Question about NP and similar types of such... *SPOILERS*


Jade Regent


Not sure if this counts as a spoiler so ...

Spoiler?:
I am wondering if things like Notoriety Points, and some similar things in the past, such as Respect points, and others that i cant remember the name of at the moment, are things that are generally advisable to inform the PC's that they are acquiring. In the case of the NP points in Night of Frozen Shadows it does not say if the PC's should be informed of it. Things like this should maybe be stated ... unless i just missed it somewhere.


Alephtau wrote:

Not sure if this counts as a spoiler so ...

** spoiler omitted **

I will handle it at my table like this...

My thoughts:

Considering the fact that the system represents the malicious and possibly subtle force of the Frozen Shadows Ninja clan, I don't intend to tell my players about the system in advance. I personally think it is up to them to determine... "Hey, when I do something that attracts attention, bad things start happening.", I would rather allow them to come to that realization on their own than them be put on their guard right away when I say, "You gained 2 Notoriety Points because you danced in the streets for an hour and yelled about how you were taking a princess to a foreign land in 4 different languages."

It really would depend on how well you think your players can avoid falling into a meta-game mentality. I trust my players well enough, but I know I /personally/ prefer to have avoided the temptation all together when I am playing.


At this point, hopefully folks reading have realized it's a GM-oriented thread and have been sufficiently warned away by the SPOILERs tag in the topic header. But, because I'm generally a conformist...

Spoiler:
It's a good question; I hadn't even thought of it. I saw the part about Ameiko and how NPs could affect her relationship score with the PCs, and for some reason I just assumed that meant, "Tell the PCs but do it in an in-character fashion, such as having Ameiko say, 'I *want* them to know we're coming. I will *not* be afraid of them.'" But, from a mechanics and meta-gaming perspective, I think Asurasan has the right approach.


I would tend to agree as well, but curious what Paizo's official stance would be. And another i remembered while at work was Trust Points, though not sure what adventure they were in, but if i recall correctly it was not stated there either.

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

Alephtau wrote:
I would tend to agree as well, but curious what Paizo's official stance would be. And another i remembered while at work was Trust Points, though not sure what adventure they were in, but if i recall correctly it was not stated there either.

Trust points were in Haunting of Harrowstone if I remember rightly. I've been up front about things like trust & relationship points, since I generally feel it helps the players get on board with focusing on such elements - how "meta" it gets really depends on the group (I have one group which is excellent about such things, the other not so much).

The Exchange

As a player, I dislike it when these subsystems are visible. Certainly, if the villagers are whispering about my suspicious deeds, or the city is abuzz since my speech in the town square, I want to hear about it. But I only want to know the in-game effects. It's boring and breaks immersion to hear that I'm low on Trust Points, or just gained five Fame Points.

Obviously you have to break immersion somewhat to handle the rules of the game at all, but there ought to be a payoff for doing so. It'd be different if all of these factors were tracked in a single unified system; if you gained Fame and Trust and Notoriety and Prestige and Respect and whatever else, and were challenged to balance these factors and the ways they interact, the minigame would have enough depth to (hopefully) be interesting to play in itself.

The caravan rules are a good example of this sort of minigame. If the rules weren't public, you could keep the entire system a secret, and modify the caravan's stats based on how the players describe building and maintaining it. But it actually seems like it'd be fun to track.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Every game's different. As mentioned above, some players don't like when these systems are visible. Others enjoy being able to see numbers as visible proof of their progress so they know what they need to do, kind of like how you can keep track of your experience points.

It's up to the GM, in other words, if the points for any of those subsystems are visible to the players. My preference is to make them visible to the players—if not, it's good to at least have an in-game way to tell them things like "You're almost there" or "you need to work on this a lot."

Lantern Lodge

What I will probably do is inform my players that it's possible to gain notoriety points, but not inform them as to what actions add to their total, or even what their total is. If they somehow decrease their notoriety points, I will probably add in subtle in-game clues that will hint at that fact.

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