We're planning on including quite a few moral dilemma's in our next game, forcing the player to make choices that have consequences on the inhabitants of the world as well as him/herself. In a lot of cases the consequences aren't immediately clear as it takes some time before the ramifications of a particular choice propagate. This can be an issue, and one way of solving that would be to give you a hint of what will happen if you make a particular choice. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that.
Lar
Something like that was realised in the Ultima series (Alrik talked already about it, and you Lar, know it aswell I bet <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" /> ), but the point is if you try for example to steal something from a NPC, a message pops up and will notice you, that your action is against the rules and will result in a loose in Karma points. Like that it was in Ultima. You get this message one time and from there on you should know it <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" /> Imho this is very important for the player. The player should always know what his action will cause. This can be realised in a quick tutorial, which describes the player's main possibilities and makes quick examples with NPC actions (like stealing an item from it, open chests without his knowledge with lockpicking and so on). It should simply tell the player what is possible in the game, and which player's actions can result in actions from NPCs.
Another idea which I like in Morrowind for example, is, if you try to kill a NPC, which is important for completing the main story, a warning message will appear. So the player isn't told by the game that it's not possible to kill him. It only tells him that you can kill him, but its from there on not anymore possible to complete the main quests.
