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Another stab at Renown & Reputation


Linda

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Alright, as some of you may now, we've been trying for a good while to sort out how to get the Renown system up and running.

A short summar: Renown is supposed to be a complement and a counter-point to Influence. Influence measures your social and political klout. Renown is supposed to give a sense of how well-known you are and whether people think well or poorly of you. If you take a look at someone's sheet, you will see an entry for Renown and one for Reputation: these are linked.

Renown is (as currently envisioned) a measure of how well-known you are, regardless of whether you are known for being a famous knight or an infamous pirate. Its just the sum total of how noteworthy you are.

Renown is made up of Fame and Infamy (just a straigtht addition of each sum). As you all know, some Assets & Flaws affect these numbers (there are none that affect Renown directly) by giving bonuses to how fast you gain either Fame or Infamy. For example, Famous gives you a permanent +5% to Fame gain.

The way Fame and Infamy were envisioned was that characters would just keep accumulating this, there's no cap or a baseline that it falls back towards as with Influence.

Reputation, however, is measured on a scale of -100 to 100 and is derived from your Fame and Infamy. It basically shows your overall reputation; negative means a bad reputation, positive means a good reputation. Its the easy part of the equation, though it does have the issue that if you have equally high fame and infamy, your base reputation will appear to be pretty close to 0. But that's why Renown has to work correctly so that people can see that this doesn't mean you're not well-known, it just means your reputation is fairly neutral.

As with Fame and Infamy, there are Assets & Flaws that affect Reputation. For example, Famous will also give a +5% to Reputation.

So, where are we?

We are pretty happy with the way Reputation is calculated from Fame and Infamy. But the problems that remain are these:

1) How do we calculate someone's starting Fame & Infamy? Its not like Influence, where there's a handy number that can control everything (your house rank is massively decisive for Influence; it sets your base score and acts as a modifier on all additional variables). We need a formula that isn't arbitrary for figuring out everyone's baseline.

2) How do we handle NPCs? With Influence its easy; everyone either gains up or slips down towards their baseline each month, even if they have spent or gained Influence. Yes, you can affect your baseline by gaining offices, but there's still a clear baseline for everyone and no one will vastly outrace the NPCs that aren't being played.

With Renown, played characters could potentially get a huge advantage over unplayed ones if they just keep gaining whereas those who aren't played get nothing. With the system that we have, where you can start as a 40-something famous knight, it doesn't work to just leave NPCs out of things. This also means the baseline cannot be entirely dependant on Assets & Flaws, since only CGed characters have those. There needs to be another figure, as there is for Influence.

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I've had a read of the starting post a couple of times and still have not come up with any good ideas, but I figured maybe I should start a reply anyway to see if it gets things going. ;)

1) Starting Fame/Infamy: Everyone could start with a common base value that gets affected by all the various bonuses etc. I still think like Influence that house and rank should have some part to play; I would also throw age into the potential mix as well (a lord who has been a lord for 30 years would have some more name recognition than a newly minted one in their 20s). Bynames would also affect this (not sure if they already give a bonus?). Possibly Tier and/or Type as well. Short of having the admins read every person's history though, I think there will be some element of hit-and-miss in any system. So I'm not particularly helpful here, I think it's just going to come down to choosing some character aspects like Influence and going from there.

2) The NPC issue is probably the more problematic one - inflation systems are always going to be tricky. If you have a steadily rising Renown for PCs, the only solution to get equality for NPCs is to artifically raise theirs alongside them, or to stop inflation altogether. Stopping inflation altogether is probably unworkable given that you need a 'base value' to return to, and as in 1) there isn't a hard and fast way to work out a fair base value for people. So perhaps the only way is to peg an NPC's renown alongside the game average, or something similar. If the total Renown of all PCs has risen by a certain average amount, then someone entering the game gets to add that average inflation figure to their PC's Renown when they create it. It'd have to be moderated for rank etc (maybe look at the average rise of all lords for a lord, or average rise of all knights, ladies etc). It's pretty clunky but just throwing it out there.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Is some sort of normalization algorithm feasible? Say, for example, every so often (maybe monthly or quarterly), the renown of all characters is recorded and then reduced in a manner so that they keep the relative disparity between them, but it's normalized so that even the most renowned character is below a cap of, say 1,000 or 10,000 or some random number. If it's at 1000, then a character that was at 1500 renown at the start of the algorithm would still have twice as much renown as a character who had 750, but the objective number would be smaller?

This is just a rough idea, so I don't even know if it's feasible, but if it's workable, it could help when dealing with inflation. People aren't so much concerned with "I have x more renown" but "I am x amount more famous than that guy". If the proportion is still there, does it really make a huge difference what the exact number x is?

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  • 3 months later...

Having seen other MU*s with "no limit growth," I can tell you that it's very, very disheartening for a newbie to log in and see a character that they can -never- catch unless that character goes utterly inactive for several years.

I like Longaxe's idea of resetting after a certain point, but still retaining the same ratios between characters. The main problem with that is that all charts showing just how famous one has to be in order to attain something, or what a particular level of fame means, have to be couched in comparative terms. You can't, for instance, say "You have to have a Renown of 100 to join the Kingsguard." You have to say "Your Renown has to be within the top X% or X number of knights." Just an example, I don't figure there's actually a Renown requirement to join the Kingsguard.

I also like Jeor's suggestion that starting characters get a certain starting Renown set based on their house and rank within that house. After all, everyone in the court is likely to know the Heir of House Lannister, but very few people are likely to know a younger son of a landed knight (of course, it sounds like this is already being handled by the Influence code).

For starting Fame and Infamy, perhaps Assets and Flaws could have a stronger effect? Defects could raise your starting Infamy, while Assets besides Fame (like Knight or Scholar) could also raise your starting Fame.

If you wanted something a little more flexible, you could have Starting Fame/Infamy be something that new characters request, and have to rationalize in their Justify. Give them a range to start with for each, and have them list out the things their character has done that would support that starting setting. Granted, that's only a short step away from Admin reading backgrounds to set Fame/Infamy, but at least it gives you just one place to look, and a point to start from.

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Definitely agreed with Longaxe's suggestion that renown be normalized, making the actual number less important. Also agreed with Jeor's suggestion in regards to making the renown system similar to Influence, in regards to having the house the character is from, their wealth, etc. influence their renown.

On another note, can we have renown and reputation in the main +cdb page? It strikes me as strange that things like Famous are hidden within +cdb/view <name>/sheet, when it should be something readily known. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I know I don't check people's sheets that often.

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We prefer to keep the more CG related information on one display and the general information on one display. If we could fit it all on one, that'd be ideal, but they're pretty maxed out so we'd have to drop something.

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This looks like it's way too mathy for me to really comment on, but I do second/support Renys' comment regarding the frustration of being a new member and realising you'll never be able to catch up with others, unless a character goes inactive. If that's the sort of thing the staff want - okay. I still question/caution against it, though, because it might lose us new recruits, and the people who have been around since beta have a significant number of benefits. Reputation & Renown should be affected by length in play, but never be "unmatchable".

At the same time, it would be frustrating to put 3 years of gaming in, taking a character from a lesser landed knightly house and then getting blown out of the water when someone brings a new PC in that has never been played but has a higher reputation due to that slow NPC inflation.

Re: Famous - I'd like to see it as a line within the Status field ("A famous influential scion of a greater landed knightly house").

On Renown/Reputation:

1) I also like the idea of having base numbers relate to house, position within the house, and any additional titles (e.g. maester, Captain of the Guard, etc).

2) Inflation - NPCs can be neutral, with modifications made manually if needed according to a set of criteria, such as is used for influence. Once the character goes through CG, whatever necessary modifications there are can be made to adjust them (ok, you bought Famous? Add this. And you're the heir to the Baratheon name? Add this). I realise this will be code-intensive, but I'm genuinely not sure about an alternative.

3) I almost think Renown and Reputation need to be swapped in the +rumors function. If someone set up a rumor that a female PC is a wanton whore, I think that would affect reputation possibly more than renown. I realise it could go either way, but I tend to think a lot of the rumors we see currently targeting Influence would be more Reputation related than Renown related.

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Just addressing a couple of parts, because the notes we have are too extensive for me to go through right now.

1) We want to be able to keep PCs and NPCs on a similar scale, but we haven't been able to solve how to normalize scores, so I am not sure it can be accomplished.

2) Renown and Reputation are not two separate things, Reputation is just a score derived from Renown, so there's no real difference between affecting one or the other.

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Re: Famous - I'd like to see it as a line within the Status field ("A famous influential scion of a greater landed knightly house").

Seconded. At least it would be something that would make someone check one's +cdb sheet and notes for more details.

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I would like to add a note about NCP's... I think you can leave them as is until they get picked up... leave it up to the player's CG skills to decided how much they are well 'worth'... when they are done CG'ing then you can decide where they start... as for already CG'd chars, when bringing the char back, you (the admins) ask that we add events, and based on the person and their states I am sure a guesstimate can be made... But I would suggest there be a "cap" as to how much they can come in with, so people don't go wild on the CG.... I hope this made sense.... OH and closed char's I have no idea... that would be on the admins I guess...

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  • 2 weeks later...

While it doesn't exactly relate to renown and reputation exactly... I find it a little curious that the assets/flaws "Black Sheep" and "Illustrious Heritage" don't show up when you check someone else's sheet. Is there a reason for it, might I ask?

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One could make a case for and against a lot of assets and flaws, so we went with the most clear-cut. But it may be revised at some point, possibly if we look at redoing assets and flaws some.

Some are also displayed in the status line instead.

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