Yes I guess you could say I've been living in a cave for awhile, as Fallout: New Vegas is the first Fallout I've played.

I'm not much of a "shooter" fan mainly because my gaming skills typically lie in RPG's or racing/sports games. Just to show you how lame I am, I died in the DEMO for Uncharted LOL

So of course, thanks to the VATS system, I actually have a fighting chance. (And having a friend who beat Fallout 3 on hardcoe doesn't hurt either). The only times I've gotten in trouble are against the Giant Radscorpions, the Cazadors (sp) and when I fount a Super Mutant thing that fried me in 3 shots.

To my question...what things does Karma affect? Because I just really want to steal the ammo from places that it shows up red in the text, because ammo can be hard to come by (I'm still around 5-6 hours into th game). Is it OK to just steal EVERYTHING, provided no one sees you doing it?

Karma does nothing, it's just a leftover from Fallout 3. Stealing will hurt your reputation with the people you're stealing from if they detect you, but if you're a good thief they won't see you doing it, will they? :ninja:

As far as I can tell, you can steal as much as you want so long as no one see you doing it so you wouldn't be forced to kill them and hurt your rep. It will probably effect the ending if you let your karma drop too low though but there should be more than enough enemies around that gives good karma to offset that.

Not much, its reputation that matters.

Awesome answers everyone, thank you! Having not played the game before, I was just curious.

I'll have to do a runthrough at a later date where I don't "steal" anything unseen

Karma does actually effect the ending of the game. When I mean ending, I mean what you're told during the ending slides. I also know of one quest that you can't do a certain way if you don't have bad karma.

Karma influences your reputation (just as luck influences all your skills, I believe). Karma also has an effect on what type of ending you recieve when you've finished the game.

Karma can also effect what happens in the final battle, for me it did.