Players who like to optimize their characters all pretty much agree that Charisma was a "dump stat" in FO3 - something you could only leave 1 point in, but you could still smooth-talk people by maxing your Speech skill. If I'm recalling correctly, there were heavy social consequences in FO1 & 2 if you floored your Charisma all the way to 1 (or put any stat below 4, for that matter). I was just wondering if the devs have addressed this for FO:NV yet? Is Charisma still a "dump stat" or will it play a more important role this time around?

Charisma affects something called "Nerve" that gives a boost to your companions.

Not really, the only difference is that in FO1/FO2 it affected how many companions you could get. It works pretty much the same way in FO3/NV besides that. Luck was(and still is) a dump stat.

I found charisma useful for Fallout 3. Then again I always balance all my SPECIAL out to 7 by level 3 or so. So eh :shrug:

They could improve it by imposing a cap on the speech skill. For every point you put in Charisma it lets you add 10 more skill points to speech. That's how I'd do it.

In a city full of gambling, you want to call luck a dump stat?

In fo1/2 luck of 10 was the most fun way to play.

Combined with Jinxed -trait.

Unless you wanted to be a sniper who critted on every shot in FO3.

Given that any stat or skill can lead to more new dialogue, I expect Charisma also to have a much bigger impact again.

I hope a low intelligence turns you into an idiot again, anyone know if intense training perk will be back

Yeah, 10 luck was fun for a few playthroughs because you can get some special random encounters and such, but it didn't really have much of an impact on the game(outside of combat). I'm going to be staying away from the gambling minigames anyway. Unless it affects missions in some way it's pointless.

There was some talk about low INT making your responses (some of them at least) a bit "confused".

And hopefully intense training will not return, but get replaced by something less powerful (since stats now have a bigger impact).

Well, I found Charisma to be a dump stat in Fallout 1 and 3. In Fallout 1, as long as you had a good Intelligence(I had 9) and a good Speech(tagged), you could do pretty much anything. The only instance where I needed high Charisma was the Water Thief quest. And in Fallout 3, Charisma only affected Barter and Speech, and you could just tag and raise those skills.

Hopefully it won't.
I hope that a lot of NPC's will have Charisma requirements, meaning you can do a quest for some guy but the reward is going to be pretty small. Or that someone just don't trust you with a low Charisma and refuses to talk "in detail" with you.

Basically, for it to be a very important stat when it comes to dialogue.

Exactly, and to some of us, dialogue is just as important to us as the weapons mods system is to other users.

i hope they make both luck and charisma if not important atleast game changing, by having exclusive things happen to players with high L and C

Even in fallout 3 it was all in how you played i used strength and endurance as dump stats and set them to 1 on most characters.

Must have made carrying loot difficult, as well as imposing a higher level of combat difficulty on yourself since you wouldn't have as many HP to work with.

Loot isn't realy an issue if you stick to a few selet gun types for use and only pick up extra for selling, I mean ya the character wasnt a pack mule but ammo was weightless so no problems. And as far as limited hp well i wasnt lookin to play it like it was halo or call of duty if i had been i'd have just played that (all fps games feel the same to me and i dont care for them) so i made use of Vats in combat situation where i could, wich after lvl 20 and grim reapers sprint was all combat situations.

I'd say luck being a dump stat is not limited to Fallout, and really, I think it shouldn't even be a stat at all in games. After all, luck isn't a physical or mental attribute of a person like strength or charisma are, it's an abstract concept that people use to describe whether things seemingly dependant on chance are going their way, the only reason I might make an exception with Fallout is because you can't really have the first letters of all your stats spell "SPECIAL" unless you have a stat that begins with L in your game.



I would say so, since I doubt gambling won't be necessary for much of the game's content, and like pretty much every single RPG I've played, you'll probably eventually have more money than you can ever expect to spend just from selling loot, so you probably won't really need to gamble at all. Now fighting, on the other hand, even though Obsidian has stated that you can complete the game without killing anyone, I'd still say that combat will probably be unavoidable for most characters.

Though I hope that Obsidian can make charisma more useful in New Vegas, since among the stats in the game, I always found it rather worthless, after all, it was only really good for barter and speech, and the former wasn't really needed at all, whereas the latter, while useful, wasn't actually essential if you wanted to pursuade people as even with a low speech skill the chances of success with speech checks never seemed to reach zero, meaning that you could just save before every pursuasion attempt and reload if you failed, annoying, I know, hence why I did generally put some skill points into speech if I intended to try to pursuade people, but it did make speech less important than combat skills, or even other non-combat skills that you actually needed to be good at to put to good use like lockpicking (Since locks had a skill requirement.) and repair (Since it determined the maximum condition you could repair items to, which effects how effective they are, therefore you needed a good repair skill to ensure that your weapons and armor would functioning well.) which, it seems to me, is counter-productive to the point of an RPG. After all, you're supposed to choose your character's skills and stats based on what best suits your character. Yet if some stats are just less useful than others no matter how you play the game, most players won't choose to increase them, and will instead focus on more useful stats, which is one of the factors that can contribute to player characters in the game ultimately seeming pretty similar. Ultimately, RPGs are supposed to be games where players must make choices, and choices aren't very meaningful if the game essentially makes them for you by making some options simply not worth taking.

Most stats in FO3 had very little effect on your character appart from serving as perk requirements. And all the best perks only required a 6 in the relevant stat. You could pretty much assign the stats randomly and your character would still become great at whatever you wanted him or her to excel in. I mean a charcter with 1 Endurance started out with more HP than a bloody Supermutant! It's like they were trying to make it idiot proof or something. <_<

I really hope they make the impact of stat distribution in New Vegas much more significant than it was in FO3.

Well since there are multiple paths to be taken and you can actually complete a pacifist playthrough, I'd say that Charisma would be important. Plus it increases something called Nerve that affects your companions. And I think Fawkes would comment on how he was surprised people trusted you enough not to attack him when you had high Charisma.

I hope there will be options like in Fallout 1.. "Master said that no humans allowed, and your a not a ghoul.. your a human!" Stupid Response: " But i am a ghoul!" or if you were smart... Smart Response: "I am android from the future..(or something like that)"