Good thing to see you're dedicated to thinking this through first

Just as a side note, one thing you might want to do is increase the karma hit for some things. I stole pretty much anything I saw with little care and still ended up a "paragon of selflessness" or whatever it was. Along with removal of karma either way for self defense, I think this would do a good deal towards making it an actual choice you have to make.

(Edit: Possibly base the karma hit on the price of the item, if it's not already. I seem to recall hearing in Fallout 3 the scale was 1000 points in each direction and stealing was one point per theft. One point per 100 caps value base value might be a good rule, I'm sure you'll figure it out)

[double post]

Non-explicitly evil...powder gangers? If you have a 20 speech, you can ask Cobb what he was in for. Multiple counts of murder, and 'blowing up some stuff' are on the *list*. The Powder Gangers aren't poor unfortunate souls kept down by an oppressive government or something. They're horrible murderers who should have been executed, or at least kept in maximum security...but the NCR decided to use them as a chain gang instead, all in the name of the mighty dollar.

I've got nothing against gaining Karma for giving a Powder Ganger their just desserts.

Powder Gangers attack you randomly. You should not gain karma for killing someone who attacked you - there's nothing karmically 'good' about that at all.

Cob is one of the meaner Powder Gangers, sure, but if you actually get inside the NCRCF and talk to a few of the others, it becomes apparent that most of them are just humans going along with a mob mentality.



All in all, the prison has a "realistic" feel to it in how the prisoners were presented, but labeling them 'evil' with the use of the karma system is an injustice against a storyline/game that tries to present more 'shades of gray' options.

I agree that karma is all messed up in this game. However, if you're going to make people with good karma more lucky, this mod isn't for me. Are you planning that? Either way, I'll give my two cents.

Karma should be based on your current reputation, because what is 'good' and 'bad' is all very subjective. Who you're on good standing with would help to show what things your character finds acceptable. Attacking anything currently in combat with you shouldn't give any good karma, but if you're in good standing with NCR, attacking a Powder Ganger who isn't hostile to you should yield good karma. I suppose that could stand with attacking NCR when you're with Caesar's Legion.

Actually, the luck thing could work with this. But I'm just jumbling thoughts together, my ideas probably won't stand up too good in terms of balance, particularly because it would lead to all characters being good. So I've just disqualified my own statement, I guess.

I still don't think you should get good karma from killing things hostile to you, though, and you shouldn't get bad karma when you take their things after they attack you. But you should get bad karma for attacking people who aren't hostile, and you should get bad karma for taking their things. What you'd need for that is some way to check if the NPC was hostile before you attacked them.

No. I will NOT be using karma to modify stats directly; that would make the mod self-defeating.

I would open to ideas similar to the Mediator perk from FO3, where you CHOSE it and it helped encourage you to stay within the alignment range that you want for your character, but I will not be adding anything to the mod that explicitly punishes players for having excessive good or bad karma.




I rolled something similar around in my head and then determined that it would make implementing extremely problematic, especially if you spent a majority of the game maintaining a neutral status or you're clever enough to get on everyone's good side (before having to actually choose one or the other) for a while. While I would love to have a dynamically context-aware karma system, trying to make it too complicated will just lead to a lot of exploiting and that's not what I really want for this project.

It should be possible to be a relatively good, or at the very least highly principled, person in Caesar's Legion or a corrupt butt-hat in the NCR. Your faction support just reflects the company you keep, not your own internal drives.

Oh, that's good. Because honestly, it wouldn't make sense-- there are a lot of bad people in the world who are just lucky, and on the flip side there are a lot of good people just given a bad hand.


You're right about this. I thought about it, and that's both easily exploitable and kind of dumb. But the last bit of my post still stands, I think.

You rather missed my point here. You've separated the issues of stealing and murder and made an illogical conclusion. I'm not suggesting that the Karma should just be based on present day law and I totally agree, if you find a dead person (ie a corpse in a house with items that aren't flagged as owned such as Nipton) then there should not be punishment for taking their stuff. If however you walk into a house with a passive friendly NPC who you then proceed to murder then it should not be ok to then ransack their house. Killing them should be evil, stealing from them should be evil, killing and then stealing is evil upon evil and should be treated as such.

This is not only the logical conclusion but the most suitable on a gameplay level. Removing the karma penalty when people die leads to incongruous situations where you'd take less of a karma hit by shooting a houses occupant and emptying their house than if you just raided their fridge.

Karma, in the religious sense, does not take into account what someone has done, only what you know. It is about trying to do good or trying to cause harm, not what the outcome or circumstances were. With this in mind, and as Parhelion rightly points out, sitting on a hill and sniping Power Gangers because "they were all bad" does not constitute a righteous act, Even after you find out what Cobb has done, deciding your just going to punch his head off with a power fist as punishment, while arguably not an evil thing, could hardly be considered saintly.

If you were going for pure real world logic then shooting anyone who's entire back story you don't know should be considered an evil act, but again as Parhelion points out, the mechanics of the game aren't complex enough to allow this level of moral intricacy. You can't be expected not to kill NPCs when they are hostile and there is no way for you to talk to them or call a truce.

NB - I should probably point out that I'm an Athiest, I'm suggesting these things from a pure game design/logical standpoint, not with the aim of turning Fallout in a metaphysical simulator.

Which would be the exact opposite of Karma and therefore not relevant.

I think you might be over-thinking this a bit. I think we both want the same end effects.

In an ideal mod, I would want context-sensitive karma. The discussions on removing karma penalties for killing deal more with characters acting in self-defense -- simply walking up and blowing someone's face off for their goodies would be very bad juju as far as the cosmos is concerned.

HOWEVER...

Karma itself appears to be a variable system built directly into the engine. That makes tinkering with how it works a pain in the butt, because it's actually tied to the nebulous assumption made in FO3 that you're a good guy and everyone who wants to kill you must be "Evil" -- thus, killing "Evil" NPCs grants you karma and killing "Good" NPCs takes it away. This is the crux of the problem with karma in New Vegas. I believe that is also why Kobu's proof of concept has to work by "unowning" items owned by the Powder Gangers -- as far as the engine is concerned, objects are either "owned" or not, and if they are "owned", you are stealing, no matter what -- and that grants Bad Karma. I'm still searching, but it appears that logic actually exists in the engine.

I have found what appears to be ways to edit karma on a player. Fixing the karma issues and creating a system that even half-way resembles what we've talked about so far in this thread is likely going to require some heavy and clever scripting -- but I've only been at this for a little while, so I might still find some useful hooks. Even then, I'm worried about finding the best way to implement these changes without ruining compatibility with any sort of future content mod or DLC that makes use of the "Evil" checkbox on NPCs. <.<

This situation would be covered by the "Remove karma penalties for stealing from hostiles" fix that I suggested. There's no need to add another layer on top of that. Stealing from anyone who you might have to kill in self defence would be karma-penalty free, whether you killed them or not. The only change that adding the "stealing from dead people is ok" fix would achieve would be to encourage the player to shoot "good" people when they want to steal their stuff, which is rather counterintuative.

Also I had this discussion with Kubo when he was originally making that mod. There has to be hooks in the ownership of items as becoming friendly with a faction removes the karma penalty for taking their stuff. For example if you get on good terms with the NCR you can take ammo and weapons from the Mojave Outpost. It should be a simple matter of reversing those flag so the opposite happens.

I will try and investigate what he did in his mod exactly at the end of my work week -- using GECK on a laptop is not the most pleasant experience.

I'll work on devising a simple-to-read outline of what my planned/optimal changes are going to be for a core karma mod and what I'd have planned for an extended one that's not bogged down with all this discussion and back-and-forth.

Until then, more ideas are welcome.

I'm pretty sure we're in complete agreement about what should be done about stealing from dead people-- it's OK if they were trying to kill you, but bad if they weren't and you just walked up to them and shot them, because then them fighting back would be survival.

I wasn't disagreeing with your conclusion, I was questioning your reasoning.



This is in direct opposition to the definition of Karma. Karma is a religious concept where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Good karma players having higher luck and bad karma players having their luck lowered would be a perfectly valid expression of Karma in the game. The problem isn't in the logic it is in the game design, rewarding one style of play and punishing another is too heavy handed, you are pushing the player down a path they might prefer not to go down.

Not trying to be nit picky, just trying to stop the thread veering off at a tangent.

I'm pretty sure that works by the player essentially becoming a part of the NCR faction. In other words, it would not, in fact, work for stealing stuff from people who are hostile to you.

Agreed with this point about the nature of karma.

Some general thoughts regarding that--

In game terms, I think karma should be thought of as good or evil acts with consequences that cut across all faction lines. Racking up bad karma doesn't necessarily have to be all bad, at least short term. Think of the classic short path to power. If you kill people for their stuff, you get their stuff. That's a reward right there. Later on you may get something of a come-uppance. On the opposite side, doing right all the time should be harder. You should struggle more. But, there could be rewards down the road.

Doing things that are karmically bad could even result in intangible rewards. We have precedence in FO3 with the Dreamcrusher perk. Many games essentially have a karma line with rewards on both ends. Generally in these things, doing bad nets you abilities to help hurt others. Going good helps protect yourself or others. Knights of the Old Republic is a good example.

In sum, I don't think treating karma as it is usually understood to be would necessarily force anyone down a path or end up rewarding some choices more in game terms. Plan it well and it could be very balanced while still keeping the idea of good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. Remember too, karma doesn't always pan out in this lifetime.



I'm actually not very far into the game. I only understood the stealing penalty after I cleared the prison of Powder Gangers because they seriously torked me off. That's one reason I haven't dived into this fully. I want to finish the game once to get the big picture and then go back and flip all the right flags.

For becoming allies with a faction and then being able to steal all their stuff, I think assigning ownership to a dummy faction would solve this neatly. However, I'm not sure what other implications that may have and a lot of testing would have to be done in game areas I'm not familiar with.

This actually was an issue in Oblivion; if you joined the Mages' Guild, it became insanely easy to run around and pick up all the more expensive items and then just go sell them. If you had the patience for it, was essentially the I-Win button for making some easy cash very early in the game. Someone (like in the OOO mod or something similar) fixed this by actually assigning ownership of items to the higher ranks.

I haven't reached far enough into the game myself to test out this theory with the larger factions, and as I understand it, you don't actually "join" them. Could look into it after the work week's done.

I don't think it should effect luck because I think it should come back at you some other way, like quest options or something. I like the way Kubo puts it, really. Like I said earlier about there being lucky bad people and good people that are bad off, nobody said they never got a good (or bad) break down the line for how they've acted in life. I think it should be different from luck because I don't think it should be so obvious as that, I think bad deeds should bite you in the ass down the line.

Skipping most of the thread because Karma arguments give me a headache sometimes.

Just a couple of thoughts I'll throw in:

1. I don't like getting good Karma for doing something I'm also being paid to do. If the job comes with pre-stated reward or pay, it shouldn't give you good karma. Bad karma is another matter.

2. If someone attacks you, all their stuff should be forfeit without getting bad karma. Not so if you attack them.

3. Karma having a temporary effect on Luck seems like it might be a good idea to me. Evil people who do good things, or Good people who do evil things will get a temporary luck penalty. Good people who do good things and Evil people who do evil things get a temporary luck boost. Duration is dependent on the karma earned/lost with minor things having no boost/loss at all. Neutral people get nothing. Kind of a D&D roleplaying thing.

I was just about to suggest that exact same thing, but you really should have put that in spoiler tags. ?_?



You've just taken an idea that was purely logical, but didn't work because it didn't take gameplay into account and you've removed the logic :-/

How was Krama and reputation handled in Fallout 1 and 2? What kind of system did they used there? Would it not be a good idea to import that system? I also can see a lot of problems regarding the change of krama and reputation, the developers did it like it is now because Krama and Morale are really complex topics and often translates bad into a game world. Someone said that morality is in the eye of the beholder, but that isnt true to some things. I think we can all agree that murdering innocent people, [censored], etc are bad things. If you arent a total sociopath, that is.

Anyway, I see a lot of work ahead OP, making a mod that chages the fundamental things in the game like Krama and reputation are sure a big task.

How about instead of a luck bonus or penalty, the player could choose from a number of perks: One for Very Good that greatly reduces the enemy's chance of a crit, also gives a small penalty to the player's crit rate (to represent the player's reluctance to kill, even in self-defence), one for Good that doesn't reduce the enemy's crit rate as much, but also doesn't carry the penalty for the player, one for Evil that gives a small bonus to the player's crit rate, and one for Very Evil that significantly increases the player's crit rate, but also increases enemy's crit rates (probably not as big as the player's crit bonus, but close).
Of course, I'm assuming NPCs even get crits, so if they don't then perhaps give the player a damage resistance bonus/penalty where applicable.

Alternatively, you could still have a luck bonus/penalty, but negate the change in crit rate that comes with it, so that good karma players still get the skill/loot bonuses without affecting combat so much (ie, have a crit rate penalty equal to the luck bonus), while evil karma players still have the skill/loot penalties while overall having an increase in the amount of crits they do (eg, if the luck penalty is 3, increase the crit rate by 4 or 5)

Possibly. I figured if you got the reference you already saw it coming anyway.

But added the gameplay. Karma has no effect at all right now unless you make massive changes to your karma level. Adding a penalty for acting contrary to your characters basic nature and a bonus for sticking with that nature makes karma have an immediate effect.

But, you might not like it. I like it when you have to make a choice that will have an actual downside or upside. Right now I can rob people blind and it barely affects my character at all. At worst I'll go from an absurdly high level of karma to a very high level of karma. That has no effect on the game at all that I can tell and my next quest always restores everything.