Well, if you were living alone, in a post-apoc world where everything was in ruins, and it was common for people to scavenge supplies for survival from the wreckage of where people once lived?

I think the big problem is that the game is inconsistent.

Raiders, bandits, most people labeled as "badguys"? Sure, nothing in their buildings are marked as "owned".

Some no-name generic Scavenger, hanging out alone in a small shelter in the middle of nowhere? His stuff is Owned.

Quest-related groups who might end up as enemies or not depending on choices? Owned (The Family, Roy Phillips' crew...)

Now, people living in a town, under some sort of organization & rule of law? Sure, their stuff is Owned, and someone who knows them would either know what to do with their junk and/or it would be collected by the community.

But then you have Brian Wilkes, the little kid in the giant ant quest. He's alive - his house is right over there, with Dad recently dead on the floor. He's the last survivor of an entire community. We even learn another relative of his living in Rivit City. But everything in that town is open loot, even Brian's toys on his bed.... none of it is Owned.

So, yeah. Hmm.

And thus is life games.

If you are living in an anarchic world then ownership boils down to little more than possession of the items in question. You can lock things up so others can't 'possess' them, but if they can get it unlocked it's basically theirs. I mean who are you going to call to report the thief? I think a lot of the FO world falls into this category. If raiders come into what you claim as your house you are not going to call 911, you're going to pull out your weapon and deal with it yourself. And if they kill you, then all that you possessed defaults to whatever raider grabs it first.

Now there are places where there is someone to report crimes to, but even those are often corrupt or inadequate in their helpfulness. To me the whole 'ownership' thing is pointless in the FO universe.

"I know you stole that gun"

"No I didn't, before the Great War, there were MILLIONS of these guns everywhere! A lot of people had them in their homes, and you're just assuming this one is stolen?

"I know it's stolen, because it's my job to know"

"Hey look! Theres a Deathclaw using a stolen knife as a toothpick!"

"Where!?!"

I hate stolen tags.

That quest alone is one of the most unrealistic (for a quest involving fire breathing giant ants I mean) in F3 - I once left Brian alone in that personal shelter for a few months, I literally forgot about him and went off and did a load of other stuff. Finally remembered him and lo he is still there as if it was a few hours since I left him.

If you seriously feel that looting a corpse (even one you did not make) is absolutely fine, then YOUR morality is a bit out of whack of the general idea of KARMA the game seems to portray. Granted, it's not perfect and there are some "questionable" instances of KARMA modifiers, but those are usually quite small and easy to offset with other actions.

I disagree with the idea that your overall KARMA should not effect NPC reactions to you, but in general, only if your KARMA is known to them (either thru some sort of reputation system, witnessed actions, or some sort of NPC initiated Perception check). It's a difficult thing to juggle and if present, the reputation system should override any KARMA checks with most NPCs.

I still gotta go with stealing not really impacting karma much. You have to steal a whole lotta junk to have your alignment change. And it's almost too easy to get good karma to balance it out.

Things like blowing up megaton or letting ghouls into Tenpenny's, sure. But from stealing? You have to be actively trying to lower your karma for the volume that it takes to do so.

Are you saying you play games like FO and TES and never loot a corpse, or you do but assume you're a bad person for it? In these games corpse looting is one of the primary means of getting what you need to survive.

I don't agree that any NPC should know your Karma. It's not like KotOR where your character will glow if they are 'Light' or look evil if they are 'Dark'. Reputation could be known maybe based on witnesses, how far you are from where you did the act for word of mouth to travel, etc. But unless I have some Karma number stuck to my forehead it really shouldn't affect anything other than LUCK, which is also a random ability influenced by powers unseen.

Because killing Powder Gangers gives good karma in New Vegas. [I think that was the original example]

I originally said that Powder Ganger's equipment belonged to the faction, so killing Powder Gangers doesn't alter possession. It now occurs to me that stealing from Powder Gangers could be good. If killing a bad guy with a gun is good, why is leaving guns in the hands of bad people good?

Ah, but that's the thing..... taking stuff off the corpse of someone you've killed has no karma effects - somehow, it's not "stolen" loot, even though the crap sitting on the shelf next to the guy you killed is "stolen".

(In the end, I just chalk it all up to "It's a game!". But I do give it an odd look once in awhile, when something particularly silly occurs.)

What's so bad about knowing what you're doing isn't right? Wait, does that make sense? I mean you can play someone who does bad things and get bad karma, you can play as goody-two-shoes and get a perfect karma score, or you can play in between. If a bit of corpse looting is a slight stain on your karma, but not enough to wipe out the good you've done, then that's OK.

Just because you want the stuff off dead bodies, or even that doing so is a primary way of getting gear, shouldn't necessarily make it not count against your Karma.

I've played several times where I'll loot weapons and maybe other valuable equipment, but not clothes or armour. Because stripping a corpse naked is a little too far for that character.

Agreed. Except I'd have it so you actually have to try fairly hard to end the game with positive Karma. No good Karma for killing, for example. Ever.

If you want the option to Not Kill, then it actually needs to be an option. Going past a Raider camp you MUST have the option to sneak past (if your skills allow it), or be able to walk up to them and say "Hey, be cool bro" and walk on by, or they give up after they take a lot of damage and then they actually don't try to attack you again. Succeed in not killing and you get Good Karma. If you are given no option other than to kill or 'GAME OVER', then you shouldn't be punished for it for sure.

But honestly, I just don't want to see Karma in the game at all as trying to make it 'fair' is just too difficult in an open world game. In KOTOR you could gain Light points in dialog, then it follows with a cut scene and you walking away. In FO you can say the right thing in dialog, but then toss a grenade at the NPC. Just too many options to track Good/Bad choices for Karma.

This made me laugh.

I do think that if we steal something we should be able to sale the goods to anyone except the owner of said stolen merchandise. Who is going to know it's stolen. I think it would be great if they removed stolen tags.

My grandfather would get calls from the local pawn shop when someone tried selling tools stolen from his toolshed. Any sale of stolen goods in the game should be with a fence that doesn't care, or with a buyer that doesn't know the victim; and if they do... then there should be a chance of them noticing the items as stolen.

Skyrim did keep track of friends and relatives for NPCs, in addition to factions, so they could potentially do a lot for stolen item recognition with the systems already in the engine. But I don't think they'd put too much importance in that sort of design, and just go with a simpler, more consistent system. It would be nice if stolen items indicated who owned, them, in the very least.

....in other words, anyone more than a mile away/outside the same settlement. At least in FO3, the "OMG, Blasted Wasteland!" setting kind of made any expectations of things operating the same as they do in the modern world, or a "civilized" fantasy setting, a bit foolish. The Capital Wasteland is full of random crap left behind by someone.... 99% of anything you pick up, no-one would be able to tell that it wasn't salvage.

(Played a bit earlier, exploring Seward Square. There's the "old" salvage left by people who died months/years/centuries ago. There's the loot from the Super Mutants that I killed to get it. And then there's the recently-dead dude whose camp I found... he's not a skeleton, the game doesn't show rotting, so who knows - he could have died within a few hours or a day. But all his stuff is lying there, no ownership tags of any kind - it's "free" loot that you're expected to be able to take freely. But, then, that guy was deliberately placed by Beth as a bit of set dressing - he was always a fresh corpse, unlike the Scavenger that you see killed by a radscorpion... that loot is marked as owned, and you get a karma hit for stealing it, even though the situations are, in-game, damn near identical.)

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All in all, I find it a bit strange to be arguing that scavenging for loot in: 1) a post-apoc setting, and 2) in a Kill Things/Take Stuff game, should be penalized and/or considered evil.

(not saying that nothing should be "owned".... obviously areas with established NPC groups - aside from designated enemies, of course - should have ownership. But the way Beth has done it in previous games has been a bit haphazard....)

Right.

(But did you read it carefully? It suggests that even those that know the victim might not recognize their property.)

**This is a good time to trot out the awful notion of "It is a game", and say that it shouldn't matter that many things look identical, and that for the mechanic to mean anything it has to have teeth, and affect the player's wishes.

It's a morality. Thing.

Good people don't steal.