The Idea

I like the wanderer ideal of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but I'm not a fan of having to acquire or use a home for my odds and ends. I love the portable doodad mods, but it's a shame that I have to go back to a home whenever I want to sort through my stuff. I like staying on the move, and I see these traders with their pack Brahmin, and I can't help but wonder why I can't have one of those. That would be very handy.

Possible Features

• A trader, possibly with his own Brahmin ranch, that sells various sorts of trained Pack Brahmin.
  
• As mentioned above, Pack Brahmin and come in various types, weak to strong, with differing amounts of HP.
  
• Stronger Brahmin have multiple bags (since they can carry more), for sorting purposes.
  
• Script to stop Pack Brahmin from following the player into interior cells, forcing them to wait outside until the player returns, then following them again when they do (for balance reasons).
  
• An essential Pack Brahmin can be purchased, the best of the range, but is prohibitively expensive.
  
• Other Pack Brahmin are non-essential, but offer an option (when the corpse is activated) to have the goods they were carrying delivered to any mailbox location that's been discovered.
  
• The Pack Brahmin carry portable goods; such as a bedroll, workbench, reloading table, and campfire. These can be unloaded from the Brahmin temporarily into a campsite.

+1 :goodjob:

I like this idea as well. It'd be great to have another way to store things and would work excellent for those who prefer not to fast travel.

The only thing I don't agree with is the sending the contents of dead brahmin to a mailbox since the point of the mailboxes is to be a courier system between the major cities and it wouldn't make sense for a courier to show up randomly wherever you're at. Instead it would add a consequence to using a Brahmin to store your loot since if it dies, you have to burden all that weight yourself.

That could be made an option though for those that want it, something that could be toggled on/off via an inventory item. So if you want a really hardcoe inconvenience, you can have it, but if you don't want to have to put up with that, you don't have to.

The thing is, the reason I play in hardcoe (and I do) is that it adds flavour to the game, I'm not so much about the inconveniences, hence the features. That's why if a Brahmin dies, I'd at least like to have the opportunity to have the goods sent somewhere so that I could ferry them to a new Brahmin.

It's still a mild inconvenience, but not one that would be considered bad design in context to the original (vanilla) concept of the game. I know some want that, hence an option, but I probably wouldn't be happy if my Brahmin died out in the middle of nowhere, nowhere near a town, and I had to slow-walk (unable to fast travel) to a town that could take a good 40 minutes to get to due to the slow speed of the walking.

Like I said, I understand that would work for some people, and especially it would work for fans of the super-hardcoe mods, the ones that foist inconvenience and scarcity on the player, but not for everyone. So yes, options are good!