As if those guys are gonna come back looking for their stuff lol

see this is why karma and alingnments like good and evil are lame concepts even in real life....it can depend on tha situation....it can be more complicated but a simple example would be stealing a cancer cure for kids from some jerk bad person who died and isnt around anymore

factions by actions where factions treat you different by your deeds seem a better way to go...like how eventually certain areas with BoS items stop being red after some things ya do in 3

Does Karma actually have any impact?
Reputation is the key thing as far as I can see.
I have stolen items from every place I have been to.

Yeah, that was something I reacted to also. It was the same problem in Fallout 3.
I can understand you getting bad Karma stealing from good people even if they are your enemys but the Powder Gang are sick evil SoBs.

This is by far the dumbest thing in this game. For me it breaks immersion that I get penalized from "stealing" from my dead enemies. If I decide the Legion is my enemy, it's stupid that I can kill them and strip them naked and it's fine, but if I steal the pencil off the desk I get bad karma.

I recently downloaded a mod from newvegasnexus that removes the karma loss from stealing. However, I'm not going to steal from innocents/non enemy towns regardless, because my character wouldn't.


Horrible, horrible concept.

As one of the debaters I have to interject that I too feel it's silly.

I found it pretty ironic when I was able to raid the house during chargen as shamelessly as I did the Census office in Morrowind!

(Well, I needed the caps. Naughty me. )

The dead cannot have possessions; therefore, you cannot "steal" from the dead. It's spoils of war at that point. I never understood why they never made it so that objects are unowned after the owner is dead.

Seriously, all the devs need to do is have a check in their logic: If the item you're taking ("stealing") is from a hostile person/faction then there should be no karma loss. Good and Evil, Moral and Immoral are all subjective and depends on point-of-view. If I just took out a whole camp of hostiles (e.g. red named mobs) in a kill or be killed situation, then I better be able to replenish my ammo from the stores of the recently departed without a strike against my karma.

would love to get word from the devs on this one. intentional? total oversight? i think i know which =) hopefully patches will fix this soon. that'll shut all the "STEALING IS IMMORAL" loonies up for good. "no, it was just a freakin' bug. amen."

What does Karma affect?

What is it's purpose in the game?

The red containers and items imply that if you pick those up, the NPCs around you will attempt to destroy your face. In FO3, there were two areas where you could pick up red items and not lose karma (all the stuff belonged to people affiliated with Paradise Falls slavers), but I get the feeling that the code for this wasn't translated properly when Obisidian took the reigns, so even stuff stolen from evil people will damage your karma.

All things considered, jacking some one up isn't a huge hit to your karma rating. Just go kill some feral ghouls or something if you want to be a good guy. Mind you, stealing from the NCR, who are really the closest thing to "good guys" you can get in this world, unless the DC BoS shows up at some point I haven't found yet, is likely a good way to be a bad guy.

Also, Karma, as far as I know, affects how certain people react to you. Although I haven't encountered any situations in NV where this happens yet, in FO3, there were a good few characters who had karma-related conversation options.

Oh, and I just wanted to add:

I think the karma system is not working well--as well as some other facets of the game--but that doesn't mean I'm not enjoying it.

I'm having a blast so far, and I'm just taking a break long enough to check out the forums and eat and pee.

Just wanted to add that in case someone who hadn't purchased the game yet stumbled in and saw a bunch of [censored]ing. :goodjob:

I agree. I haven't looked at the GECK yet to see how easy it would be to 'fix' this (don't want to see any of the nuts & bolts until I have at least one full playthrough), but I suspect that it might not be too easy. If it is, I may give it a try. So far, that's the only annoyance I have with the game (and as annoyances go in recent games, it's pretty minor).

I'm an admirer of the Dalai Lama as you obviously are; I understand your points. I created the thread because of the inconsistencies others have been bringing up, but I didn't make that clear at the outset. It's terribly odd to be "rewarded" and "punished" nearly simultaneously for similar activities. I was concerned about the implementation of karma in this game, not its essential and vital nature in the universe.

To properly reflect true karma, it feels as if we shouldn't be able to pick up anything at all without a karma hit, unless we're given it by someone else in return for good and valued services rendered unto them. Even then there are arguments that they'd be better off if they kept their possessions, so we should refuse the reward and have no possessions other than those we made ourselves from raw materials also gathered by us. Not much of a game there :-p.

And the wheel turns...

Yeah got to play the game last night and finished with the first town. Of course I seem to be in some kind of war with the powder gangers and they assault me on sight. Although now a days I just snipe them from the distance before they start shooting.

Then I wen't to Primm and on the way there there was a couple Powder gangers having some kind of small camp on a mini buss or something and they assaulted me. Killed them off.. then I try to take their dynamites from the table. Bamm.. Bad karma.

Can't even loot the darn armor boxes. I quess I just have to leave them be. Don't even know what the Karma affects.

The problem with "stealing" arises in Morrowind / Oblivion / FO3 / F:NV because there are limited ways in which a player can acquire goods. It's a limitation of the design being so simplistic.

Let's say that I see a pile of stimpaks sitting on the table in front of a vendor. In real life, I could offer the merchant money for those, or barter for them, or arrange some sort of payment via work/quests/tasks. You could even ask the other party to give them to you as a gift, or threaten the other party with force (extortion). In Bethesda's world - you can't obtain those stimpaks without stealing. So even though those objects are there in plain view, the merchant NPC can't sell them because they're not in the merchant's magical inventory container.

Another issue is that unlike real life, the player can't grow a garden, or raise animals, or work a 9 to 5 job. There are generally very few repeatable quests either that reward the player with what they need. Adventures are expensive endeavors. The player has few choices available. Remain poor and do poorly as an adventurer or ransack and loot anything that isn't (and is) nailed down.

In a wasteland, very little should be marked as owned. Especially when away from where sentient NPCs live. Stuff inside a house where the NPC is alive and well? Yeah, mark that as owned and lose karma if you steal it. But that goes back to the problem that the player has no non-theft method of getting the NPC to give them a particular item unless it is scripted. There's no barter or trade system in-game that lets you obtain goods legally from non-merchant NPCs. So the player is once again forced to go with a black/white choice of either doing without entirely or losing karma via stealing because there's just no other way.

Excellently written; this's one of the best synopses we've seen. It's the puzzle in a nutshell.

if the owner of the item is dead, you should be able to steal it without losing karma. i mean c'mon, he's DEAD!

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34784

Doesn't fix the problem, but it does a decent enough job hiding it!

After reading all the replies to this thread, I came to the conclusion that the items that we've been "stealing" aren't owned by the NPCs we've just offed, but by the faction as a whole. Now I completely agree with the fact that there is a broken, in game, mechanic that doesn't adjust for the factor that if you are vilified by said faction, for instance the Powder Gangers, it should allow you to steal the items that are laying around their camp without a negative karma penalty.

Are you all aware of the term, "moral grays"?

Killing is somewhat justified in this universe, but an entirely good person does not loot bodies, for trophies, supplies, or anything.

Let's look at the crusades: the crusaders were considered to get "good karma" for killing "infidels", but they were still chastised for thievery and looting of bodies.
In modern armies one does not take jewelry off of the people one kills, even if they are terrorists, or the like.

Sure, finding things that aren't owned is fine, but a good person doesn't take anything that is owned without paying for it, or receiving it as a gift.

I, however, plan on being good only when I am being watched: quite the hypocritical character, no?

I agree.

Do not read if you haven't done everything there is to do in the REPCONN facility.

Very interesting; I just finished the REPCONN Test Facility, came here to make a similar comment, and here you were. This is one place where it's hard to argue that the devs are implementing some detailed interpretation of Buddhist karma.