Even though I completed FO3 last year, and am probably half way done with New Vegas, I remain clueless of certain things.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that I have no clue about dialogue benefits compared between Speech, Perception, and Charisma.

The only thing I know is that a lot of screenshots of Fallout games show that your first three dialogue choices vary, but it's a choice provided, often influenced by these attributes. I'd like to know everything there is to know about all the attributes that affect options in dialogue. If I am missing something, please let me know.

In FNV; Perks, skills, and SPECIAL all ended up with dialog checks, which was pretty cool.

In FO3, iirc it was only based off your speech skill (and was % based vs FNVs pass/fail)

I like the former, because it makes your character feel more... Complete, and opens up more dialog, while not necessarily having to persuade someone to do it.

Ex: Just because your PC is a window licker who can't spell his own name, he's a savant when it comes to guns, and is thus able to convince the Gun Runners to access their better stock.

Very informative.

I'd be interested in knowing how you knew of this, or of any comparison between Bethesda RPG's. It seems like this information should be right up front where you can understand it, in all of it's detail before getting involved with said RPG. (y'know?)

Fallout 3 did have a few checks outside of Speech, but they were pass/fail and rarely offered new shortcuts.

The older games factored in Perception, Charisma, Speech, and (with great emphasis) Intelligence. And a bunch of other skills, in more specific cases. And none of it was marked. It was pretty cool, but occasionally a huge pain in the ass (and if your IN was under 4, you were literally an idiot who could barely speak in grunts and couldn't start several quests).

The Fallout wiki is a pretty solid source. New Vegas and 3 also mark every dialog check with the skill/attribute/perk it's dependent on.

Fallout 4 has a completely different dialog system, though, so we have no idea how it's going to play out for that game.

I'll back what he said up. F3 had just speech checks and a few checks for other starts but NV went a lot further with it and gave more conversation checks for stats like perception, agility, and guns, just to name a few.

Now I know.
It's looking more and more like this topic is the only reasonable thing to speculate over seriously before FO4's release.

I don't see how other stuff matters much, considering that attributes/ skills are supposed to dictate how the character is made.

Well that's subjective, everybody is going to have their opinions on what is most important. For instance, some people will care more that the combat is improved and so forth. I agree that I hope the stat checks in dialogue will be brought back though I wouldn't say it's most important to me.

Perhaps, but let's be honest.. sitting around on my ass imagining that everyone in this forum knows how "combat" works in FO4 (without the ability to play the game), kinda defeats the purpose of discussion on the topic of said combat.

Sorry, but I am a "hands-on" kind of guy.

Point taken.

lol.... K, awesome.

I think we all know how it works; and had a pretty good guess even before the demo.

What I've read from those that saw the combat demo, is that it's FO3.1
(Which is what was expected; and what I've seen in the video of Todd's stage presentation.)

*As a sequel to FO3, I think the game is about as spot on perfect as one could hope for.

(I wish that FO3 had been so faithful a sequel to Fallout 2; but was told they never do that, and always redesign the game from scratch. Doesn't seem to be true though.)

In Fallout New Vegas, you would often see a dialog option such as, "You can give me a better price (Barter [ 25 / 40 ] )".... which would mean that you could select that dialog option, but since you only have a 25 skill and the check requires a 40 skill, the dialog option would automatically fail --- you could still CHOOSE it, it just would not WORK. If, however, you had a barter skill greater than the check value, it would just say, "You can give me a better price (Barter)".... and if you selected that option, it would succeed.

There are two issues with how Fallout 4 works, here....

(1) With short few-word prompts for dialog, I can't see them showing us which skills/perks influence a dialog choice. In one video, one of the dialog options was yellow and the others were green, but that could mean any number of things (yellow could lead to further dialog, or could end conversation, or could be reliant on some skill, etc). This could mean that you simply don't even ~see~ an option unless you have the perk/skill/stat sufficient to "succeed" at it. The down side to this is that you don't know what you missed. More reason for replay, I suppose, and "realistically" how would you know that you needed Science! Rank 3 in order to get this particular dialog option?

(2) Being able to walk away from conversations ---- or, presumably, do other things, like pop some Mentats ---- might be advantageous if you discerned that you needed a higher INT/PER to get a dialog option, so you could pop some Mentats or quickly skim a book/magazine to boost your skill/stat/perk to a sufficient level to get the dialog option to appear / succeed.

In any event, my ol' Quicksave / Quickload buttons are going to get a hell of a workout because of Fallout 4 conversations....

As I recall, the SPECIAL checks were usually to open up new lines of questioning, where the skill checks dealt more with influencing an NPCs decision or gaining an advantage in some way.

EX:

• A Perception check would allow you to realize the NPC was lying or hiding something so you could confront them on the deception (a new line of conversation).
• A Barter check would allow you gain some item, service or resource the NPC was offering at a reduced cost (gain an advantage if you were good enough at Barter).

Sorry for bumping an old thread I made, but BrotherGrimm's reply is interesting news in comparison to what I've been reading in the forums lately.
Were you referring to information you think you know as it relates specifically to one game? (FO3) Or Fallout games in general?

Most likely it's just an observation of how SPECIAL affects conversations in previous Fallout games. I was playing New Vegas recently and several times saw a dialog option gated by PER (mine was a little low, so I backed out of conversation and popped some Mentats ). Of course, if they don't let us know that having a higher PER would allow us to use a dialog option, there'd be no reason to pop Mentats (unless you ~constantly~ pop Mentats).

I may be mis-remembering, but I'm pretty sure that they also had dialog options based on skill/perk selection. Like, if you had Explosives of 40 or more, then you could make an observation about explosives.... or if you had the Gun Nut perk you could make an observation about guns. And of course having Black Widow / Lady KIller / Cherche La Femme offered many great dialog options in addition to the raw combat damage bonus.

Not accurate. There were quite a number of options based on SPECIALS in FO3 but you only saw them if you had the required SPECIAL score. I think certain ones should be % based and other should be flat PASS/FAIL (and the PASS / FAIL should only be seen if you can PASS...per the SPECIAL choices in FO3).

If you point was that Obsidian (FNV) used a different dialog system than Bethesda (FO3), that is accurate.

You must be right because I remember seeing a dialogue option highlighted with "explosives" (once). That was in New Vegas.