I'd like it back in, but I want it fixed. Yes, ok so my Karma should go down by stealing things, but surely stealing bottlecaps isn't as bad as killing someone and eating his eyes?

#justsaying

I am curious how killing a member of a faction is 'good' karma, but, stealing from the same faction, is 'bad' karma. How does that in any way, make any sense at all? Looting their corpses is fine, but, looting their containers is not? What??

I don't mind it. Just don't be ridicules with it. FNV you get negative karma from stealing from an evil faction and you get good karma for killing a feral ghoul? WTF?

Apart from all other problems with it, karma in FO3 wasn't really karma at all. Karma in popular understanding means when you do good things good things happen to you and when you do bad things bad things happen to you. FO3 karma doesn't work like that at all, in fact it's really a global reputation system. Not that it even mattered anyway because you had to fight Enclave and help James in any case. It hardly influenced anything apart from which group of assassins went after you and which companions you got to recruit. Also it was ridiculously easy to manipulate, no matter how many people you killed, enslaved etc you could still have good karma by giving purified water to beggars.

If, as people are speculating, you can join either the Institute or BoS then you need a faction reputation system, it won't work otherwise. And if you have a faction reputation system you already don't need a global reputation system. You'd just need to add a general wasteland faction, or even better different factions for all settlements, like a separate faction for Diamond City, a faction for Railroad if it's in there and so on.

Yes I supposed, though it seemed to easy to become a saint. I did kind of like the Karmic Rebalance, Devil's Highway and Escalator to Heaven perks. There were a lot of things that have already mentioned that didn't make sense when it came to good and bad karma. I guess I would want to keep it but fix it.

And I liked how the faction stuff worked in FO:NV.

ok you asked...

the "real" concept of karma, as it is in buddhism, hinduism etc, isn't anything like some kind of spiritual system for punishment or reward for being good or evil, or anything about moral or ethics etc, that's just pop and totally past what it's actually about.

as far as i get it, it goes about like this: karma itself doesn't make any sense without it's (ignored in pop cultural contexts) counterpart "dharma".

dharma, that's something like, what you're supposed to be in life, in a sense like, imagine you're water, spilt at this and that spot, and landscape and gravity and what not pretty much say, ok, you're gonna run this way. that's dharma.

where karma now comes into play is, you're kind of a willpowered creek. so you can say, screw it, i'm gonna go uphill. you can do so, but the further you move away from your "dharma" riverbed, the harder things are gonna get for you.

or maybe be it a rubberband you drag into another shape, if you like that better. anyway, it's kind of a measurement unit for an imaginary force pulling you back to what you should be. for that reason, there actually isn't such a thing like "good" or "bad" karma, since it's more like, a distance or stg.

the main thing about it being anyway, it's totally NOT about "good or evil". if you SHOULD be a frantic mass murderer, being nice is VERY bad karma for you actually

...thinking about it, it'd even be easier to implement into the main story, assuming there's something like an "most fitting" character outcome - the more you differ from that, the harder things get. and by noticing how hard things get, you can determine how far you are from where you should in the game ,-)

I'd rather not see Karma in the game because it just doesn't work.

In Fallout 3 I'd sometimes just follow a group of BoS around until they ran into a Death Claw or some other enemy. After the fight I'd finish the remaining enemy or enemies and loot the BoS for their armor and weapons completely avoiding a karma hit. Obviously, that kind of behavior - watching them die with the intention of looting them, would not be considered good behavior. In fact I'd consider it bad since I did nothing to help them. So, unless they can put in a really good karma system, I'd rather not see one at all.

I don't really want karma nor does the game really need it. I would love to see reputation again though.

You get harassed by Talon Company because Moriarty puts a price on your head and they seek to claim it.

Oblivion had an better system here, it was cut from Skyrim probably to save memory.

In short you have personal reputation, faction reputation and cross faction reputation.

if you help somebody or even just trade much with an merchant you get personal reputation, a bit of this leaks up to faction reputation. Doing quests for faction and perhaps other tasks improve reputation towards them, this has spillover to other factions, some of this might be negative reputation in hostile factions.

Say you help NCR and gain reputation, this will generate negative spillover reputation with legion and the other way around even if you actions was no way hostile to legion and something they also would approve like killing raiders or dangerous animals. friendly factions will have positive spillover.

This gave some funny results in Oblivion like the guards and thief guild fought together killing the pirates from the ship after you killed the captain for the dark brotherhood.

The guard attacked someone who was popular in the city, the thief guild to protect an member.

Yes it could also result in civil wars if you resisted arrest and the people in the city liked you a lot then they fought the guards on your side.

never realy cared about karma, i just let my own moral compass guide me and be damned with what title the game gives me for that.