Karma Accounting


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


A friend and I were talking about a character that believes absolutely in moderation and balance. (But maybe not too bright.) Reincarnation rewards the perfectly balanced individual. So he keeps a diary of everything he does with a complicated ledger system to make sure he balances out any extreme behavior.

So today he helped stop a thief. Well tomorrow he better help someone cheat on their taxes.
He pulled a child out of the way of the chariot. Then he balances it by publicly screaming vile cursing at an old lady.
He gets hired to recover the hostages, but he’s going to charge too much for it.
He needs to torture someone for information then walks out into the street and gives a small fortune to the beggars.

I’m not sure why, but this struck me as supremely amusing. I may have to try this in the near future.


This is the result of a phenomenal misunderstanding of the nature of Karma. In actual Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, Karma isn't some metaphysical "tit-for-tat" with ledgers and balances; it doesn't even remotely work like that. In Hinduism, Karma is what you earn by performing your Dharma, which is your duty in life and determined by the caste you were born into. A warrior is supposed to fight proudly on the battlefield so a Warrior-caste's Dharma is satisfied when he goes out and fights and kills. If a Warrior-caste wants to be a pacifist, that's going against his Dharma. So in one life, it may be good Karma to kill in battle but in another life, it may be bad Karma to kill because you're not a warrior. Furthermore, it isn't a matter of "2 good Karma and 2 bad Karma cancel each other out." The universe records every single solitary action you perform across all your lives. There is no balance, there is no adding or subtracting. A single bad act reverberates throughout all your future lives; it never goes away no matter how well you act within your Dharma subsequently.

For Buddhism, there is no caste system to deal with but, instead, the concept of Karma was adapted. This is closer to the layperson's understanding of "Karma is points for being a good person", but you still have that concept of "bad Karma" never going away. You can atone for past sins, but that doesn't erase them.

Think of it this way; two wrongs don't make a right. So if this were truly a character that believed in moderation and balance, he'd see extreme good as wrong and extreme evil as wrong as well. So performing one wrong act (according to his beliefs) isn't overridden by performing a different kind of wrong act. Thus, he's not even internally consistent. If he views all these extreme acts as bad, and he continually and willingly does bad deeds, he's no different than the LE character who considers himself a "fine, upstanding member of society". This is the most shallow, base concept of roleplaying a "neutral" character; essentially the same as Lawful Stupid or Awful Good and I'd strongly, strongly suggest you reconsider your enthusiasm for attempting it.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
ElterAgo wrote:

A friend and I were talking about a character that believes absolutely in moderation and balance. (But maybe not too bright.) Reincarnation rewards the perfectly balanced individual. So he keeps a diary of everything he does with a complicated ledger system to make sure he balances out any extreme behavior.

So today he helped stop a thief. Well tomorrow he better help someone cheat on their taxes.
He pulled a child out of the way of the chariot. Then he balances it by publicly screaming vile cursing at an old lady.
He gets hired to recover the hostages, but he’s going to charge too much for it.
He needs to torture someone for information then walks out into the street and gives a small fortune to the beggars.

I’m not sure why, but this struck me as supremely amusing. I may have to try this in the near future.

This is essentially the character type described as Neutral Stupid.

A true Balancer looks at the world as a package and fixes what he perceives as out of balance overall. In a Warhammer 40k world, he will be spending his lifetime doing good acts, because the place is simply CrapSack from top to bottom.


Kazaan's understanding of the philosophy checks out pretty well with that one survey course I took on Buddhism*.

But this is a game. If playing a Lawful Stupid or Neutral Stupid or Chaotic Stupid character is amusing to you and your group (or at the very least not outright annoying to said group) then have fun with it! All sorts of zany world-views make sense in a world with objective moral alignments -- the weirder ones like Neutral Stupid almost make more sense than the real-world ones do. (c.f. Planescape)

As for philosophy, my (poorly understood) grasp of the idea is that what you do affects your world which affects you. "What goes around comes around," they say. You don't do X good things to cancel out the one bad thing you did. Even doing good things can result in bad things for you. There's a zen teaching that extrapolates this into the aspiration to do nothing, and affect nothing, which has always been dear to my heart.

*That makes me an expert. Eat your heart out, Alan Watts!


Kazaan wrote:
This is the result of a phenomenal misunderstanding of the nature of Karma. ...

I'm aware of that. That was kinda the whole point to it. We had both watched some of the same stupid movies that misquote and misrepresent the entire concept of karma. However, there are people that have those misunderstandings and truly believe that is what the system is about.

The character isn't to bright and either from mis-hearing or mis-reading has a totally screwed up belief in the system. But he is trying to follow that misunderstanding as best he can. Things like that actually do happen.

There were certainly many people who truly believed they were really doing god's will during the crusades, yet that is not what is in the bible.
There are certainly people that think it is doctrinally correct to blow up a bunch of innocents, yet the religious text they claim to follow does not espouse that or anything like it.

We were trying to poke a small bit of fun at that kind of person that doesn't really bother to check and see if his (mis)understanding is correct, but goes ahead full bore anyway. I am sorry if that offended you. That was not my intent.


Regardless of his understanding of karma and Hinduism/Bhuddism, I think this character concept is hilarious.

I am sure his group members are confused, annoyed, and amused. :D


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

There's a quarterstaff in Weapons of Legacy from 3.5 that has almost this exact story behind it (minus any mention of karma). I don't know what class we're talking about here, but if you can find that, it would probably go well with the character concept.

Edit:found it, it's called the Scales of Balance.

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