I'm playing the male protagonist on my initial playthrough. I'd like to play the female next time around.

The male, as we know, is an Army veteran and has apparently seen combat. Presumably he has training and experience with weapons, power armor and survival.

The wife, from what I gather, is an attorney. I would expect her to have high intelligence and possibly high charisma. Otherwise I'm not sure what her skill set would be for surviving in a post apocalyptic world. I would even grant her decent proficiency with small arms but I doubt she'd have any knowledge of heavy weapons like a minigun.

At least initially I think she might be in over her head (but hopefully a quick learner).

Any thoughts or experiences on playing the female protagonist?

Just so there's no confusion: I was more concerned with "Attorney vs Army Veteran" rather than "Male vs Female".

In my opinion, the 'backstory' of the main protagonist(s) is basically irrelevant. I've never really spent much time thinking about it. I think of walking out of the Vault as something of a 'clean slate.'

I'm playing the male protagonist, and my initial character build was pretty high in charisma and intelligence. I suppose it does make sense that the former attorney would be high in these characteristics, but you can set it however you want.

Small guns sounds reasonable. You won't be able to talk or charm your way out of much, regardless of how much charisma and intel you pile on, so might as well make her a sharpshooter.

I am going to play the female as a stealth melee character using the idiot Savant perk with low intelligence to get the most out of the perk.

Maybe the 200 year freeze messed up her brain a little.

Sure...an attorney during the day...but it's up to you to decide what she did in her spare time.

Women work out, lift weights, shoot guns, practice the martial arts, and one doesn't need high charisma to be an attorney. We can see plenty of examples of that in real life.

So in short...create whatever you want.

And for what it's worth, my female's back story has nothing to do with the opening sequence or her being an attorney before the war.

Imagination ftw.

Army reserves, Neighbourhood watch, Elliot-Ness-Style district attorney, JAG, NRA-activist, Military Intelligence, Pro-Athlete, Fitness Freak, Mobster...there are endless of possibilities to combine with a law degree that would make sense for a good wasteland survivor.

I decided my female protag went into the army and was assigned to be a combat engineer (so good building skills), where she met her husband. When she finished her tour of duty, she got her law degree with a G.I. Bill scholarship. Her specialty was legal advocacy for veterans. She is high Str and Cha, good at building and talking to people mainly, but familiar enough with weapons she knows which end to point at the enemy. She's finding herself a good fit for leading the Minutemen, not only for a military background but also a legal one, where she hopes she can establish eventually a proper rule of law for her settlements.

Likewise, since male protag is supposed to be "giving a speech" at the beginning of the game, once can presume he has more skills/education than just what he learned in the army. He might also have a degree, like in poli sci or something. Or not!

On one hand, it's weird they added such specific background to the main protagonists, on the other, people can be multi-skilled and multi-task and have rich histories. I'm thinking about another female protagonist playthrough where she got her vanity-degree from a correspondence course and is no more qualified to be in a court than a teddy bear. Another who was a criminal in her youth, who survived horrible things in juvie, and studied law to find ways to better protect and rehabilitate underaged inmates. And so on.

Likewise with the male protag---what other education he might have, or not, what his upbringing was like, what unit he served in all can result in very different characters. Was he a chaplain, a sniper, infantry, MP, or medic? Etc.

Chinese infiltrator masquerading as a housewife. Lot's of juicy targets around the area, like the listening posts or the nuclear silo

Things escalated quicker than expected, and now that both the enemy and her own country is gone, the psycho has to find her own fun in the post-apocalyptic playground Funny how the least "motherly" of my characters turned out be the only one

Hey, nothing contradicts that. Well, except not being able to speak Chinese to captain you-know-who
And that you can't do anything psychotic. Except murder 90% of people you run into. But that's what every character does

The way the opening story is laid out it is fairly ambiguous as far as the female protagonist goes. It actually seems like she was military as well and got her law degree after discharge.

Think of perks as what you gain through experience in the wasteland, rather than things earned from her life pre-war. I doubt pre-war protagonists of either gender were befriending feral ghouls or recovering health through cannibalism. How she starts is a blank slate. Being forced to survive is what'll give you the extra skills and mutations you need.

First time she did practically the whole game with the 10 mm, gun slinger and gun nut, with the double barrel shotgun and a 38 pipe pistol when ammo ran short. I never much bother with the sneak sniper in any game, but she had a good arm and a stealth grenade does double damage as well.

I played a male first, war vet grunt, and now the female and I definately went with the high INT and CHR route. Small arms only (I assumed her husband showed her how to shoot a pistol). Just kind of went from there.

Oooh! I like it!

I'd like to think that my F!SS was an attorney as more of a way to put her brain to use. She grew up in a spy/secret agent family, and one of her tasks was actually to be a more "domestic agent". Official story is he was put on "burn notice" (not the show). She ended up marrying her high school sweetheart, studied (and struggled with) law, etc. She had about average intelligence because she was more apt to charm people to do things for her than logic her way into places.

I say my character was a JAG. Now they're both military.

One of my female backstories:

A suburban housewife with drug and alcohol problems, part of a pre-war government experiment where they experiemented on teenagers to try to create unaware assassin drones through genetic and cybernetic implants. Always thought she was just an ordinary, miserable housewife, until she picked up a gun and all those subconscious implants kicked into gear...

I figure since both sixes sign up for the draft, she at least saw combat training. At the very least, her husband being a war hero (yup, fraternal post 115) she might have picked up a thing or two about handling fire arms. Everyone from the pre-war era seemed to have had a pipe pistol anyway.

Otherwise, if you MUST go the route the game determines, she does get to learn how the 10mm functions and gets some practice on some rad roaches before stepping out of the vault.

I just use the lawyer idea as a cover for her real job. Counter-espionage. In truth she's a highly trained operative (agility/luck/perception for VATS pistol madness)

I play with a female protagonist mainly because I think the storyline of a woman with her motherly instinct looking for her child seems to form something more poignant. A father looking for his kidnapped child would probably be something like a "Taken" movie.