Part 2: The What and Why of Character Creation

Update 2: The What and Why of Character Creation

Before we go on with the Adventures of Luke, it's a good time to talk about the game system used for the Fallout games and why I made the choices I did for our main character in this LP. So, let's take a look at him again:



I'll start from left to right. First target:

S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

I'm not going to go too far into the origin of the system, but the basic story is that Fallout was originally meant to be a GURPS game but was changed into its own modified system. You start out at 5 in each stat, and have 5 free points to assign at the beginning of the game. You can also decrease a stat from that base of 5 to get more points. I'll go over each of the base stats and what they do, which will explain a lot of the secondary statistics.

Strength (ST) - Raw physical power. Your Strength score determines how much you can carry, how much damage your melee and unarmed attacks do, your base HP, your range with thrown weapons, and how big of a weapon you can use effectively. Weapons have a required strength, and every point of strength below the minimum required for the weapon results in a -20% penalty. You can raise Strength by 5 points just picking things up in the game, so there's not much point in raising this above 5.

Perception (PE) - How well you see and hear. Determines sequence (initiative) in battle, how far you can reach out with ranged weapons, and how easily you find traps. It also plays a roll in noticing small details, which translates into determining eligibility for some quests and conversation options.

Endurance (EN) - Your physical toughness. Influences HP (base and per level), radiation and poison resistance, healing rate, if your character gets knocked down or knocked out by criticals, and how quickly you recover from being knocked out.

Charisma (CH) - The ability to look good and act charming. Charisma affects how other characters react to you and how many followers you can have. The formula for the latter is simply 1/2 Charisma, rounded down.

Intelligence (IN) - How sharp your brain meats are. Intelligence is used in determining what conversation options are available to your character, and how many skill points you get per level: 5 + (2 x IN)

Agility (AG) - Your ability to move gracefully. Agility figures in your Armour Class (Agility + Armor Rating), Action Points, and dodging traps. Agility affects more skills than any other base statistic, including most of the combat skills.

Luck (LU) - The Lady's favor. Affects primarily critical chance (at least most directly) but factors into almost everything. Luck influences how good your critical hits are and if good and bad things happen to you, as well as if you find special encounters.

Since that neatly wraps up the base stats and most of the secondary stats, the next thing to talk about is skills.

Skills

There's a lot of them. Most of them are pretty self explanatory, but the base level in all of them is determined by some combination of stats. Unarmed and Melee weapons, for instance, start off as a multiple of the average of ST and AG. Science skill is based completely off of IN. Lockpick comes from PE and AG. The formulas have been changed somewhat from Fallout 1 if you're familiar with it. At character creation you get to tag three skills as specialties, and this gives a 20% bonus to that skill right off the bat. In addition, all skill points you dedicate to a Tag skill count for double. You can Tag additional skills later on, and this will double that skill on the spot.

Traits

At character creation you can pick up to two traits to further define your character. You don't have to take any at all, but a lot of them are useful. I'll go ahead and list them with some commentary.

Fast Metabolism - +2 to your healing rate, poison and radiation resistance drop to 0%. If you're relying on your healing rate to recover HP, you're doing it wrong. Poison and radiation resistance aren't as useful as you think, but still not worth it.

Bruiser - +2 strength, -2 action points. This is Bad with a capital B. The strength is nice, but agility points are what determine how many actions you can do during a combat turn. Losing 2 is pretty much guaranteed to cost you one attack per round.

Small Frame - +1 agility, -50 carry weight. Can be useful with some characters, as a point of agility is valuable. Carry weight hurts at the beginning of the game, but once you've got a few minions to act as pack mules you won't notice the difference.

One Hander - +20% when using one handed weapons, -40% when using two-handed weapons. If you want a pistoleer character (which is a very valid option) this is pretty good. Otherwise, not so much.

Finesse - +10% critical chance, -30% damage. You can build a character around this. Since critical chance is based off of a base stat with a range from 1 to 10, this is actually going to double or triple your chance of getting a critical hit. Higher end criticals can cause instant death, especially using targeted shots at the eyes and head, so the damage penalty can be effectively eliminated. I don't like it since there are far easier ways of increasing your critical chance later on in the game.

Kamikaze - +5 sequence, 0 base armor class. This restricts you to nothing more or less than your armor value for defense, and in exchange you get to pretty much act first. Although your physical armor will outclass your agility based AC pretty quickly, this is still a pretty terrible tradeoff.

Heavy Handed - +4 melee damage, -40% damage from criticals. Obviously only good for characters who are melee based, and most of them tend to rely on criticals for damage. You can apply some of the same arguments from Finesse to this trait, but the +4 bonus is going to pale in comparison to the damage from later weapons.

Fast Shot - Ranged attacks cost one less AP to perform; cannot make targeted attacks. Pretty terrible except for one or two builds (one of which I plan on using for the extra updates). The bonus applies to ranged weapons, but the inability to target your attacks applies to everything. You simply can't switch to aimed shots within the combat engine.

Bloody mess - Every creature killed in the game dies with the messiest animation possible. This does nothing, but if you want to go Fist of the Northstar and have everything exploding into a bloody mist it's great. I picked it for this character because I didn't have a second trait I wanted. Major downside is that it can be difficult to loot some corpses after they've disintegrated.

Jinxed - Critical failures for everyone! This multiplies the chance of everyone in combat having critical failures exponentially, both allies and enemies and is based on your luck. You can only get a critical failure if you fail, and if you're very lucky and pick your shots well you won't. Can be endlessly entertaining, but can also completely make a train wreck of your game.

Good Natured - Combat skill base levels receive a penalty, Speech, Barter, First Aid, and Doctor receive a bonus. You can overcome this with skill points and dedications, and if you're intending to create a peaceful character this can help with successes early on.

Chem Reliant - You recover from hangovers/withdrawal faster, but you're more likely to become an addict. Not for me, as I don't really bother with drugs that much. If you do, however, you're probably never going to come down from your high and you're going to be mainlining enough drugs that you'll be addicted no matter what.

Chem Resistant - Your chance of getting addicted is reduced by 50%, but so are the stat bonuses you get from drugs. See above, only this is worse because you're not even getting all the benefits of being stoned out of your gourd.

Sex Appeal - Bonuses to reaction from characters of the opposite gender, penalty to reactions from members of the same gender. More useful for women than men, since men are in the majority across the game. You can use it for a femme fatale character.

Skilled - You get +5 skill points per level, but you only get perks every four levels instead of every three levels. I'll cover perks in another update, but they're massively useful and cutting yourself off from 2 or 3 over the length of the game is a huge downside. Absolutely terrible.

Gifted - All your base stats are increased by 1. In exchange, your base skill levels are reduced by 10% and you get -5 to your skill points per level. Considering that raising your IN by 1 point already makes up 2 of those lost skill points, and you can probably save enough from not having to raise other stats to get yourself two more points in IN. Probably the best perk, but you can live quite well without it.

So, that's pretty much all you need to know about basic character creation. Next, we'll talk about :

Pre-Made Characters

There are three characters available for use if you don't want to go through the trouble of making your own character. Let's talk about them a bit:

Narg



Narg and Cameron would be best friends. Screw those guys. That said, Narg is perfectly useable as a character with a few major reservations. Melee weapons and small guns are useful skills, but throwing is absolutely crap. Heavy handed isn't a great Trait, but his stat distribution is pretty good. You can use the modify button to fix a few of these things, which is still probably a faster option than creating a character from scratch.

Mingan



Your stealthy option. Mingan has bigger issues than Narg. He's got no combat skills, which hurts the early game when you have a harder time avoiding fights. He has no diplomacy skills, which will hurt him in the mid to late game. His stat distribution is pretty decent for what he's supposed to be doing, but skilled is going to hurt a lot in the long fun.

Chitsa



The diplomatic option. Chitsa is probably the most solid overall of the pre-made characters, but her lack of combat skills might make it a bit rough for beginning players. None of her Traits are horrible, and her stats are pretty well distributed. Barter isn't terribly useful as a tag skill and first aid is distinctly inferior to doctor, but otherwise it's okay. Give her a pistol to capitalize on that One Hander Trait and she'll be fine.

Why Luke?

So, with all that information dump let's take a look at our character and I'll explain him a bit.



Stats - 5 ST is more than enough, and we can live with 5 EN pretty easily. 8 PE is important for showing off as many quests as I can, and there's a couple of perks that require high perception. 6 CH will help with diplomacy, and having 3 henchmen means lots of storage capacity and friends. 9 IN ensures that we'll have access to just about every dialogue option, and helps with the skill points we're going to need. 8 AG gives us just as many action points as 9 AG would, and we can save that point for other areas. I went with 6 LK because that's the minimum for a number of useful perks. It's important to note that you can improve all of your stats in the course of the game, so that's a pretty good reason to not put any stat at 10.

Skills - Small Guns is hands down the most versatile combat skill in the game, so that's an easy choice. You'll see just how versatile it is as we go through the game, but you can go from the beginning of the game to the end with just Small Guns. Doctor seems like a weird one, but you'd be amazed how many quests and other benefits you can get from having a high Doctor skill. Also, Doctor can fix crippled body parts which can be really useful. Speech is also a way to open a lot of doors, and many times you can get additional quests and better rewards for using Speech persuasively.

Traits

For the stats we need to get as many quests as possible and the perks I want, Gifted is a must have. I can get around the reduced skills starting off, and 9 IN makes up for all of the lost skill points. I didn't really want to use any of the other Traits, so I picked Bloody Mess for the entertainment value. I'll be able to live with the difficulty of looting the resultant piles of bits.