Street Cred

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Street cred is an objective rating on the competence of a character's actions including effectiveness in combat, ability to stay unseen, and ability to accomplish missions.

Game Rules Description

The only proving ground for a runner's skills is the streets. When a job goes down, its success or failure will always creep out into the shadows and ultimately affect the runner's next job. Skillful execution brings more and better business; botching milk runs knocks you down to only the low paying or insanely risky. Street cred represents this perception in skill using a single rating. The higher the better, with no specified upper limit and no specified lower limit, indicating to the world every good and bad thing the character has done in one easy stat.

When certain things happen, saving a friend, gaining reputation, succeeding at a mission, etc, street cred will increase to give the player immediate positive reinforcement. When a character abandons a friend, loses rep, fails a mission, etc, street cred will decrease to give a similar immediate lesson in what not to do. Sometimes, these losses will be temporary, lasting hours, sometimes they will be permanent. This should indicate the other players the total skill-level of the player behind the character and their ability to make judgments and play well.

Also, missions, amongst their many possible requirements for entry, will rely upon street cred to delineate if a character is 'ready' to take it on. For instance, early missions that may impose no or low street cred requirements will be straightforward smash and grabs, assassinations, etc. But high-level missions will go into dangerous territory, involve twisting plots, and make cause the character to accrue lethal enemies.

Technical Implementation

Street cred will be a single statistic, like an attribute or current karma, that all player characters possess. It will be adjustable via scripting at most any time, allowing content creators to directly decide when to raise or lower street cred. Temporary loss in street cred will have a programmable duration from minutes to days, but it is likely there may be an enforced limit of a few days game-time for temporary losses. Also, scripting will allow missions to use street cred as a pre-requisite to decide whether or not they should be offered.

It is likely we may discover that an upper and lower bounds for street cred may be necessary. In the case of storing it, we can support numbers in the billions if need be, so it is unlikely the computer is the limiting factor here. It is just unknown if players will find it a personal challenge to find a bounds or if it's exciting to have unlimited growth potential.