I decided to fight the Powder Gangers. I am in their area (no spoilers, so not being specific), I kill them, I gain karma. I then try to loot their boxes/crates and I lose karma? What am I missing?

I guess killing bad guys, if they are bad guys is good, but stealing no matter from who you do it from is bad. The property is owned, so if it's owned, then it's considered theft. Theft is BAD, at least in New Vegas. Well that is my guess, hope it helps.

:fallout:

Good question. And why is it still considered stealing if the owner is dead?

That's what I don't understand at all. It's perfectly ok for you to mass murder some "bad people" but you can't loot some ammo without it being considered "bad", even though it's a game about survival, and usually when someone is dead, they no longer own anything.

I know they said that most interactions are based on standings with a faction, so I just steal from everybody and do good options on the quests to try and keep my Karma neutral.

I thought that was kind of odd, too. Ran into it at the one Powder Gang checkpoint on the road to Primm.

Kill the guy - that's fine.
Loot the corpse - that's fine.
Grab the thing sitting on the table next to the corpse? Whoops, you vile thief!


I do suspect that it would have been annoying to try to code theft vs. looting into the reputation system. But it's still kind of confusing to run into.

Karma is not as important as Reputation in FNV anyway.

Just remember that the karma you gain for killing the bad guys is not equal to the karma lost by stealing from them. The game hides the numbers, but there are numbers there.

I've forgotten now, but I think it's a 2000 points scale. 0 is neutral, -1000 is evil and 1000 is good. Killing a bad guy might give you +10 but stealing from him will only take -2.

Look into the numbers, I'm just giving an example.

Trying not to give out any spoilers at all, but think about this:

Are you sure THEY own that ammo box?

Maybe THEY stole it from someone else?

Shoot me a message if you want me to clarify, but you may understand what I'm trying to say here.

Was the same on FO3. Also things like not being able to sleep on a bed while tresspassing was annoying. The owner of the bed and property was dead... I know, my character killed him. Somehow I don't think a killer would consider for a moment that sleeping on their victim's bed would be a worse crime than actually making their victim a victim in the first place. But, no matter what, she just wouldn't lie down. :sadvaultboy:

Exactly. With the new faction system, the old karma system is pretty obsolete and lame. Why would faction X dislike me for stealing from faction Y (their enemies).

Not saying the faction system is all that great either.. Do some minor task for faction X, your reputation with them goes up slightly. This is good. Kill important members of the faction, your reputation with them goes down slightly. :facepalm:
I would say it should hit rock bottom straight away.

spoiler free thoughts:

Yeah I noticed that too. I think it should be addressed, for example, if you were to eliminate the inhabitant of a room or building or whatever and nobody else was around. If you are alone, and the owner is no longer the owner, there shouldn't be a problem.


A more interesting possible bug/feature I noticed was that if you take out a member of a faction without them noticing you, you don't lose any reputation with them! This is extremely cool, you can ambush or take them out from a distance and be rewarded.

This may be true, but as far as you know, that item belonged to it's recently deceased owner. It's not like it says "Property of Such-and-such" on the item. And if it does, the game certainly doesn't make it clear who it belongs to.

Killing is evil. Stealing from the dead, no-matter how evil, is immoral.

Stealing is always immoral no matter where the person you're stealing from got it.

Killing isn't always immoral because if you kill a person who murders/steals you're helping others. You've prevented a bad guy from hurting more people; that's good.

If you steal, even if its from a murder/thief, you're only continuing the process. Especially since, in this game, you can't return stolen objects to their original owners.

IRL example: You walk into a drug dealers house, shoot him dead, and then take everything he owned. Does that sound moral? No, it's chaos.
You're benifitting from taking things he came into ownship through undboubtedly subversive methods for your own personal gain.

Killing someone for their property makes you no better, if not worse than, the criminal.

Even if you just steal from the person and don't harm them you're still no better than the criminal because you're taking something they own for your own personal gain.

So, the "stealing is always immoral" guys. You can steal from dead people and always hostile factions (jackals, for example) just fine. It's alignable faction owned items you can't take. How are you going to rationalize that?

Spoils of war and just plain stealing