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Steal This Rule: Trust

...and we're all pointing and laughing... Reputation systems have been a bugaboo for many heroic-fantasy genre games for some time. Vastly abstract, or with relatively little relevance for the effort put into them, most reputation systems languish, overly detailed and un-used, between the pages of dusty old tomes in our gaming libraries. There is a reputation system that defies this...

Blog-Trust.jpg

...and we're all pointing and laughing...

Reputation systems have been a bugaboo for many heroic-fantasy genre games for some time. Vastly abstract, or with relatively little relevance for the effort put into them, most reputation systems languish, overly detailed and un-used, between the pages of dusty old tomes in our gaming libraries.

There is a reputation system that defies this. Relevant, effective, and granular without being overly detailed, this system does more than measure how well-liked a given party is in a region: it helps the DM to sprinkle plot lines, to get an idea of a party’s direction, and even to track time and the changes that the party can bring to an area.

What follows is one of the best reputation systems I've seen. Enjoy.

HOW IT WORKS


There is a group of NPC’s that you want to track the PC’s relationship with over time. This may be an organization (such as a thieves’ guild or a church or an adventuring company), a location (such as a village or a city or a kingdom), or even just a single NPC (the love interest, or the local lord). The thing that this system will do is track the relationship between the party and that entity from “perfect strangers” to “intimate allies.”

Give the party a new stat: Trust. Trust is a statistic shared by the entire party, not contingent on any one member of it, and something that each member has. Trust comes in ranks: from no ranks, up to however many ranks the DM desires (typically from 3-5). Trust is what the PC’s develop over time with this entity.

Trust develops through the completion of adventures. Any entity the PC’s want to develop trust with needs something done: a delivery must be made, or a basement cleared of dire rats, or a particular monster menacing the path must be slain, or whatever. Said thing involves some danger out in the wilderness, so they’d much rather have trained adventurers do it.

These adventures can be of any length, though generally speaking it’s better to start with small adventures, and ramp them up. The entity in question isn’t going to trust some unknown vagabonds with something precious or complex, but they might trust them with a simple errand or a basic task.

Thus, the entity serves as a dispenser of adventures, quests, and tasks for the party. They need something done, and the PC’s are there to do it. As the party accomplishes these deeds successfully, they gain Trust – the entity begins to have more confidence in their proven ability to do the deeds, and so gives them greater and greater deeds: longer, harder adventures, with bigger threats and bigger stakes. Trust can be gained after a single quest, or after many.

The rank of Trust that the party has with the entity will dictate several things.
Each quest the entity might give has a corresponding Trust prerequisite that must be met. The great baron might give out a general bounty on orc ears, and when the party returns many of them, they may gain a rank of Trust (bringing them to Rank 1) – the baron believes these adventurers may be capable of slaying the orc chieftains in the region! If successful at this, they may gain another ran of Trust (Rank 2), and the baron, aware of their great skill, tells them to lead the siege on the orc fortress in the mountain pass. Clearing the mountain pass may have been the goal all along, but he’s not just going to trust some random wayfarers with that task – he’s going to put a few tests out and see who comes up.

Similarly, things like treasure can be tied to ranks of Trust. Perhaps the baron entrusts them with a sacred blade to slay the orcs in the fortress at Trust 2, but at Trust 0, he’ll only give out a few coins of treasure as a reward.

Escalating trust can tie into things in the ongoing story of the game, too. Perhaps when the party clears the fortress and achieves Trust 3, the baron suddenly disappears – creating an adventure to go rescue him from his orcish captors. Or maybe at Trust 3, the orcish counter-attack started.

It’s a good idea to have multiple entities with which the party can gain Trust milling about all at once. This can lead to interesting decision points as to which adventures to take: if the baron is offering a bounty for orc ears, but the local wizard’s college is more interested in the sudden appearance of fiends in the forest, there’s a pretty explicit choice to be made. Indeed, if the party never follows up on the orc ears, perhaps the Baron never gets kidnapped…or perhaps at some point the orcs attack the city, because the threat was ignored.

WHY THIS IS PRETTY COOL

Hub-And-Spokes

This system works best when there is a main central group of NPC’s that the party will be interacting with. This group may be the residents of a particular town or kingdom, or the members of some organization, or are in some way a group that the PC’s continue to interact with for some time (anywhere from a single level, to the length of the campaign). This is the group that they’ll be gaining fame within, the people who will go from largely not knowing them as any different from any strange vagabonds to trusting them with their most personal, difficult, and intimate problems.

This reflects a bit of realism in the system: if people just waltz into town, slay a few orcs, and waltz out, you’re not going to cement much of a reputation in that particular town. You did something positive, but there are a lot of problems in the world, and your wandering adventurers were only a momentary distraction. In order to cement fame, to gain a reputation, the party needs to put in the time and effort within a single group of NPC’s.

The group of NPC’s thus serves as the hub – the people the party keeps returning to.

The party is sent out from this hub into the surrounding area to do things for these NPC’s.

This helps the DM out in giving the PC’s a solid goal, and a detailed way of reaching that goal that can involve a lot of the other events going on in the game world. That gives the party a reason to interact with the world – to earn the trust of those entities that inhabit it. This makes world-building easy to make relevant, and helps the DM introduce new material gradually. If the DM just bought an awesome nautical adventure, and the party is far from the sea, perhaps someone who has great Trust in them tasks them with protecting a shipment, giving them a dang good reason to go to sea.

Adventure Gateway

The main mechanical consideration of trust in this system is to dribble adventures out to the PC’s. This distinguishes it from similar reputation systems, which are often more concerned about the benefits the PC’s get for being recognized local heroes. It focuses on the responsibilities that come with wielding great power in a dangerous world.
This also helps out the DM, as it keeps a steady dribble of plot lines and hooks in the hands of the players. The players always know they have something to do, and what they need to do, or at least who they need to talk to.

As a bang-on effect, this helps couch the rewards the party gets in terms of the size of their quest, too. No more orcs with +5 vorpal swords squirreled away: now, that +5 vorpal sword sits behind a Trust 5 gateway that is going to require some digging before it drops into your hands.

Goal Tracking

PC’s can have some grandiose goals. To become rich. To master powerful magic. To restore the gods to life. These are great end-points, but it doesn’t always give a DM good guidance for doing the little things.

Trust can function as a goal-tracking mechanic as well. Perhaps becoming rich requires an effective Trust of 10, which can then be broken down: okay, earning a bit of coin at Trust 0, maybe a house opens up trust 6, and by Trust 10, your character gets a sweet inheritance. Quests can tie directly into these goals: in order to get a house, the party must clear it of the undead occupying it, so you know that the quest for clearing out the undead opens up at Trust 5. Depending on your preferred level of detail, you can even break down individual quests at each XP level, or even break them down to specific encounters.

TRUST THE TRUST

So, what do you think? How would you use Trust in your games? Or do you already kind of do that, but under a different name? What other potential uses for the system do you see?

Let me know in the comments!
 

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Shayuri

First Post
One thing I like about this from a player-side is that NPCs who recur, and have a relationship with the party gain the party's trust too, and become important hooks into the game setting.
 

delericho

Legend
Good article. Very good article, in fact.

Give the party a new stat: Trust. Trust is a statistic shared by the entire party, not contingent on any one member of it, and something that each member has.

Semi-serious question: what happens if most members of the party are working to gain the Great Baron's trust, but the party Druid is to tact what bulls are to china shops? That is, what if one PC seems determined to work at odds to the rest of the party?

Trust can function as a goal-tracking mechanic as well. Perhaps becoming rich requires an effective Trust of 10...

And another... If Trust is being used to track goals, why not track the goals instead? Have the party define their long-term goals (become rich, track down and kill the six-fingered man, etc) and track progress towards those directly. Amongst other things, this has the advantage of working whether the PCs are tied to a specific location or if they're more mobile (where the Trust mechanism relies on either them remaining in the same location or on the NPCs travelling alongside the PCs).
 

Shayuri

First Post
Yes, I see trust as being something more attached to NPCs than the party. And I can see how there could be individual levels of trust, and another level of trust that encompasses the group as a whole (an average perhaps of the individual scores?).

That could give rise to some interesting situations, where the Duke pulls the paladin aside to offer him some special request or reward that the other, less trusted, members are not privy to. Conflicted loyalties?

Seeing as how it's a mechanic, it might be useful to discuss how Trust can be earned or lost by more than just succeeding or failing at tasks too. Do social skills like Diplomacy help? What effect does bad behavior have if it's not quest related?
 

Rune

Once A Fool
Looks great! Although, I think I would give the Trust stat to each NPC. That way, there could be different levels of trust for the party at the same time.

...And ninja'd!
 

Random Axe

Explorer
This sounds like it is meant to be an integral part of the campaign, the driving force behind the series of adventures the PCs are being sent on. How might it be used (or is it meant to be used) in a campaign that is already underway, for instance, or where you as GM might already have an idea of the progression of missions or adventures to involve the PCs in?
 

I'm A Banana

Potassium-Rich
delericho said:
Semi-serious question: what happens if most members of the party are working to gain the Great Baron's trust, but the party Druid is to tact what bulls are to china shops? That is, what if one PC seems determined to work at odds to the rest of the party?

Because the Trust stat is associated with the party in general rather than any particular member of it, a sort of democracy takes place. The Baron trusts the party in general, because the party in general has done things for the baron that the baron values. The baron might personally think the druid is a jerk, but if the druid has been fighting orcs all along anyway, then the baron can at least trust the druid to be a competent adventurer with the tasks they are given as a member of the party. It's sort of how you might trust a certain company, even if one of their representatives is a jerk to you. They do good work, and they get the job done, but man that one guy is a hassle.

delericho said:
If Trust is being used to track goals, why not track the goals instead?

You could, but that loses some of the strength of the mechanic to tie the PC's interaction into the game world itself, and the groups and people in it. A more mobile group might not really cement that trust, though. There may be a specific quest to get rich, but there's no link between that quest, that reward, and the greater world, necessarily. Goal tracking is kind of more a neat little trick you can do with it. But if the group is a bunch of antisocial vagabonds with only their own mercenary interests at heart, Trust might be best used just to track goals. ;)

I think organizations can help with some mobility. If there's an international Church of Bahamut, or a cross-planar group like a Planescape faction, or even just a group of knights and town guards under the King, then wherever you go, you can find representatives of that organization.

Shayuri said:
Yes, I see trust as being something more attached to NPCs than the party. And I can see how there could be individual levels of trust, and another level of trust that encompasses the group as a whole (an average perhaps of the individual scores?).

That could give rise to some interesting situations, where the Duke pulls the paladin aside to offer him some special request or reward that the other, less trusted, members are not privy to. Conflicted loyalties?

Seeing as how it's a mechanic, it might be useful to discuss how Trust can be earned or lost by more than just succeeding or failing at tasks too. Do social skills like Diplomacy help? What effect does bad behavior have if it's not quest related?

I like the way you're thinkin'!

Like I pointed out above, I think Trust works a little better as a group stat than as an individual stat. One of the other effects of this is that it gives the party a reason to stick together despite their conflicting loyalties: that druid might hate the baron, but if the rest of the party wants to help him out, the druid might go along for the ride because then the party might help the druid with his own issues (There's a Dire Bear who keeps getting his head stuck in a beehive). I imagine there'd be variations within a given trust rank as to how particularly friendly the entity is, but in applying to the group, it keeps everyone on the same general plateau, with the same group goals.

That's not to dissuade you from giving it a try like that, though! Could be interesting to see how some groups negotiate those conflicting loyalties.

Random Axe said:
This sounds like it is meant to be an integral part of the campaign, the driving force behind the series of adventures the PCs are being sent on. How might it be used (or is it meant to be used) in a campaign that is already underway, for instance, or where you as GM might already have an idea of the progression of missions or adventures to involve the PCs in?

Quick process:
  1. Come up with an adventure idea. There's hooks and random generators aplenty for this, so just roll one up that seems pretty basic. "Go kill X" or "Collect for me 5 bear bottoms" or "Make a delivery for me" kind of quests make good first-rung Trust 0 quests. Tie it to some reward that corresponds to an average treasure roll, or some median number of GP.
  2. Introduce the NPC with the adventure idea to the party via their normal haunts. Someone looking to hire some dangerous adventurers might hang around in a tavern or in a weapon shop or at an inn -- anywhere the violent and the menacing are likely to hang out. It's especially good if the NPC is out of place there: some minor noble's daughter slumming it in the dirtiest dive bar in the forge district is going to attract some attention.
  3. Have the NPC explicitly approach the party and give them the assignment: "Please, I'll pay money, bring me 5 bear bottoms, I need this." At this point, it's not about the PC's specifically, but about the NPC who needs something done. If not the party, she'll find some other sucker...er...adventurers.
  4. Think about why the NPC might want to do this. Why would a noble's daughter desperately need 5 bear bottoms? Maybe she wants to revenge herself against the bears who killed her fiance. Maybe she wants to craft the softest bear-fur pillow to win her stepmother's favor. Whatever. The idea is to dig deep into what accomplishing this mission does for the NPC. Whatever accomplishing this mission does: treat it only as the first step. After getting 5 bear bottoms, perhaps the noble's daughter also wants the PC's to harvest some rare dire spider silk so that her pillows will be the best. Perhaps after wreaking ursine vengeance, she still wants the SPECIFIC bear who killed her lover slain -- and that bear is a horrible mutant dire bear who has menaced the land for a long time. The idea is to have the PC's help with the next stage of her mission, too. After the PC's complete the first mission, they get Trust Rank 1 with that NPC.
  5. The NPC's ultimate goal should be broken down into a few steps (that's the 3-5 ranks of Trust), or given a few complications along the way. You can actually take a queue from story-writing here: each entity effectively has their own plot arc, and you can use the ranks of Trust as the acts along that arc. By Trust 5, your noble's daughter should be praised by her mother, or be personally feared by every bear within a 1,000 mile radius. ;)
 


Argyle King

Legend
I think it's a cool idea. It's a nice shorthand way of keeping track of social interactions. GURPS (which is currently my primary game) already has a lot of things I can use similarly, but I might adopt this idea as a quick shorthand method of taking notes.
 

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