I have had to restart 3 times because of glitches in quests that won't let me continue quest chains.... including the main quest line.

They seriously need to fix these.

I restarted a 4th time due to bugs, however I still had my saves from my 3rd restart when a fix/workaround was found for the bug I had for it (ctd on pipboy hotkeys). I was able to recover that game and continue. Still, I'm not convinced I'll be able to finish this 3rd try given the number of bugs that I had before (much later in the game) that I have to try to avoid triggering again.

I've delted 4 characters just because I used them to complete the mainquest siding with NCR, Mr. House, The Legion, and once going independant. I scrapped my 5th character after 10 hours because I tryed using companions but it really just made it feel wrong to me and it ruined the roleplay. On my 6th character currently around 18 or 19 hours in.

I have 3 characters running in parallel, so thats 3 actual starts.

For my main, I have yet to restart, but I'm really thinking I want to. I have played him up to level 20, but I realize now that I want to do some things different with him, and that I want to re-orient his Perks in a way that means I'll have to fairly radically alter his stats. So I am about to restart him.

Then I made a cowgirl, played her up to level 8 and realized that I needed to shift her stats pretty radically also.

My most irritating restart, even though I didn't get to a high level, was my melee gal. Her starting STR was 8, END was 9, INT was 10, CHA and LUC are both 1. My goal was to sneak her all the way to the cyber doc, then play some caravan, then buy the END enhancement so her END score would be 10. And it worked great though it took me a couple of hours. THAT is when I realized that by failing to erase the autosave and quicksave in the directory when I made a new character, all her save games were starting in number at like 220 instead of 1. I have serious issues with OCD and having my first save game being 220 instead of 1 really pissed me off.

So I went to bed and the next evening, I re-made her. I spend 2 hours again doing it all over again, getting her to the cyber doc by level 2 again and pumping END to 10 at level 2. The savegames were fine but THEN I switched my camera to take a look, swung the camera around to the front ... and oh no, her lips and mouth area are freakin' blue. She looks like she has been huffing paint. Something about some of the non-caucasian skin tones makes the mouth area tend to fade to a neon blue or to other weird colors, esp if you hit randomize like I do. So I had to remake her again.

I then spent the next 2 to 3 hours going through the character creation over and over. Just because your face looks fine in the mirror doesnt mean it doesnt have a blue paint-huffing aura around the mouth. Something about the African American facial region and skin tone sliders makes hitting 'Random' very likely to have a discolored aura around the mouth and chin, but you cant see it until at least the point you are getting into the couch and to really look at it you have to go through the doctor's whole intro. Took me a long time to get a face that looked feminine, tough, and that didnt have weird random facial tone / engine issues.

When I finally did re-make her and had a face that worked, it took me a couple of hours to sneak to the doc near Vegas again. After all that work, she became my new main and she is level 22! YAY!

:)