Starting my 2nd playthrough and while doing my first wasn't really concerned about my karma rating and
wound up evil because of the tons of stuff I stole and was never able to fix it because of the few
opportunites to gain positive karma in the MQ.

Now that I'm doing my second runthrough, I haven't seen many opportunites yet to get
good karma. What's some stuff I need to do to gain it ?

kill members of the fiends.

Kill bad guys save good guys. Or if your a girl, you can sleep with Pres. Oliver. Your choice.

kill fiends, kill powder gangers, kill feral ghouls, kill anyone considered bad...
Basically, KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
And you'll be considered the greatest good guy in all of history in no time. Its almost creepy how much people will think your a good guy as you sheer off heads with a meat clever...

In the prison, I went around shooting prisoners in the face while there were sleeping in their beds and gained good karma for each one.
In the fiends hideout, I was chopping off legs with a combat knife as I silently creeped around and gained good karma for each mutilated corpse.

Unless you are doing it for achievment purposes, karma does not mean a whole lot in this game, my current character sometimes steals essentials from the NCR, things like a med bag, but as long as you are not caught and have a good reputation with a group, karma means squat.

are you for real ? If thats the major way to gain karma, thats just stupid, and shallow.

Seriously, as a girl you can gain karma by sleeping with the Pres ?? Hilarious.

Other than killing, there usually a bunch of dialogue check that usually lead to good karma and there a handful of them.

Really? I had the exact opposite. Working with the NCR, despite the fact I stole everything I could, still found myself with insanely high positive karma.

I agree, my character is no friend of the powder gangers, but to get karma for killing them just does not feel right, now if you had the dialogue option including speech check to get some of them to turn themselves in, that's a good reason to gain karma.

I seem to have trouble getting bad or even neutral karma. It seems almost everything I kill in this game gives me good karma.

I can't stop myself from getting very high karma, even if I try.
It's RIDICULOUS to get positive karma from killing powder gangers and fiends.

Too many to list,just do whatever seems good.

Ridiculous for some of the named powder gangers, but the ones parked by the roads waylay and murder just about any passer-by. The fiends make sense since they are all [censored] murdering sociopaths and each one of them killed effectively represents many lives saved. I do think you get too much karma for killing the minor evil doers though; karma should be on a larger scale (say -4000 to 4000) with killing minor bad guys giving plus one and also having a maximum accumulated gain cap.

Donating supplies and turning down rewards is, however, how I have received most of my positive karma.

Really? I'm having a hard time trying to get bad karma for some of my builds. I massacre complete towns and I'm still the last Best Hope for Humanity?

I don't beleive it maxes out your karma, or if it does it maxes out so high that it can become irevocably high so that you will almost never be able to outweigh all the good slaughtering you've done. That is one of the biggest reasons I think their should be a max accumulated gain from killing minor baddies- this would prevent you from accumulating such a high karma from killing fiends that it no longer seems to matter how many grannies and hokers-with-hearts-of-gold you turn into hamburger.

That's my point though, they attack and kill EVERYONE. Even evil characters. An evil character killing someone that wants to kill him shouldn't be considered a moral act; he can have very amoral intentions.
You shouldn't get Karma for things that you effectively HAVE to do regardless of inclination.

It would be comparable to giving you negative karma for stepping on flowers as you walk around a field.

Don't steal. Don't kill good people. Don't make bad decisions.

Don't think of karma as a moralistic philosophy...think of it more as a generalised attitude toward you...what society overall thinks of how you behave.

It's better if you consider what the basics of 'karma' are all about: Do good, and good results from that.

If you have good karma, and are thought of well in a place, they will gift you things, like stimpacks.

Shoot all their cattle, or ruffle their hairdo, and they may shoot at you on sight.

Karma is only loosely related to how a specific faction relates to you....if you do certain quests for most of them, that improves your standing with them, so long as you don't do evil to them.

Also, killing everything and everybody doesn't make you evil...it makes you a psychopath.

Don't steal. If you can talk your way out of a fight do it (via whatever the check is). Do the nice thing, by not telling someone to screw off I won't help. Kill fiends, that's because they are causing trouble for the regular good old folks of the wastes. They are just drugged out trouble causers.

My favorite way to get good karma was by helping Boxcars (good karma), do his quest (good karma), shoot him in the face because I REALLY hate him (more good karma).

Yeah Karma doesn't really mean jack in this game my characters spend most of the time with nuetral cause im always doing good things but then i steall alot of stuff haha.


Also one tip when your stealing stuff and you dont wanna get caught pick up the item carry it to a safe location then put it in your inventory lol.

I find it extremely difficult to become evil (although I was somehow Neutral until level 13). Don't steal (or limit it) first of all. Also, when you run into fiends, kill kill kill. Killing those guys results in good karma. It took my Neutral character to Very Good in a flash. Give medicine to the Followers. Do all-around- do-gooder stuff.

No it makes sense- some traditional views on the idea of karma portray it to be part;y intent-neutral. The idea is that regardless of whether you mean to do good or ill, you are responsible ultimately for the true effects of your actions. For example, someone tricked into performing actions that killed an innocent would have that weight on their soul regardless of their ignorance. At the same time were a burglar to have killed a man during a robbery who just happened to be a serial killer who would have gone on to kill dozens of innocents, the universe would recognize the rightness of that act even if the burglar did not.

The core of this is that "right thought" and "right action" are partly independent of each other. While having "right thought" will most likely lead to "right action" this is not necessarily the case. Sometimes good intentions have bad results and bad intentions may have unexpected good results- the universe tallies result despite intent (although most of these schools of thought suggest the universe also recognizes intent but that it is neither an excuse nor a pre-requisite for responsibility over the results of one's actions.)

I lose no karma for murdering a travelling merchant in order to loot his caravan and corpse, and I gain karma when I murder a Fiend asleep in his bed. Life seems bizzarely cheap in Vegas. The karma system's fubared, and I'm not sure if it's design quirk or bug or both.

Welcome to a real Fallout game.

You misunderstand me; this is the post-apocalypse and of course life is cheap in the financial sense - I'm currently playing a ruthless bastard who lives by this principal. I get that. But this game has a karma system, which implies some kind of universal balance sheet of your good and bad deeds, and murder doesn't make a dent on it. This is not reasonable. Either have a sensible karma system or ditch it altogether and just have reputation instead.

edit: and incedentally I've played Fallouts 1 and 2 oh great condescender.