New Vegas is great. My first 'Very Good' character was a blast (sided with Mr House), massive improvement in many aspects to Fallout 3. On my second character I am 'Very Evil' or so I try but I am considered good. I'm level 18, following the Caesar path, finished missions with evil endings, steal, eat corpses and murder. I run across a few fiends who spray me with energy weapons so I put them down and then all of a sudden I'm good.

This is ridiculous and what makes me sad is that I'm on console so no mods and I doubt there will be a patch for this.

The effects of Karma are unknown to me however if you're going to implement it in the game I think some thought should go into it. Kinda roleplay killing, is there a way to exploit the game to get a stupid amount of bad mojo?

Anyways I'm wondering if anyone has the same annoyance with this and has anyone found work arounds?

Yep, karma's borked in this game, cold-blooded murder is never penalised and the only advice I can give is to try and ignore karma and focus on reputation instead. Annoys me greatly too, if you will include a karma system it'd be nice if it worked properly. Oh well.

I would argue that there is no "Good" or "Evil" in this game, those concepts are dated and are too generalistic. You can be Good with some factions and Evil with others, or Good but known as a trouble maker with some factions while be utterly idolized by other factions. If you do enough for a group of people and they grow to like you alot because of it, they might be willing to overlook alot of "minor" bad stuff (in their view). If you steal from faction X, Y and Z, why would Faction A care about that if you just saved their town and rescued their citizens for death?

This game goes alot deeper than simple Good and Evil, and I think Karma has to be considered in that context with F:NV. Also remember that this is the Wasteland, and such high and moral concepts would melt away to the need for survival in such times, so I don't think trying to apply Karma in a generic way works at all in Vegas.

Then why is there a page on my pip-boy that has a picture of me and the word "good" or "evil" underneath it?

"Good" is a dated concept, is it? Like Aristotelian elements and the long-player? :blink:



But nonetheless the game does it.

If they felt that Karma doesn't particularly fit with the world then they shouldn't have implemented it. I don't like switching on my PipBoy to find an angelic picture after I just pillaged an innocent caravan for its loot.

Actually yes it is dated, as Good vs. Evil is faction-dependant now. You can be "Good" to Ceasar's legion or "Evil" to them, and that has nothing to do with what your pip-boy says.

Frankly I don't see why they show it anymore.

Thats the problem with karma, you get it for killing NPCs/creatures that are a danger to the general population, doing the population a favor so to speak, I've never agreed with it, not even for my good characters, I killed that damn fiend because he was trying to kill me not because I'm trying to save the population.

I don't really care about karma this time around.
Bad.
Good.
Neutral.
Who cares.
What matters is what I do for each individual and faction and how they like or dislike my actions.
"Good" and "Evil" worked in FO3 since it was very black and white.
But doesn't really work that well here.
Hell, the Karma feature should be removed in FO4.
Serves no real purpose IMO. :shrug:

Good/Neutral/Evil affects the endings.

And killing certain people in the final fight gains you karma... :rolleyes:

Centurions... :swear:

I SMITE THEE WITH MY COMPANIONS!!!! :flame:

I'm having trouble siding with Caesar because his means are pretty terrible and impossible to justify. Which makes it even more confusing how I am good by helping him. I am only really doing it for the ending. Can't wait for my 'Yes Man' playthrough though.

You're "Very Good" despite all your misdeeds because the game awards you 100 karma for each character tagged "Evil". And 2 karma for killing a "Very Evil" character. :facepalm:

Since those Evil characters have a propensity to shoot you without provocation and you naturally resort to self defense because you're rather fond of living, you get karma for simply defending yourself.

All those feral ghouls in Searchlight? 100 karma for each killed.

In FO3, the "Evil" chars gave no karma upon death. "Very Evil" gave you 100 karma simply on the fact that their death has made the world a slightly better place because your victim was one sick B/SOB.

Obsidian's Use of Karma is sad. I honestly want them to change it completely.
And burn all of it to hell.

I've shared my thoughts on another thread about how badly implemented the karma is as a whole. However, without getting into philosophical discussions about good and evil, as they are entirely irrelevent to the problem ... the simplest thing they could do is remove the positive karma for killing anything but an evil "boss". This is like the guys begging for water outside of Megaton and Rivet City, where you could go from antichrist to saint for donating some water with the notable exception that here, just killing something trying to kill you, or letting your companion do it, has the same effect. Simply defending yourself shouldn't make you "Hope of Mankind".

I personally like the Karma system in general, but I think they gimped it for 'Evil' players.

-Fiend fires at you and you fight in self defense-
-Gains Karma-

-Kill Feral Ghouls that attack you-
-Gain Karma-

I understand the concept of WHY you'd gain karma for this, but from a Role-Play perspective, it'd mean a Evil player would have to avoid karma boosting generic NPCs.

@Xanderleo- In Fallout 3 it made sense though, since you're giving a man dying of thirst, but that was entirely OPTIONAL. In New Vegas it basically smacks you in the face with Good Karma if you intend on exploring in detail.

That was exactly my point. Karma gains for regular mobs should have never been added and should be removed with the following patch. They should also fix the ownership issues while they're at it so I don't have to suffer negative karma looting powdergangers.

I agree wholly with this. If you're villified with a faction. It's obvious you're not going to give a [censored] about what you take. IMO if you are classified as 'villified' or something, you should have green text instead of red text.

I just steal everything that is red. I mean EVERYTHING.

As far as stealing from powder gangers go I understand, your not stealing from powder gangers, your stealing from whoever they stole the stuff from.

I can see where you're coming from, but I think it's just a mistake in coding. If you want to open that pandoras box of ownership chains, almost nothing in this game would be safe to take because everything has belonged to someone else at some point. Besides that, what makes anyone think that the person those goods were stolen from is still alive? Are we to think that it is better to just leave it out to the elements or leave it for other criminal elements to retrieve and use against more innocent people? We could even make the case that taking from the powdergangers should give positive karma, not negative. No, I don't think there is any complex thinking behind this, just an oversight that's needs to be corrected.

Anyway, if the powdergangers issue was deliberate, than it is highly inconsistent with the Vipers, Fiends and other criminal elements who outfit themselves with raided goods, but don't incur karma penalties for looting them.

You should get serious negative karma for killing neutral or better characters without being attacked first.

slaughtering a caravan for drugs and ammo isn't seen as a bad act in the eyes of the game.

I think alot of the problem is that the Powder Gangers are an identified faction with a reputation chart, as opposed to being a faction like the Vipers, Fiends etc

It still makes no sense to me why Powder Gangers would trust an outsider no ones ever heard of before to work for them anyway. :whisper:

That makes sense. If the character is neutral then you make a consicous decision to act in the way you do. When it's just mobs that are mindlessly hostile to you though, different story.

The old karmic correction for doing a few good deeds for your own personal gain.

I have a problem with the karma system too. But only when I want to be Evil. It's GREAT if you want to be Good!

Difficult to see how it could be fixed.