Reputation value.

but they don't so it's not a real problem.

So lets just massively increase the motivation for them to do this thing they don't yet do and we don't want them to do with a specific mechanic that does little or nothing else other than to motivate them to do this.

That should work out fine, what with them not doing it before we started sending out hand written invitations for them to start doing it.

[HalcyonUmbra]

"The baron wants us to kill the bandits robbing merchants in the pass, but let's give it a few weeks so when we kill them they'll have more gold."

That's the same thing and players can do it now, but they don't so it's not a real problem.

I wouldn't say these are that comparable. Gold is zero sum, reputation is not. The heroes can technically still get the same amount of money by defeating the bandit, and then mugging the merchants themselves.

But regardless, I don't see the capability of characters to "farm" villains for reputation as a downside, because people do that in stories all the time. True, it's nearly always the bad guys doing it, but then you just need to specify that postponing help in order to increase your status is an evil act. Plus, these plans often go wrong. Syndrome got his ass kicked by the Omnidroid.

[Eikre]

The dragon has -12000 rep with the Village of Crappington so killing him is worth abs(-12000) / 2 = 6000 rep. Something like that.

Oh boy, no.

That's a "Let's give the dragon an extra week to trash the country side, maybe even see if it wanders over and racks up some points against the elf kingdom too. THEN we will harvest it, but not before it is ripe!".

The slayer PC is played by Dennis Quaid and the Dragon is voiced by Sean Connery. Nothing can go wrong.