Is there a mod out there that actually makes charisma really useful besides follower mods? I just cant see why I should invest points in this.

I also feel the same towards speech and barter. I am playing FWE on a harsher difficulty and I still don't see a good point on why I should increase them.

Are there mods that makes the NPC not talk to the player if you have a really low charisma?

For roleplay value?

If you like a harder game experience, consider tagging Speech and two other non-combat skills. Since you picked Harsher settings it sounds like you like a real challenge

I can't remember exactly, but Charisma might be important for Wasteland Whisperer, which lets you tame wild animals as followers. Although, maybe that fits into the followers category I dunno . . . it's pretty appallaing how some skills/SPECIAL's are really just about useless in 90% of the cases. I see some gaping holes in the game design in this regard.

Well Sharing and Caring Companions is basicly a cheat, since you can ask anybody to join you or for their items.

Companion Share and Recruit by Talkytoaster actually depends on the players speach skill for you to get them to join you, and if they like you enough to teach them things.


Most ingame Quests as I'm sure most quest good quest mods, there are Charisma based speach challenges to escape the violent solutions, although speach challenges are just as linked to Luck as they are to Charisma, and since Luck helps alot of other stats and rolls, its alot more useful by far!!

Thank you for the replies. I will just get charisma 6 for the Child at Heart perk and drain my endurance or strength more.

I like harsher difficulty because it makes me feel that I am really struggling for survival. The default FWE settings is still too easy and I was hoping that if I make the game harder then I could finally get some use for bartering and stuff.

I might start learning Fallout 3 scripting so I can make my own perks for charisma.

Arwen's Realism Tweaks makes all stats more important. With a low charisma and barter skill, you get awful deals in stores. With a barter skill of 10 you have to pay 200% of an item's value to buy it (150% in vanilla), and you can only sell things for 25% of it's value (49% in vanilla).

Adding to that the speed at which armor and weapons deteriorates and the scarcity of ammo, being able to get good deals with merchants becomes pretty important.

Edit: Oops, I missed the part where you said you're using FWE.

Don't forget that the newer FWE releases have in-game customization options. I've made my game so insanely hard it's like a blend between Arwen's and a meat grinder. Perfect.

I'm not exactly sure if there are really any mods that focus on charisma as a main deal. It's actually kind of stupid, in a way. It'd make sense for some people to refuse conversation to a player with low charisma, or some quests have a bit of a charisma requirement before you can get into the goods.

I think one of the issues is that this game doesn't really take advantage of dissposition as much as oblivion did. Say what you will about the oblivion speech challenge mini-game, but it did mean that high personality characters would have an easier time, in conjunction with speechcraft, to raise NPC's dispositions. This would also help reduce the price of goods.

Maybe we should look at this from another angle. What is the advantage of having a high Charisma in the real world? The advantage is that you are better at interacting with other people. This includes other people being more helpful, particularly in the sense that you have an easier time getting them to do what you want. You are also likely to be better at inspiring others to perform their best. Furthermore, high Charisma may also make you better at understanding others, that is, give some insights in guessing their motives.

This leads to a central point: If Charisma is to be reasonably well balanced, it needs to be thought into the quest and world design itself, and not so much into game rules. Many of these things are difficult to do without changing significant portions of the game. We could remove perks like Black Widow, Lady Killer and Child at Heart, and let the corresponding dialog be dependent on Charisma. Some quests could also be dependent on the PCs Charisma. For instance, Lucy West may only approach people that seem trustworthy (decent Charisma), or Vance may only teach a certain perk if the player has an insight based on Charisma.

In Fallout 2, your followers could perform some skills for you. Getting a few extra followers were often worth it as they could help you with your weak points in terms of actually being able to use skills aside from shooting up your enemies. Again, this would require significant work, as I'm sure Tarrant and others can elaborate upon. A somewhat easier approach could be to let Charisma improve the performance of your followers. As an example, each point of Charisma could add +10 HP and +1 to each tag skill for each follower, as a measure of them trying harder.


From my point of view, the speechcraft minigame in Oblivion were one of the things that made Personality useless. Even with low speechcraft and Personality you could get the disposition of NPCs high enough to only need slight bribes (or charms) to get what you needed from them. I would prefer a more skillbased system, where disposition (based on past actions and Personality) would set a speechcraft difficulty. If you speechcraft were at the required level (or higher), you would succeed. If not, you would either be unable to get what you want, pay the NPC a large bribe or something similar.

I can and I have.
But yes it was at least something that gave the speech skill some value. I'll be honest and say that I didn't know who Bethesda was until I heard that they bought the rights to Fallout. Everyone said "Morrowind with Guns" so I bought Morrwind to judge for myself. Fast forward to when Fallout 3 actually came out and like everyone else I was dissappointed that some aspects weren't done better, or at least did'nt seem to be influenced by how Elder Scrolls handled similar issues. I was lulled into a false sense of satisfaction when I saw how some of Moiras dialogue had options for Sciencey/Physical characters that I assumed was linked to the players stats. But she seems to be the only one wher this matters. It would be possible to add stat/skill requirements to more NPC dialouge, but most dialouge trees don't have enough branches to make this worthwhile or even coherant in some cases. I suppose you could add charima checks to all the line that have speach skill checks, that shouldn't take too long considering how few there actually are, but again how worthwhile would that really be?