Doing main quests should have a huge impact on your reputation with those factions and then maybe a smaller reputation change towards the factions who live in the region where you did the quest(maybe even create this sort of wave effect like, the region where it happend gains an X change in reputation, regions around the original region an X/2 change and according to the scale of the act you did, further regions may aslo recieve a reputation change). Ofcours if it's something really important, every faction that is not completly excluded would hear of it and your reputation with them would change.
To keep all this trackable, maybe we could have a 'Reputation Page' or something similiar in our journal. And let's say that if you click on one of the Reputations, there pops up this little diagram with your reputation changes the last few days.
Sounds like good suggestions. Both with the reputation page and news spreading over entire organizations.
Every item of news about you (read: quest solution) could also have a predifined spread pattern. Usually solved quests of some importance would generate rumours; these should probably not fade in effect with distance travelled, but instead lose credibility. When determining the rumour derived part of an NPC's relation score, the NPC should consider all the credible rumours first (typically those from the same region). If the resulting score is positive, the NPC will then disbelieve all the negative but less credible rumours (perhaps decrease effect to 1/3 or so of the value), while accepting all the positive ones (full score modifier from those) (vice versa with the score being negative). There should also be a more reliable way for news to spread far and wide within an organization. Guards could be better informed about regional murderes then the common folk. And if you sabotage guild B on guild A's behalf, then news should spread reliably within those two guilds (unless you chose a stealthy solution in which case guild B may not figure out who was responsible).
Something else that popped to mind: what about hiding your identity and temporarily altering your reputation with certain factions? would you be able to dress up as someone? IE kill a guard of a city where you are hated and chased by the citizens, take his raiment and be able to move through the city whitout being recognised, some citizens might even come to you with a problem. If you take off your raiment, you're cover would be blown, resulting in being chased again.
Disguise seems like it could be hard to implement with the system I've detailed in my two posts here. The game would first of all need to know what you are typically recognized by, as rumours normally don't include pictures. There has been some wishfull thinking about your reputation carrying with it information about your combat style that the enemy AIs you come across can make use of. IMO something like that would be hard to do, but in order to have camouflage the game would pretty much need to keep track of: A) your legendary weapons you've used or whether you often use some exotic weapon, B) your commonly worn shining armor C)spells that only you can cast (and have cast on a quest before...) or your signature combat spell combinations D) (optionally) your common combat tactics (stealth or brute force?). If you can hide enough of these, then you may not be recognized by NPCs who do not know you (If one NPC of the group recognizes you, he/she probably informs the others. Also, some important NPCs would probably have some form of the true seeing skill) Disguise as a feature should allow the character to complete a quest (or commit crimes) without revealing his true identity. The player would need to activate a »disguise mode« while putting on different clothes or completely covering himself with a robe. That would be to insure that you are still assigned all your hard earned fame even when you change your armor. While disguised, you would have to refrain from using A1 or C1 and shouldn't use much of of A2, C2 and D. -Else you could blow your cover. As I already mentioned, NPCs who already know you should be able to recognize you by your face and voice (unles you master some sort of a disguise skill...), so there could also be some kind of a »mind fog« spell which would provide you with complete disguise by itself, yet shouldn't affect more than one NPC per skill level (just to keep things interesting). Anyways camouflage should probably be ineffective as a means to disassociate MAJOR crimes and grand-scale quests completions. Sooner or later someone would pay a diviner to figure out your identity. In the first case it could be the royal guard and in the second it could be some wealthy person (or bards?) interested in a story. Diviners may not be a foolproof way to read even important past events, yet after being taken to a few crime scenes they should probably be able to describe the perpetrator with certainty.
