How Karma should work

Atomic Postman

Atomic Postman

Vault Archives Overseer
In the next Fallout game, I would rather like to get rid of the frankly terrible Karma system, and implant a new one.

The player gets positive Karma for doing good, or other wise selfless acts, or contributing to a greater cause (even if it means doing bad things), having good Karma is like having extra luck, sometimes you'll get a better critical hit, sometimes you'll break through an enemies armor, and sometimes you might find more ammo or useful supplies in a box than you would with neutral Karma.

Having negative Karma would do the opposite obviously.

I'd also change the system so that you couldn't do horrible things and achieve negative Karma, then give 30 bottles of water to a hobo and get the highest possible levels.

I'd probably separate deeds into several Karma "tiers" to try and balance it out.
 
Karma should totally be dropped out.

What's "good" and "bad" in game should be left for a player to decide, not so that you're punished for doing something developers labeled black or white.
 
Akratus said:
What is there to gain from a karma system anyway?
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I'm not sure, really.
I believe it has stuck over all these years because it was something original in the first game, so the devs decided to keep it in later games to keep the tradition, so to speak.
But, in reality, there's little or no gameplay value to it.

Reputation is a lot more logical stat, one that should be even further refined.
 
Walpknut (& Atomkilla) said:
Yeah, drop Karma, embrace Reputation.
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I believe these gentlemen have it pretty much covered.

AlphaPromethean said:
(...)or contributing to a greater cause (even if it means doing bad things),
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There's a bit of a problem there, and it's one that's plagued the Karma system almost from the start: subjectivity. You could argue that helping just about any faction in the wasteland was "contributing to a greater cause." The Enclave seek to return pre-war civilization to the face of the Earth. Sounds pretty worthwhile. Vault City's aims are similar. The Master and Caesar both sought to unite the wasteland and fundamentally alter the self-destructive nature of humankind. The Church of the Atom's messianic prophecy involves the destruction of an entire town via atomic explosion, and if you were roleplaying a true believer in their philosophy, you should technically get good karma for the act, no? I could go on.

The player gets positive Karma for doing good, or other wise selfless acts, or contributing to a greater cause (even if it means doing bad things), having good Karma is like having extra luck, sometimes you'll get a better critical hit, sometimes you'll break through an enemies armor, and sometimes you might find more ammo or useful supplies in a box than you would with neutral Karma.

Having negative Karma would do the opposite obviously.
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Doesn't that make things even more black and white than before, though? Good guys are rewarded, "bad" guys are outright punished? And you could earn those rewards by committing heinous acts, as long as you committed them in service of a proper cause? Setting things up that way would not only spell out an inherently right and wrong way to do things, but it would also make playing the game as a good guy (as most people tend to do) "easy mode," in a franchise where many players already lament the lack of difficulty even on the hardest settings.

I don't mean to knock down your idea entirely, though. Perfected, it sounds like it could actually make a really interesting mechanic (a core mechanic, even) for some other game that's less about shades of grey and doing what it takes to survive, especially if said game contained some kind of added incentive for being evil or entailed significant sacrifice for taking the good path.
 
I'd like to see karma shift from good/evil to law/chaos.

I can see two different ways to go about this:

1) Your alignment shifts toward law when you act to reconstruct and advance society. Your alignment shifts toward chaos when you act to bring about the dissolution of society.
Restoring a pre-war power plant would be a lawful act, while deploying an Old World super-weapon to destroy it would be a chaotic act. Either act can be morally justified.

2) Your alignment shifts toward law when you act to protect and advance humanity. Your alignment shifts toward chaos when you act to destroy humanity and replace it with something inhuman.
The Master would be considered chaotic under this scheme while the Enclave would be lawful to the extreme. Putting the robot Primm Slim in charge of Primm as their new sheriff would be a slightly chaotic act while finding a human to do the job would be lawful.
 
How about the ultimate moral grey, let the player decide, you just have to live with your choices nothing more. In my real life experience most of what I have gotten(lousy childhood but good adulthood) had very little to do with deserving things and more about luck, knowing the right people, and seizing opportunities when I had them. I think its like that for most people. All this the world punishes the wicked is just to help us sleep at night(chronic insomnia on my part).
 
Cave Bear said:
I'd like to see karma shift from good/evil to law/chaos.

I can see two different ways to go about this:

1) Your alignment shifts toward law when you act to reconstruct and advance society. Your alignment shifts toward chaos when you act to bring about the dissolution of society.
Restoring a pre-war power plant would be a lawful act, while deploying an Old World super-weapon to destroy it would be a chaotic act. Either act can be morally justified.

2) Your alignment shifts toward law when you act to protect and advance humanity. Your alignment shifts toward chaos when you act to destroy humanity and replace it with something inhuman.
The Master would be considered chaotic under this scheme while the Enclave would be lawful to the extreme. Putting the robot Primm Slim in charge of Primm as their new sheriff would be a slightly chaotic act while finding a human to do the job would be lawful.
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The whole thing with chaotic/lawful is just to reminiscent of DnD's mechanic, its lore as well as other games.
It sounds, in a lack of better phrase, wrong to use it.
Not that the post-apocalyptic world doesn't have it chaotic and lawful fronts, but again, I think the best judge should be the world itself, not a specific two-sided stat system.

You allied with these guys? Those other guys will hate you.
You kill a whole town? Next town won't welcome you.
You choose to kill a homeless person? A local population will judge you.
You steal? Okay, as long as you're not caught. You steal and you're caught? People in that area will not like you.
You steal a lot and you're caught a lot? You are branded a thief, and people far and wide don't like you much.

...and so on, and so on...

All of these can be incorporated into the game if the Reputation system (which was great in FNV, but not flawless) would be tweaked a bit more.


Edit: Wish I had a cool name9 ninja'd me, in a way.
 
You seem to have mistook my meaning.


I'm all for dropping Karma in favor of reputation, I was only saying if there is a Karma system, this is how it should work.
 
Cave Bear said:
2) Your alignment shifts toward law when you act to protect and advance humanity. Your alignment shifts toward chaos when you act to destroy humanity and replace it with something inhuman.
The Master would be considered chaotic under this scheme while the Enclave would be lawful to the extreme. Putting the robot Primm Slim in charge of Primm as their new sheriff would be a slightly chaotic act while finding a human to do the job would be lawful.
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The problem is that's as subjective as good/evil.

Think about it, what is law? Baby don't hurt me.
I mean, what is law? Is something mostly related to order, to knowing in advance what would be punished and what would be rewarded. The Master offered this as much as the Enclave, so he is as lawful as them. Also, considering mutants inhuman is racist, IMO, they are just another form of human, just like ghouls.
 
If there's one thing I've learned in all my years of tabletop gaming, it's that defining the axes of the alignment system ranks somewhere above politics, religion, personal wealth, and illegal carnal practices you'd like to engage in with the assembled grandmothers of everyone in the room on the list of things not to discuss in mixed company.

If there's one other thing I've learned, though, it's that concepts like law and chaos are just too abstract to be trusted to a non-human arbiter, and even then they're generally meaningless without good and evil as a co-axis. Law is order and stability, but it's also tyranny. Chaos is turmoil and uncertainty, but it's also free will and intrepid curiosity. Technically, for instance, busting up a slave ring (outside of NCR territory) would be a chaotic act-- you're destroying a highly organized social institution governed by strict rules, protected (or at least not condemned) by local law, that a broad and varied cross-section of people and groups depend on for their livelihood and lifestyle. Aren't you also protecting and advancing humanity by doing so, though? By the same token, would it be a lawful act to destroy a New Reno crime family, who are responsible for a great deal of chaos and vice but are also the only organizing forces and authorities in the city?

Or, to put it better and far more succinctly,
Oppen said:
Think about it, what is law?
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Here's an idea. Since they talk about religion a lot in some of the games, perhaps you could get the option to join one of a selection of religions, each of which could have effects on what increases or decreases the karma meter. For example, you could become Jewish and lose karma for eating Pork 'n' Beans.

There'd be more to it than that, of course, but it's an example...
 
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