I dont play video games to charm my enemies. Most evil needs to be scrubbed off the face of the planet. Charisma does not accomplish that.

I would love more charisma/speech stuff like New Vegas, however I don't want it to be overpowered and it needs to be a significant amount of charisma points put in to it. Personally I think it should be tiered by a 2/4/6/8/10 model and if your in that range and have the right perks, you should be able to convince people and so on.

I think it would be fun to Lando Calrissian all the way through the wasteland without ever firing a shot, just for the writing and and see what options are available.

How's Lando Calrissian going to talk his way out of this one?

lol, I first shoot and then ask who's there.

Most things but not all things.

I'm all for interesting solutions via speech, but I'd like something more nuanced than the "have required points, press A to win" setup that New Vegas/Fallout 3 had. What if instead, if you have the required level of speech, several dialog options appear, some of which could lead to success while others might lead to pissing off who you're talking to, and you need to figure out which is most likely to appeal to the guy you're trying to convince. Having a high energy weapons skill doesn't allow you to auto kill everything- (outside of vats) you still need to place your shots, make tactical decisions, etc- in other words, play the game. Roleplaying challenges (non-violent or not) should challenge the player and require the same level of consideration and input.

Believing that everyone who is on chems or is a "raider" just attacks on sight is pretty naive too, and that has been the way in almost all of Bethesda's games for the most part. I see no problem with being able to talk your away out of almost every situation because in a game, it adds a whole different layer to the game world. It adds more fun and maybe more replayability.

I had intended for this to be a thing.

Even if you can't talk your way out of a particilar situation, you could at least get some better information/more story from it.

You're not going to be able to not do any violence, but with some great social skills, you could get others to do your violence for you.

It's not a Charisma thing, it's a non-violent solution thing.

Non-violent solutions tie into many skills, abilities and choices. Sneak can be non-violent. Intimidation can result in non-violent consequences. Using your knowledge to brew a special soporific and resourcefully knock out a whole hostile company for the night in order to trespass the area/free the hostages without bloodshed is a non-violent solution.

Charisma alone shouldn't allow for a pacifist run. A dedicated build should.

I hope...

...that the amount of points you spend in charisma or intelligence, in fact any of the stats, make impact besides the story dialog. Like when it did with the old games.

I agree that you have to be able to CHARM your way out of situations sometimes. Not just SPEECH.
FO1 and 2 had Charm checks while Bethesda decided to make it a complete dump stat. How many times have you played FO3 and NV with 1 Charm?
1 Luck I understand since we're not all going for the Crit build but we should have more Charm checks, all the way up to 9 or 10 since we can increase it by 5 by taking Party Time Mentats.

Here's a scenario for you. You just started the game and have relatively low Speech and don't have the guns nor melee competence yet to be able to take them all on but you have high Charm.

A Raiding party was going for your stuff but then they take one look at you and decide to keep you for "something else."
Now they take you to their hideout where you can Stealth, Lockpick, Steal and Reconn all you want while your 1 Charm, Commando counterpart has no choice but to defend herself from attacks and discover their and Raid their hideout herself.

Yeah, don't tell people how to play.

That being said, a Fallout story about a pacifist that wasn't extremely short with a tragic ending wouldn't be much of a Fallout story.

There are many impossible solutions. You can't turn any Democrat into a Republican just because you can speak well... Why should a raider stop to attack you? He wouldn't even start to speak to you he would just attack... how would you speak out of this situation?

I think playing as a pacifist is a perfectly legitimate playstyle and while not my personal preference, I dont see why it should be unavailable because you have access to guns. Playing the Witcher, it always bugged me that a guy with all this access to magic often couldn't use a jedi mind trick to get what he wanted. People may hate this idea but bringing in a system similar to the wheel thing in Oblivion minus the mini game might help.

We need a proper system for why a person wont give you info rather than a randomly generated percentage based on difficulty settings. With raiders it's not doable as they hate everyone but store owner and other NPC's would be fine.

Is talking your way out of every situation in a video game more or less realistic than punching a super mutant to death, killing a raider by launching a teddy bear at them, getting shot multiple times in the head and shrugging it off, being healed by drinking soda or eating squirrel bits, etc..? I think we left the land of "believable" behind a looong time ago.

Yeah, people like Adolph Hitler wouldn't have been able to get anything done with charisma and persuasion alone! Good thing for him that he roamed the land shooting people himself so he could be effective...

That would be awesome XD

While he definitely was a charismatic leader, he kind of had an army of jackboot thugs at his disposal. Charisma didn't invade Poland, or France, etc etc. Dudes with guns who shot first and asked second did

Also, here is a letter that Ghandi sent Hitler, on behalf of all humanity to stop his actions. It doesn't matter how charismatic someone is. Bad people do bad things.

http://m6.i.pbase.com/g4/60/645360/2/144353836.pxZDNTi6.jpg

I find the the demanding tone of the OPs topic highly ironic for the subject matter....the whole flies and honey thing...

This is Fallout we're talking about. Having a 10 in charisma is literally compared to being a cult leader. If you have a 10 in any stat, it should let you do insane and ridiculously cool things with it, even things that should be impossible.

I never said any of those things aren't unrealistic, but mostly those exist just as gameplay mechanics. Things that exist in a game world are not required to follow the rules of the real world, but they should at least follow their own rules.

Not really, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption to make that a guy who murders people and takes their things for a living is going to attack you without giving you a chance to even speak.

I'm perfectly fine with some situations the player being able to talk their way out of combat, but only in a way that makes sense. Take like in New Vegas where you could convince the leader of whichever faction you were opposing to just walk away. This made sense because at the time you are talking to them your character is sitting in a position of power, mainly due to having an army at their back. Even then it takes an extremely high speech skill to work.

Rather than see us being able to ridiculously charm our way out of every fight, I would prefer to have non-lethal ways to take down enemies. There are plenty of weapons that can be used just to incapacitate enemies.

Given the new special distribution, it would actually comfort me more for it to take a 10 charisma stat to even attempt talking your way out of an obviously hostile situation. Focusing on one particular special attribute should have unique things that can be done with it, but no matter how much honey is dripping off your tongue it should never be a fool proof system that you can walk away from every battle without even raising your weapon.

It would be cool to see some sort of non lethal shock weapon or something. Could make a pretty nifty animation of a dude writhing around on the ground after getting tazed.

The only way to play fallout wrong is to play it thinking there is a right and wrong way to play it.

yeah it was pretty cool that your skills and attributes showed up so often in dialouge during new vegas. I hope that bethesda has tons of skill/stat checks in the game instead of one per quest.

I also would like to think that "boss" fights should be able to be avoided if you can talk them down, but i don't think talking every bandit into submission makes sense.

By your logic you play wrong too then by suggesting I play wrong.

These aren't the droids you're looking for.

You can go about your business.