I have a few questions for all you shotgun enthusiasts.

First off, do you prefer the Hunting Shotgun or the Riot Shotgun

Secondly, has there been any solid data on how shotguns crit? I remember there used to be a debate about whether or not all the pellets in a shot get a crit if just 1 pellet scores a crit, and thus giving the shotgun a much higher chance to score a crit.

Thirdly, I am looking for suggestions for character ideas for characters that use shotguns a lot. So far I have though of possibly making a character that uses shotguns and explosives while rocking medium armor. Not sure if he should be crit oriented or not.

I much prefer the riot shotgun. I'm unsure regarding whether every pellet crits or not. I usually just go with the "I am there" concept, with little or no background to my player character, with one exception- that he has some kind of military background. I usually use a long- range (sniper) weapon, a medium range (usually assault carbine), and a riot shotgun, with throwing knives and hatchets tossed in as well- and always light armor. Good luck with your build- out.

Hunting Shotgun: Better range, better accuracy, better durability.

Riot Shotgun: High DPS and can effectively shred things at close range, combines with And Stay Back! (Knockdown chance PER PELLET!) and Shotgun Surgeon to make sure the enemies get relentlessly knocked-back into another dimension.

Both of them have the same x1 crit, so it really depends on your build. If you exclusively prefer a sneak range build, the Hunting Shotgun would deliver a more precise payload and better crit in general at the cost of painfully slow reload and generally less awesome... But hey ho, one shot one kill! Otherwise there's no point of using it over the Riot Shotgun.

Second question: I think each pellet does their individual crit (Just like how the http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/The_Terrible_Shotgun in FO3 works), so when you score a sneak attack all of them will crit; otherwise it's a chancy game with x1 crit chance for each pellet with both the Hunting Shotgun and Riot Shotgun.

Third question: I'm running an all crit perks, max Luck max Agility Guns/Sneak build, and I hardly ever crit with Dinner Bell; while I do most of my work with pistols and Sniper/Hunting rifles. So I wouldn't make shotgun/explosive a crit build, just focus on tanking and getting close. The Riot Shotgun does insane DPS/Knock-back anyway, and with the Big Boomer as back-up, you will be just fine.

BUT consider this: The Tri-Beam laser rifle is a sort of shotgun, which has a 1.5 crit chance. It also spread much less than the normal shotgun, but all three beams have a high chance of criting with a crit build. So it might benefit you to consider a crit build with the Tri-beam as a range option, and switch to the Riot Shotgun for close range, so you can get the best of both worlds... I mean, what else are you going to put your SPECIAL points in anyway? You don't need much Strength for shotguns, and I'm pretty sure that if you're wearing Medium Armor you have the best balance option between mobility and DR; so high Endurance would be trivial.

Criticals are calculated per pellet, with the exception of VATS. The same applies for slugs.

That's what I always figured, but for a time there seemed to me some crazy idea on these forums that if 1 pellet gets a crit they all crit with it. I have no idea why that would ever be the case, but some people were quite definite that that was how it worked.

Most likely under that assumption because certain iterations of pellets have damage spread compensation. Certain pellets underperform per shot but game mechanics compensate by making the second shot break even.

The riot shotgun is brutal and with shotgun surgeon and "and stay back!" turns it into unstoppable killing machine. My main shotgun guy uses pretty much a modded hunting shotgun, I like less spread and I can snipe with it and slugs, so bonus. As I recall there was something on the wiki that made me avoid "Dinner Bell", but I cannot recall why atm. As for critting my guy doesn't have max crit or all the crit perks, so cannot really say he crits often or not lol