I ve seen Styles and several others say that the old fo leveling system may help with overall game balance a lot.

Now my question is, but not limited to............. If skills maxed at 300........... Say you can get 300 lockpick then there were locks to pick that needed 300 skill? Im guessing yes.

How many skills could you max out? For me I like 100 in guns, lockpick, science, and speech at least. Would that still be possible with the old leveling system?


What was the level cap, and is it reachable?

Any insight would be great. I m just trying to fully understand it, and how it may help new fo be a better overall game.

With the 101+ skill caps I don't think there are any hard caps to anything, it's all decided by character skill.

This is my idea of how the lockpick system could work as I don't know the full details of how the 1st gen Fallouts were.

So with 100 in Lockpick you'll be decent enough at lockpicking but you'll break several picks and might even break the lock if going for a stronger lock while at 300 all locks will be opened far more easily. (this removes the minigame though.)
So it's not about "At X you can do Y" it's more about "At X you're this good at doing Y".

So take an easy lock, it requires 1 to 100 in Lockpick skill.
At 1 to 100 it's all decided by % of chance to pick the lock.
At 20 Lockpick you'll have 20% chance to pick it.
Once you go above 101+ it's 100% chance to pick the lock.

Now a medium lock requires 50 to 150.
If you have 40 in lockpick your chance at picking the lock is 1% (Always 1% on all locks).
So when at 100 you have 50% chance to pick the lock.

The amount of times you can try on a lock depends on what lock durability it has and your skill.
A character with 7 lockpick will most likely break a very hard lock on the first try.
So the lower the skill you have the more damage you inflict on the lock if you fail to pick it.
While the higher the skill you have the less damage you inflict on the lock if you fail to pick it.

Same thing for just about everything else.

A stimpack requires 80 to 160 Medicine to craft.
If at 80 then the stimpack will be low quality and not heal as much while one at 160 will be perfect quality and heal more than standard stimpacks. (still not as much as super stimpacks.)
At at 160+ you get a % to create two stimpacks instead of one.
So at 300 you might just craft 3 quality stimpacks for the price of one.
You can still craft a stimpack at 30 in Medicine but you only have 5% chance to craft one and it will be a crap quality stimpack too.

That's the way I figured a 300 skill cap could work.

Still, it's not a requirement to bring it up to 300.
300 costs a lot of points.
So stopping at 200 or 150 won't harm your character too much.
You'll be really good in that skill but you will still have the occasional fail moment.
It's just that 300 will mean your character is an absolute expert in that area and will be successful no matter what he/she does.

The older Fallouts' 300 cap was very unnecessary as it didn't really do anything and was by far too hard to get to.
Changing it to this could increase the 300 mark's potency.

Why we consider the older Fallouts skill system to be superior though is that Tag skills are more important with the "1:2 2:2 3:2 ratio" while untagged skills go by "1:1 2:1 3:1 ratio."
It means that we won't get maxed characters as it will require a [censored]load of skill points to achieve this.
Tagged skill will be easier to reach 200 with while untagged skills are best to leave at 100.
It will allow for greater specialization and smarter skill point allocation.


Aaaanyway.
Fallout 1 lvl cap 21. skill cap 200
Fallout 2 lvl cap 99. skill cap 300
And I mostly reache around 150 in all of my three tagged skills and then 100 in one or two others.

were you able to come close to level 99 in fo2 before the ending events in game?

No, you definately never needed at 300 skill in anything. In fact it would be a waste to do so, and I've never seen it done.

The way it worked is based on PnP Role Playing games, and can be simulated with two 10 sided dice - set one die to be the 10's, and the other to be the units.

For a basic test to pass, you need to roll under your skill level. So if you wanted to say use Doctor on yourself and had a skill of 43%, you'd need to roll under 43 to succeed.

This caps out at 95% - if you'd have a better than 95% chance to succeed, then its rounded down to 95%.

In practice for most skills there's a bunch of extra things thrown in. If you were lining up a shot you might get a bonus or penalty for your weapon type, range, for the amount of light,, and a penalty if you were doing a called shot (or VATS as most folks have renamed it now).
So you'd take your skill, take any penalities, add any benefits, and then look at whats left - again if its above 95% you round it down to 95%.

If you were using lockpicks you'd get a benefit from using a set of lockpicks (you don't need lockpicks to pick a lock, but it helps), and a penalty for the difficulty of the lock. Again, to a max chance of 95%.

So no matter how good your skill is, you never have a better than 95% chance of succeeding.
In practice, only fighting skills benefited from being over 100%, and even then any points over about 150% were wasted (even lower if you've got fast shot and/or arent targeting), especially as in FO2 the more you go over 100%, the more each % costs in skill points.

As I said before, I've never heard of anyone in the course of normal play having 300% in anything (Note the words normal play - in Postgame play in FO2 you can get 300% in everything if you locate a certain item).

(Note, there are exceptions to this in computer usage - locating certain information in some computers just checks for a minimum skill level of a certain skill, not a skill roll)

More like 20-30 depending on your build and that's if you've done every quest for said build. You got most of your xp from quests.

The old skill system isn't like fallout3/NV skill system. There was no need to max anything out at 300% in fallout1/2. LIke it was stated, fallout1/2 system is based on dice rolls, probability the higher the skill more of a chance you are likely to succed at using selected skill and less of a chance of failure. So no there is no 300% locks. Best way I can explain this and from my limited understanding is this: Using a computer terminal in fallout3 you have to have 25 skill points 50 75 in order to be able to hack it. In fallout1/2 is more like 25% it'll take 1/100 tries to access secret information on the terminal is the best way I can explain it. Fallout1/2 skill system was wierd in my opinion 100% does not mean 100%. You could have 100% in certian skill but in reality its only 80%, I never understood the math behind the skill system.

Yes that is possible in the old leveling system guns lockpick science and speech, that's 4 skill sets thats about as many could get to 90-100% at a high level. I'd say you could max out 4 skills in the old leveling system, except I wouldn't call it "maxing out". Some skills in these games it was pointless to go 100% as it was adquet at 60-75%.

Others have already explained it far better then I ever could.

If you are worried you will need 300 to be able to unlock things in the originals don't. The originals also had lock picking kits :celebration: They give you a big boost as long as you have them.

So the main point is that it was harder to be good at almost everything, because you needed more and more ex to raise skill levels?

Like once you get a base character down early, then you ll only have room to really specialise in a few skills as you level higher. Is this the point you guys are trying to make?

And would it really balance real time combat much?

Turn based was pure stats. Real time even with stats involved........your actual video game shooting skill plays a big part in it now.

Oh I forgot to mention the tag system, tagged skills leved up faster because 1 skill point counts as 2 skill points when you level up your tag skill if I remember correctly, I think thats the balance people are looking for... Untagged skills took more skill points so thats why it was difficult to make a jack of all trades character.

It'd be implemented better if things like combat had more dependence on character skill, like make the sway much more extreme if you dont reach the skill level.

Perhaps also have auto aim play a bigger part when your skill is much higher or better vats %'s up till max range.

It is the point I am trying to make. If you are worried it will don't work for real time, don't be. It works for Fallout Tactics. Only problem with Tactics is that it is not a RPG and skills like speech arn't that important.

Needing more and more xp to go up in skill helps create a specialised character.

No, I wouldn't say so. There are certain quests that can only be done a certain way, and certain quests that are only for certain character types, but there's enough combat to satisfy any XP needs. However being a bit of a generalist does help - throwing those extra XP into Lockpick might just help later on

The advice in the fallout 1 Manual was Specialise in the early levels, generalise mid game.

You can see this working in the Fonline fan made game/mod for Fo2.

For long range skills, it would eliminate most "player" advantage rather than "Character" advantage (there's still a gain to be had with good tactics, weapon choices etc), but if your small guns is only 15%, then you will not hit the broad side of a barn at half a pace, whereas a character with 150% small guns will hit the cowbell of a brahmin from a kilometer away whilst in fog.

However for Melee as the reviewer on NMA for fonline noted, it doesn't really work at all in real time.