I am working on a campaign where the PCs have to keep a low profile because a corp, probably Apsis, has trashed train rep and launched an attack campaign to paint them as monsters. I am torn on if there should be some sort of mechanic to monitor how well they are doing at staying under the radar. While it would be easier to largely leave this to plot, I also want to them to weigh the risk and reward of certain actions. Do you think that there should be some sort of background game mechanic, if so do you know of any good examples?
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 16, 2010 Top 4
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The Bloodcove Disguise has an excellent mechanic for parties attempting to move between several points in an Aspis-held city while trying to keep a low profile. It gives PCs a number of options for how to accomplish this, and gives several levels of response from the city depending on the PCs' level of success.
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I personally prefer to just roleplay those situations out.
In this situation I'd Provide options to the group on what they can do, but let them know some are more attention grabbing than others.
The subtle path is far longer, by necessity. The shorter path will lead to more gains/victory, but you'll bring down th wrath of the consortium as you do it.
Let the players make that choice
it's easy enough to apply a mechanic to what you and Wrath are saying, Nohwear. Do what Wrath suggests, and assign point values to each task. If the players accumulate a certain number of Attention points, the coroportation becomes progressively more heavy handed in trying to stop the party. At first maybe just sending a message via hacking their personal com at, say, 5 AP, but stepping up to warning the locals against dealing with the party at 10 AP, sending a local tough against the party directly or one of their allies at 15 AP, using political influence to get the party arrested at 20, sending actual corporate assasins at 25, and so on.
Several APs in pathfinder have used a similar system; off the top of my head both Hells Rebels and Hells Vengenace APs used something like that in volume 1 of each.
Edit: a secrecy roll can also be a thing. Let the party roll 1d20 every once in a while (or if they pick a particularly subtle option); if they manage to roll lower than their current Attention, remove a point, or 2 on a 20.
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As the paper man suggests above, there's a few APs that create systems like this.
There's the influence system from carrion crowns first volume
There's also the one from Jade regent where you accumulate points to win over the influential NPCs
You could easily modify those to work.
The reason I don't like a hard system of rules is because it sometimes wires in a select series of options rather than allows freedom of creativity by the payers.
No reason why you can't have to both ways though. Just let players create their own approaches and assign scores for success or failure that adds or subtracts to their subtlety.