Two Steps Forward… Fallout Chapter 3

So last time, as Red Metal so correctly put it, we fell victim to what’s sure to be our nemesis this run, poor stability. And I found that I had completely forgotten to save since the start of that run. Is that the death knell of our playthrough? Would we ever be able to bring ourselves back to the state we once were?

Well, yeah. We weren’t exactly that far in. Just a few minutes later, I had rebuilt our character, did all the same stuff, and got us back to right to where we were. Well, most of the same stuff. There were a few things I did differently.

First, we had a random encounter on our way to Shady Sands, wherein Athena almost tripped up a cliff somehow, then complained that the government wasn’t doing it’s job. Welcome to a day with my clients.

When we got to Shady Sands, we picked up on the same radscorpion and raiders quest hooks as last time. We continued on that line a bit, and spoke with Razlo and Jarvis. Razlo’s the resident doctor of Shady Sands, currently tasked with helping Seth’s brother Jarvis fight of that nasty case of Radscorpion stabbing. We could royally piss him off by asking what someone with his education is doing in a place like Shady Sands, but Athena is much too suave for that.

The most important thing we did in Shady Sands last time was have Ian join our crew. We could do it the exact same way this time, just by being very charming, but one of the best things about Fallout is how there’s multiple ways to do pretty much everything.  Since we have to do it again anyways, let’s take the opportunity to exercise that.

Also, it lets us drag Athena‘s good name right through the mud. Man, I’m really enjoying naming this character after her now.

You See Ed. Fallout Chapter 2!

So when all’s said and done, here’s our guy. Well, girl. See, I really like the idea of naming the character after my fellow webcrawlers, and Athena both called dibs and did a pretty good job of selling me on the glory that is Athena. So we’ll we’re going to be Athena. Sorry, LightningEllen. I am going to do my best not to drag her name through the mud. But, then again, that’s really going to be up to you guys, isn’t it?

I took the liberty of setting her stats based largely on the skills you folk chose. Since you guys made the strong tactical decision of just being born better than everyone else, we ended up with a lot of stat points to play with, here. Yes, we’re Gifted. That’s going to make us slightly weaker at the very beginning of the game, as our increase in stats doesn’t make up for the decrease in skills, but we’ll catch up.

Red Metal had a great idea of maxing out her Agility. Agility’s one of the most useful stats in the game, determining how many action points you get per turn, and your natural armor class i.e. how hard it is for Athena here to end up pummeled. I only set it to 9, however, rather than the max of 10. There’s a reason for this. A reason that’s not going to come to fruition for a long time, at which point I am going to forget to mention that’s why I did this so you won’t know how smart I am, but there’s a reason for it nonetheless. How about you guys just go ahead and think I’m really smart right now.

We’re pumping Intelligence so that we can say smart things about videogames boost our skill points per level back up to normal levels and compensate for the lowered rate we see from being gifted. It also plays into our good talking to people skills, as a higher intelligence opens up more dialogue options. Fun fact, if you have an intelligence of 3 or less, you are not smart enough to hold a normal conversation with people. Makes playing the game a totally different experience. Perception, we’re boosting because I took Mishka’s ‘combat skills’ suggestion as a seconding of Athena’s ‘small guns’ suggestion, so we’re rolling with that. Perception impacts a lot of things, but the most important is our accuracy with ranged weapons, so we’ll need that to, you know, actually hit our enemies. Of course, we’re a Night Person, so our Perception and Intelligence are never actually going to be at 8. They’ll be at 7 during the day, and 9 at night. So when we have the choice, we’re going to want to wait to fight and level up at night, because we’ll get better bonuses then.

Strength theoretically isn’t all that useful since we’re never going to not be shooting people in a fight, but all weapons have a minimum strength requirement or else Athena will be shooting like a stormtrooper.  For small guns, it hits out at 5. Otherwise, the only thing it will impact is how much we can carry. Charisma doesn’t have very many impacts this game, vaguely affecting disposition and prices, but I still figured that since we’re going to be using our speech quite a bit, it’s still handy to have high. I couldn’t bear to have a third stat at 8, so I left it one point short. I left our Endurance subpar, because we need a weakness somewhere to give enemies a chance, and shunted it into Luck. Endurance determines your rate of healing over time, but since we’re a skilled doctor, it’s not so important, your resistances to things you’ll only see a few times in the game, and your hit points. Luck does exactly what it always does every single game it comes up.

So where does this leave us? Athena’s going to be walking out into the wild, rabid wasteland (seriously, they don’t even have Dragon Age out there) able to handle conflicts in a variety of ways. It’s not always going to be the case that we’ll have to the option both to fight and talk our way through, but one of those two will almost always come into play. With our doctor skills, we’ll be able to recover from anything we find on the wastes that doesn’t kill us outright. This is a solid set of skills you’ve started us out with.

And here I was worried that everyone was going to jerk me around by picking Gambling, Outdoorsman, and Throwing for your tagged skills and leaving me with nothing viable to do.