If you look at forums for any other game you'll see players asking for the best stat setup for class x, and they'll get replies giving generally the same setups.
On the Fallout 3 forums however it's completely different.
Ask for a SPECIAL's setup for class x and you get players saying for example, choose high perception and luck with low charisma, or choose high agility and endurance with low luck, etc. Noone seems to be able to agree on good or bad SPECIAL's. Okay so charisma seems to be the one that most say is useless, but then again you'll get others saying they'd never play without a decent amount in it.

So, are the SPECIAL's so well balanced that people can't decide which are the most important, or do they just not matter too much?

It all really depends what type of character you are planning to play, if you decide to play a big brawler, no nonsense kind of character why have high charisma if you are only going to punch your way through the game But if you are a sneak character high luck may be of great use to you. So all the specials are important, just the type of character you are playing changes their importance. But with Broken steel I just take 'Almost Perfect' at level 30, collect all the bobble heads and become a God anyway :bowdown:

Some are useless, others are not. Intelligence is crucial for becoming skilled or for gimping your character intentionally. Endurance for whether or not you want good damage resistance via lots of health. Luck if you want to stagger. Specials are also important as a requisite for perks. You can't get toughness without 7 endurance, etc. Charisma is good only for raising certain skills at the beginning, but you can only have one follower no matter how high it is.



Special is for YOU to decide how your character plays. How much they can carry from strength affects your game greatly. If you play Dead is Dead, then you will be dead soon without high perception. It depends on you.

No you can have more, but i have no idea how many. My last character had Dogmeat, Fawkes, and Cross.

Unless my game was buggy or something....

If you've got the Broken Steel DLC then you can get a perk at level 30 that sets all your SPECIAL attributes to 9. Which effectively means any starting value is temporary, since there isn't any perk left that could possibly be better at level 30.

That said, the usual suggestion for "best" SPECIAL at start is at least 6 agility, luck, and perception, at least 5 strength and endurance, and preferably 9 intelligence. Intelligence gives you more skill points and the rest of the mentioned stats are due to requirements from what is widely considered "good perks". Note that there's no charisma requirement. Usually it's harmless to dump charisma to 1.

There's a quest which adds +1 to either strength or perception so obviously you could take 4 strength or 5 perception and get the bonus from said quest. If you're not using the unofficial patch then there's also an item that ads +1 luck, which is mistakenly considered a hard point rather than an item bonus. It's a bug but it does allow you to start with 5 luck and still get the perks.

Generally, I'd probably go with

S P E C I A L6 6 5 1 9 7 6

6 strength for carying capacity, 6 perception for seeing things early (and I'd take more perception in the mentioned quest), 5 endurance because you just don't die that often and healing is plentiful, 1 charisma because it's a useless attribute, 9 intelligence because I like being smart, 7 agility because it gives more AP for VATS and that's never harmful, and 6 luck because there's no less than three worthwhile items that provide a luck bonus, so pushing luck higher really isn't a huge priority.



A few corrections, if you'll pardon me.

You need 5 endurance to get the toughness perk and as far as I know, you can have one non-human follower (the robot or Dogmeat) and one humanoid follower, regardless of what your charisma is. All charisma does is essentially allow a few not too useful perks and giving you a starter bonus to Speech and Barter, two very non-essential skills.