Hi all,

I just wanted to see if anyone has had a similar play through and get their thoughts.

After playing a stealth-sniper and a stealth-melee characters, both of which felt very powerful (especially the melee build) I decided to make a charisma based character with no points in combat or stealth perks. With my previous two characters I had mostly ignored settlements so with this character I embraced settlements as well as the Minutemen.

I must say, it has been extremely fun and has resulted in a very rich gaming experience. This character is now level 75 and is my highest level character.

For RP purposes he's an older man around 50 and still in very good health. He has some prewar military experience as an officer. He never received much weapon training but was a natural leader and effective officer. After leaving the military he became a city planner and started an affair with Nora. Yes, Shawn is not his son so he doesn't have a burning desire to track him down. That was mostly a reason for me to just explore around. Even at level 75 this character still hasn't been to the Institute. He just happened to be at Nora's house on the day the bombs fell and used his high charisma to convince the people at the Vault that he was Nora's husband and thus was on the list. It's really too bad for Nate that he was down at the Legion Post that day preparing for his speech.

Combat wise, I've invested in the perks to boost my companions and once I gave them Spray and Pray they became extremely capable in combat. Since the perk prevents them from damaging me with their attacks I don't need to worry about the explosive damage from their weapon. The domination perks like pacify mean that I often have another ally as well. It can be a lot of fun to bring a deathclaw or behemoth to help liberate Quincy. Throw in the mysterious stranger showing up occasionally and it feels like I've got a mini squad going into battle. Oh yeah, I've also outfitted my provisioners with ballistic weave armor and weapons that are either legendary or maxed out gauss rifles so I often have yet another useful ally show up in fights. If it's a tough location with no provisioner in sight I can send a signal and either get some minutemen allies or call in an artillery strike.

Settlement wise this character has become amazingly successful. I've got Sanctuary up to 51 settlers, most of which are well armed and armored so they deal with attacks very easily. It was quite a trick getting the settler count this high. I started out with 10 charisma and waited until after I found some Daddy-O in order to temporarily lower my charisma before I used the You're SPECIAL book to raise my charisma to 11. Then added the charisma bobblehead to get to 12. Throw in 8 points from clothing and another 12 from chems and alcohol and I could temporarily boost charisma to 32 which let me move settlers from other settlements into Sanctuary until it was at 42 residents.

Then came the real trick. I hadn't yet rescued Preston and company from Concord so I went and got them and that added another 5 settlers taking me to a total of 47. The rest have been from similar scripted events such as hiring Sheffield and the Vault-Tec Salesman. I could have it higher if I wanted to dismiss more companions to Sanctuary but it feels more right for Piper and Nick to stay in Diamond City since they both have friends/family and businesses to attend to. My goal was 50 settlers and I achieved that so I'm happy.

For fun a couple I've also heavily armed and armored a group of 20 settlers and then done the temporary charisma boosts to let me send all 20 at once from one settlement to another. Walking with them from Red Rocket to Warwick Homestead and back was a lot of fun. Imagine the look on a group of raiders faces when the PC, a companion, a mysterious stranger and 20 settlers armed with gauss rifles come walking by. We devastated everything in our path. It really made me feel like I actually was the general of the Minutemen.

I wish this capability was better supported in the game though. It was a real pain trying to get the group of settlers organized and sent out as a group. I'd love it if I could designate a squad leader and be able to control the entire group just by issuing commands to him. As it is, I'm glad I did it a couple of times but I don't think I'll be doing it again.

Having a water farm and plenty of stores in Sanctuary means it's a huge source of income and goods. Whenever I show up I can harvest over 6000 caps worth of water and buy whatever I need. Even though I took the crafting perks so I could build settlement stuff I limited myself to only using whatever weapon mods I could buy. It turned out to be not much of a limitation though as almost everything is readily available. At this point I go ahead and craft whatever I want just for convenience. Having all the shops including 7 of the level 4 merchants as well as a trading post for the trading caravans means I never have to leave Sanctuary to buy most things. Occasionally I will make the rounds to other merchants if I want to buy shipments of ballistic fiber or something like that.

This character build has pretty much felt done since level 50 when I was able to get the last rank of Pacify. Now at level 75 I've got something like 25 unspent perk points. I'm debating whether I want to go ahead and spend those points to make him a real gunslinger or not. It's against the original concept of the character, but it's also reasonable to think that after 75 levels of practice he would have learned to be proficient with his weapon. If I don't do that I can't think what else I would spend perk points on except maybe to just raise his SPECIAL stats when seems more immersion breaking than him learning how to use a weapon well.

Has anyone else done a similar build? What are your thoughts.

I always have an Uber character that can sneeze and clear out a room, a few balanced characters that are good at some things, and not at others, and then some Gimped characters. Not being able to faceroll the content changes the way the game is played. It forces me to think about how to approach things and be careful about what I am doing. In taking the time to do these things, I tend to discover more about the game.

Someday you should try an character with an Intelligence of 1 or 2. I don't know if or how much this changes the game this time around, but in earlier Fallouts, it would be a big change in dialogs and how you did some quests.

I've built two non combat type characters so far.. Haven't actually played with them, just created them for the fun of creating. One is a sleazy car salesman type. The other is a really good looking self centered type.. Not really sure how to RP him though. Just be as selfish as possible which probably means that he'd do a really simple story run.. skipping as much as possible just to get his son. He wouldn't actually finish the game. After he discovers the truth he'd just take advantage of the institutes hospitality. "yeah, I'll get to that later."

I did that with my second character who was a melee specialist. No guns allowed. She's somewhere around level 63.

She has gotten side tracked though. I was looking for a good way to role play her low intelligence and I decided that once she killed Kellogg and saw the Brotherhood of Steel flying in she would jump to the conclusion that the BoS were in league with Kellogg. She's been hunting BoS members ever since. It's kinda fun in that she hides whenever a vertibird flies overhead since she's certain that by now they must be hunting for her. One of her proudest achievements was managing to destroy a vertibird with Pickman's Blade while it was landed next to Swan's pond.

At some point I'll have her realize what a horrible mistake she's made and that will probably send her a little further down the road to madness that she's been on.

No. The only thing I limit is the absurd perks like not tripping traps and such for challenge purpose.


My character is very flexible for whatever approach I want to do. No roleplay roleplay stuff since she already has a role: a lucky widow with a lost infant son frozen for centuries.

Ehm...

I've gone for a more techy and warfare high int science and armour /weapon mods maxed out so have highly modded armour and guns but also a smooth talker with high charisma just like to get speech challenges done

I tried doing an all charisma run and it was just boring.