I strictly roleplay most of my characters with their own specific histories, personalities, motivations, etc...and all the stuff I do is within the limits of that personality

I think his argument with playing the character he wanted being difficult to implement was that the game didn't allow you to hold on to skill and perk points. You had to spend them immediately. I found myself preventing leveling up a few times because I wanted to have that 1 more point in Perc or Agi to be able to take the perk that I wanted.

I do both, to an extent. My first time through the game will be played basically straight, with my character making the descisions I think I would and using any old equipment I come across. I might do this a second time making oposite choices just to see what happens.

Then, when I feel I know the game and the roleplaying possibilities it offers, that's when I start to specialise and enforce gameplay limitations on myself, such as using only food to heal or just using certain weapons/armour. I just go with whatever I feel fits the character I've created.

First playthrough I'll play as is and go with my usual morally grey character, I wont kill you for fun but if you have something I need......well thats the (Fallout) world we live in.

Mostly I limit my self in what weaponry I travel with, one sniping weapon, one pistol (silenced), one AR or shotgun for close encounters and an emergency blade, this is to try to avoid the way I used to end up carrying around an arsenal of weaponry.

I tend to play the good guy. I always end up feeling guilty if I do something bad. I try not to shoot peoples faces off if I dont have to, unless Im feeling vengeful anyway..

I find it interesting the parallels in playstyles between tabletop roleplaying and videogame RPGs.

I grew up with tabletop gaming (my Dad got me into it at an early age,) and I've noticed most players fall into a couple of different categories. We'd always have one guy who would basically be playing an idealized version of themselves - he'd create essentially the same character in every game we'd play and go for the same priorities when building his characters. Then we'd have the... "my character wouldn't do that" players (for lack of a better term off the top of my head.) These guys would spend a lot of time creating elaborate backstories for their characters before the campaign even started - often without much thought to the rest of the party or campaign setting. These guys would start off with a very complete picture of their characters from the get-go, tended to roleplay in first-person ("I do this" as opposed to "my character will do this,") and put a lot of focus on what their character would or would not do - it was largely up to the GM to provide proper motivation to their characters to go in the direction intended.

My preferred playstyle was to go in with something of a basic idea of my character, but allowing room for that concept to grow during the game. I've noticed over the years that characters tend to evolve as you play them - within three or four sessions they've often developed a bit of a mind of their own and it's not always what you'd planned on. (For instance, in one of my current D&D campaigns I do with my friends I had created a Dwarf Thief that I'd built specifically for dungeon-crawling. Kind of a self-styled "Gentleman Archeaologist." But a lot of his personality traits didn't evolve until I'd sort of grown accustomed to the character. I'd started with one concept but a lot of the things that define him now as a character weren't traits I'd come up with prior to playing him in-game.) I also take a bit of inspiration from Improv, so I'm likely to take more of a "Yes, And" approach than just saying "my character wouldn't do that."

So for example my approach is that I decide what I want my character to do, and then it's up to me as a player to supply to the motivation for why my character would want to do that. If we, as a party, need to go explore a Haunted House because that's the scenario our GM designed for us in that session - one approach is to think "my character wouldn't want to go in there, the GM now has to work around my motivations and give my character a reason to go in there." Another approach is to think "I want my character to go explore that house, so let's think of a reason for him to do that." And the third approach would be more along the lines of "I want to explore that house, so that's what I'm going to do."

So I've always thought it's interesting that these same (kind of arbitrarily-defined) playstyles still carry over into these sort of videogame RPGs. You've got the players who just play the game as essentially "themselves," without really thinking of their character as much separated from themselves. You've got players who will come into the game with their own backstory already created (and are likely to make use of Alternate Start mods or rail at the more defined backgrounds for their characters in their games.) And then my approach (I am aware that I'm characterizing my preferred playstyle as optimal - but there's a pretty clear bias there, and it's an approach I'm more familiar with,) tends to be more about filling in the blanks where they're presented as I go along. So I know my character will be married with a child when I start Fallout 4 - so my character concept is going to be built around that, for instance. I'll start with that as a basic foundation and go from there as I play the game and make organic choices.

I don't think there's any inherent values to place one approach over another, mind you. One's just as valid as another, and I've enjoyed playing with other players who take all manner of approaches that differ from my own philosophies on the subject. I just thought it was an interesting parallel - and I can imagine this is one reason I could see it being difficult to balance a videogame RPG with all of these playstyles in mind. You have one game that everyone's going to be approaching in pretty wildly different manners, after all.

I played a lot (too much) back in the 80's while I was in college (2nd Ed D&D mostly). One thing that your character did have to follow, whether you really wanted to or not, was your character's alignment. If you're Lawful Good, and kill some guy for a nice looking sword, the DM would lay the hammer down on you. So there was playing 'in-character' and also playing 'in-alignment' that you needed to follow. I do see myself generally doing the same in TES and FO games, even unintentionally.

I don't wanna get off topic but I'm curious, how would laying that hammer down work, how are you punished? Is it just the DM says hey cut it out, like informal, or is it somehow built into the rules of the game? Sorry I know very little about tabletop, or pen & paper, whatever, see I don't even know the right terms .

I generally dont lie in my first playthrough, so If I come across an encounter where i find a guy running away from his wife (divorce) and then I find the ex wife and she asks me if Ive seen her lousy fiancee Ill say yes and point the way he came, even if it means death for him.

I pretty much play to my characters strengths. But I do everything. Stealing murder and all that and then the good things

I'll be setting a lot of self-imposed rules. It's a Fallout game, and while Bethesda is good at visually creating a bleak and hopeless atmosphere, they're not especially good at making the gameplay match that. Bethesda just doesn't challenge players, ever. Remember dragons? I remember watching Skyrim previews thinking that each fight with a dragon, especially early on, would be a harrowing, life-threatening experience. They did a great job visually, the dragons were some of the most beautiful in any game to date, but they were just giant lizards that you could wreck with little to no effort. In Fallout 3, bullets just didn't hurt like bullets should hurt. Even on 'very hard' the problem isn't really solved, because it makes no sense for you to suddenly be vulnerable to high velocity lead when everyone else in the world treats bullets like paintballs.

...tangent.

Anyway, my restrictions:
1. No fast travel unless absolutely necessary.
2. Remain in-character. No killing someone for his Awesome Shotgun of Boom if I play a good or neutral character.
3. Dead is dead, though only if the death is something that I view could reasonably happen "in character." Deaths due to glitches and poor programming won't count.
4. Eat, drink, sleep. Even if there isn't a hardcoe mode... though there should be one.
5. Limited loadout. I will bring one large weapon, one to two small sidearms, and a melee weapon. I won't be packing ten different flavors of assault rifle, because that's just impractical to carry around.

Interesting results. I thought it would be a little bit more like 70/30 for playing it as it is. That said I think some people did not really understand what I meant byj setting rules and limits to your character etc, judging by what they wrote.

I always start by just playing the game, no limits. But eventually, after a few characters, dead-is-dead is a go-to choise for me.

Edit: Also, can't vote, because it depends on my current playthrough and character. The answer is both.

Well, i play as if there was only one life in game (that is hard considering that game is pretty lazzy scripted in some places and badly written mods can get you killed too).
Sometimes i ressurect people if they just died and still have all the limbs on them (i probably should use some mod to make it more immersive).
I never use fast travel ever, unless it is like in Skyrim, where you can pay people to take you somewhere (btw i have not finished skyrim, because i got too bored, but i plan to do it with cheats).
And so on ...

I had to make that rule too, because it is almost impossible to avoid those things.

Btw i currently replay fallout vegas with a mod that slows leveling by 2 times, it is pretty cool, only bad side is that you sometimes get not enough skills to open some looks, but they never got anything good in them so that is fine. Combined with one perk per levle, makes you actually look forward to level ups, in contrast to vanila version where it is almost a bad thing.

Is there anyone here besides about ten of us that play Fallout?

*Voted 'game as it is', though I'm not exactly sure ho that was meant.

I obviously meant the whole series, not just the first game.

And by setting rules and limits to your character, I basically mean strict heavy role playing, where if you have a very specific character, you won't allow him to do certain things even if very useful options are available to them.

OR, also for example (somewhat along the same lines) if you think something is overpowered or what not, you just tell yourself, I'm not going to use that because it makes me overpowered and I choose not to use it, so I limit my character.