Do we really need charisma in the game? From what I get, unlike Fallout 3, where if you have a high enough Charisma you get extra options to pick in dialougue. It seems that in New Vegas, this is more of your Intelligence and some options you pick in perks. So the only reason I can see picking a medium or high Charisma is to get your Speech and Barter skills up higher, but otherwise, it doesn't come into play in New Vegas. Am I wrong here?

Also from what I gather, Luck is mostly for playing gambling. I have my Luck of 1 right now. I know any companions I have will be weaker, and my % chance for getting criticals is way lower. I am ok with this. This makes the game a bit harder withou increasing the difficulty level for me. When I made my character, I was told not to gamble. Why would this be? So is gambling bascially rigged then? I thought gambling was basically random and not rigged.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

The gambling is indeed rigged, not in your direction......

Charisma is even more useless as you now have speech checks instead of percentage. Luck is important as the higher your luck is the more skill points you get when you start out and your chance to get a critical hit is higher if your luck is higher.

It affects how your companions react in combat. If you have a low CHR, they will sometimes run away after taking a scratch. If it's at 10, they will fight until they die.

ive read that charisma gives armor and damage boosts to your companions. im glad they got rid of the stupid percentage thing since that just encouraged reloading. in new vegas if you skill is to low then tough luck. either use the console and cheat your skill up or come back to that particular quest at a higher level.

nah, maybe in hardcoe, companions will throw themselves at a half dozen rad-scorpions and fight until KO at at least CH4

Gambling is always rigged whether it's in game or IRL. However when your luck is high you have a higher chance of winning a lot of chips and getting comped free stuff like food and armor. Gambling is a great way to make money. I guess a lot of people have noticed that it's hard to make money in this game but I set my luck to 10 and have had no problems (Although finding out there was a luck implant I feel I wasted a stat point.). So yeah high Charisma means that your followers will do more damage and take less damage from enemies. And a high luck effects your crit chance and gambling.

Charisma affects your companions attitude towards you - the higher your charisma the better they do (I think)

Unfortantely I have charisma 8 and have not found any charisma speech checks yet, but I have seen lots and lots of barter and speech speech checks

I don't find luck very handy anymore, I don't gamble in casinos or ever use VATS

I believe that having Charisma of 6 or higher gives bonuses to your follower's damage and HP. It also strongly affects barter and speech.

Luck gives a small bonus to pretty much everything (seriously, everything) as well as unlocking perks like Mysterious Stranger and even causing enemies to fumble attacks (miss) more often.

I just payed a sh**load of caps to have these two raised to get their bonuses.

I'm on my 2nd play through now, Charisma at 1 and Luck at 1, have seen no difference so far, playing on very hard hardcoe.

My char had a charisma of five and his followers would charge into swarms of those mutant wasp mother-[censored] without missing a beat and fight to the death, or at least unconsciousness. Maybe it's different on hardcoe.

I started with a Luck of 9 and 4s and 3s in my physical stats. Then I cleaned ouyt all the casinos and balanced out my characters stats with implants. It didn't even take that long, especially if you're any good with Blackjack and I had just come off a two month stint playing Red Dead Redemption, so I knew how to play and win. Maybe fifteen minutes to clean out one casino...

Charisma is extremely useful for pansy characters. My guy is a pansy. Therefore, I have high Charisma.

i play on hardcoe and my first two characters had charisma at 5 and i never saw my companions run away from even deathclaws on low levels. im thinking its mostly for the damage and armor buffs.

Not sure if you get more skill points out of luck. I have only 2 points in luck and i am a walking wall wit a gun. I just can't win [censored] in the casinos.

In my game (hardcoe and 5CH too) Veronica sometimes got so scared at only seeing enemies from a distance that she ran away a little and crouched holding her head (didn't happen often, though, but nonetheless).

I find Charisma to be the most useless skill in the game, as companions are already godly in this game. Adding a couple armor and damage points to 'em really doesn't affect the game majorly.

Distributing those points to essential stats. such as Agility and Intelligence is probably for the best.

CH seems useless in this game. I should've just poured points into Intel and then raised speech since like others have stated the companions are overpowered and I don't want them around.

My character started at:

S-P-E-C-I-A-L
9-1-9-1-10-9-1


And Its very successful at level 11 so far using melee weapons. I already finished a playthrough with a guns character and this melee character blows the other one away, does twice as much damage and enemies drop twice as fast.

My first character had 70,000+ caps without ever gambling by the time I finished the game so therefore I don't need the luck for slots. I'm waiting for cooky things to happen because of my low luck but so far out of almost 100 hours of playtime nothing yet. I'm about to reach the medical clinic and will put implanets into str, end, and agility immedietly, and as soon as I finish a few quests get the damage reduction implant.


Don't listen to others by making a mediocre character, a jack of all traits. Select something you want to do beforehand and focus directly into it. The game will end soon enough and you can then try a different character that specializes other skills therefore needs other SPECIAL stats invested into.

I played with 1CH/1Luck and had no issues at all with any companion I've tried - they're all gung ho. Veronica would be right up there punching the hell out of things while I smacked them with Oh Baby!

Regarding what you say about her crouching & holding her head - I noticed that if I was far enough away from an enemy, Veronica would do that "crouching pose" - I worked out that this was because she could see the enemies, but considered them too far away (or unreachable) to warrant running over to hit them - the moment I moved close enough to the enemies, she'd charge in. It wasn't to do with her being "scared".

This is on very hard hardcoe.

Charisma is even more useless than it was in Fallout 3, since half the time there is a speech check there is also an option to use some other skill. There weren't nearly as many science/sneak/medicine/etc conversation topics in Fallout 3. Luck does indeed seem to have an enormous impact on gambling. My current character has 9 luck, which makes blackjack pretty much impossible to lose. I've also gotten a 17k chip jackpot at slots without really trying (got me banned right away from The Tops, but hey).

Another thought. The VAs recorded days' worth, no, weeks' worth of dialogue in this game. You know how much effort is put into a Lock Pick check or an exploding head? Far less. It just seems a waste of money to ignore all the effort the writers put into this game.

10 luck + Slots in the Tops Casino + Better Casinos Mod + Casino Unbanner Mod = 3 million legit caps in the space of an hour.

[censored] yeah.

Charisma does seem useless. To me anyway. I wasn't planning on using companions beside just testing a couple out for the fun of it so I went with a 1. Rex still always would suicide run into a mob of whatever he got a whiff of. I also never put anything into Luck. I have it at 2 and I still get Crits left and right because I sneak so often. And since Charisma doesn't effect your interaction with NPCs it seems that much more useless. My Speech is at fifty and that's enough to get just about anyone to do what you want.

hehe, i found agillity to be more worthless. To each his own i guess
Then again, i don't care that much about Silent Running or VATS anyway.

I actually found Charisma to be more useful in this game than in FO3. There are no "Charisma" checks in either game. In FO3 it was all Speech, and there was a percentage so it was VERY easy to go through the game just reloading a previous save (I did this for the Operation: Anchorage during that last boss guy 'cause I couldn't kill him, but my chance of getting him to kill himself was only like 15%. So 20 reloads later and bam, it was done). In this game it's Speech and Barter, with some Medic and Sneak a couple of times. Sure you can just put points into them with a high Int, but why not just put Charisma up to 4 or 5 and start with like 15-20 or so points instead of starting with like 8 and having to put a lot of points in to compensate? I also really like having a high luck because I crit hit all the time. With 9 luck it seems like every 3rd of 4th shot is a critical hit, and this is without the Finesse perk yet.