Street Cred Options

[gendo]

Hi. I have a question.

How many points of street cred should have a famous character like FastJack or Slamm0! and how many a character who isn't well known? What does it actually mean that somebody has for exsample 4 points of street cred?

Thx for help,

G.

[HappyDaze]

It means you're using one of the more broken systems in the game. If you don't agree then wait until a character with massive Street Cred (earned from being good and subtle) has to do something obviously nasty - like rape and murder a bus full of kids - to build up the Notoriety needed to drop their Public Awareness down...

[Brazilian_Shinob...]

People like Jackpoint or Slamm-o probably don't have only high Street cred but possibly some Public Awareness. Sure, no one may know how Fastjack looks like (except for some close friends), and many countries and corps might even say "officially" that someone like Fastjack doesn't exist, but his "legends and rumours" do and this is enough for a high public awareness. If a wannabe hacker decides to use Fastjack's or Slamm-o's name as its own, three things might happen. The real ones will hunt the person down and teach her a lesson, the enemies of the person being impersonated will hunt down the pretender hoping it is the real deal or both of them.

I don't know what kind of Street Cred they would have, but I would say they would have AT LEAST Public Awareness 3.

[Brazilian_Shinob...]

It means you're using one of the more broken systems in the game. If you don't agree then wait until a character with massive Street Cred (earned from being good and subtle) has to do something obviously nasty - like rape and murder a bus full of kids - to build up the Notoriety needed to drop their Public Awareness down...

Nothing says you can't have negative notoriety if you want, and even if you can't have notoriety below zero, you can always "burn" two points of street cred to reduce your notoriety by one, but since is zero already, there is no reduction.

[Draco18s]

I don't know what kind of Street Cred they would have, but I would say they would have AT LEAST Public Awareness 3.

Fast Jack is Public Awareness 8, in all likelihood.* PA 3 is only "police have a dossier on you."

*And at least the National level of the Fame quality.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Fast Jack is Public Awareness 8, in all likelihood.* PA 3 is only "police have a dossier on you."

*And at least the National level of the Fame quality.

The Hacker I am playing currently has a Public Awareness of 10... and that is after having burned down a point of Notoriety...

There are ways for you to reduce your Public Awareness... simple change Persona and move to another city (may not be necessary if you are unknown by sight in the first place)... your Public Awareness as "Fastjack" is no longer relevant if you are running as "Lightspeed". Yes, you will have to lose a good portion of your contacts, but if you were smart, you were building some of those new contacts as Lightspeed prior to the final switch...

Keep the Faith

[Draco18s]

The Hacker I am playing currently has a Public Awareness of 10...

You have a trid about you yet? I was in a party once that the game ended with the face having a 10 public awareness, so he went on to be the actor who played him in the trid.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

You have a trid about you yet? I was in a party once that the game ended with the face having a 10 public awareness, so he went on to be the actor who played him in the trid.

Not yet, I am doing everything I can to keep out of the light... I have recently switched my identity and have a new street name as well, as well as undergoing the knife to emerge as a completely different look, to help throw thigs off... hopefully it works out...

It is about time to change characters though, at least for a while...

Keep the Faith

[Glyph]

Nothing says you can't have negative notoriety if you want, and even if you can't have notoriety below zero, you can always "burn" two points of street cred to reduce your notoriety by one, but since is zero already, there is no reduction.

What he was talking about is raising notoriety, then spending street cred to get it back down - thus lowering your public awareness.

If a player tried something like that in a game I was running, I would consider it the worst kind of metagaming (and I don't think metagaming, in and of itself, is always bad). But public awareness is not simply a mathematical calculation. From pg. 258, emphasis mine:

At the gamemaster's discretion, any exceptional efforts the character has made to keep her profile low and activities secret can be used to reduce this score. Likewise, if anything the character does is intentionally or inadvertently splashed on the news, the gamemaster should increase the score accordingly.

So if the players attempted something like the bus/schoolkids example, simply burning street cred to reduce their notoriety would not be enough - their public awareness would remain high, or likely even go up.

[HappyDaze]

Glyph, that's the best way of handling it - by throwing the RAW on Reputation out and just using GM's discretion for all three aspects.

[tagz]

I pretty much don't use it. The group in the game I run is so secretive and whatnot that StreetCred never applies because nobody knows about anything they've done. Sure, some things have gotten out, but for the most part the only people who know anything have a vested interest in keeping their mouths shut.

Heck, half the time their fixer is shocked to hear anything about them. All he knows most times is that the Johnson didn't end up in the obituaries and didn't call him up and yell at him for setting him up with crappy runners.

This of course, has kept the good AND bad out... They have had trouble breaking into the corporate level because of this (and a few other reasons like not contact building).


If someone ever really had a reason to be aware of the group's activities I'd use it of course, but so far it hasn't really come up.