I always had to make my tag skills 100.

Thank god i'm not alone. The only skill I haven't made even is Unarmed, which is still at 17.

When I am buying ammo, I buy just enough to have my cap-count end in a 0 or 5 aswell!

I do it too sometimes. Mostly because 50+% of the speech and barter checks start at 30 or 35. Barter is such a vacuum cleaner from combat skills, but I hate getting terrible trade in value. svcks that once again, Science and Lockpick have to hoover up like 40% of the skillpoints just to be able to crack Very Hard locks or terminals for all the cool items. The programmers needs to just have keys and passwords cleverly hidden for that stuff so we don't nerf our combat skills.

I'm the same way; I built an excel spreadsheet that lets me do "what-ifs" and pre-planning. Allows me to plan all 30 levels of skills, implants and books to build my own version of an "optimal" character with no odd values. Note that when you're planning such a build, keep in mind the effects of clothing- I forgot this initially but was able to adjust the plan without wasting any points. In my case, I was planning a Science of 80 (allowing very hard terminals to be unlocked with a magazine), but I'd forgotten about the +10 Science/+10 Medicine Lab coat from the followers. Same deal with Barter (+5 hat, +5 clothing), Repair (+5 clothing), and Lockpicking (+5 clothing). I'm sure there's more in the Wiki.

I just wish the game would stop freezing so I could actually play my character. :banghead:

I only worry about 25, 50, 75 and 100 as those are break points for the next level of whatevers in the game. In between, I worry not about odds or evens on the skills.

I do this, but not just with the game. I do it in RL as well, usually with volume controls for the radio in the car, or for the TV. In all these cases, I really would prefer if they were all ending with a 0 or a 5.

Practically speaking upping a skill from 23 to 25 will get you past more skill checks than say raising any other skill to a value that is not a multiple of "25". I'm on my 3rd playthough and have yet to finish the game because I wasn't happy with the stats from my previous playthoughs, so I feel your pain man...

This thread isnt quite what I expected. My skill point obsession is to collect all the books and to plan what I'll pump my stats to, with implants and any (if any) intense training. But the obsessive part is that I have to get all those skill books, or many of them, before I begin play. That is especially true for perks like Travel Light and Cowboy (etc) where I want to have minimum actual investment into the skill, AND I still want to take them as soon as possible.



(possible SPOILERS in that I may mention foes or locations, with no details)
(possible SPOILERS in that I may mention foes or locations, with no details)
(BECOMES SAFE AGAIN AFTER NEXT PARAGRAPH)



As a result, I get through Doc Mitchell's character creation, and then I run willy-nilly like a school girl around past and through gangs, molerats, death claws, coyotes, preferably just running and praying, and then sneaking into every single place so I can run over and consume every skill book. Even if that means running the Boomer's gauntlet at level 2 and running through glowing ones hoping to get down to cottonwood cove without triggering Primm, etc then fine, I dont care, but I'm getting all 156 free points if it kills me. Or all 208 free skill points if I'm going to take Comprehension (tho in that case I just horde the books until I do). It can be pretty challenging, and there are one or two places its hard or impossible to get into depending on tag skills, and I *might* delay skills I dont intend to pump ....

But believe-you-me, I will obsessively have all my books in pocket or eaten before I do even one quest. Or as close as I can get. Then I'll shyly sneak back into goodsprings to talk to the townsfolk to talk to them about the issues they need help with. Sure, maybe I'm unavoidably level 6 by this time, but I've got my obsession behind me and I can focus.

Well, the obsession continues from there because I use an excel sheet to calculate and plan/track my skills as I go, compensating for skill books and planned/actualized stat upgrades. But that's a different obsession.

Question for the people who level to multiples of 5 though ... what do you do about items you usually wear like power armor or glasses, where when you are wearing the items you have +1 to a stat? Do you obsessively balance to where you see 50+ or to 52+? Because you know, if it says 50+ then your REAL skill is probably at 48. But if you balance out the real skill to 50, then you'll be staring at 52+ the whole time. Doesn't that drive you absolutely CRAZY?

You just sent all the OCD's into Overload.

That's a pretty hardcoe obsession my friend!

I'll probably (finally) play through to the endings first before I embark on an early level skill book hunt...

I have other ones. It took me 9 hours to make a character one night ... well over the course of 2 nights.

Ya see, it was my first alt. I backed up my save games, and then deleted them from the main directory. I was making a melee character with END 10 and INT 9 (or was it vice versa) and I wanted to get the most skill and/or hit points possible, so I needed to run over to the location where you can augment your stats. But obviously I didnt want to level, but getting over there, and earning the caravan hands to get the cash, and not being able to avoid every fight, well it takes a little time to make the character, get it looking right, then run a safe course the long way around (I have recently discovered a shorter route) WITHOUT leveling up any more than necessary.

So it took me about 2 hours to make a character, run my route, avoid waypoints (dont want XP) play caravan, hit "the location" and get my stat point before hitting level 3. Its just a bit of a process.

Then I discovered that when I deleted my saves, I hadnt deleted my autosave or quicksave, so my "first" save was labelled save # 289 (my first character had 288 saves). By then the values of the next save were in memory so I was doomed to always have my save number (289) and which save I was on (#1) be different. Maybe I could have played with it more, or figured a way around it, but somehow it just really irked me .... even if I could have tweaked the file or renamed it, my OCD had been triggered .... the character wasnt right ...

So I wiped the character. Then I did the whole process again, this time I was careful and my save games were numbered correctly. I got my character looking good, I did the running around and the caravan and pumped my stat. Then I camera-panned out and discovered that my face, which looked perfectly fine and cool in the character creation "mirror", had this neon blue aura around the lips, mouth and chin. Frankly, it looked like I had been huffing paint. I just couldnt escape it. It really REALLY irked me.

I deleted her.

Well over the next 3-4 hours, as I hit "randomize" to get a face I liked, I discovered that African American females, and indeed lot of the non-Caucasian face models, seem to have some crazy skin blushing locations and blush tones, such that 80% of the time you'll get patches of blue or yellow (usually blue) on your face. At least for the African American female. The problem is that you can't really see that in the mirror when making the character, and other than a brief glimpse when you sit in the couch, you have to go through a fair amount of the actual session with Doc Mitchell before you can really pan around and inspect your character. Plus I'm *really* picky about how faces look, and I cant figure out how to make the sliders work manually.

But *eventually* after about 4 hours of messing around, I got my character right. Then it took me another hour or two to get my stuff going, sneak over, get my stats, and get back to town (still level 2 on this character).

I'm glad I did, I have a really cool Unarmed/Melee/Science/Energy Brotherhood of Steel / Drill Sergeant type gal, but MAN my OCD was killing me over those 2 nights.

yes

I am so glad I'm not alone. Yay for anol retentives everywhere!

I will come out of the closet as well.

My only exception is will melee and unarmed since I don't play that character. Medicine, lockpick, science, ....all go 5's

gahhhh yes i suffer from this same insane problem and it drives me mad lol the worst part is when you get a skill book to increase a skill by 3 skill points and you HAVE to waste two random points to even it out to 25/30 or what have you. even wearing a hat with +1 PER drives me mad because it adds +2 pts to random skills and makes a nice round 25 into a rage inducing 27!! WAAAAAAAAGH!!!!! still, with time, i think i've learnt to let it annoy me less give it time young one, and you may just overcome this madness

Yea, I do this all the time too. Even more than in Fo3 because of the usefulness of skill magazines (whoever came up with that was brilliant) I love skill magazines.

In FO3 I always used the first couple of levels' worth of SPs to even out all the skills to multiples of 5, even the ones I wasn't going to use.

Now, in F:NV I level out the ones I am going to use to multiples of 5 after hitting L2, and then after that I steadily increase some skills by 5 points per level and put any 'remainder' into another skill that I want to also raise early. Sure, it means I tend to have at least one skill currently in use that is not 'perfectly' leveled, however with the more limited supply of SP I am not worrying about it as much since it will get there eventually.

As far as implants are concerned, I don't worry about the +2 'ruining' my skill layout and just smooth it out the next time I level. I don't wear any +Attribute clothing other than Power Armor at this point, although I am considering making a character that will, so I don't have any worries there. I do take 1 rank of Intense Training at L2 since I haven't really found enough use for the conversation-related perks and don't really need the damage bonus most of them also provide, but I don't worry about the skill increases as I will smooth those out eventually.

One thing I am rapidly becoming OCD about is completing companion quests, especially in those cases where another quest can/will get said companion killed (Cass is a notable example of this). I barely used companions at all in FO3, but the ones in F:NV actually feel like companions and not bots (even ED-E, who actually is a bot ) so I have taken to planning my early leveling around having them around to handle combat for me. Since I can only have two at once I simply must finish their quests before I can replace them, even though that means I delay getting some companions for quite a while since some quests are not particularly well-suited to lower-level characters due to involving high-order skill checks and/or incredibly dangerous locations.