How much Strength does a Behemoth have?

How much Perception does Dogmeat or a Death Claw have?

I love how the average Special Stats starts out at 4 for Fallout 4, but it would be nice if I have an 10 stat and I had cyberware installed, we could go over 10.

Or an Advance Recon helmet's sensors might boost my Perception over 10.

I just think it would be neat if the NPCs and Creatures used the Special Stats too.

It would certainly make some game mechanics easier.

This likely hasn't happened but some thing to think about for Fallout 5.

YOU'RE NOT THINKING BIG ENOUGH.

SPECIAL stats over 9000 or I cancel my pre-order Bethesda!

In theory, 10 in any stat is supposed to be epic. Actually, the first (two?) game referred to a stat of 10 as "heroic". In practice, it didn't quite live up to that.

Rather than have stat artificially inflated, I'd rather see each point matter more. One point in a stat should close of some doors and open up others.

You know, there is this little thing called balance in RPGs. It helps make the game not poorly designed.

Anything over 10 is obviously beyond human but in Fallout there are a lot of things that are more than human.

Real world example, Dogs can smell 100,000 times better than humans.

I was only suggesting that if everyone and every thing used Special, then a lot of mechanics be easier to setup and if someone managed to get over 10 in a special due to drugs or cyberware then it could be recognized and used in the game.

If Power Armor boosts the wearer's strength then why won't it boost an Olympic level weight lifter's strength.

I've spent a lot of years as a Shadowrun GM so I understand game balance.

Usually the result of either poor mechanics or poor interpretation of the mechanics.

Often not help when the game designers refuse to clarify a vague paragraph.

A game with good mechanics brings the game world alive and makes maintaining game balance very easy.

I can see that this is maybe not a can of worms they want to open without building it in to the game engine from the ground up, but I do think that if everything had special stats it would make the world more alive.

Example in Skyrim. It would be nice to know how perceptive a guard is, or how agile a thief running away is, or how intelligence the gatekeeper is and have it in a form that you can compare to yourself.

Personally I'm fine playing a mortal and leaving godhood out of it. Part of the fun in games comes from overcoming hurdles and obstacles with work, diligence and forethought. Being super takes the challenge out of it and makes it a hollow experience.

This.

How exactly would we as the player know the difference? When I fight a behemoth I could certainly assume he is a 15 strength due to its size and the fact that it is beating the crap out of my character with a school bus.

Attributes like intelligence would be different though I would think. The only way would be through dialog. Maybe like: "Excuse me while I vaporize your face with my homemade dark matter rifle" ( apparently he also has a +8 in politeness).

I think these things may be there, but we are just unaware of the exact number.

I know true virtual reality is just around the corner when Fallout starts to divide perception up between sight, smell, and hearing.

Morrowind level overdrive. (fortify intelligence potions in Morrowind stack and improved alchemy skill)

I would prefer to keep the stats capped at 10, but without the ridiculous ability to get 10 in every stat across the board. Your SPECIAL choices should matter. For some reason Bethesda seems to be pretty strongly against letting the player make choices that might lead to them svcking at anything, so they have had a habit of making stats more or less irrelevant, or allowing people to just go ahead and max everything. Building a character to specialize in something is completely meaningless if you can get take one perk and be "almost perfect."

I'm not the OP but I'm pretty sure the OP wasn't asking for any of SPECIAL to be OVER 9000!

I would like to see a soft cap rather than the hard cap in FO3 and NV, meaning 10 is the most that you can assign to any one stat but you can go over 10 later on in gameplay via implants, drugs etc. I am talking about 12 at most, I don't see how that would unbalance the game. And this is a single player game, if you intentionally break the game, well that's your choice.

Yeah, 10 was the natural range for humans. Personally I think that you should be able to exceed the natural bounds with cybernetics or mutations, much like Super Mutants do. Not by too much though, maybe somewhere between 20% and 50% more. That's just me though.

Personally, I want to see a max SPECIAL of 100, but only give us enough points to go up to 25 or so if we distribute them evenly. A human, unless heavily mutated, should not have the same strength as a deathclaw. Giving SPECIAL a huge role in the game, and then making it so that there are creatures that, no matter how hard we trained, would rip us to shreds, would make this game more fun and put more emphasis on playing intelligently.

What do you mean? One point in a stat should open up doors and only indirectly close doors by not being able to assign the point to another stat.

A Strength of 7 should in all (but a few exceptional - so exceptional that mentioning them gives them too much credit) situations be better than a Strength of 6.

You also have to remember that different levels in SPECIAL fare differently for each enemy. A Behemoth with a Strength of 1 is probably equivalent to a human having a Strength of 10. They are freakishly big, you know! ;p

Sole Survivor is such a badass that his SPECIAL stats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o .

Really 10 in each stat represent as strong, agile, charismatic etc as a human can get, no need to go any higher .

Yep, you got it. That's exactly what I meant: doors are closed off due to not having that point somewhere else, but new doors are open by having more points in one stat.

You MAD? str over 10, nonononon we can't have that here! This is a place of civilised beings and we all invest in Int and Char xD

Problem is that an player at the end of all expansions in FO3 or FO:NV will end up having maxed out most stats.

Going for only perks will make this harder but it also looks a bit that we will get more levels to compensate.

Honestly, I feel Bethesda took a dump here. I can understand at balancing out the beginning but they should only just remove the bonus 5 points (that's way you can start off with SPECIAL being all 5s, if ya wanna). This way, you can allow your character be shaped as he or she should be... But from the looks of it, it'll be VERY EASY to increase your SPECIAL (rather be it by leveling up or other means) which is again, something I'm against. (There's a reason why I never use the SPECIAL increasing perk while leveling up). And SPECIAL should STAY at the 1-10 range (5 is average while 1-4 is below and 6-10 is above).

Really... Fallout 3 (and I guess New Vegas can count too, despite not being a Bethesda game) had almost gotten the "attributes" (SPECIAL) so close to being perfect, for once, and now it looks like they aren't even at least keeping that for Fallout 4? Argh... It makes me sad. I'm just glad, though, that the attribute system is just one small thing in the whole game so hopefully Bethesda does other things amazingly, like they usually do.

Please no.

It looked to me like all of SPECIAL starts at 1 and you get 21 points to distribute. I hope that while you distribute your points you get to see what it effects. I made a character sheet based on how I might build my first PC and it ain't easy getting a smart, alert and agile character with a little Luck on his side. Perhaps you will give up some things to get others. I think 10 is a good hard limit and see no reason to go beyond that limit. Most likely you will be able to find bobbleheads and/or perks to boost the stats anyway.

This. This so much.

There was still a right arrow when he put luck to 10, so this might be the case.

Not for humans, but they do need to make it harder to reach 10.

No SPECIAL over 8 is possible at start.

No Perk can get you over 9

10 can only be achieved by implants (and they are much harder to get than in NV).