Hello guys and gals, I was wondering what sort of non-combat options a particularly poor shot could make use of? Certainly things like more speech, karma, or skill checks would be nice, but that's not all I'd in search of. Things like repeatable quests where you could get by without firing a gun, and a "surrender" option would be nice against people like slavers or the enclave (I don't think raiders would listen, let's make use of the Sprint mod).

It'd be great if one could somehow craft a game where you at no point have to kill someone, but that could be hard given the nature of most of the quests in the game. How close can we get?

There have been games like Myst, Riven and Rendevous with Rama that required lots of reasoning and little to no jarhead swaggering, so it is possible to do. I even liked the part of Rendevous that let me use the hexidecimal functions of an old calculator to solve quests. Hadn't used that since machine language training. I can't believe it went over well with the FPS crowd though. Even for me, enrelenting puzzles are not my dream of the ultimate RPG. Sometimes the sword IS the best solution to a Gordion knot and I want to blow stuff up and move on.

I like a mix of guns and plotting. Quest mods are my favorite, and I think that they are the most difficult to make well. Unfortunately, even the best quests are generally interesting only the first time that you run through them. six and violence have more repetitive appeal to the average player.

Oh, it certainly can be done, but fallout 3 hasn't.
Yeah, I suppose in many cases combat is pretty unavoidable, but, for example, why can't there be more "The Replicated Man"s and less "Go here kill that"s? If I need a few caps my only real options are shoot people until they die then take their things, or do a quest where I shoot people until they die and get some sort of reward! Can't I set up a shop, ask somebody to shop-keep it, and then sell things at the outrageous prices the other merchants get away with charging? Is there really only one person in the game who needs a letter delivered?

You certainly can. Open up the GECK and start making them.

Surrendering to the slavers will make you a slave. Surrendering to the enclave will probably get you killed since you would not be considered a 'pure strain human'.
My Vault 64 mod that I am making is more puzzle oriented with 'no' killing involved in aquiring the vault.

One of the devs at Beth did it with a character he made, but I do not have a link to the article. He mostly had his character run away. You have to kill the cockroach in the Vault, unless you use an Alternate Start mod, of course. If I was trying to do this I would sneak and run away. If you used something with the Chinese Stealth Suit technology so you were very stealthy and basically invisible you could avoid conflicts with the Enclave, etc. The MQ doesn't actually require any killing. The big robot takes care of that and you could sneak your way through RR and you don't need to kill the Enclave in the Taft Tunnels and you can sneak through everything else. So, I think you could pull it off. You could be primarily stealthy and then whatever you wanted. Science-y or Charismatic or whatever you wanted your character to specialize in. And then you could pick and choose whatever other quests you wanted to take based on outcomes. Also, you could travel with a companion to do killing for you if you needed that. Although that might get you into more trouble actually.

Worse than that, the Enclave only turn up in the wastes after Raven Rock- at which point you're Public Enemy #1 and potentially someone out to massacre the Capitol Wasteland with Eden's FEV for all they know.

I don't remember any real combat in the Myst games, i missed Riven though i played the rest, at most it was things like pushing a button and something happened elsewhere and maybe something died as a consequence. Of course its been ages since i last played any of the Myst series. I'd not mind a quest with no combat at all, i think To Sleep Perchance to Dream has no combat but somethings die when you pull levers but thats the only mod offhand i can think of. Plenty of mods out there to help with the stealth approach or use Anchorage's Stealth suit.

I've played a character that gathered quite a few caps just by scrounging and selling stuff. I snuck along behind an Outcast patrol right out of the Vault and picked over their victims focusing on high return low weight salvage. Without mod-added weight to ammunition you can carry unlimited ammo and there is always a market for it. Vendors don't have unlimited cash though, so that approach requires a sneaky, nomadic gameplay to gather many caps from different merchants, and you have to be cheap enough only use what you find. I made an exception for buying .308 ammo and sniper rifles for repair but I never bought armor.

I'm working on it as part of a mod I'm trying to get to alpha, only problem is my dialogue editor has always caused the GECK to crash as soon as I hit New Topic or whatever the button is.

Rama gave me nightmares way back when. That was the one with the bird thing, right?

There's a lot of old games where you used your brain rather than a trigger finger, which is what arcades were used for. Whatever happened to point and click games? And even in the original Fallouts, quests that took place in the cities involved talking. Oh, I remember one game where everything was made of clay. I think the animators used 2 tons of it. But yeah, no guns in that.

As for Fallout quest mods, start with a Note Easily Missed. But crafting the whole game by a mod, making it so that there's more options would be difficult. So many quests, Lots of variables to change and to add, just in the main story it's self.