Honour Mechanic

Hi everyone, I’ve been messing around with a Honour system for the pasted couple days would love everyone’s opinion on it and help filling in the table XD
mechanical feedback is sorely needed

After reading it, I like the ideas in it.

I’m not sure players should start with that high of honor, as a level one PC is basically a mercenary in till they start helping people, I would think people would look down on the strangers. Oh course this depends on the setting.

Also I think Reputation is a better name for this, as groups like the Archmage’s College would use their own ideas of honor to judge PCs, and groups like a Thief’s Guild would have radically different ideas of honor. Although that may over complicate things if we started assigning Honor to each group and each player.

Overall I think this has potential if the setting has more mono-conceptual ideals of honor.

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First, thank you so much

Second, I think it will be much more clearier of where players fall on the Honour score when the table is fully finalized but in general for me most of my campaigns start with everyone coming from the same town or city so a score of 5 fits but anyone who is new to town would get a score of 4 to show them not fully trusted by the general population but not any lower to represent being totally untrustworthy but like you said depending on the setting the placement of players will vary

Thirdly, in terms of calling it Reputation I did talk about it in the Tidd Bits section. Tho in short I talked about honour being basically Reputation with a moral code attached so it can be easily changed to fit different setting but if you just want to use it as is then you can always say well everyone has a different set of moral codes and in the eyes of these new people the party would be let’s say a 4 but again once the table is complete it would be alot easier to quickly give an NPC a view of the players

Finally, yes I think an honour system would fit properly there or with certain races or cultures that hold honour to a high degree IE dwarfs, barbarians, anicent Japan, orcs or a tyrannical space marine empire

First of all, I don’t know why you put the Pope two tiers higher in your example honor scheme than Buddha :persevere: As I see it, there were just as many lying cheats in that office as there were righteous ones.

Setting that aside, I also think that reputation would be a much better fitting name.

In this spirit I would suggest to adjust the scale: level 1 characters would start at zero and can go up or down from there. Positive values would represent a good reputation (famously honorable), and negative values represent a bad reputation. This could directly be translated into advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation. If you want to persuade the Samurai that you didn’t kill that guy, you gain advantage for positive reputation, and disadvantage for negative reputation. If you want to persuade a street thug to better tell you an important piece of information because you will gut his sorry ass otherwise, you gain advantage if you have bad reputation and disadvantage for good reputation.

So, my question would be why you decided for a system where you just limit the attribute score by the honor score? It just seems to punish the un-honorable and has no apparent benefits for honorable characters. Also, a possible build-around would be to invest heavily in deception instead of persuasion and just lie your way out of a bad situation.

The only benefit for honorable characters is the “leverage honor” rules option. However, giving a lot of advantage suffers from diminishing returns. Meaning if you compare no advantage with advantage 1, the expected result is about 2 higher for the advantage 1. If you compare advantage 5 to advantage 6, you have not even an improvement of 1. So, the advantage of having high honor is marginal at best in this case as well.

Ok first, ye the examples in the table are very much a stand in for now. Was hoping for more feedback on filling out the table but ah well it will come to me somehow XD

Second Reputaion I talked about in the tid bits section

Third negative values don’t translate well into dice and have exploding negative dice is pretty shit and will slow down the game. advantage bumps is an idea I had but I didn’t want to mess around with that as if I didn’t have this mechanic I would just go with giving the player ad/dis anyway and instead wanted to add a something new to the table.

Forth, well in a setting were honour is put above everything else the more honourable players get the benefit of using their full attribute dice. The deception part is a great point but if that person comes across a well respected guard and gets a great perception roll that guy is out of their and has lost a lot of honour by doing so and can’t do anything else coz that’s how his character is built

Lastly, can I see your maths please

You can find the math on the discord server. It’s in the pinned messages.

I gave the doc a quick read and while I like the concept of the mechanic and how it interacts with the rolls, I struggle or rather am confused with the base premise, because you use the term “Honour” differently every other paragraph.

From my reading I get 2 definitions of honour (also not that your initial definition of honour doesn’t define honour, but a person with honour):

  • one who is regarded with great respect or great esteem So this essentially equals to some sort of reputation

  • From the descriptions, I get much more the feeling that you mean some sort of code of conduct or ethos

These definitions are rather distinct from each other, to the degree that they can contradict each other. Your examples add to the confusion: Lets take Muhammad Ali. His actions of protesting the Viet Nam war by refusing to enter the draft were in line with his ethos, but did not help his reputation.

I’d also recommend using a spellchecker, because if a file is hard or confusing to read, it will deter others from giving feedback.