So I got to play a whole bunch of Missions this weekend at AnCon, and now realize I've been ignoring a part of the rules. Specifically the whole total karma adds to Street Cred which raises Public Awareness thing.

I had almost 60 Karma earned, and few point of extra Street Cred for doing the right things, and only 1 point of Noteriety as I'm not the "performs vivisections", "chokes every prisoner to death", or etc kind of go-ganger, and sadly a few "bonus" points of Public Awareness from some missions. So, when we were doing Romero and Juliette, and I actually took the time to calculate that, I had over 10 Public Recognition. And sure, it was really cool to find out that surprise, little girls were dressing up for Halloween as my go ganger, it's probably not healthy to have such a high PA score. (Okay, I probably shouldn't have hugged the little girls mom and had pictures of the girl and Road Rash Doll taken together flashing gang signs, or offered to bring myself and my hellhound Mr. Torchy to show n tell at her school.)

What can I do about this PA aside from buying off that 1 point of Noteriety with 2 points of Street Cred? It's not much of a dent. I'm just thinking that there has to be something that doesn't involve becoming a sociopath to reduce PA, and that I'm just not looking in the right book.

Thanks,

Eric

To start with, I'd say ask your GM to ignore all that nonsense about Karma earned increasing public awareness, because Karma is a measure of XP and you can earn XP from running around in the limelight or doing a black ops in the middle of the Mojave desert with nobody left around to see it, but you're evidently playing Missions.

So, no idea.

By the book, its the Notoriety exchange for Street Cred. This oddly means that you can go from a household name, to a nobody by instituting a state-wide manhunt and slaughtering orphans.

On the plus side, this is the last season for SR4. SR5 will hopefully have a better system.

So, 60 karma. Which would be 6 Street Cred. and 1 Notoriety. So you earned like 23 bonus Street Cred? Or I guess you could have earned like 4 bonus Public Awareness + 11 Street Cred...

Either way, that sounds like a bit much for only a 60 Karma character... Don't forget, it is: Karma divided by 10 (rounded mathematically) in base Street Cred. Then (Street Cred + Notoriety) divided by 3 for Public Awareness.


As for reducing your public awareness, it is up to interpretation, but you could conceivably reduce your Notoriety into the negative numbers. Technically a starting character with the Lucky Positive Quality would have a starting Notoriety of -1...

I noticed that while making a character in Hero Lab, I thought it was a bug. Never taken Lucky before.

I would say the only real way to lower public awareness is to lay low for a while and have it sped up by having hackers (or doing it yourself) help remove information about your prior activities.

Buying the Erased positive quality at its higher value should help, too.

as has been said, notoriety is not restricted to being a positive value

Or you can hire Mungo. You'll be invisible by comparison, and nobody will WANT to inquire into unusual things on the off chance it's HIM.

Do you have the right Negative Qualities? Some NQs have Notoriety associated with them.

You do eventually get to the point where the only possible way to get rid of Public Awarenese/street cred is burning it to erase notoriety.

Old Man Jones has a PA rating of like 14 at this point, AFTER already burning multiple points on notoriety. For a guy with the Erased quality, he's ridiculously well known. So much so that I wrote it off as Horizon having used his name for a 2070s reboot of the old flatvid show "The Equalizer". Search for info on the 'fictional' version of him from the show, tons of wikis, blogs, and speculation. Search for info on the actual person, you run into a brick wall.


-k

Also, you don't have to be a baby killer to rack up some notoriety. Some other places you can get it include, insulting your johnson, picking a fight and losing, refusing jobs and exceptional bad luck. You could start a fight and deliberately lose. No one said it had to be a lethal fight. Piss off a Johnson that is asking you to do something you don't want to and then refuse the job. Good for 2 points right there or combine this with the first one and get more notoriety. Pick the fight with his body guards or the bouncer at the club where the meet is. Lastly, keep some of those critical glitches on occasion. That should be good for a point or two as well.
Yeah, for one job you look like a complete ass, but if the point is to lower your profile, this will do it. Racking up 5 points of notoriety is good for 10 points of street cred and some laughs. That should keep you off the radar for another 10 runs or so and then repeat.

I'll try and keep the critical glitches in mind.

As far as telling the Johnson to frag off, I'm not doing it, I'm playing Missions at Conventions. I mean I show up to play and then don't take the Mission? Now what am I going to do for the next 3 hours and 55 minutes until the slot is over? And am I then screwing over the other players at the table? That'd be kind of douchy on my part. Now in a home campaign, telling the Johnson to frag off is perfectly acceptable, and I'll keep that in my back pocket cause it's a swell idea.

I don't think I can buy the Erased quality after character creation in Missions.

I was hoping that Public Awareness had some sort of locality mechanic to it, and I could leave Seattle for the Tir for a few in game months to do the Elven Blood series and have my Seattle PA drop while I'm away. And that those mechanics had been introduced in the Runner's Companion or Attitude or some where I missed it.

Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case. Guess I'll need to house rule that next time I run a home campaign.

Thanks for the input folks.

Eric

SR4 has now set mechanics for lowering your Public Awareness.





Notoriety only negatively impacts the usefulness of Street Cred, not it's relation to Public Awareness. Since Public Awareness is the sum of the values of both Street Cred and Notoriety, raising Notoriety will only raise Public Awareness.

I'd rule that months of laying low could lower ones Street Cred and thus Public Awareness. Also ridding oneself or any Distinctive Style and striving for Blandness could help one lower PA directly.

Right, but subsequently spending 2 Street Cred to lower Notoriety would lower your Public Awareness.

Eric, exactly how much bonus Public Awareness and Street Cred did you earn from your missions that got you up to a little less than 60 karma? I'm curious about your exact numbers because it seems hard to believe to be completely honest.

I have a character that is nearly 140 karma and only just now got to the point where he would have had 10 PA (I was able to burn it down by 3 because I had also earned a few points of Notoriety).

No hackers in any of the runs, so no one erasing security footage for us, and I'm guessing that's why I've got 5 or 6 extra points of PA above and beyond what my Karma and Street Cred and Noteriety add up to. My Street Cred is, iirc, 14 or 15 and my final Karma after AnCon is now 76/77? I think I'd be at a 5 or 6 PA if the tables hadn't received those extra points. I haven't read the mods for spoilers as to how we got the extra PA, but it might have been something else besides security tapes?

Eric

K = Karma
SC = Street Cred
N = Notoriety
PA = Public Awareness

K/10 = SC
(SC + N)/3 = PA

Ouch, 5 or 6 bonus. That's rough. Sounds like you need to stop having all those fights out in the middle of the street >.<

But yeah... in Missions, I can't think of a whole lot you can do to lower you Public Awareness. In Season 4, they hand out those Street Cred, Notoriety, and Public Awareness adjustments like it's candy. And I don't think there are any criteria for giving you penalties to any of those numbers...

There isn't anything in the book that explicitly reduces your Public Awareness, so it would be up to the individual GM's about how you could do it. If you talk to the GM that is running your table, assuming there is time, you might be able to arrange a way to work on reducing your public image...

Shaidar, I get the formula, but don't have the record sheets in front of me. And the Missions can add extra SC, N, and PA. It's the 5 or 6 where we added +1 to PA that are what's pushing over the novahot line. But there doesn't seem to be any mechanic, such as lay low and do no runs for 1 month and reduce PA by 2 kind of thing in any of the rulebooks.

Eric

At least you get to be Kane, with your own TV show and movies made after your likeness!

Well, the Humanis Goons and shedim (spelling?) need to stop attacking me in the street then.

I accept that there is likely a minimum PA threshold that a female ork go-ganger dressed in the biker armor suit with 1%er patches, 405 Hellhound patches, a "F**k You!" patch, and a pink lettered "Fights Like a Girl" patch comes with. Adding a pet trained hellhound probably doesn't help. She's not ... subtle or bland. I accept that. But it'd be nice if I could say, spend two or three months in Portland doing the Elven Blood mods (we did one), and perhaps go to Vegas for a month, and have my Seattle PA drop a bit. Instead that Karma and street cred and PA I earn in Portland is going to just add to my Seattle PA.

I blame Joe Martin and Dana Oaks.

And people mistaking Kat for Kat O'Nine Tales.

have you tried heading over to the missions section and asking about ways to reduce public awareness?

strictly speaking, as i've said before, the rules don't prevent you from going into the negatives for notoriety... but for missions, you probably need someone in charge to authorize that being a possibility.

you may have to go to the official forums for that, though. but hey, the worst they can do is say no, right?

Or Bull, with a series of video games that exaggerate your exploits.

Or let you die in a multitude of amusing ways.

Well there was your mistake. You know what we did to Joe Martin? So as he asked for us to 'help him' we dosed him with laes, rigged up footage of him with underage prostitutes and then released it to KSAF. When he came at us a second time, cuz he had forgotten the first due to laes, we repeated the exercise. Even if he didn't get it, his editors seemed to and he has never shown up since. Of course you would need a hacker to help out with all this and you did say you lack one. Too bad. I never liked Joe Martin.

Step 1: Publicly announce that you're having a talk and signing for all your fans.
Step 2: Set up and cater the event.
Step 3: When the fans show up, lock the doors and torch the building. There are now fewer people who know about you.

I will now happily await a statement that you want to raise public awareness, gencon seminar guy

His video games are now simesense capable.

Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Heh. Ironically, I fired my agent because he kept telling me to do things I wasn't comfortable with to "get me into the spotlight." Fuck that noise, I'm doing this for fun and awesome.

Anyway, as BishopMcQ said, the easiest way to reduce your Public Awareness is spend Street Cred to reduce Notoriety. So until there are newer, slightly less weird rules on the subject, you're stuck. On the bright side, there just might be some newer, slightly less weird rules on the horizon.

Alternatively, you could start going to Missions games, telling the Johnson to go frag himself, putting his bodyguards through the window and escaping like a cackling lunatic, then spend your cred to lower your notoriety, somehow becoming overall less well-known, and earning a reputation as the biggest troll ever to live.

After a few different groups start furiously complaining, they may rush in some rules to allow you to reduce PA without resorting to such ridiculous measures.

With Bonus Points if you can manage to kill all of their characters in the process. Sure fire method to get different rules...probably along with a security escort out of the con space.

Move to Friday nights on Fox. No one will no you exist then.

Better yet, EXTRA bonus points if you find players who are also having the same problem as you and group up with them and go around just insulting, picking fights with, and getting the living shite beaten out of your characters by Johnsons, before extracting yourselves from the fight. Then telling the bewildered GM exactly why you're behaving so irrationally: to get Notoriety to burn off Street Cred and thus reduce Public Awareness.



And make sure to get interrupted by affiliate carriers for local football games.

Ouch...

How is Friday nights on Fox different from any other network?

The Friday Night Death Slot is bad enough on most networks (though, oddly enough, Grimm seemed to flourish in it,) but on Fox it wasn't just the FNDS, they also let their carrier-affiliate stations just run local sports or whatever over Firefly.

Maybe that's why Grimm flourishes. It's picking up all the viewers who change the channel from Fox.

Ah. Gotcha.

So, why on Earth did they move it to frelling Tuesday?

I mean, it works out for me that way because it comes on immediately after NCIS: Los Angeles, which is on immediately after NCIS, but still. I'm not sure that they're going to pick up much of the police procedural crowd, especially since they've been moving more away from the police procedural aspect of the show.

Not a clue. After having worked for a big business I've long since given up trying to understand them, other than the ideal that "they're stupid."

But that certainly could be another way of dropping your PA score. Move to another major city and start hanging out with a crowd that has no fraggin' clue who you are.

That's actually what we do once things get too high. The characters change their street name and maybe their face, depending on how well known they are, and then we just zero all the applicable stats (Street Cred, Notoriety & Public Awareness). Basically start over again but then again, you have better skills and gear by that point so you don't stay at the bottom of the heap for long.

Also, you either have to dump your contacts (to keep your new identity safe) or gain their complicity in keeping your secret.

Have all your non-fixer contacts know you by a separate identity. It's not ideal (for the contacts you meet during runs,) but it keeps that guy you weaseled into Ares R&D from freaking out when Horizon puts a big smear campaign out on you.

The other option, though it is a LOT of work, is to accumulate your Street Cred, Notoriety and Public Awareness based upon your seperate identities. It is a lot of book keeping, but it is satisfying, in a round about sort of way.

I would submit that one of two circumstances arise there:
1) Loyalty reset to 1 after new introductions are made by a third party; leaving a chance that despite a new face (voice, etc), the contact recognizes you by grammar, syntax, mannerisms, etc thereby blowing your new identity.
2) If you confide in your contact(s), people will talk and eventually your new identity will become synonymous with your old on the street, returning your public awareness to previous levels. I would definitely consider a loyalty of 5+ to be a mitigating factor though.

If the GM, I would argue that only a clean break will return your character to obscurity. YMMV.

In this day and age of DVR, do we really care what time slot a show we want to watch is in? I sure don't.

Unfortunately, the networks haven't quite grokked the idea that the only measure of a show's success is how many people watch it when it's aired for the first time.

We use the option I mentioned when characters move to a new city. For the reasons many of you posted it can be very difficult to pull off if you stay in the same city and for that reason we don't let you do it if you don't move. You lose your contacts but at least you aren't dealing with fans chasing you or the FBI watching your every move and every two bit wannabe trying to take you down so they can prove they are the next big thing.

DVR doesn't help when the local College Football game comes on instead of the show you want.