what would be the perfect moral choice/karma system?

[eels05]

How about a system where your character goes insane depending on how exteme your decision making is.A character that kills 50 people in a matter of minutes(if thats whats called for) isnt going to walk away a wisecracking hero.
Your never going to get a perfect snapshot of morality that everyone agrees with.All game developers can do flesh out their characters and concentrate on their personalized reactions as a individual.

 

[Mad Maniac with axe-firing chainsaw]

How about a system where your character goes insane depending on how exteme your decision making is.A character that kills 50 people in a matter of minutes(if thats whats called for) isnt going to walk away a wisecracking hero.
Your never going to get a perfect snapshot of morality that everyone agrees with.All game developers can do flesh out their characters and concentrate on their personalized reactions as a individual.

Thats a good idea. This sorta happened in MGS 3 if I remember, the more people Snake kills, the worse the blows to his conscience are later on in the game.

 

[Imrix]

Firstly, change the karma bar to a circle. That way, multiple coloured areas can represent multiple moralities- the closer you are to the centrepoint of a given moralities area, the more you believe in that morality, while being closer to the edge would mean you have a mix of beliefs drawn from the two. Meanwhile, the further you are from the circles centre, the more extreme your beliefs.

Secondly, offer multiple reasons for performing a specific act. Let's be honest guys; it's not possible to account for every course of action you can take in a game. There just isn't time to make all those options for the whole thing. So, offer multiple reasons to pick each option, and apply the karmic rewards to suit. It shouldn't matter whether you take the good or evil course of action- what should matter is WHY you do it. Obviously, you can't ignore the actions completely in favour of intent, but you get the gist.

 

[KarumaK]

An overarching one that would take into account every decision you make that affects that moment, thus as you went further in the game certain decisions would be much bigger.

You could spend all game being kind and helpful and giving, and late game due to all of that an option arises that doesn't for the mean destructive guy. Maybe your left alone to guard an object you'd otherwise never have access to? And given the chance to take the powerful object for yourself? And if you do you get a massive evil side boost that overpowers all your previous good due to all the manipulative faking you did you get to that one spot.

Basically a more dynamic system reacting to the current reputation and all the things you did to achieve that reputation before you decided to take advantage of that trust.

Most important though is that being neutral is still a viable option for players.