Alephtau |
Not sure if this counts as a spoiler so ...
Asurasan |
Not sure if this counts as a spoiler so ...
** spoiler omitted **
I will handle it at my table like this...
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.
SnowHeart |
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...
Grendel Todd RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32 |
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).
LeadPal |
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.
James Jacobs 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."