User:Mannon23010

How to check your Karma on X-Box 360 & PS3
You can't access the console and hence are unable to use console commands to check your exact karma level when playing Fallout 3 on the 360 or PS3. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to determine. It just takes a small amount of effort.

Start by saving your progress. This is the save you will load back to after you determine what your karma is. The purpose here is to render all the changes made in order to determine your karma merely temporary. Then take a look at your Karma Level in the pipboy. Knowing what level you are currently in gives you a general idea, but not an exact number... unless we do a little work. Each Karma Levels is precisely defined. In other words 749 is merly Good while 750, a mere 1 point higher is Very Good. The idea here is to see which level you are currently in, then determine how much your karma has to change to get to a different level.

Karma is generally quicker and easier to raise than lower, thus for all but those who are currently at Very Good you should probably aim to find the amount of karma needed to raise you up one karma level. For those who are Very Good you will have no other choice than to determine the karma needed to lower your karma level instead. Utilize whichever ways of changing your karma work best for you. Scrap Metal and Purified Water are okay, but I find that donating caps is generally the most efficient means of raising your karma, particularly because you can donate 10, 50, or 100 at a time. I recommend you save again before actually changing your karma, so that you can redo things a bit differently if need be or just to save time. Start big, changing your karma up or down by 100's then either go the other direction once your Karma Level changes or reload and redo it, dropping to a lesser increment before the final 100 that previously changed your level. It sounds more complicated than it is. The important thing is to keep track of all the cumulative changes. It's pretty easy to determine within 10 karma by merely donating caps, but you can refine your precision even more by then stealing or hacking a terminal since this nets you -5 karma.

Unless you have the Cannibal Perk you cannot alter your karma by less than 5 points up or down, however if you don't have the perk all activities that alter karma do so by numbers that are multiples of 5, therefore discovering your karma to within 5 actually will be right on the money.

Be aware of the way karma inverts. In other words when checking for a good karma level change the lowest karma that results in the level being raised will be exactly 250 or exactly 750. (You need to use stealing or hacking to be certain to get your accuracy down to 5 karma instead of merely 10.) For checking evil karma the highest karma before your level changes to a higher level is the exact number. If you have the Cannibal Perk then your karma may not be a multiple of 5, but you can simply devour some corpses to find the exact number once you have found the level change within 5 karma.

Once you know exactly how much karma it takes to change your level it simply becomes a matter of math. You take the amount you had to change your karma and subtract it from the karma at the point of the change. So if it took 115 karma to move you from neutral to good then you know that 250 - 115 = 135 karma. Try not to get mixed up when you are checking evil karma levels or when you have to drop a karma level to check your karma rather than raising it.

Thoughts on Karma Management for Cleptomaniacs
Being a thief with a conscience can be a little problematic if you aren't doing some karma management, since you lose karma even when you don't get caught. If you only steal valuable items or only rarely, this is not likely to be much of a problem. And there is a great deal of karma to be gained merely by playing your way through quests and such as well. But if you are more meticulous and obsessive enough and greedy enough to want to take even low value items, then you may run into trouble maintaining your karma level.

I myself got my karma pegged all the way down to -1000 very evil just by stealing in Megaton, and even with disarming the nuke and such. The fact is at -5 karma a pop you are only 200 karma hits from 0 Neutral to -1000 Very Evil.

Let's think of karma as a resource.

Donating caps to a church results in a direct caps to karma conversion ratio of 1:1. That gives us something of an exchange rate since you can always trade caps to recoup lost karma. Under those conditions any item you cannot sell for more than 5 caps is not economical to steal due to the loss of karma. Exactly which items will be worth enough will depend largely on your barter skill.

Scrap Metal is always economical to steal, however. That is because you can trade the scrap metal strait up for 10 caps or 10 karma, both equivalent to double the karma loss.

Purified Water is even more economical to steal since stealing it is merely -5 karma while turning it in is worth +50 karma for a net gain of +45 karma! This also means that in once sense each Purified Water is worth the equivalent of 50 caps, regardless of Barter, though only if it is saving you caps otherwise spent on karma.

When karma hits 1000 it caps out and any good karma received actually has no real effect and is more or less wasted. So with a little planning every 5 karma gained over 750 is actually 1 free item you can steal or 1 more terminal you can hack, without consequences. Yes, if you do enough good deeds the people of the wasteland will overlook even the bad deeds they didn't catch you doing but somehow know you did. ;p

You can also obtain 5 free Purified Water once every 7 days from Wadsworth in your Megaton house for a net total of 250 karma which is the entire range of Very Good to the cap. That also means that based on this source alone you can steal/hack 50 items/terminals every 7 days with no repurcussions or expense, thus making even low value items economical to steal, though you have to be cautious not to steal too many at once unless you don't mind dropping your karma for a while.

There are of course, many other sources of karma.

There is also a negative karma cap of -1000. So if you ever find yourself already extremely low on karma, then you might as well go on a stealing spree and grab everything you can while the cumulative karma hits cannot actually sink you any lower. Then you will only need to get back out of the hole and you can go about your business.

Going from -1000 to 750 of course takes 1750 karma. That is the equivalent of 35 Purified Water or 7 weeks of water from Wadsworth.

Note also that stealing costs you -5 karma per transaction, so when you are steeling from a person or a container you will actually only lose -5 karma no matter how many items you take, as long as you take them all in a single transaction. It does not make any difference if you take all or if you individually move each item into your inventory before finishing the transaction. But accessing the container or pickpocketing again and taking something will result in another -5 karma each time.