I thought of an odd idea:

eg. a Swords and Sorcery world. Advancement for the players is described by the number and level of monsters which "hate them."
The idea is that the players would never actually kill off the enemy as in a typical hack n' slash campaign.
Low level players might have an adventure where they have to rescue a town from goblin raiders.
After the players dispatch the monsters, they would record "goblin raiders- Level 2" on the adventure sheet- showing that next time, their goblin raider nemeses would be more in number and stronger.
Eventually, after many encounters, the entire goblin kingdom would be their enemy.
High level players would have lists of dragons and demons they've temporarily defeated but are still gunning after them.

The same sort of thing would work for a Star Trek-ish campaign where no one really dies.
Campaigns might be like an episodic tv show with recurring villains.

This sounds kind of like "fame" points, but I don't really know any rpgs with it. Did anyone beat me to this? Someone must have.

I’m fascinated by this idea, and I don’t know that it’s been explored in the way you’re proposing. Notoriety, reputation, etc. are often found as advantages/disadvantages in character creation systems, and reputations of a sort have shown up in Werewolf: the Apocalypse and Streetfighter: the Storytelling Game, among others I’m sure, but in none of these cases are they really linked to character advancement.

I can think of a couple of other, somewhat related ideas that have shown up here. The idea of using ritualized boasting about past deeds for combat resolution arose during this discussion, and I have to say I’d like to see it implemented by someone. Also, I used reputation as the central way of defining traits in Shotgun Musashi. I was particularly interested in how reputations can be both good and bad, and how we negotiate our identities in relation to our relationships. I'm still interested in exploring it, perhaps with a different setting, as Mike Holmes has suggested.

But getting back to your main question: no, I don’t think anyone has used notoriety in the way you’ve described. I think it’s an idea worth exploring. In particular, I like the idea from a couple perspectives. As a player, I like the idea of seeing my own character's power or importance reflected by the power and number of my character's enemies. As a GM, it makes the job of creating recurring villains a snap. In fact, although recurring villains are often encouraged in RPGs, many games assume that the GM will have to cheat the players in order to keep NPCs alive. If the game rules themselves are based around recurring villains that cannot be gotten rid of, this assumption is reversed.

I think it is equally interesting if these recurring villains can be permanently defeated, but only at a cost for the player. Considering that advancement is linked to the number of enemies you’ve acquired, it could be interesting to use a spin on the “players decide when their characters die” theme. Players also decide when their enemies die. This sets up a tradeoff between advancing the character and defeating the villain. The more villains the players keep around, the more their characters advance. But if they ever want to finish the story of their rivalry with a certain villain or villainous group, they can do that too.

I’m looking forward to seeing the “Game Design” version of this idea. What would be your take on actually implementing this?

Rich Forest

This sort of mechanic is perfect for those Hercules the Legendary Journeys style of stories (including all of the imitators like Beast Master the series, etc). In these the "code" of the hero means that the enemy is rarely killed when defeated. After a few season a regular cast of recycled villains and fallen warlords would make reappearances.

In fact if each villain equated to a certain number of "character points" that were distributed on the character sheet than actually killing a villain would DECREASE the character's own effectiveness...enforcing the 4 color comic code. Characters who actually decided that killing the enemy would be better would lose the increase in character effectivness.

Perhaps the reward shouldn't be "advancement" oriented per say, but some kind of meta game power. Like the ability to call upon Deus ex Machina, or engage in Dramatic Editing, etc. So players would have a real choice to make...kill the villain and end his depredations for good...or throw him in prison, KNOWING he'll break out and come back, in order to score a big metagame reward.

I like that concept alot.

Hi there,

A number of RPGs have used fame or reputation as a feature that accumulates over time, including Pendragon, L5R (which was influenced highly by Pendragon), Prince Valiant (ditto - same primary author), and Swashbuckler. Few of them actually use it as a mechanic during play, except perhaps in terms of recognition or social advancement ... having it play a metagame role like you're describing sounds like an excellent central RPG mechanic to me.

Best,
Ron

I don't know how relevant it is to the conversation at hand since I don't actually own the game, but doesn't kill puppies for satan have a "how many people hate me" stat? I thought I'd mention it as something that might be worth looking into while developing this idea.

Thanks for the responses.

My thought processes that led me here:
-I tried to come up with an odd way of defing characters. Contacts/allies is common, but I wasn't sure if the idea of Enemies had been done before.
-The other idea was that PCs should never be able to kill off any super-powerful evil wizard. I remember old Dragon magazine suggesting stuff like having the evil nemesis escape death at the last second to come back another day. That kind of thing would really piss off the players in a bad way unless the game was explicitly structured around vanquishing but not actually killing off powerful villains.

A play idea was for PCs to have the metagame ability to insert their favourite stock villains into an ongoing campaign when desired.
eg. assume we're using the ever versatile "The Pool" rules. When the PCs have low dice and want some more, someone or the GM can volunteer to narrate in their favourite old villains- it has to make sense narratively of course. The party would receive a bunch of dice depending on how tough their summoned foes are, ie. bringing in a tough nemesis nets the party alot of dice. But don't forget that each time you bring in a nemesis, they get tougher.
Convergent to Rich's comments, I also thought of PCs "buying" away a foe: ie. paying a bunch of Pool dice to permanently kill off somebody.

Everyone, feel free to borrow this idea. I'll read up on those linked threads now.

Kenway wrote: A play idea was for PCs to have the metagame ability to insert their favourite stock villains into an ongoing campaign when desired.
eg. assume we're using the ever versatile "The Pool" rules. When the PCs have low dice and want some more, someone or the GM can volunteer to narrate in their favourite old villains- it has to make sense narratively of course. The party would receive a bunch of dice depending on how tough their summoned foes are, ie. bringing in a tough nemesis nets the party alot of dice. But don't forget that each time you bring in a nemesis, they get tougher.

There was a cool thread a while back (which I can't find) about a trying for an advancement scheme where you rise from

Less powerful, but an unknown quantity (gives you flexibility)
on up to
Very Powerful, Very well known (and fixed in the minds of the world)

seems to me it had something to do about a setting of intrigue

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As an old Champions GM I love the idea of putting the use of Player's disadvantages (like old enemies) back into the hands of the players!