Good luck vendur. Looks like a really fun approach.

My pacifist character is level 26 already with no signs of slowing down And when I say pacifist, I mean pacifist. Not a single shot fired, not a single punch thrown. Though I admit you have the better of me with your no companions rule. My character hangs out with people sometimes; she can't mind control them into not shooting anything! However it's not like I'm using my companions to kill my way through the game. Mostly I hang out with them to do their quests and sometimes they get gun happy when scorpions crawl out of the rocks. Whenever I get into anything serious that doesn't involve companions I generally send them back to the Lucky 38. They cramp my sneaky style.

Boone can easilly outdamage the PC with the right equipment and decent charisma. Not only that, but he has an infinite supply food/water/doctor's bags and instantly heals after every fight with infinite stimpacks. Haha.

Companions can really cheapen the experience if you are going for a challenge.

Yeah. I avoid using them in anything story-related, but it doesn't bother me too much when just out traveling. (I was annoyed though when I realized you get xp for their kills!)

Pacifism + companions actually does add for some pretty harrowing gameplay moments sometimes. My character pretty much just runs from everything, but when companions get the itch, I'll be halfway over the horizon and then be all, omg, they're fighting back there! Then I have to decide whether to run back and watch, or keep running away in the hopes my companions will disengage and follow me. A few times I've had to run back and "tank", i.e. take a few bullets for my friends, though I never attack of course and having a 2 EN doesn't help. I pretend that I'm just running up to the bad guys and yelling, "Stop! Stop! What'd we ever do to you?" while they rain blows down on my poor blocking hands.

As for Boone, if he expects me to set up an assassination for him, well, he doesn't know what it means to be talking to a pacifist PC. He can sit in that dinosaur and rot for all I care

Dude I have ten clips on my thread showing you how it was done....

I thought letting your companions kill someone goes to your stats as well, that's cool and pretty funny.

Yeah, definitely does not go to stats. I have 0 kills on my Pip Boy although Veronica has punched countless scorps and raiders to oblivion. I keep running away from them, but she keeps running back to kill them.

My general rule is: if I got exp for it, I killed it or directly contributed to its death.

This sounds like a very interesting idea, although it would be incredibly hard on Very Hard / hardcoe. Adds an extra element to the game that's for sure.

Yea dude without companions doing most side quests without attacking and or killing is impossible. I got my dude to lvl 30 on very hard and hardcoe did 9 quests and had Boone and ED-E as companions though, it got too boring having them do everything.....I will do more missions on my spare time or when I'm really, really, reaaallly bored.... Here's my vid dude...you never showed me yours about your "description" thread. If you described it on a thread that's useless, you're just re-typing from an strategy guide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5JgaWcvmDg

Well, dude, I've completed over 50 quests so far and have yet to come across a sinlge one where I had to kill anyone to complete it.


And did it really take 30 levels for you to get bored with watching boone vaporize anything within 100 yards of you?

I'm doing something like this. My premise wasn't being a pacifist - I found that a bit unrealistic in this world - but I'm not using weapons at all, including not by proxy via companions. So it should be more or less the same as what you are saying, except I may have a slightly different attitude in some dialogs E.g. if I can talk one guy into killing another for me then I would probably do that. I would just never shoot him myself or get a companion to shoot him (in fact I don't even get any companions, because I couldn't restrain them properly). I'm playing on hard btw., because it's my default difficulty, but note that avoiding combat makes the difficulty level meaningless, as it only affects damage taken by the player and by NPCs. hardcoe seems to make only a small difference as well, certainly less than on my other playthroughs (that are all on hardcoe).

I did rush the main quest a bit because it opens up more areas for questing, and I chose to work for the NCR. So far I've only encountered one quest where I almost had to shoot someone.


I've not yet decided what I would do with quests where I can only avoid killing people with weapons by doing something else that also results in their death, for example


I picked 1 strength btw. Don't need a lot of it if you don't have to carry weapons or ammo. You can make a lot of money by selling a small number of heavy items, for example

Not needing all those fancy weapons and armor means I get a lot more free caps early on. On a non-pacifist playthrough I would almost never sell an expensive weapon, either it's good enough to use or it's useful to repair others with.

In total, my SPECIAL stats were at start:
Strength 1
Preception 1
Endurance 3
Charisma 9
Intelligence 9
Agility 8 (+1 from small frame trait)
Luck 9

Str 1 still lets me carry a weight of 160, as outlined above I think this is enough.
Perception 1 is a bit of a handicap for running away. At least in theory. In practice I found that it's good enough and it's actually better if I only see red dots for enemies that are near enough to actually be a danger. It can be easily boosted to 3 with items, but I'm not doing that so far.
Endurance 3 is what I had left from maxing the others, but I figured I don't need more than three because I really only want to implant charisma and intelligence - and that still leaves one.
Charisma and intelligence are obviously 9 so I can get them to 10 with implants. They affect my primary skills (speech, barter, science, and so on) and they make sense for a pacifist character.
Agility is high mostly for RP reasons (it doesn't affect running away as much as I'd like it to), but some points are necessary for perks like silent running. I took the small frame trait because one extra stat point is too good not to take, even though neither high agi nor higher chance to become a cripple change much in this game.
Luck is high for RP reasons too, but also affects all skills, so it's not useless. Could also balance some of the missing loot I'm not getting from people because I don't kill them, but it turns out I don't really have a cap shortage anyway.

I've been frapsing this playthrough, but I haven't yet posted most of it to youtube. So far I've only posted two excerpts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4olRMdijpec lifting the Bomber, because someone asked a question about this quest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOKuHw1eroo George getting himself blown up
As you can see my character is wearing a dress, armor doesn't seem to make a lot of sense if I'm not going to fight. Currently she's wearing a suit from one of the minor factions because I got tired of the dress. Either way, this negates two or three missing strength points just because I'm not wearing a 20+ weight piece of armor.

One thing I did early on was skip the entire early quest line and run to the strip as my first destination, where I "acquired" the chip. Then I continued with the NCR quest line. I've documented getting to the strip at level 1 here, but this is on a different character that I only made for this specific video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoueiV8ZRfk
Actually making that video is what gave me the idea to try a non-violent playthrough, but in that video I wasn't in the mindset yet as you can clearly see at the end when I meet Vulpes Inculta.

Hey, ED-E helped too!! And yes, yes it did.

You are aware that many quests involve much more than just passing a couple speech checks, right?

Yes, but I'm not sure why you would only quote my special stats since there are no quests that require high strength, perception or endurance if you're not going to fight anyway.

How do you plan on surviving indoors quests where you have to run through doaens of enemies while you dink around looking for something/usingterminals/etc.?

Which one specifically?

Animal friend is [censored] stupid. Doesn't even work. Dohs won't even attack fiends. What a stupid useless perk, and there are two ranks of uselessness. Grrr. False adverising.

And just to clarify: emergency radio is the same thing as using a companion IMO and so it's forbidden.

I been having trouble finding a way to kill the fiends off without actually, uhh, killing the fiends. I found a nice strategy after many, many failed other ones. It takes a lot of armor/stims etc.

What you do is take the quest to kill nelphi, and then go and run into the building where nelphi is, run him into range of the NCR strikeforce they send with you to take him out, and then run him away slowly so the strikeforce keeps following you. You can pull them almost back into the area nelphi was at. Then from there you can run and pull violet and cook cook FAST cause they leave shortly after nelphi kicks the bucket. I think I burnt through 30-40 stims doing these three, but I did manage to do it.

I also had toughness, nerd rage, med-x, and reinforced mk2 combat armor both helmet and body on. Might be wiser to do this after some power armor.

this was definitely the toughest nut to "crack" for me so far, until I finally had a workable plan it really looked hopeless. the problem is violet and cook cook only chase you so far and then run home, so thats why you have to pull the NCR snipers as far forward as possible. I really though I finally had met the unsolveable quest line.

I think a pacifist character would just not accept a bounty quest in the first place. I don't see a huge difference between using the radio and using a quest-provided strike force; or a companion, for that matter. You're killing someone with a weapon you're not holding yourself.

Nope. I have no control over the actions of the NCR, nor the fiends. They make their own decisions. A pacifist in real life still calls the cops when some psycho with a gun is after them.

Are yall arguing what a pacifist would and wouldn't do?? Pacifism is the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved. Calls for the abolition of the institutions of the military and war, opposition to any organization of society through governmental force (anarchist or libertarian pacifism), rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals. The obliteration of force except in cases where it is absolutely necessary to advance the cause of peace, and opposition to violence under any circumstance, even defense of self and others. So the game of Fallout alone defies what pacifism is.

So you CAN call for help from the Radio: you just telling the rangers to clean some raider from the area.....

A real life pacifist wouldn't visit a military command post and take on a bounty mission, though.

Imagine Ghandi had the same thoughts, how can I get rid of these pesky Britsher Raiders without killing a single one (and not dying) HE DID IT! (killed by his own though later)

wtf are you talking about?? lmao How did that come to mind from that comment??