Reputation

xTATTEREDx  · +FINE+  · *SUPERIOR*  · ≡EXCEPTIONAL≡  · ☼MASTERWORK☼

v50.14 · v0.47.05 This article is about the current version of DF. Note that some content may still need to be updated. More Info · V

 

Reputation, or fame, is an invisible metric that tracks how well-known or fearsome your adventurer is. Reputation directly impacts the quality and difficulty of quests you will receive, the number of companions willing to join you, or whether bandits will directly attempt to target you. Certain reputation also allows you to get tavern services for lower (or free) price and vice versa.

Increasing your reputation

Quests

The most straightforward way is to perform quests, and report back to whoever sent you off. These range from killing some mundane animal (like a dingo), to neutralizing a bandit camp or outing a vampire in hiding. As your reputation increases, you will be tasked to complete more serious quests, such as slaying a megabeast on the other side of the world. If you are a hearthperson or a subordinate to some kind of lord, you may repeatedly ask for quests to your superior and build up a reputation as a loyal soldier.

Rumors

If you are not a subordinate to anybody and don't wish to be, you can simply use rumors to brag about your feats. Simply slay some beast, bandit or night creature and bring up the incident in a conversation, and let the rumor system do the work. Alternatively, you may tell the story of your feats in a performance, and spectators will spread the story for you.

Types of reputation

There are currently 32 sorts of reputations, with corresponding utterances, but they aren't equal or even necessarily numeric. It's all handled dynamically based on incident/rumor/entity-membership knowledge, so it can be slippery to pin things down, especially in the cases where somebody has died, since people can go a few levels deep to ascertain what they think about that (and still too often end up with nothing.) Once events/etc. go stale, a simple numeric reputation is captured for those events, and that lives inside entities and historical figures that are thinking about a given person (some events are entity level, some historical figure level, some both.) The utterances are shifted in ranges 1-24, 25-49, 50-74, 75-99, 100+, oftentimes, so many reputations have five verbal levels. So for example, you get 25 hero points for reuniting two people if the thinker has a positive feeling about either of them, or a positive entity affiliation with either - you get 100 hero points from either of the reunited people regardless of affiliation. Whereas an entity itself gives you a hero rep for reuniting people with positions, and that is felt by all members.

Depending on the feats you've accomplished, your type of reputation may differ: slaying bandits will earn you the title of "protector of the weak", while doing your hearthperson duty will make you known as a "loyal soldier". Retrieving artifacts for claimants will make you known as a "Treasure Hunter". On the other hand, if you become known as a thief or a murderer who indiscriminately massacres citizens, people will refuse to speak to you and spit on you. Therefore, it may be desirable to avoid, or at least control, rumor-spreading.

The scale goes from 0 to 100: for instance, in the "hero" scale, you will be known as a "Famous Hero" between 75 and 99, and a "Legendary Hero" at 100.

Controlling your reputation

You may assume multiple identities as an adventurer. Starting over with a fresh identity will reset your reputation if people don't know you under your previous name. Alternatively, if witnesses see you murder someone, you may try to kill all of them before the site is offloaded (which is a requirement for the rumor system to start working). Or you may move to another civilization entity entirely where your reputation does not follow you.

So if you ask after a goblin agent using their true name or an identity used in a previous town, people in the current town the agent is infiltrating will properly say that they don't know who you are talking about, even if they have a lot of information about the agent under their current alias -- or they might have an opinion about the old identity if they heard a rumor about it. People can give different answers for the true historical figure and each identity, as well as what they think on sight (which may or may not involve any names -- they keep track of which identities they associate with the physical appearance).

Trivia

If your reputation becomes exceptionally high ("Famous Hero", so above 75), bandits trying to ambush you will say "Ha-ha-halt!" instead of the normal announcement message, presumably stammering in front of such a fearsome figure. An exception is if they have [NOFEAR].