Need some help. I know I want Small Guns and Speech, but for the last tag, I'm torn between Unarmed, Melee, Lockpick, Steal, and Sneak. I plan to be a quick thinker who talks his ways out of big fights, or takes enemies out from a distance, before they even know he's there. Basically a Sniper with great persuasion skills. But the final tag I'm stuck on. And for my later fourth tag as well. What do you think would be best?

Unarmed and melee are useful early on, but later in the game guns are just a better choice. I never tag either of them. Steal and sneak aren't too useful, there's never really a time when you need to be sneaky and pickpocket people. Doctor is a good choice if you have a poor healing rate, as you can heal yourself faster and also fix crippled limbs as a bonus. Repair, science or lockpick are also good choices. However, you can get your repair and science skills pretty high with books as well.

I always tag small guns and speech.

Small guns, speech, science, big guns, energy weapons, doctor, lockpick and outdoorsman are all nice ones depending on the character you're creating. But really, next time you play fallout, make it an unarmed or melee only character. Makes things tougher in combat, but it's really fun to do if you really base your attributes to a melee class character. It also leaves options open to be persuasive, or a scientist or whatever you like.

Tagging Lockpick will save you grief from reloading and reloading while picking lockers and such. Moreover, I remember important, even VITAL things locked away. I can't say much for sneak - it's good to be in sneak mode behind an npc when stealing from them, but simply being behind them is good enough. Tagging Steal and raising it to 90 or even 75 will get you tons of ammo and money, especially if you buy and steal your money back. You can use it if you just want to plant some ticking dynamite on npcs. Plus, you can get the perks Theif and Master Theif to help raise those skills.

Btw, if you are going to use speech at all be sure to have an Intelligence of at least 8.

Lockpick, outdoorsman, and unarmed (there are some cool quests using unarmed) are some good ones. There are a few uses for Science, and you are likely to get some use out of doctor if you take that. Honestly a lot of the skills in Fallout 1&2 are pretty useless most of the time, I think skill consolidation was the best thing they did in FO3.

Also, for at least your first character, you should take gifted, and increase your INT. I know it makes the game easier, but I still take it every time I play (and have played like a dozen times), I just feel naked without it.

Outdoorsman is actually pretty useless. The special encounters are nice but not essential, and when you're running into them all the time they're not special anymore.

And yeah, it goes without saying, take Gifted unless you're doing some kind of challenge run.

Pickpocketing for ammo and cash is good and all, but you should be overloaded with cash, weapons and ammo later in the game anyway.

Speak for yourself, but avoiding those half dozen Highwaymen when you're level 3 and only wearing a Leather Jacket is quite useful.

^ Yeah that's what I was talking about.

And for example if you're trying to grab some loot to afford that shiny new armor, you want to be able to find the bandits and highwaymen while avoiding the fire geckos and deathclaws.