I want to make a forum game about criminals. I'm thinking it's going to be a quite open RPG, and I haven't worked it all out yet, but I've come up with a few ideas.
There are two meters: Luck and Money. Luck runs out is when you fail certain rolls that could lead you into danger. If you get shot, you lose a luck point, but if you fail to hack into the CIA database then you'll lose a luck point too. Money is the amount of cash you have on hand, and it's lost when you buy stuff or at the end of a few turns as part of "living expenses" like food and electricity. When both meters run out, you're out of the game as you're either made bankrupt, killed, or arrested. Naturally as time goes on, things get riskier, but also living expenses go up, meaning the players can't just farm jobs until they've got infinite money.
There is another two meters that are more wanted levels: Heat and Notoriety. Heat is the active persuing by the law you're getting, while Notoriety is your long-term reputation. Heat will have you being actively hunted by the cops with the only way to stop it would be hiding or losing them. Notoriety is more subtle; it's a tracker for what the cops know about you. If you're a drug dealer, except more cops to turn up if you roll a bum roll on dealing, or if you're a bank robber expect the banks to be more heavily armed. If you want notoriety to go down, do something different in order to throw them off the scent: they won't think it's you because it doesn't match your M.O. You could also wear a mask instead, but that's rather suspicious on it's own and they can identify you if your notriety gets high enough.
The final idea I had was for gang warfare. As most of the mechanics I've come up with implies the average player is probably a single crim who cares more for mercenary jobs then supporting any gangs, a good way to involve gangs would be this. Every so often, a certain district is embroiled in a gang war. This means the streets are not safe (Meaning the player could get into combat while within the zone) and the customers do not want to hang around there (meaning lower profits for black market players). However, the advantage to gang wars is that players can join on the side of a certain gang to do hostile activities against the other gang. The other gang will get very angry, but the reward will be double the usual cash. The problem is, gang wars don't last forever and when the war ends, the source of money is gone too.