hello all, this is my first post here of hopefully many to come!

I have bought the Fallout 3 game of the year, but something strange happened to my character so I am hoping someone here can explain what I should do. I am only at the beginning of the game so I do not want to continue playing until I have this "issue" resolved somehow...

OK, here goes:

I did my homework and read a walkthrough on how to set up my character. In the walkthrough it was said that Luck is not as important as in older Fallout games ( i played Fallout and Fallout2 so i know how important Luck was then and how important was NOT to have any of the SPECIAL stats at value of 1).

Since it was said this is not an issue anymore, i though I should take a Luck of 1, since if I cannot talk my way out of trouble (no Luck needed) i will fight it out ( Luck needed but not so much as gun skills anyway).

So, my character had a Luck of 1 but pretty high other stats, with Charisma at 3 points. I wanted to offset this by tagging "Speech" skill...I figured, if I have high enough speech, low Charisma and even lower Luck will not matter...so i met Silver and when I wanted to push her for more money i had (Speech 31%) option..since my speech was at 35% i figured I am sure to win here..but that conversation option FAILED!! much to my surprise. So, i reloaded and tried again..same happened...i went on and talked with Sheriff in Megaton..again i tried talking into having more money to disarm the A-bomb (500 caps instead of 100)...speech needed was 21% so i thought i will win this with breeze since I had 35% to speech already..but again I failed!! After several reloads i managed to succeed...then with Mr. Burke same thing happened, 19% speech needed but failed with 35%...I realized that something must be wrong and suspected that me having a Luck of only 1 might have to do something with it....


So I loaded back before exiting the vault and put one more point to Luck ( Charisma was at 2 now and Luck at 2 as well)...I again talked with Silver and succeeded..talked with sheriff and succeeded...talked with Burke and failed!!

So now I was totally confused....what was I doing wrong here??


So,please, can you tell me if having a Luck of only 1 will affect my speech, even if I have high enough percentage to succeed at speech?
Is it better to have CHA and LCK at 2 then CHA at 3 and LCK at 1?

Is it some kind of bug in the game( very unlikely I suspect)?

Basically, i want to know why I failed at speech option when every time I had (much) higher speech percentage than needed to succeed??

Thank you for reading and thank for any help!

Pretty sure that the percentage in speech challenges represents your odds of being successful: higher the better. So,with 31%, you'd only have a one in three success rate; at 21%, about one in five... (There is a calculation with luck and charisma with speech but since this is general section, will omit.)

Having a luck of 1, will svck for you. Is combat hard? Does it take a long time to kill anything? I put my luck between 4 and 6.

As for the speech... if it sez that there is a 21%, that's the chance of passing the speech check. Just because you have 35 or whatever skill does not automatically mean success. It's still a 21% chance of passing. And with a low skill of 35 ( in my example), it will be hard to pass that speech check.

The percent chance related to speech is the chance you will succeed at the speech challenge in the dialogue. You had low chances of success with odds like 35% or much lower (around 20% as per your post).

Luck adds points to all skills. Each point of Luck gives you +1% chance of a critical hit and every two points gives you +1 point on all skills.

Techie explanations aside, I think that it maybe in the programming to make you succeed more at what you do when you have a higher Luck.

10 Luck....get the 8 ball+1, the lucky shades,+1 the luck bobble head+1 and wear ranger armor+1...so basically if you have 6 to start...in the end, you'll have 10!!! and that rocks.

Even with my Speech skill at 100% there are a few(very few!) Speech Challenges that are not automatically successful. I have had one at 81%, which shocked me(I had gotten far in the game and was expecting 100% success rate every time by then! :blink: ).

I see!

Thanks guys (and girls) for helping!
I was sure that the percentage meant "how much speech skill I have to have in order to succeed" not actually "the percentage of success" :facepalm:

I know from the guides that speech is quite important in F3 so I will have to reconsider my character...

Additionally charisma makes speech challenges easier beyond your speech skill. A character with a high charisma has much easier speech challenges then a low charisma character even if they both have the same ranks in speech.
So simply swigging a whisky and equipping a couple charisma boosting gear can vastly improve your chances

One more question...unrelated to this topic though...

Do I have to finish the original story in order to be able to play the new scenarios( Anchorage and the rest)? Or can i maybe play those scenarios "before" the main story? If so, how can I start them?

Mentats (especially the hard-to-get Glamorously Graqe flavour!) are another good option.

It depends. If you're having a good time, I'd keep going. If you're looking to do all and see all with one character, ok. But if you plan on building multiple characters (like I have), I'd work on speech on a different character. Many characters blow off speech and barter, to make the game harder, as you will become insanely rich and powerful later.



You can play them anytime you want, with the exception of Anchorage. I don't have Zeta. Once you start Anchorage, you must finish it. But with everything else, I mix and match, doing sidequests, mixed with Main Quest, mixed with personal exploration and fun in the wasteland. Like arming all the raiders with power armor, to make the battles harder and longer.

FYI, Charisma simply increases Speech skill by 2 pts per point of Charisma (same with associated skills such as Barter).

Some guides will claim Speech is very important, others will state that it is pointless to spend points on. The latter is closer to the truth because you can simply save prior to a Speech challenge and reload if you fail it (tedious with low success chances, but doable, and other skills tend to be far more important for survival, especially onn higher difficulty). However, for role playing, you may want a high speech if your character concept demands it. As was stated, play in a way that's fun for you.

I have had several 100% Speech challenges with my current character and she has a low Speech (around 20) and is only level 10 (or maybe level 9). Of course, I've had more that are much less than 100%, and I also use clothing that increases Speech +20%, but that's still not huge with her low skill level.

in the Pitt there's actually a speech challenge against Ashur where you can lie about never meeting Wernher and at 100% speech you still only have a success rate of 57% :0

Yeah, better build a character the way you like it and stick with it's imperfections than railroading yourself into a "perfect" build optimized for FO3 world, because powergaming is a double-edged sword that can easily kill all the fun.

Personally, currently I am playing with a Luck of one, and moved the points to more useful areas for my kind of play, more interest to me. Having good speech and Charisma to have more interesting dialogue and reactions in the game.

I find the game-play is good, the very low Luck not having a disastrous effect.

Some regard Charisma as being of no value but I find the interactions with other characters to be much more interesting. Speech is also very useful, and both of them can be boosted if you consider it to be vital.

Barter, I do leave it very low, killing, and selling the loot from the bodies will provide more money than you will ever really need.

Pretty much the most important thing luck does is increase your critical hit chance.

1 luck gives you a 1% chance of a critical hit. 10 luck gives you a 10% chance. But also you need to factor in the critical chance multiplier of the weapon. A sniper rifle multiplies your critical chance by 5, so with 10 luck you get a 50% critical chance.

So luck can really add up. I would recommend not going with 1 luck as criticals are very helpful.

Increases a critical chance hit, that's true, but if taking a shot when Sneaking, and unseen, .. the hit is always critical.

You then become seen, unless you relocate position for the next guaranteed critical hit shot. So it's a choice really ..........