We're getting close-ish to the release date and I dunno how into character crafting you all are but I find it fun, even if I wind up going in an entirely different direction once the game actually drops. I usually use http://www.miniworld.com/adnd/100ThingsAboutUrPCBackGround.html to get a clearer picture of who I want in my head. I also found http://sugarbombed.com/forums/threads/countdown-the-hundred-day-g-o-a-t-exam-updated-daily.3744/, it's Fallout specific and I get the GOAT is usually orientated towards skills and it did help with that a bit but it helped shape morality/reasoning in my head too. There's also https://www.reddit.com/r/ICanDrawThat/, but I've never used it so can't vouch for it. If you wanna be really thorough there is also a variety of personality tests on the internet, I like using the http://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test as a component for creating characters. Generally ain't no one got the time to actually painstakingly go through all these and catalogue their responses, the point is just to use them to form a solid mental construct of the kind of person you wanna roll.

Feel free to share your characters and/or other resources you use.

My first character is a loner, Im fully embracing the hinted ex military background and making a high toughness, high agility soldier build. In his mind his home blew up back in 2077, not just his actual home, but his home nation, his America, to him the Boston wasteland is one big foreign battlefield and everyone within it, a battlefield combatant, there are no friends, only allies at best, enemies at worst.

I am a LOGISTICIAN(ISTJ-A)

Pie maker!!!

Wow. Way too complex for me. I have an image (which I have misplaced but is still strong in my head) that I am going to base a special forces type character on. I plan on her being basically good, but practical. That's about it. I'll learn more about how I picture this character as I progress through the creation process, intro section and as I play the game through.

I have two characters in mind - and I don't know which one will be my first playthrough. I'm embracing the military background thing, but with a twist.

Jack, my male character, was a military engineer - hence the knowledge on operating power armour, customising and modding weaponry etc, without locking him into the gung-ho soldier stereotype. I'm thinking a high INT and having a secondary focus on Endurance and Strength, but with not a whole lot of Charisma. Think a grizzled and hard smoking, hard drinking engineer who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty by whacking you in the face with a wrench

Nora, his wife, was a Battlefield Medic. High Charisma/Agility with a preference for small arms and talking her way out of situations. Probably more likely to be leading settlements and helping out the general populace than her husband.

I haven't really thought either of through too much as I like to let the game shape their personality somewhat, but always good to have a place to start.

Probably make a highly intelligent, yet mentally unstable fellow who I'll name Floyd Barrett It's the same name I used for most of my time playing New Vegas , as well as FO3. Might as well continue the (Fallout) tradition

As for specific character builds, I usually keep the backstory pretty simple. I tend not to put too much thought into it, as that way it leaves wiggle room in the RP for when things don't quite go as planned...and more often than not I find they don't go quite as you had intended.

Wow, I totally miss out on the RPG aspect. I'm pretty boring. I'll most likely go with the stock character they've been showing and name him after myself. I'll then select the perks based off of my wants and not the type of character I want him to be.

Gonna try and make myself.

And spend wayyyyy to much time trying make my handsome mug in the creator.

First character is probably gonna be a Female Thief character that are into guns and money.

I would describe her as "Chaotic Good" character, Robin Hood style.

I'll fiddle with the character creator until I get a face I like (based on previous games with character creation, there's high odds that she'll be a green-eyed redhead with sharp cheekbones and a narrow chin. ) And then go from there. Most likely playstyle for the first character will be small guns/sneak/lockpick/perhaps some sniping. And "good"/helpful.

I'll figure out a name when I get there.

I never use anything beyond default male/female face 1, as I'm way to lazy to actually try to make something myself, and they are likely gonna get some face covering helm later on so.... eh.

Ill name the male Albert Cole, and his wife Nore Cole, since I love making refrences to past games, especially since the SS looks to be designed to look like Albert Cole from Fallout 1 to begin with.

My goal is Intelligent, sneaky, sniper, thief. .. I'll most likely start off building up all the thieving type skills and work my way toward sniper. I'm really hoping we are no longer cut off from hacking and lockpicking by the amount of points we put in the perk like the last games.. I don't see how since there are level requirements for perks as well. (because that would mean chests and computers could theoretically be level locked... which would be awful.)

Can never use Jack!!!


Gopher has that used!!!

i normally play with a sniper, and melee combat style for close, and always hacking, since i love using terminals on Fallout world, i always alone, but with the new companion improvements maybe this will be the first time someone will fallow me around.

Mira. former military cook. a complete lunatic who poisoned pea soup and acted as a camp doctor. A smooth talker and a rather lucky fella. Avoided any punishent due to fact they needed every able hand to wield gun. She suffers from delusions and whatnot. From time to time she has worshipped the old gnomes and other imaginary spirits. Poor husband bought Codsworth to house protection against her. Their marriage is a case of severe stockholm syndrome between victim and his kidnapper.

Mira re-routed Codsworths progamming to keep him locked up.

Haha to be honest, he probably won't actually be called Jack. I'll just name him whatever the default is, ala Nora for the female. I'm just using Jack as a placeholder.

My first character id consider a mercenary, he will be good with big guns and pistols, only using big guns when in a full suit of power armor and specializing in pistols when not in a suit of power armor. No stealth, just guns blazing, and he will have all the crafting perks for armor, weapon mods, and some gathering perks as well. This character is a long term play through character, the perks are pretty spread out.

If I was going to specialize in a character at the start id start with one of the specials at 8, and id go with one of these two characters I have in mind.

I do extensive back stories, but not to the point of RP a personality test.

My FO4 char was born and raised by rural isolationists / preppers. Not the religious doomsday types. Still very much 1950's American idealism but mixed with a post modern fixation with the end of things as we know it.

Our hero joins the army out if school. Partly in rebellion to his folks, and partly a secret fear that they're right, but that the such a future would require a certain military grade response to threats. His country conditioning, self sufficiency, and work ethic gains him recognition by his superiors and he quickly finds himself in some rather interesting units.

So the prepper / survivalist background allows him to be level headed when he wakes up to he destruction of his previous reality. The military training allows him to thrive in a world of ever present violence. The booze helps too.

I don't use face-covering helms. For exactly that reason.

Good karma [censored], made to look like Frank Zappa. I'll pick the most dikeish dialog options available (maybe not the openly bigoted or unambiguously evil ones, though), but always take the good karma path in the end; ie, I'll be the hero everyone needs, but no one really wants.

I'll focus my build on endurance, and energy weapons. My plan is, above all else, to be absolutely indestructible. I want Deathclaws to tickle me. I want to get smacked by a Super Mutant Behemoth's hydrant club and think "pillow fight!". As for guns, I've learned that my favorite kinds of guns are the ones where every bullet counts. So I'll be sticking with hand cannons, rifles, and sniper rifles - in energy weapon terms, that probably means a Gauss Pistol or a really mean Plasma Pistol, a Laser Musket, and a Gauss Rifle.

SPECIAL will probably look like:

S3 - solely for the armor crafting perk, although I may bump it to 5 as I level to get access to Big Guns.

P5 - Demolition Expert and Rifleman will be the most important perks for me here, although if P7 has to do with Energy Weapons I'm taking it.

E10 - Solar Powered, Toughness, Life Giver, Adamantium Skeleton, and Rad Resistance. Probably in that order. >.>

C1 - It really hurts to do this, since I love passing speech checks, but something's gotta suffer.

I6 - Medic and Science! are the important ones here, although I may bump it up for Nerd Rage and I9. Definitely at least once for Chemist - if that's Chemist at I7.

A1 - All I really need from this is Gunslinger, but I will max out Gunslinger, so fair's fair.

L2 - Still sore about this, since criticals and energy weapons are such a perfect match, but que sera sera. Probably the first SPECIAL I'll bump up.

I have kind of Ripley from Aliens thing in mind for my first playthrough. High INT, with CHA and AGI as my secondary attributes. I want to really dig into the crafting and settlement-building so I'll need to bring STR up just enough to get the necessary perks to play around with weapon modding.

I'm not entirely 100% that we're absolutely going to have military backgrounds for our characters, but I think I'll run with it either way. If it's set that we're ex-military, then that's great; and if we're not then I'll still use that as my character's imagined background. I'm thinking I'll also have kind of an engineer background - she'll know how to pilot power armor and the like, but more from support and maintenance than actual fighting.

I'm kind of wondering if we'll able to pick scars for our characters or not. I thought it might be neat if she picked up a purple heart while on deployment and at the time the game starts is looking forward to a nice quiet life in the suburbs.

That's probably about as detailed as I'm going to get, though. I like to keep things open and fill in the gaps as I play the game - I don't know what the narrative is going to entail or what's going to turn up so I think it's better to play it loose and establish things as they come up.

For my character's husband I'm not doing much of any set background prior to the game starting. I'll likely spend a lot of time playing around with the customization options for both of them before starting the game proper, though. One thing I was thinking of doing was giving my spouse a defining characteristic of some sort that would be likely to carry over to our son (like a hook nose or something.) Nothing too weird that would look out of place in the game - just something that might carry over to the child's characteristics. That way if either show up later on in the game, it'll be a little bit more noticeable, I think.

I haven't got around to making my backstory for my first character but my special will be:

S: 6

P: 4

E: 4

C: 3

I: 6

A: 3

L: 2

Just wanting to be able to mod/create all my weapons, right at the beginning. That and hoarding, of course. I know that my character will be diabolically evil though. It'll be fun.

I like those links OP. I generally do a lot of research before making a character. Easy enough to do in TES with all the lore out there. FO has quite a bit of lore also ... but not a lot of Pre-War lore, which is making my hunt for background material interesting to say the least. I've actually started looking into just modern Boston and 1950's Boston, just to see what all is going on in that city as far as businesses, jobs, schools, surrounding areas, farms, etc. I do generally try to play what I think would be the Canon PC first, just to have a better chance of seeing the game as it was meant to be (so to speak). Later PC's generally go off the rails some, though I am concerned that since they're all going to sound exactly the same if I should even bother.

I will make for my first playthrough either a slinky assassin or a charismatic 20's style gangster. I'll decide when I get the game in my hands.