VATS is a method of adding a tactical side to the battles in a first person shooter with a lineage composed of rather tactical (or so I am told) RPGs. To say that VATS is unrealistic is to ignore the fact that the player's reaction times are remarkably slow due to the control methods used, unless you're the type of person with a good mouse set-up and an extreme mouse sensitivity level.

At least in some part due to the "hardcoe" changes in your mod, I've found that the first thing to go in a firefight is my arm, a stimpack, my arm, a period of time where I'm either hiding or shooting back, and my arm again - generally followed by my life. This is probably because I am not hardcoe enough to withstand the sheer intensity of the hardcoe-ness of your mod, but either way it is very, very annoying. I've found playing without VATS is rather hard when everybody you meet tends to be faster, and a hell of a lot better equipped than you.

In any case, however, it's your mod and your decisions behind it. But please, remember that there are a number of us that are not as hardcoe as you, but enjoy reasonable challenges.

There's always the FWE alternative.


I barely use VATS so having it disabled when arms are crippled is not a big deal to me, but I guess that it could be a feature that would be nice to have toggleable.

Well, it is Arwen's Realism Tweaks .

I believe that when most of us are writing a mod, we write it because we want to use it in our game. I haven't heard of anyone not using their own mod, even if it svcks, and we all know how hard it is to please everyone's tastes when it comes to matters like immersion. Some people just don't agree. In that case, we either make the mod modular/configurable or we just publish what we'd use in our game. You just can't make every variable configurable through :nuke:

Btw, I usually find myself reloading when I am crippled in any limb because it's too much of a pain to deal with it, so personally it wouldn't bother my game :fallout:

VATS has broken-arm penalties, where your chance of hitting is dramatically reduced. Personally, I've found that using VATS with a crippled limb is usually a death sentence because I don't hit much and then just stand there afterward soaking up bullets while the cinematic camera camera finishes doing its thing. I've played a fair amount both with VATS and with bullet-time, and find bullet-time to be a much more viable option than VATS when an arm is crippled.

This of course assumes that VATS is fixed from vanilla, since in vanilla FO3 it was pretty much god-mode, where you only took 10% damage. And if I recall correctly, your mod fixes that.

That said, I like having the fixed VATS available, and don't find it any more immersion-breaking than bullet time, since in real life I can neither stop time nor slow it down. And for me, the immersion in FO3 doesn't come from gunfights, which are (and should be) unrealistic for a number of reasons. The immersion comes from exploration and interacting with the environment, from needing to make smart decisions to survive, and from watching my character progress from an unskilled newbie to badass of the wasteland. Vanilla FO3 really left out those last couple things, and your mod adds them in beautifully.

Thanks for the all the opinions on the way that my Tweaks makes VATS off-limits when you have a crippled arm.

There seems to be way more users who think that having a crippled arm should not prevent you from using VATS.
But there's another issue that I forgot about last night (due to having just spent several frustrating hours in the GECK, trying to make a new quest work):
Using VATS while you have a crippled arm caused a stuck animation problem and this was how I finally managed to prevent it.
Before I changed this, I was getting a LOT of complaints about the animation bug . . . and no one has complained about it since.
So, unless someone can show me a better way to prevent the animation bug, I'm not changing this.

I have yet to play the newer stuff(from 4.0 on) I've been really busy elsewhere for the past month. BUT ! Adding my two cents anyway. There is always the option to haul ass out of an situation you cannot win. That makes me think of the mod as being realistic =)

I have read a point though (assuming its true) that two handed firearms cannot be used, where as a sledge can be? That seems a little out of place. I don't want to propagate other stories however when I personally can't test at the moment. Writing here is easy enough though, only takes a few minutes. Any truth to this?

Although I cannot say I agree with everything in arwens tweaks. She does make it rather option friendly. For now the idea (not having dealt with it yet) no vats when an arm is crippled sounds fair. Plus I tend to pick up a slave or a companion that can cover me as a meat shield lol

Yes, you can use 2-handed melee weapons when your arms are crippled . . . but you will do a LOT less damage AND it will take more whacks to knock someone out.

Again, my focus is not necessarily to make the game more realistic, since this game takes place in an alternate reality. Much of my changes/additions are done to make Fallout a better RPG and to make the game more balanced. Yes, some parts, like my Encumbrance module's Stain, does make the game more realistic . . . but it was mostly done to make the game more challenging and to increase immersion.

Plus I'm doing some things in my new injuries module that is going to drastically alter the consequences of being injured. Not only will you lose HP when a bullet hits you, but you will also receive a wound. I still have a LOT of work to do on this and still have to figure out how to implement many of my ideas . . . so I'm not going to discuss the parts that are not functional yet in my own Beta version, other than to say that my intent is to include an overhaul of my crippled effects/penalties.

This is not directed at you, WhackaMacka, but from what I'm hearing lately in this thread, I'm guessing that 75% of the users of my Tweaks are going to hate my injuries module.

After I am done with my Pack Mentality scripts for my NTFS mod I am thinking of writing a mod that will forbid you to load your game for some minutes if you have been crippled. No more quickloading to avoid it. Want to give it a try? :celebration: :toughninja:

The combination of no VATs or 2-handed weapons with a crippled arm has made some really fun combat stuations for me in the last week or so. I like it the way it is.

Think of it this way: You're character is bleeding hard from the left arm. When you're not in combat, he/she is putting pressure on it with the hand that hold your 10 mm pistol. wobbling around just trying to find a merchant or a stash of stimpacks, bandages, and a mattress to rest on. You're blacking in and out and you find a raider heading towards you. Honestly, would you freak out or slow down time and aim slowly?

Listen people, put up with it. If it's you're only issue with the mod, great, bring it up and ask why Arwen put it into her mod. Don't constantly complain about it and bash her for it. It's her mod that and she has been courteous enough to give it to the public.

Wait...Am I late on this one? Crap.

Anyway, I'm not sure if the injuries will be simplified or made even harder. Hopefully with each injury there will be different ways to heal it...If you heal it with something you can find easily, you would have to sleep for a bit in order for it to heal up, though this could be aggravating in combat. MMM epically with this. But I'm sure it's almost complete and it's late so...Forgive my...erm...outbursts.

Calm down Arwen. I think you created a great mod, and thanks for making it. The internet is a harsh place. Troll or no troll, you're going to get very bad feedback. You're going to have to have tougher skin.

I've played with Arwen tweaks for about 2 days now, and I can tell you one thing. It favors the thinking, more strategic player.--those who pick battles and chose battles, and those who know when to run away. I use a lot of frags and Mines to take on raiders. Raiders are smart enough to use cover now too, but I don't know if that's an artifact of Arwen's tweaks or one of the other mods i'm running. Enemies aren't going to coming running towards you blindly, which makes mine use a little harder.

It definitely DOES not cater to all the John-rambo players out there. Don't get me wrong. If that's your playstyle, then you a right to demand it (this is a game). Just don't play Awren's tweaks because it's not going to work.

The only thing I don't like about her/his mod is that the Player's selling price for items are way too cheap (my barter skill is pretty low BTW). I sold a mini nuke to trader for 7 caps, and the trader listed his sell price for the same nuke at 450 caps. A mark-up of that many thousands of percent is completely unrealistic and very immersion breaking. There are laws of economics to consider. I can understand the barter skill element here, but even a child is smart enough to realize when he's being ripped off. The cheap selling/trade-in prices do make that game feel that much more desperate, and becoming rich so easily in the vanilla economy was almost game-breaking. I'm glad you addressed this this issue, but rare items like mini nukes should cost a little more than 7 caps regardless of the barter skill and charisma rating.

I'm not upset at all and never was upset with Hattix . . . I was just tired and frustrated at the time, and the harshness of some of his comments were hurtful to me. Plus I'm a bit sensitive about my language issues (comes from being treated like I was slow by teachers who just didn't get that there was nothing wrong with my intelligence . . . other than the fact that my brain works rather differently . . . so I learn and perceive things differently). I'm as tough now as I'm ever going to be . . . when you're wired the way I am, there's like no way to be less sensitive. The best I can do is not respond until I get my emotions under better control. OK?

And thanks for comments about the way my Realism Tweaks are not for Rambo-Players. And the Raiders are smarter due to my Smarter AI changes . . . which is VERY intentional (I put a LOT of work into making all the NPCs perform better during combat).

As to my Bartering changes: Charisma controls your initial Barter skill, and Charisma has always been one of the most neglected SPECIALS, in that most players don't put more than 3 points into it when they are distributing their initial stat points (and hardly anyone selects it as a tagged skill). This is because in the default game, having an additional point or two in Charisma didn't make much difference at all. And the same is true for adding additional points to Barter when you level up . . . Barter was like the last thing to add point to. I wanted to change that.

Is it realistic to have to pay 3.5 times more what an item is valued at, and then only receive 1/10th of its value when you want to sell it? No, not at all . . . but this is a RPG, and it is not supposed to be a real life market simulator. In real life, when I go to a shopping mall, most merchants don't give me a better deal just because I'm friendly and perky. The most likable shopper and the nastiest shopper pretty much pay exactly the same price. But then again, most people do not shop where a bartering system is used. But when I go to my local Farmer's Market, where some of the farmers and craftsmen know me, I do often get a much better deal than the average tourist.

But I do feel that I overdid this a bit, and I have been working to make Barter more balanced. In v.4.2, as part of my Gender Differences, I made Barter a bit less harsh (but you had to be playing as a female character to really notice the change). In version 4.9, I've balanced it out quite a bit:
At 10 Barter:
Buy: females will have to pay a 185% markup for goods; and males will have to pay a 200% markup (was 230% and 240%). [default was only a 50% markup]
Sell: females will only receive 20% of what an item is valued; and males will receive 25% of the items value (was 14% and 9%). [default was 49% of value]
At 100 Barter:
Buy: females will still only have to pay a 5% markup for goods; and males will now have to pay a 20% markup (was 5% and 15%). [default was a 10% markup]
Sell: females will now receive 65% of what an item is valued; but males will receive 70% of the items value (was 50% and 45%). [default was 90% of value]

You may have noticed that female characters still receive a Bartering bonus overall. But in v.4.9 this is being done a bit differently. In my earlier versions (since v.4.2) females had a 10% buy bonus AND a 5% sell bonus . . . in v.4.9, females now have a 15% buy bonus, BUT males now receive a 5% sell bonus. This was done to help balance out the fact that male characters generally as stronger, so they can carry more stuff . . . which results in males selling more items and also buying more . . . so this should keep the average male characters' wealth more inline with the wealth of the average female character.

I have no idea how you come up with these ideas, but that sounds good!

Wow...I had no idea how deep the little things were in your mod. Also, note to self, do not get nimble when you have 3 strength. You will only be able to carry 3 pounds. And since you mentioned that males would normally be stronger so the female characters would have better deals with merchants in order balance the barter system, I'm a bit confused. 90% of my characters have been weak and nimble, so the idea that my male character gets less of a deal than a female makes me scratch my head. does this mean you have (or plan) to give bonuses/disadvantages to the six the player is? Like races in Elder Scrolls.

Or am I just saying random ideas that pop into my little brain :blink:

Povuholo: Well I do have a pretty strangely wired brain. I think most people will agree that my current version makes Barter too harsh for low level characters, so this should make most happy . . . at least as far as Barter goes (I hope).

Mooguy: My Gender Differences have been part of my Hard-Core module for quite a while. Go http://amito.freehostia.com/Fallout/Arwens_Hard-Core.htm#gender for all my current differences.

Read through all the Arwen's Realism Tweaks sections on Arwen's site, you'll be reading for an hour.


Also I guess that with the new script that damages NPC equipment when they die the Enclave weapons will be less valuable? I find that before doing the quest that adds Enclave troops all around the wasteland caps are pretty hard to come by (as they should be), but once you get your hands on all those plasma/laser pistols and rifles that they all carry and sell those it gets a whole lot easier.

I was looking at my load order....nothing wrong per se....but I was wondering should ripno go in the middle of MMM and yours? MMM / RipNo / ART ?

Forgotten a bunch of stuff as I work on other games and projects. =/

With v.4.9, nearly every body armor (but not helmets) that you loot off dead NPCs will be in much worse condition. But my changes work on only a small percentage of the weapons . . . only the ones that are equipped, but not flagged as 'dropped.' It's not a perfect solution, but my method involves only a few lines of code. Plus when my injuries module is released in v.5.0, you’re going to have to purchase more medical items, like bandages . . . so I figured that I better get my Barter changes more in line with my other recent changes.

How many different types of medical supplies will there be added for the injuries module? If you have an idea of that at this point. So there's bandages, and I assume something else to heal crippled limbs instead of using stimpaks for that?

Did you have anything in mind for vanilla items like medical braces?

I really don't know yet. My new module is still in very early beta (actually more like alpha), and it is currently on hold . . . until after v.4.9 is released. I'm still sorting out my first-aid menu and trying to set up a config menu . . . and making menus is still not easy for me. Things were going pretty well until I tried to add key binding . . . which I'm currently stuck on, since this is something I've never attempted before (I can make a key bind, but I can't seem to get the key do open my menu).

At this point, the only new item you have to buy are bandages, but I'm going to be creating a number of other items eventually. The healing is still being tested, but you will definitely be needing more stimpaks, due to both my increased injuries (like wounds) and changes in the way first-aid is administered (like the way that I separated the healing effects of stimpaks. You can either use them to heal an injury, or to restore some HPs . . . so you will need two if you want to do both). Your body will slowly regen HPs, and repair some minor injuries . . . but not nearly fast enough to keep up with the amount of of HPs loss in combat. And there are still braces to partially restore crippled limbs.

I have no idea how involved I'm going to get with this, as it will depend on how difficult it is to implement my ideas. My goal is to end up with an injuring/healing module that is a LOT less involved than Real Injuries, while making combat result in a greater variety of injuries. Plus I'm going to make armor a factor in how easily you are injured. What I don't want to end up with is a tedious process of constantly having to administer first-aid (but I haven't really figured out how to do both yet).

I have no idea how all that works either. I know you use(d) the bullet time mod, have you looked at how the FOSE version triggers the bullet time there?

I've looked to they way it was done in the Bullet Time mod, but I still cannot figure this out. Part of the problem is that my bind key has to open my main injuries menu (not toggle it) and Bullet Time uses a bind key to turn the slower speed on or off. I'm probably going to be redoing most of my injuries module from scratch, as my beta is pretty much a mess from trying out so many different things in so many different way. It really needs to be cleaned up before I do try to do any more with it. But that will have to wait for a while.

Right now I'm trying to wrap version 4.9 up. I looked into disabling my Crippled Weapon Penalties, based on when the Operation Anchorage simulation quest is running. I could add that to my GOTY patch, but my patch requires all 5 DLCs, so that will not work for users who only have OA. So I added the ability to toggle on and off the "not being able to equip 2-handed non-melee weapons when an arm is crippled" part in my in-game Options Menu. Which is probably the best way to handle this (at least for now).

I've used this sequence to capture a bind key being pressed:

;Bind key processing	if (iBindKeyTrigger == 0)		;Ignore Bind-Key if already triggered (reset this when leaving the menu system)		set lKeyPressed to GetKeyPress 0		if lKeyPressed == lMyBindKey			Set lKeyPressed to 0			set iBindKeyTrigger to 1			ShowMessage MyMenuSystemTopLevel		endif	endif

My current character has been going for 50 hours now, and thanks to the reduced XP feature with the default settings I'm only level 12 so far.

Isn′t it awesome
My current main-character has been going 44 hours for her level 11 now.
While my newer character has had 22 hours and is scraping along level 6, getting in extreme trouble with the main-quest.
Really, he doesn't stand a chance against a single Enclave Theta Soldier.Poor chap.