Transhuman body switching aside, the part about the reputation economy is really interesting and something that could potentially be ported to other games. Kevin Crawford takes a swing at it in Stars Without Number Deluxe Edition, but he treats reputation as just another currency that you spend the same way as money, which it absolutely should not be.
You might want to use this in combination with abstract wealth rules.
Reputation differs from money in three very important ways: visibility, uncertainty, and consensus.
Visibility: Your reputation has to be public information by definition, and only things that become known to the public, or at least a significant number of people, can impact it. There's no reputation equivalent of a "Berkshire billionaire" who nobody knows is rich.
Uncertainty: If something is for sale, you know exactly how much it costs, and you know you can buy it if you have that much money. With reputation, you don't know for sure whether you can get what you want, or how much it will cost you if you do get it.
Consensus: In a money economy, it's possible to be very niche and make good money off a small but devoted customer base, even if everyone else hates you. After all people can buy from you or not, but they can't take your money away. Call this the Insane Clown Posse Strategy.
In a reputation economy, people can do more than just boycott you– they can actively reduce your reputation. This produces consensus, but also it's dark side, conformity. The good news: no Insane Clown Posse. The bad news: no 69 Eyes. Lots of The Beatles and The Eagles though.
You don't need to be running a transhuman or futuristic setting to use a reputation economy, although it helps. I'll share some thoughts on using this in other settings towards the end of the article. First, here's how the rules work.
Design Your Reputation Networks
Before you start your campaign, you'll need to come up with a few reputation networks. Eight to twelve is about the right number.
These networks can represent a single faction or a group of similar factions, depending on how diverse your setting is. Most should be a mix if factions. Like in Eclipse Phase, Firewall has it's own rep network, but every other network is used by a mix of factions with loosely similar ideologies.
For each network, you'll need to define it's name and a shortened name for the associated time of rep, who uses it, what their ideology is, what they love, want and dislike. Some rep networks may also have special rules. eg-
Autonomist Web, aka @-rep
Who uses it: Anarchists (both individualist and collectivist), some brinkers, contractarian/extropian types, ultra-libertarians
Ideology: Various types of anarchism or extreme libertarianism, or just individual isolation
Likes: Personal freedom, flat organizations with little or no hierarchy, using rep networks instead of money, decentralized everything, transparency, free information
Dislikes: Traditional laws and governments, old style or exploitative capitalism, the old economy, megcorporations, charging money for electronic goods
Special rule: The favor level for purely digital goods is a level lower. The favor level for luxury physical goods– other than small luxuries that everyone can afford, like a case of beer– is a level higher.
Special rule: The favor level for purely digital goods is a level lower. The favor level for luxury physical goods– other than small luxuries that everyone can afford, like a case of beer– is a level higher.
Outlaws United, aka o-rep
Who uses it: Criminals of all sorts, but mainly career criminals who want to be criminals and who are not too set on hiding the fact that they're criminals
Ideology: Might makes right. Omerta- don't be a snitch.
Likes: Violence, making money illegally, corrupt and ineffective governments, strong leaders even if they're vicious or tyranical
Dislikes: The cops, law and order, having vices like drugs and gambling legalized since that pulls the rug out from under them, people whining about "empathy" and "human rights"
Special rule: Due to the nature of being a network of criminals, this network offers more privacy than others. Finding out incriminating information on people takes a roll even if it wouldn't on other networks, unless that person deliberately publicized it. Also, anything illegal is not inherently harder to get than legal stuff on this network.
Character Creation
New characters start with rep in two networks of their choosing. Roll 2d6 for each network and record this as their starting permanent rep in that network. These reps are treated like ability scores and have modifiers the same way as other ability scores in your system.
If a character starts with one or more fake IDs or alter egos, they get one extra rep network choice for each additional identity they start with. However, they have to split their rep network choices between each identity, since reputation is attached to identity.
They can pick the same network for different identities. So a starting PC with one fake ID could have anarchist and researcher rep for his real name, and criminal rep for his alter ego.
These rep scores determine how easily you can get favors and how big those favors can be. They will go up and down frequently in play, both permanently and temporarily.
Note that unlike ability scores, ten isn't necessarily average. Or like maybe it's average for someone who puts all their focus into one rep network, which the PC's don't do by default.
Using Rep To Get Favors
Favors are rated zero through five. If you want to get a favor, you roll a d20 and add both your charisma modifier and your rep modifier. The DC is eight plus twice the level of the favor.
If you succeed, you get the favor you wanted and take a variable amount of damage to your reputation. If you critically succeed, you get something better than what you wanted.
If you fail you don't get the favor and take only one temporary rep damage. If you critically fail, your rep score permanently goes down by one instead.
Trivial favors are rated zero and you can get one within minutes. Typically you don't have to roll for them and they don't inflict rep damage unless you ask for a lot of them in quick succession and start annoying people.
Typically a trivial favor would be something you could maybe have looked up yourself given enough time, like a really good guide (as in written, not a person) to the local area.
Minor favors are rated one, so the DC for them is ten. If you get a minor favor, take d4 rep damage. They usually take like an hour or two.
Typical minor favors would be learning the location of a black market, getting some legal advice, or borrowing a common vehicle for a few hours.
Moderate favors are rated two, so the DC is twelve to get one. They inflict d6 rep damage and usually take like 6-10 hours to arrange.
Typical moderate favors include a day's work, long-distance travel, confidential information, etc.
Major favors are rated three, so DC is fourteen, and they inflict d8 rep damage. They take around a day to arrange.
Typical major favors would be borrowing a small spacecraft like a shuttle, top secret information, a week of skilled labor, etc.
Level four favors inflict d10 rep damage and take 2-3 days to arrange, while level five favors inflict d12 rep damage and take around a week to arrange. Modifiers can change the level of a favor.
Scale: If a favor would require several people to perform, it's level is plus one. If it would require more than ten, its level is plus two. This could also apply to who the favor is done for, like if you wanted to arrange travel for your whole party rather than just you.
Risk: If someone has to put themselves at risk to do the favor, the level is plus one. If they'd risk their life or something close to it, it's plus two.
Favor also helps the person doing it: If the person doing the favor also gets something significant out of it, the level is one lower. If they'd get something potentially life-changing out of it, like you need test subjects for a new cure for PTSD, the level is two lower.
Note that favors cannot be higher than level five, even though modifiers could push it as high as seven. If you want to recruit an army, that needs to be a quest, not something you can do by just making a roll.
In order to request a favor, you need to be able to absorb the maximum cost of it without losing all your rep in that network. So you need two rep to ask for trivial favors, five to ask for level one favors, seven rep for level two favors, and so on.
All of this is public. If you want to keep it quiet, you get disadvantage to the favor test but anyone trying to find out about it needs to roll an investigation check to do so. If you role-play taking specific, intelligent steps to cover your tracks, like specifically asking trusted friends for help, the test to learn about your actions may even have disadvantage.
You can also burn permanent rep points to get advantage on the favor roll. This costs one permanent rep point for a minor favor, two for moderate, three for major. The permanent rep points are only lost if the favor is granted, and if it is, it's granted as fast as possible.
You can also burn permanent rep points to get advantage on the favor roll. This costs one permanent rep point for a minor favor, two for moderate, three for major. The permanent rep points are only lost if the favor is granted, and if it is, it's granted as fast as possible.
Healing Temporary Rep Damage
You automatically heal one point of temporary rep damage per week in each network that has rep damage, provided you don't ask for any favors– even trivial ones– during that week.
Additionally, you can heal rep damage faster if you do favors for other people in the rep.
If you spend around half a day doing trivial favors for people, you heal one rep damage. You can do this only once a week, and can spread the time spent doing it out over the week.
If you want to do larger favors, say so to the referee and they'll come up with a few random favors that people are asking. If you do those favors, you get the same amount of rep as the person asking them would lose, so d4 for a minor favor, d6 for a moderate favor, etc.
If you don't do a favor there's no punishment; they aren't being asked of you specifically. The referee can of course generate favor requests without being asked, if they want to tempt the players or provide a story hook.
If you spend a whole week of downtime repairing your rep by doing favors for people, you restore d6 rep if it costs nothing but your time, or d8 if it costs you something more. Anything bigger than that should probably not be abstracted via downtime.
Your rep can temporarily go over it's maximum; for every two rep points doing favors would send you over your max, you gain a temporary rep point. You can't go more than 50% over your max rep this way, and temporary rep points are lost at a rate of one per week if not used.
Additionally, you can heal rep damage faster if you do favors for other people in the rep.
If you spend around half a day doing trivial favors for people, you heal one rep damage. You can do this only once a week, and can spread the time spent doing it out over the week.
If you want to do larger favors, say so to the referee and they'll come up with a few random favors that people are asking. If you do those favors, you get the same amount of rep as the person asking them would lose, so d4 for a minor favor, d6 for a moderate favor, etc.
If you don't do a favor there's no punishment; they aren't being asked of you specifically. The referee can of course generate favor requests without being asked, if they want to tempt the players or provide a story hook.
If you spend a whole week of downtime repairing your rep by doing favors for people, you restore d6 rep if it costs nothing but your time, or d8 if it costs you something more. Anything bigger than that should probably not be abstracted via downtime.
Your rep can temporarily go over it's maximum; for every two rep points doing favors would send you over your max, you gain a temporary rep point. You can't go more than 50% over your max rep this way, and temporary rep points are lost at a rate of one per week if not used.
Permanently Changing Your Rep
Permanently changing your rep is similar to restoring temporary rep loss, except you have to think bigger. You have to do a favor for a large portion of whatever group uses your rep network. We'll call these deeds rather than favors.
A good deed has to help hundreds of people, if not thousands. Like, at least enough people to populate a village or village-sized space hab. Also deeds are usually, though maybe not always, done on your own initiative rather than in response to a request from others.
If it's the equivalent of a minor favor for those people, like fixing up a bunch of stuff on their habitat, you gain d4. If it's the equivalent of a moderate favor for them, d6. Major favor, d8.
Adjustments for putting yourself in danger apply as usual. Adjustments for scale are scaled up; +1 die size if you help tens or hundreds of thousands of people, +2 if you help millions, or a large fraction of the whole rep network. Those scale numbers are based on the Eclipse Phase setting where there are less than a billion humans, almost all in the solar system, so adjust accordingly.
As your rep gets higher, it gets harder to raise it higher. If you have a positive rep modifier, subtract it from any rep gained– so if it's +2, then a major deed gets you d8-2 permanent rep. Additionally, a deed can't get you permanent rep if your rep score is already twice the highest number on the die it would give you– so minor deeds no longer register once your rep is 8 or higher, for instance.
You lose rep the same way– by doing bad deeds, which are just like good deeds except they hurt people in the rep network. Scale modifiers still apply, but risk modifiers don't. This can give you negative rep in a network.
If your rep goes negative, it works the same way as positive rep, except people in the network can gain rep by fucking with you. The stuff they can gain favor for doing to you is equivalent to the sorts of favors you could ask for with an equivalent positive rep. If you have a rep of -2 people just say snarky stuff to you, at -4 they play minor pranks on you, at -8 they might vandalize your car, and -12 and beyond is where people might kill you (-10 for more violent networks like the criminal one).
The same limits apply here as for raising your positive rep, so repeated minor bad deeds won't take you past -8.
As for determining when and how people mess with someone, I'd put that into the random encounter table and the random downtime events table. If that comes up, randomly pick a PC who has a negative rep to get messed with, and if necessary randomly determine which network or what level of problem they suffer. If nobody has a negative rep, or anyone who does is using a fake ID and people wouldn't know it's them, this doesn't happen and don't roll for a different encounter; they just got lucky.
Again, everything about permanent rep still assumes your deeds are publicly known.
A good deed has to help hundreds of people, if not thousands. Like, at least enough people to populate a village or village-sized space hab. Also deeds are usually, though maybe not always, done on your own initiative rather than in response to a request from others.
If it's the equivalent of a minor favor for those people, like fixing up a bunch of stuff on their habitat, you gain d4. If it's the equivalent of a moderate favor for them, d6. Major favor, d8.
Adjustments for putting yourself in danger apply as usual. Adjustments for scale are scaled up; +1 die size if you help tens or hundreds of thousands of people, +2 if you help millions, or a large fraction of the whole rep network. Those scale numbers are based on the Eclipse Phase setting where there are less than a billion humans, almost all in the solar system, so adjust accordingly.
As your rep gets higher, it gets harder to raise it higher. If you have a positive rep modifier, subtract it from any rep gained– so if it's +2, then a major deed gets you d8-2 permanent rep. Additionally, a deed can't get you permanent rep if your rep score is already twice the highest number on the die it would give you– so minor deeds no longer register once your rep is 8 or higher, for instance.
You lose rep the same way– by doing bad deeds, which are just like good deeds except they hurt people in the rep network. Scale modifiers still apply, but risk modifiers don't. This can give you negative rep in a network.
If your rep goes negative, it works the same way as positive rep, except people in the network can gain rep by fucking with you. The stuff they can gain favor for doing to you is equivalent to the sorts of favors you could ask for with an equivalent positive rep. If you have a rep of -2 people just say snarky stuff to you, at -4 they play minor pranks on you, at -8 they might vandalize your car, and -12 and beyond is where people might kill you (-10 for more violent networks like the criminal one).
The same limits apply here as for raising your positive rep, so repeated minor bad deeds won't take you past -8.
As for determining when and how people mess with someone, I'd put that into the random encounter table and the random downtime events table. If that comes up, randomly pick a PC who has a negative rep to get messed with, and if necessary randomly determine which network or what level of problem they suffer. If nobody has a negative rep, or anyone who does is using a fake ID and people wouldn't know it's them, this doesn't happen and don't roll for a different encounter; they just got lucky.
Again, everything about permanent rep still assumes your deeds are publicly known.
Using Rep In Other Settings
So the default assumption behind these sorts of mechanics is that you're in a transhumanist, partly post-scarcity world where everything is really densely interconnected and everyone's on the future internet and in pretty close communication with each other. If those assumptions aren't true it might still be usable, but you have to change things a bit.
If humanity is spread out across multiple star systems, and there's no FTL communication, word of your deeds won't spread as easily from system to system. The referee will have to decide what impact this has, but in general a lot of things should either not affect your rep, or count for less, unless you make an effort to spread the word, and this can be good or bad for you.
In a modern setting, rep networks could pretty much work as-is, but their use is way more limited. They haven't even begun to replace money. You can get favors, but anything that requires people to give you physical goods or work long hours is at least a favor level higher.
In pre-modern or fantasy settings, it's just like above but also communication is slow and non-digital, and the rep networks are probably informal rather than an actual reddit-like network where you can see your rep score. You may have to send letters by post or physically go around talking to people, and most uses of rep will therefore take a long time. On the other hand, it'll be more normal, as a practical necessity, to ask favors of specific people. Referees may wish to not tell players exactly what their rep score, instead just letting them know a general range it falls into.
Stuff You Might Need to Run This
Mainly, you need to design your rep networks, which will be specific to your setting.
You'll need random encounter tables and random downtime events tables anyway; put the "PC with negative rep score gets messed with" events in there. You may also want to put a "PC with notably high rep score receives random favor or goody" entry in each of them too.
You may also want random favor tables to generate favors other people are asking for that the players can do to regain temporary rep. It'll need to be a different table for each rep network; some of the favors on each can be duplicates, but like there are some things criminals would want that scientists wouldn't, and vice versa.
This is actually making me want to run a transhumanist game now. Gotta build the post-apocalyptic game first, but I'll explore this idea more when I can.
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