I'm hoping you have more than just charisma checks. For some things, charisma should be important, like making an emotional persuasion in a grey area, but when it comes to making observations or deductions, it makes more sense to use perception, intelligence, or even some combination of the three. I'm also hoping for perk based dialogue checks, but there may be some limitation in this area due to voiced protags.

Fallout 3 had some of this, although New Vegas obviously blew it out of the water. I don't want so many non-Charisma checks that it defeats the purpose of using Charisma to get ahead in dialog, but being able to use perks and other stats to add some flavor dialog or skip some quest stages with the power of knowledge (ie using Robotics Expert to skip one part of the Wasteland Survival Guide) would be great. I don't think the voiced protagonist would put too huge a dent in it, although they obviously couldn't do idiot dialog unless they wrote it more like Phillip J. Fry than Captain Caveman.

Yeah, I wouldn't want the things you could unlock with Charisma to be bypassed. I guess what I am really concerned about is that I will often make characters that reflect myself, so I will give them decent intelligence but very low charisma. As a result of this, when my character talks in dialogue and I fail speech checks, I actually sound stupid rather than just unpersuasive. While this is sometimes funny, I think having this issue on a voiced protagonist would really irritate me. I'm not sure if this has ever been an issue in Bethesda games to be honest, I played KOTOR recently so I might be getting this from that game.

Looking at the Perk Chart, I'm actually inspired to try to make as non-violent a character as possible. Focus entirely on Sneaking, Stealth, Manipulation and Intimidation. Put a 9 in Charisma right out of the gate.

It looks feasible for once - with us being able to talk enemies into fighting each other, inspire companions like Dogmeat to attack for us (and we get the XP, as has been confirmed), etc.

I'm looking at:

S:1 P:5 E:1 C:9 I:5 A:6 L:1

It makes me REALLY need to avoid straight up combat. Sneaking around enemies, pickpocketing, stealth kills, etc. will be necessary. Really build up companions and my settlements, and eventually be able to talk enemies of both the human and animal variety into leaving me alone. I wonder if non-lethal weapons will be available?

Could make a very interesting first run at the game, since I won't have any fore knowledge to game the system with.

I really hope non-lethal weapons will be available. I think Skyrim had some hints of efforts towards this, like maces that healed enemies but damaged fatigue. NV had some, but they were kinda half-implemented.

As for your charisma build, looks like fun

Something small you might want to consider for the build is that your high tier charisma perks probably won't do much until after you are around level 15 since you need to be a higher level than your targets for them to have a chance of working, so you could comfortably afford to start out with lower charisma and build up as you level. Just something I noticed while I was considering a charisma build.

I considered that. But I don't usually ever get perks like Intense Training, or level up my Specials beyond collecting the bobbleheads. So that will like be my SPECIAL for most of the game. That one last Charisma point is reserved for the Charisma bobblehead. But we'll see.

And it'll just make the start of the game more difficult (and thus more rewarding) when everything has me out-leveled.

gotcha, wonder if it will be very different than illusion builds in Skyrim, useless early but super powerful mid-high levels. I'm hoping they have some good animations for these charisma features.

hmmm, I forgot about them bobbleheads, just rewatch that E3 video to see how many there are.. looks like 20.. curious.....

Exactly. While Charisma should be important in many areas, other attributes should be utilized as appropriate as well. At least, that's my hope.