Karma points and the like are nice but they have one big problem - someone needs to judge what is good and what is bad. In the situations we've been creating, we found that it's hard to say what's the correct route from an ethical/moral point of view. So our current trend is to set them up in such a way that the consequences have advantages and disadvantages, without judging. It'll be up to you how you feel about those consequences.
There'd definitely be gameplay value in valuating these consequences somehow, but other than an utilitarianistic (what a word) moral system (where you measure the moral value by its overall utility), I can't think of any impartial method of assigning value to moral choices. Brilliant ideas more than welcome <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
Regarding Sophie's choice - of course the choice is sadistic (from the point of view of the guard), but is the writer who uses it in his script therefore sadistic ? I don't think so - he just exposes the sadism of the guard & forces the audience to ponder the situation. The interesting thing about RPGs is that we can let the audience participate, making the confrontation with the guard's sadism even more intense. And to make it even more interesting, we can afterwards give the player the choice to delve into the live of the guard to see how he came to be such a sadistic person (I'm just giving hypothetical examples here).
