Reputation Tables

Instead of a ± to Reaction rolls or whatever, track individual events the characters take. To do this, we first make a Reputation Table. At its most basic, it’s an empty d100 table.

Whenever the PCs do something people might talk about, write it down on your Reputation Table - representing both fame and infamy. Particularly noteworthy stuff should go in there multiple times.

Then, in future, whenever the reputation of the PCs is important (e.g. Reaction Rolls) you can roll against this Reputation Table - either acting to justify results or modify them as you see fit.

When adding results to your Reputation Table, roll the appropriate dice - overwriting any existing entries “beneath” the new one.

The easiest way to implement this is a universal d100 table, used across the gameworld. Alternatively, you could:

• Have a d20 table of reputation per kingdom.
  • Kingdoms with trade relationships, shared linguistics/heritage/whatever share the first 10 entries of their Reputation Tables.
• Have a d8 table for each social class, guild, family, gang, whatever in a single city, adding events to multiple tables at a time depending on their specific nature.
• Have a local d20 table, with individual (random) entries “permeate” outwards to surrounding locales each month as gossip spreads - perhaps with a chance of mutation.

Nesting and linking multiple tables is more work but can give some powerful results.

Bigger tables highlight the size of a place and the relative unimportance of the PCs (to begin with, anyway) whilst smaller tables might highlight the limited geographical area or population being considered - or a more uniform opinion held within a group.

Of course, you can also use this as a method for advancement instead of XP or Boasts.