are speech checks set in stone or based part on luck? cuz it seems like if your 15/whatever or lower(my speech is low atm) then you cant get them to budge, no chance a all...in fo3, you had a chance of success even if you had a very low level...it was a bad chance, but it was a chance atleast

The 15/whatever score isn't your odds of success, it is your score versus the score needed to succeed. So if it is 15/50, you'd need a 50 speech score to succeed, and 15 would be your character's current speech level. It is set is stone, unlike fallout 3 where even a totally uncharismatic character with no points in speech had some chance of succeeding.

Yeah... this is good an bad. I like that there are checks. it makes investing points into a skill mean something. I can't just ignore speech and roll the dice until I make my check, however, I now know that if my speech skill is X, then I can rail road my conversation knowing that I will be successful.

That's how I heard it (read it); I really dislike that bit but Josh Sawyer stated that he prefers thresholds to percentage chance.

Thresholds create a perfect PC that never fails, never has a bad day, never says the wrong thing or gives a poor delivery... Percentages allow for even the old pro to slip up once in a while, and for the unsure novice to luck out occasionally; while most of the time the weighted chances are in the favor of the better skilled, and poor skill usually mean poor results.

I don't like the way they do it, because it seems like they use more than just speech skill. Some threads need one skill, another yet some other.. And since skill points are much, much more difficult to get, it seems that until the middle of the game, most of those will be replies you'll never see.. Especially since there are more available perks, but you only get one perk every 2 levels, and some perks that require 70 skill come early in the game-- so you wind up having to pump a lot of points into a single skill...

Fallout 3 was a big pushover in a lot of ways skill-wise, but NV seems to have completely swung it in the other direction.. Much harder to start off, since they start using multiple skill checks right off the bat.

I think on balance I would prefer a random element in there, even if it were just a small chance that you could win a speech check - I mean IRL I have days where sometimes the things I say make people laugh and other times I fall flat on my face - maybe Luck ought to be a component because sometimes it just comes down to luck that you have caught someone in the right mood to find a particular comment charming rather than obnoxious.