[jess hughes]

On my first play-through of New Vegas, I've decided to go Legion. There's just something sixy and suave to their brutality that I like (Roman copy-culture not withstanding)... and something a little unnerving about the "good guy" NCR that obviously can't be all that good (despite whatever the Karma System tells you).

What I am looking for are other people who are planning on developing content or projects meant to make the game less "black and white." In particular, I absolutely love the idea of the Rep system, but the Karma system on top of it seems redundant and (in my desire to be "Good") it can actually drive my actions more than the story or the factions themselves. In essence, it takes a game world that can be very deep with ambiguous, context-heavy shades of gray and installing a filter over it so that you only see Good and Evil. Does anyone have any plans for restructuring how Karma works, so that it's more about personal choices and behaviors as opposed to some sort of left over mechanic from FO3 determined by what faction you soldier away for?

For example, my character is a principled sociopath... she sides with the Legion and gleefully does their political bidding, but still doesn't just tra-la-la around slaughtering random people. Justice, honor, and generosity are still in her vocabulary. She might be a "good" person who just happens to be brainwashed to the Legion ideology.

I never got to really jump into modding on Oblivion, as school took precedence, but I'd love to chip in on a team devoted to high-quality gray-scale content. I am not an artist, but I can be pretty handy at programming.

[Eddie Howe]

I still haven't found a use for Karma. You win it, you lose it but nothing ever seems to check for it.

Spoiler

Possibly the very end sequence

Apart from that it seems to just be a leftover from FA3.

[Causon-Chambers]

I still haven't found a use for Karma. You win it, you lose it but nothing ever seems to check for it.

Spoiler

Possibly the very end sequence

Apart from that it seems to just be a leftover from FA3.

Yeah, I noticed this, too.

It kind of bothers me that there's kind of this mechanic just... sitting there. I suppose it's sort of like the mini-challenges, where you try to kill 5 billion things using only your left hand while hopping on one foot - except there are no badges involved.

I would really like to see it put to some use, just not in the way that it is now (i.e, you gain it for killing NCR and lose it for killing Legion). Reputation is an excellent system for how others view you, but karma is sort of how you (or the cosmos) view yourself.

Edited:

I think, if no one speaks up on any current related projects on this, I'll probably start banging something out on my own after I've fully finished a play-through.

[jason worrell]

You can also lose it for stealing, using stuff that belongs to other people, essentially anything that makes your "use" command go red. Also, the Cannibal perk.

Because of the fact nothing seems to be really linked to it, you can go wild with ideas for it. For example, you could have a negative Karma loss linked the the old "I won't buddy up with you". Someone like Boone probably won't stick around if your Karma keeps dropping (this might actually be ingame, the companion->karma scripts look like FA3 ones though). You could have a positive Karma give you a better discount with merchants, but a negative more likely for them to say give you stuff out of fear.

[Emily Jeffs]

You can also lose it for stealing, using stuff that belongs to other people, essentially anything that makes your "use" command go red. Also, the Cannibal perk.

Because of the fact nothing seems to be really linked to it, you can go wild with ideas for it. For example, you could have a negative Karma loss linked the the old "I won't buddy up with you". Someone like Boone probably won't stick around if your Karma keeps dropping (this might actually be ingame, the companion->karma scripts look like FA3 ones though). You could have a positive Karma give you a better discount with merchants, but a negative more likely for them to say give you stuff out of fear.

Something I was toying with was to also do conditional-based perks - ie, if you keep your karma at such-and-such a level, you get x bonus.

In FO3, I actually found it pretty hard to acumulate too much "bad karma" if I just didn't go out of my way to wipe Megaton of the map and slaughter everyone in sight. The opposite seems to be true in New Vegas -- one of the reasons being is that, even after you wipe out a camp belonging to an enemy faction (even an "evil" one), if you attempt to loot their stuff it's considered stealing. ((This assumes you aren't gaining/losing by killing Legionaires/NCR soldiers en masse.)) Tweaking this behavior might play into my "shades of gray" playstyle -- dead enemies don't need their precious tin cans anymore. Not sure how to approach this without making it rediculous, though.