Hi, I've been playing Fallout New Vegas since the weekend and have been really loving it but last night I found that I'd misunderstood how limbs are healed. I thought the doctors bag just un-crippled limbs, not actually healed them - so I've been going around almost crippled for most of the game so far which has kept things really tense and exciting. I did find it strange that I seemed to fair so much better some times against similar opponents, but this would have been down to visiting the doctor before the quest. Doh.

Discovering this I think combined with getting better armour has caused the game to suddenly become way too soft for my tastes. What I'd like to know is what others have done to solve this problem? By the way, it's not that I'm amazing at playing the game - I died absolutely loads before I realised what I was doing wrong - it's the tension that's created by the ever present threat of death that made the game so compelling. It forces you to play much more carefully and tactically as one wrong move and it's over! Every encounter became a challenge.

I can think of the following options, which I guess could be combined to some degree - I'm going to try these out and see how they effect gameplay:

1. Turn the difficulty up

In Fallout 3 I found it became less tense as I levelled so kept increasing the difficulty until the max. Eventually battles became a grind - enemies already take a massive amount of damage to kill and increasing that just made things last way longer with no real change in tactics required. Not being able to stimpack limbs will certainly help make increasing the difficulty a better option than it was before, but I fear it may still not be enough.

2. No armour

Not wearing armour would prevent the problem I'm having where I'm taking very little damage generally now. I made the mistake of choosing the toughness perks so I have a base DT of 6, then I'm wearing ~17 armour on top of that. Not much seems to be able to penetrate that effectively at this stage in the game (lvl 10, just left boulder city). So, I might just leave the armour behind - that would still give me a base of 6 that I cannot remove, but should help.

3. Self harm

I could cripple myself and only un-cripple limbs in the future - don't heal them up any further. This is effectively how I've being playing most of the game so far and it's been working well. The problem is that each time I run out of doctors bags (or the drug) I cannot un-cripple myself without being healed in full. Trying to get my limbs low without being crippled after every visit to the doctor would become time-consuming and annoying. Playing a mission that I know will not be as much of a challenge (which I did not know before, even though it was happening) will mean they're not as fun.


So, what are peoples thoughts on this? Has anyone tried any of the above? Any other options? What works?

Ultimately, it's not my ability to deal damage that I want to change - it's my enemies ability to damage me and specifically to cripple me that I want to increase.

- oxJelly.

I have tried no armor and the rusult is death within seconds of anything of a higher level. Such as Deathclaws and NCR(if you are on there bad side) because of there numbers. With the armor i did by buy or killing FreeSide thug and collecting his armor and wear that.