Also, in all my many trips through the world of Fallout, I’ve never put points into thrown weapons. “Bare handed” and “melee combat” should really have been merged into a single skill.
(How could I be a master doctor and yet be inept at first aid?) Likewise, the division of weapons into six different categories seems needless, and doesn’t really lead to any interesting choices in the game. Tag skills go up faster, but you can distribute the points wherever you need.įirst aid and doctor skills overlap far too much. When you level up, you get a few points to spread around, raising any skills you like. There is a large list of skills in the game (top right region) and you can pick any three to be “tag” skills. The skills aren’t quite as well-devised as the attributes.
You can if you want, but you will regret that 3 charisma or 2 intelligence before you get very far. Creating a character is a matter of balancing tradeoffs, not min-maxing the crap out of your stats. How “wise” or “foolish” I am should be determined by the choices I make in the game, not my character sheet.Įvery attribute is meaningful for every character, and there aren’t any obvious “dump stats”. I’ve always disliked games where things which should be emergent during roleplaying end up assigned a hard numerical value. Nebulous, personality-driven concepts like wisdom are left off the list entirely. There aren’t any ambiguous stats, or stats which overlap. Seven is a lot of attributes, but they are clearly delineated and easy to understand. That’s clever and makes them easy to remember.
There are seven core attributes in the game: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck, which spell SPECIAL. Leveling up shouldn’t change your core attributes, (or at least, not by much) it should simply allow you to better use what you were born with. I never liked games where you can become “smarter” or “more charismatic” by fighting and leveling up. When you level up, your skills improve, not the base attributes. You aren’t locked into choices where being good at fighting makes you bad at conversation, or being good at stealth implies you want to steal stuff. You can be a “rogue” or a “melee fighter” or a “gunslinger”, but the particulars of doing so are up to you. Of all the (computer) RPG’s I’ve played over the years, my favorite character progression system is still the one found in the 1997 classic Fallout. Opinions ranged from “you should only need mind / body / spirit” to “let’s track every possible aspect of your being using linked stats and floating-point numbers”.
Several people mentioned other game systems, some with numerous attributes that define your character, and some with very few. The discussion on Eschalon’s character system was pretty interesting.
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