What you have described is a condition known as cognitive dissidence.

This would be when the thoughts of the person, and the morals and ethics that person believes, cannot be reconciled. For instance, a good person murdering people out of a forced need for survival. Or hunger. Or addiction. The reverse, a ruthless person suddenly finding themselves having feelings of remorse and regret for all their wicked deeds, would also be understandable.

Your 'bonus' idea for remaining true to your character's... well... character... would actually make perfect sense, if instead of simply affecting luck it was made to have effects which carried through to things such as faster firing rate, a charisma bonus (for being comfortable with yourself), and other minor pluses. I could totally see that.

It may not be directly RELATED to the traditional beliefs of 'Karmic' balance in the world... but then again, Fallout never really cared about those things from the get go. Karma has, and as the maker of this thread suggested it may well continue to be, a 'morality guide' for the player. Something to visually represent their actions, and which occasionally had an effect in the wide world around them. (Very rarely in Fallout 1 & 2, Overly much so in Fallout 3)

[edit:] Antiquated changed to 'traditional'. Mild brain damage causes words which have similar meanings to occasionally pop up when searching for another. Traditional was the word I was originally searching for.

I had already finished it, but anyone who reads your comment who hasn't started that quest is going to immediately know the outcome now, I really think you should put it in a spoiler tag.



What I meant was that whole "luck bonus" idea came about from a concept that had absolutely nothing to do with game design...it's a bad idea, don't try and roll with it. I'm not saying you can't use luck as part of your suggestion, just go for your own idea, don't try and modify a rubbish one to make it acceptable. No offence to the guy who suggested that originally :whistling:

Man I seriously don't see what's wrong with my original suggestion that started this whole bonuses debacle. It's simple, easy to implement, and makes logical sense without breaking the balance of the game. All you need to do is add a % increase/decrease to things like trader prices, speech check requirements and damage when fighting NPCs of the opposite alignment. For example a good character would get

Better deals from good traders, worse deals from evil traders
Higher crit/damage vs evil NPC lower crit/damage vs good
Higher skill/stat requirements for conversation checks when talking to evil NPCs, lower for good NPCs
Any or all of the above

And then the exact opposite for evil characters. People keep suggesting luck based on some spurious notion that it would somehow represent karmic retribution like it's going to give them a better chance of finding a big sack full of caps, which would be ideal if that's what luck did, but it doesn't. What you're actually suggesting is a 1% crit bonus vs everything, what kind of karmic bonus is that if it helps you kill indiscriminately?

You are correct and it is done. Please pick up your quote of the comment and remove that as well to excise my error. edit: Thanks.


I can see the second if it could be implemented, but the first and third seem to be more a faction reputation thing than a Karma thing.

Luck does have an effect on all skills, so you get some of that stuff from a temporary luck bonus, but you are correct that luck is not implemented as thoroughly as it needs to be to truly be useful in this case.

I suppose that given the game design and concept, you could never really make karma work right. If everyone had the Mysterious Stranger and Miss Fortune perks, I suppose you could play around with them a bit to get a bit of Karmic retribution.

I don't see why the other two aren't Karma related, I was going on the basis that like minded people are more likely to see eye to eye. This obviously takes a small logical leap in that everyone can tell you're a nice guy just by looking at you but it's no more illogical than shooting a bad guy making you temporarily better at cooking (as luck would). The point is that this method would give both sides tangible, temping benefits while keeping roughly in line with the original concept.

The other benefit of doing a percentage increase like that as opposed to a flat out perk is that you can vary the increase/decrease based on how many karma points you have. You could go for a more obscure route, like trying to add some kind of mysterious stranger style random event, or not making the bonuses so explicit but not only would that be a lot harder to balance, it would be extremely difficult to make it feel like part of the game, as opposed to being blatantly obviously a mod/cheat.