Obsidian uses 'Karma Police' designers to make sure every RPG skill gets enough use

Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has pulled back the curtain on how Obsidian keeps RPG skill builds from feeling like a waste of time — and it involves a dedicated internal role called the Karma Police.

Speaking on the Human Can Opener podcast, Sawyer explained that at several points during development, a designer is tasked with combing through every script in the game — dialogue and otherwise — and tallying how often each skill gets checked. The goal isn't perfect symmetry: Sawyer gave the example of Medicine showing up 40 times versus Science at 28, and said that's fine. "Get in the ballpark," he said. What Obsidian wants to avoid is a player investing heavily in a skill and going long stretches of the game without it ever mattering. "We're not gonna leave you out to dry and not give you something to be excited about," Sawyer said. He also pointed to New Vegas' decision to scrap the Big Guns skill entirely — splitting those weapons across Guns, Energy Weapons, and Explosives — as a structural fix to the same problem. In Fallout 1, tagging Big Guns meant waiting until The Hub before you even saw a relevant weapon. Obsidian didn't want to repeat that.

Obsidian has long been one of the few studios that genuinely rewards weird build choices in RPGs. New Vegas is a textbook example: in the starting town of Goodsprings alone, the quest Ghost Town Gunfight lets players use Sneak, Explosives, Barter, Speech, and Medicine to shape the outcome. Sawyer credited former Obsidian designer Eric Fenstermaker, who built Goodsprings, with deliberately front-loading that variety to establish trust with players early. That trust — the sense that however you built your character, the game will meet you there — is something Sawyer says has to be earned in the opening hours, before players have committed dozens of hours to a build they're not sure the game respects.

Sawyer's comments land at a moment when the RPG genre is healthier than it's been in years, with studios like Larian, Owlcat, and ZA/UM all doing serious work with skill reactivity. But the Karma Police concept is a concrete, practical answer to a problem most RPGs still fumble — and it's the kind of behind-the-scenes design detail that explains why New Vegas remains a reference point for the genre more than a decade after release.