(...) If the amount of souls you stole unlock different dialogue options (related somehow to the souls, though, not just "evil"), then that would be a better option than giving you stats. Besides, there should be no deterrents for playing a certain type of character, not really. Just how the world reacts to your character and if it reacts bad, then so be it. It can throw more mobs at you if you are overly aggressive or tougher ones etc. Alpha Protocol had such an example - if you were aggressive to a character, he rats you out to his superior, which is incidentally your next mission, and that placed more guards in the mission. Just no numerical advantage/disadvantage to your character.
Yes, but the Source points you get from stealing souls
is a mechanical advantage, because those Source points are used to create very powerful magical effects
in combat. From what Swen said on the stream, the entire reason for the karma idea is to balance this.
I'm not disagreeing with you about having dialogue choices generally affecting further dialogue choices and keeping the systems mostly separate. That makes all kinds of sense. It is also why I think "karma" (maybe I should be using a different term to clarify, but I can't for the life of me come up with one) should be used as a
mechanical balancing effect to stealing Source points and pretty much nothing else, except in the rare case that the NPC you're talking to can somehow see the "corruption" in your soul and it affects the social situation of the dialogue (which is going to be rare.)
That is not a deterrent to playing an "evil" character---it's just a way of making sure doing so won't imbalance the combat side of gameplay, if Source theft is going to be part of the game.
