Banquets, Reputation and Largesse

[Duvaille]

In light of the thread about reworking prestige and honor, I thought of a way which would, in my opinion, tie together the new stats of Reputation, "New" Prestige and Largesse. I am not making an actual feature request about this yet, as so much is up in the air. I also do not wish to derail the existing threads, so I'll post this idea here.

Basically the core of the idea is this:

1) You can hold banquets, but they must always be in honor of another noble.
2) If you are successful, you gain +1 largesse and target character gains +1 good reputation.
3) If you fail miserably, there are no gains and you lose -1 prestige.

This could actually be the primary way of gaining good reputation. Essentially banquets would be about making a statement about someone else, and in order for your statement to have an effect, a good number of the others would need to agree and pay for it with their precious time. In order for them to drop whatever else they are doing and instead spend time at your banquet, they would either need to care about the reputation of the target character or your reputation - or possibly both, and believe enough of the others will attend for it to make a difference. If on the other hand you are as popular as a rabid rat and/or the target character is a dishonest charlatan, not many may show up. You might even want to turn it into a popularity contest by deliberately hosting another banquet at the same time as another banquet.

It could also be so that the higher your relevant stats are, the more guests you need to avoid total failure. If a popular prestigious king holds a banquet and only his general shows up, it should not be seen as a success. Also the current reputation of the target character should probably also be considered. If he currently has zero good reputation, hosting a very small party with only two guests might be sufficient to give him the gain.

Your reputation is something that is not directly in your own hands. To gain it, someone else needs to suggest it and the others need to agree in sufficient numbers. Thus the difference between zero and one points of reputation would be rather significant. From a player's perspective, it would also feel very nice to have a banquet in your honor.

Perhaps this kind of reputation would also be something that tends to diminish over time, although slowly.

So there it is. Does this idea have any merit? Is it simple enough?

[vonGenf]

It depends on how many characters you expect would have any reputation at all. With the mechanics you propose, Kings and Dukes would get it, and a few other sparse characters. You can't expect 50 banquets to be held in a 50 person-realm - the game would turn into BanquetMaster. It's a fine idea as an additional way to gain reputation, but if it is the main one, then most characters would forever remain at 0.

[Tom]

Less side-effects, please.

I would like to seperate the attributes more. Something designed to handle Largesse should handle that. Plus I fail to see why a banquet needs to be in honour of someone else. We already have a feature like that under discussion (statues).

[Duvaille]

Less side-effects, please.

I would like to seperate the attributes more. Something designed to handle Largesse should handle that. Plus I fail to see why a banquet needs to be in honour of someone else. We already have a feature like that under discussion (statues).

Ok, so my proposal obviously does not fit what you had in mind. If you want to separate the attributes more, it will no doubt be easier for the players to grasp, but also more challenging to come up with meaningful content for each of the attributes. I am not saying it can't be done, but just that it takes more thinking.

As far as banquets are considered, they are obviously something that, if implemented, should be about Largesse, so my proposal has effectively imploded. But this short discussion was not in vain. It has helped at least me to better understand what you aim to accomplish with the new stats (or at least I think so). In any case, this thread is a dead end, so I'll lock it.