How about if you role play that Burke isn't even real. That he's all in your head. Same with Moira. So you blow up the Town to make the voices go away.

Blow it up?!? I LIVE THERE!!! Okay... i did it once to see the pretty mushroom cloud

You mentioned that a psycho wouldn’t do it simply because they would kill everyone else another way, but, what a about a particular type of psycho?
I mean, someone that gets off on making things explode would probably get off by making things explode.
Think along the lines of a pyro that digs explosions. Someone like Michael bay.

Another way to look at it is that you are asking what good reason a person could have for blowing up a town.

I think that question is telling, isn’t it? It suggests that most people aren't going to blow up Megaton.
Certainly would explain why it is there still.

From replies I saw on here, when the game was still new, not a lot of people could really bring themselves to do it.
I saw it more as a replay value device.

I just blew up Burke and Tempenny.

Or Stephen King's Trashcan Man.

Fresh out of the Vault, you are accustomed to a decent living. ANd it so happens I get offered a nice replacement if I push one little button. Unlike other people, I'm not a simple shack dweller.

So your reason for slaughtering around 50 people is so that you can have a nice apartment which you don't even know is the reward?
So I take it that if you ever lost all your money you'd set of a bomb on a bus so that you could live in a 4 star hotel then?
Or that you'd bomb a school for a sports car?


Would you be able to live with yourself knowing you killed off around 50 people so that you could have something nice?

Ofcourse someone is capable in a gameing senario ... those people are just little bites of information , I merley spread those bites into bits.

If your seriously pulling guilt trip strings ... then why dont we do any number of things in this world instead of selfishly put our money into gameing for our own enjoyment?

Mr. Burke's amazing voice and dialog persuaded me to work for him. I also needed the trophy.

There is a difference in buying a game and being completely oblivious (at the time) to starving children in poor countries and cold-bloodedly murder around 50 people.

Would I blow up a town full of innocent people tomorrow just to make some money? No.

After a nuclear war, where I had to spend all day, every day foraging and fighting for survival. If I were offered a safe and secure place to live in comfort in those circumstances would I kill a town to get it? Probably.

Especially if Moira Brown lived there.

I blow it up because it's one of Fallout 3's biggest story flaws.

But he doesn't even tell you about your reward. As far as you're concerned, you only hear about money, not a safe new home.

Blowing up Megaton is a typical case of Stupid Evil: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StupidEvil

Edit: Ha! Fallout 3 is even listed on that page under the examples:

If you see a difference , then what was your point of this statement?

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So your reason for slaughtering around 50 people is so that you can have a nice apartment which you don't even know is the reward?
So I take it that if you ever lost all your money you'd set of a bomb on a bus so that you could live in a 4 star hotel then?
Or that you'd bomb a school for a sports car?


Would you be able to live with yourself knowing you killed off around 50 people so that you could have something nice?

To give examples of how far he'd go for the sake of luxury, how many people he'd be willing to slaughter for something nice.

But I do know about the safe new home. Regardless of whether Burke tells you or not, we all know that's the reward. IMO blowing up Megaton to get the Tenpenny suite is a fair trade.

Burke pays, simple as that

Seriously, when you talk to Moira with bad karma when starting her quest theres a Karma option which is just about the pay..

I dont think Bad Karma is "evil" its really just about getting paid and being ruthless.

You keep flip flopping. Are you asking from a role playing perspective? If so, then why do you guilt trip people with a "You would murder 50 INNOCENT PEOPLE for caps???"
Well, I'll answer both.
ROLE PLAYING: Oh, so many reasons. It depends on the person.

Maybe you really really like explosions. Maybe, living in the vault, you've grown up hearing about the great war, and how everything was devastated by nukes. Maybe you fantasized about what one of those would look like. You knew it could never happen, but it was a wonderful thought. And then, Mr. Burke offers to make your dream a reality. Oh yes.

Or maybe, you've been having a really bad day. You're 19 years old, and you have just been forcibly evicted from your home. Your dad has abandoned you, your friend was murdered. You were attacked by crazed security guards and radroaches. And that's before you left the vault. Now you're in a hostile, alien wasteland. It's hot, very bright, there's only open sky where ceiling has been all your life. Knowng the wasteland, you've probably been attacked on the way to Megaton. When you're finally in, everyone looks at you distrustfully, and they all stink. You wind up in the bar, and that's when you see him. Mr. Burke. A beacon of civilization. He draws you in, charming you, saying that you are important for this next task, that you can make the wasteland that much better by wiping Megaton from it's face. He'll even pay you. Yes.

And plenty of other scenarios. The possibilities are endless. They may not be good reasons. They may not be moral reasons. But they are reasons.

PERSONAL REASON: Fun. I don't normally destroy Megaton, for convienence reasons, but it's fun sometimes. Also it lags like crazy in there. And if you blow it up, you get to see a cool mushroom cloud! And Moira as a ghoul! It's not like it's gone forever, I can just load up a game file where it still exists.


If you tell me my reasons aren't "valid", like you seem to be doing, why? Why is it not valid? Because you wouldn't do it? I personally would never blow up an actual town, but this is a game. This is a character that is not me. That's the point.

I'm just trying to make sense out of who would ever do such a ridiculously stupid evil thing, both from an IRL perspective and from a roleplaying perspective.
But when someone so casually goes "Oh I blew them up for a nice apartment " it makes me question their IRL morals.

Anyway, I'm bored of this thread now, I've heard a few good suggestions for why but most reasons are completely incoherent.

I said that. But there's no need to question my morals. I pointed out that I wouldn't blow up a town tomorrow for a nice place to live. But if this were a nuclear wasteland IRL your morals would become a very different thing. When you aren't safe behind your keyboard and instead live in a world where death and starvation are a very real possibility, we would all kill for a packet of crisps. Morality doesn't come into it when it's a matter of survival. So as I've said before, 50 deaths for a safe, secure place to live seems fair.

Blowing up Megaton would result in blowing up my house, and all the special loot, armor, weapons, supplies and ammo i have been saving up the last 2453463984375723658762 million years of my fallout gameplay.

Yeah it does.
Seeing as how Megaton, Rivet City and Underworld never gets attacked and Rivet City has way a way more secure place to live I don't see the point to killing 50 innocent people.
Sure, if you're starving like those people in the film Alive then morality can be thrown out the window in order to survive.
But what survival are we talking about here?
You're fresh out of the vault and have no idea how horrid the wasteland really is, so killing 50 people is not for survival.
And even if you go back after say 20 hours of gameplay then how does survivial come into the mix?
If you were to shoot someone by anger in a settlement and have to fight your way out then yeah, you're killing innocents for your survival in order to get out.
But blowing up a town isn't for survival at all, cause if it's for a nice secure place to live then just go to Rivet City, that way you don't have to slaughter 50 people.

So I think survival is a very poor argument for murdering 50 people.

You know, more realistically, you probably wouldn't be thinking of murdering 50 people. All you have to do, for security, is to rig that bomb to explode. Then you go to the spot and collect your reward. It'd be very easy to just not think about it.

Once you get there it might be a whole other story, of course. Pushing the button, or watching them push the button. Seeing the explosion.The magnitude of what you've just done might hit. Or not. Who knows? I've never blown up a town.

I suppose.
Like in those films about war where there is some hot shot young'un that thinks war is gonna be awesome and then when he first arrive he panics and just wants to go home.
Still, there is a long way to go to Tenpenny Tower, a lot of time to think about what is actually going on, should be hard to not think about it.

Yup. And they'll keep walking, uneasy. Knowing that this a very bad thing to do, in the back of their mind. B-but it's okay! They'll tell themselves. Megaton is a [censored]hole, anyways. You're doing the world a favor, really. Really. And they keep walking. They do it anyway.

And now they're a bad guy!

It's interesting, though. Because even at that point it could go in multiple directions. Maybe they continue to live in denial, making reckless, violent decisions. Maybe the atrocity they commit is a wake up call, and they spend the rest of their life trying to repent. Maybe it breaks them. Maybe they can't live with themself anymore, so they don't. Maybe it hardens them, and as the years go by they grow colder and colder, eventually able to commit all sorts of horrors without flinching. Or something else I haven't thought of.