Fallout: New Vegas, the greatest video game ever made.
How would you run a campaign in this setting? What system? How do you adapt the courier to a party?
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Fallout: New Vegas, the greatest video game ever made. How would you run a campaign in this setting? What system?
by using good ol fallout pnp
>How run
Run it in the aftermath of the game, with the common consent of the players on what happened during the game.
>What system
Your general options are GURPS, Vaults & Deathclaws (free online), this one, or the 'official' one based on Fallout 4 with snowflake dice. Some people go a bit wider-net and opt for Savage Worlds or Barbarians of the Aftermath, but you're going to be very mechanically divorced from Fallout by that point, if the actual mechanics are what you care about at all.
>Adapt the Courier
You don't. No one is the Courier, and the players never meet the Courier. This helps the common-consent way of starting the game work best. Everyone has their own idea of that character and besides the occasional mention in-game that's as far as it should go.
How is the official rpg? I see it at my store, but I'm not the biggest fan of 4's world building so I haven't checked it out.
Mediocre. And heavily oriented towards Bethesda.
I was going to run a game in it but ended up dropping it because the system was just counter to my needs.
Instead of being a cool game to play fallout games in, it really goes hard on trying to replicate the looter shooter playstyle of 4 and 76s. A large amount of the book is given over to crafting and cooking, and the expectation is that you're going to be hitting a lot of procedurally generated encounters to get randomly rolled loot with which to barter, craft and cook.
Part of the problem with this is the that system to actually generate encounters isn't actually in the core book, it's in a book that comes with the gm screen. So, to even run the game the way the devs intended, you need to buy a separate 35 dollar add on. Which, I suppose, actually makes it a very faithful adaptation of a bethesda fallout game.
The combat and resolution mechanics seem fine, though, so if you're either interested in that kind of explore/fight/loot/craft game loop, or you're alright with ignoring whole swaths of the book, or if you really want to set a game in the commonwealth, it might be a good fit. Otherwise I'd skip it.
Modiphius does have a free starter on their webpage if you want to check it out.
You absolutely don't need the dice for the 2d20 fallout game.
God, we've gotten to the point that if a company even offers dice, it's a system that uses """snowflake dice""" and people get salty about it.
For FNV, I might start with a Wild West game instead of the default modern setting.
Maybe Dogs in the Vineyard?
>Dogs in the Vineyard campaign where you play as mormons nursing a badly burned man backed to health and bringing him into the Faith
Actually a pretty good idea for a game.
>Fallout: New Vegas, the greatest video game ever made.
>Made the side boss the final boss
>Made the final boss a DLC boss
Ulyesses is a pointless addition to the game that exists to moan about how the setting has moved on since the 90s, the perfect Avellone mouth piece. He believes in nothing, he creates nothing, he just wants to destroy. He's a very very poor version of Kreia from kotor 2.
Lanius is the perfect ideological rival for most endings. Caesar's Legion is an interesting faction that has beliefs and desires for the future.
>Caesar's Legion is an interesting faction
They're written as unambiguous and cartoonishly evil bad guys who's one pro is "once we take over the number of raiders will decrease"
>who's
Whose.
Not only that, it just uses the facade of safety. There's more raiders, it's just that they are' the government now. You aren’t actually safer living under a complete despot, because the thing about despots is that the rules can change very arbitrarily and there’s nothing to protect you. I’d hardly feel safer in North Korea where people have had commissars “disagree” with how photos are individually set-up in-camera.
Thats the hat trick of the despots. There aren’t fewer raiders, there may even be more. They just convince you that they are nice enough to schedule their raids.
Don't forget to dilate.
Im here to laugh at you gay
They're the antithesis to the NCR, it's heglian dialectics, something I'm not surprised you wouldn't understand
Yes, that's what he said, they're cartoonishly evil bad guys.If you think there is any world where they're even close to good guys, you deserve a 12 gauge slug to the face like every other Slaver homosexual.
If they're supposed to be the antithesis of the NCR, then why are they incompetent and moronic as well?
thats the joke
The problem is, if you look at what they've said, Avellone and Sawyer had very different visions for the Legion (guess which one was pro-Legion lmao). So you have them written half the time as "trains run on time" and the other half of the time they're literally just raiders, in a way that's really bipolar instead of just meeting in the middle.
When you dig deeper you can find stuff like this all over the game. It's very apparent in the Brotherhood's case, where Veronica's quest basically paints them as a bunch of backwards morons, but if you do the content outside of her quest they kinda start doing exactly what she wanted them to do in the first place and the worst actors in the organization are Hardin and her mentor.
>they get their shit together and lift the lockdown
>cool the shit with the NCR and team up against the Legion
>adopt Duraframe Eyebots to supplement their forces (despite Veronica's slides saying the refuse to adopt new technology)
>also no one really cares about her being gay, that was just her grandpa being an abusive gay to everyone
House even still has lines complaining that the BoS don't bother the Followers because they don't care about surgical tech or the like.
There's a lot to like in NV but you can sorta see it was written by committee once you dig into the weeds and examine stuff more closely.
I feel like Veronica's opinions towards the brotherhood works when you consider she was taught by the most radical and insane member of that chapter.
Veronica being sane and reasonable still believes partly what Elijah taught her, that the brotherhood is destroying itself, and her job of being outside the bunker means she's not got any personal connections or a lot of social time back home to see attitudes changing.
Still, they need an outsider to come and bring the wasteland to them before they're willing to leave the lock down. They're won't change if you don't help them.
The lockdown only gets lifted, the NCR treaty negotiated, and the duraframe eyebots built if the Courier intercedes directly. And to be fair to the game, Veronica's young adult life has been defined almost entirely by one controlling egomaniac who has been going steadily insane, who has raised her on a diet of 'everyone but us is a fricking moron' and 'these rules are pointless in the face of modern reality,' which she has internalized and which at least partially shapes her view of the Brotherhood.
It's sort of split.
Most of the changes that happen are McNamara's policies moving forward at slightly accelerated pace thanks to the Courier being an outside actor McNamara can have perform tasks outside the lockdown, not really from the Courier's personal input. The Courier doesn't talk McNamara into lifting the lockdown, McNamara makes that decision based on the intelligence from his own scouts (which he has the Courier gather). The Courier doesn't talk the BoS into adopting Duraframe Eyebots, he shows up with EDE one day and one of the tech guys asks if he can look EDE over to copy down the specs. The Courier does negotiate the NCR-BoS alliance, which is a big deal, but again you have McNamara being the more willing party in that agreement. Shit, McNamara is already going over Hardin's head about the air filter issue.
Contrast this with how we see McNamara behave in Veronica's quest, and he just doesn't really seem to be written on the same principles. Courier-McNamara interactions have him act very spooked and cautious, but he's still willing to treat with the Courier and entertain our input if we prove we're not there to threaten the BoS. His interactions with Veronica have him actively sticking his head in the sand, and it's not exactly clear how much of that is because Veronica actually has 3 CHA on her SPECIAL sheet and is canonically horrible at rhetoric or because he's supposed to be as backwards and luddite as her ending slides paint him as. There's also the extremist paladins that pop up in both endings of her quest that no one ever brings up in-game (and the knights in the bunker will even shoot at them if you drag them inside). You'd think if I shot three paladins to death at the bunker's doorstep someone would bring it up, but the only people who can be affected by them are the player or the Follower Outpost that only exists to be slaughtered by them, which just digs Veronica deeper into her own weird little causality bubble.
Again, it's worth pointing out that Veronica is Elijah's protege, and even before Dead Money filled in the details, we know his ideas had lead this Brotherhood chapter to near annihilation. 'Fruit of the poisoned tree,' as it were.
I mostly agree with you. My umbrage is more with execution. It doesn't really feel like that's the vibe you're supposed to get from Veronica's content, especially not with the omniscient narrator in her ending slides explicitly saying Veronica spends her days wasting away as the Brotherhood refuses to adopt new technology (and then starts talking about their radical new duraframe army about thirty seconds later). The player also has no dialogue options to really challenge her beliefs with, you can only agree with her or deflect her no matter what stage you're at with the Brotherhood quest.
But on the other hand the Brotherhood actively exiles anyone who tries to improve anything.
In 76 the reformed brotherhood leader wants to reform the Brotherhood ideals even while Maxson is still alive, and coincidentally is the one on an expedition sending her to the opposite side of the continent. Same happens with Elder Lyons and his DC expedition.
Veronica doesn't even start making waves, she just starts asking questions and they sent her on grocery store duty to minimize her time in the bunker, and then start to actively threaten her when she starts asking uncomfortable questions.
The split between the reactionaries and the reformers in the Brotherhood is probably the most fascinating part to me. After what happened with the Eastern Brotherhood where the Lyons faction was completely disempowered, I don't think they can be saved as an organization. The only reason that Arthur Maxson is able to keep the two factions in line is he has near deific status in the organization, and both factions see what they want to see out of him. There's an argument to how successful his leadership is, but I don't see any other figure who could keep the split between the former outcasts and former Lyons brotherhood together.
Maxson is kind of the faction getting to have their cake and eat it too by returning the order to their roots: atomizing moronic glowies who deserve everything they get. Lions got in so much trouble because he was grinding his chapter into dust fighting what, from the outside perspective, looks a lot like a natural disaster/old tech run amok. And FO3 sort of vindicates the Council's stance on the mutants since they've almost run out of FEV serum by the time the player leaves 101. They are ultimately a self-contained issue that Lions keeps throwing men against when his job is supposed to be keeping dangerous stuff out of the hands of idiots (a purpose he actually winds up fulfilling once the Enclave shows up and runs face-first into his cadre battle-hardened veterans).
This sounds like a callous decision from the Council but you have to remember that something like 7 in 10 members of the initial expedition have died in this endeavor. Scourging the Pitt cost Lions one Paladin, locking down DC has cost him almost everything, and the reinforcements that he requested were called in under false pretenses (another mark against him for a lot of the Outcasts). From a commander's perspective, you'd have to be a complete idiot to keep sending him resources if he's just going to keep dumping good men into the void, even if it might be for good reasons.
In my read, the Brotherhood defeating the Institute is probably the one thing that gets the two factions in the order to play along. The conservative elements get their stance on unchecked scientific experimentation validated in full but the reformists get to prove themselves in vattle, the merits of outside recruitment, and their new organizational structure in a trial by fire. I think what probably happens is that Maxson's Brotherhood sort of becomes the de facto org, especially since he's working with the Council's blessing now and likely controls the bulk of the BoS' remaining forces.
Yeah, but Lyons had vision. Something everyone else in the faction lacks. By helping the local wastelanders he ensured he'd have endless manpower as people were desperate to sign up for basic food, water, military training, and dealing at least slightly with the super-mutants of DC. Supporting Project Purity was invaluable because it not only gave them a near endless supply of water, that water was instrumental in ensuring control of the surrounding region for marginal costs. It essentially turned the Brotherhood from a well-outfitted group of raiders into a proper-post-war state.
And the problem is the reactionaries in the Brotherhood such as the Outcasts fail to see any of the upsides of this, hence they paint Lyons leadership as categorized as nothing but failure when they also destroyed the local enclave and reaped the huge rewards from doing so.
Arthur Maxson sees the value in what Lyons was trying to do. While his crusade against the Institute is nuts in terms of strategic value, he can (depending on player actions) gain a major foothold in the Commonwealth by providing security to the locals, he even in essence allies with the Minutemen (assuming you the player do their questline while siding with the Brotherhood). He may have tightened up recruitment standards but he keeps it open.
Imagine if another Elder Elijah was to take over after Maxson? (and he can die in Fallout 4, so it is very possible his leadership ends in that game) Do you think they'd see the value in using Vertibirds to guard caravan routes?
Also: I have a theory since we see airships in the Fallout show and it's set in California that the Western Brotherhood is planning a complete evacuation of California to move out east.
>Imagine if another Elder Elijah was to take over after Maxson?
Elijah is sort of a special case even in the BoS. Supposedly the Mojave chapter was founded specifically to keep him busy, out of trouble, and away from places where his dangerous ideas might spread and cause issues. It just so happened that he landed on top of Archimedes, the Dam, and then later the Big MT and the Madre. There's a reason the Elders assigned Christine to put a bullet in his skull.
>strategic value
Ah, but what validates Maxson here isn't strategic value, it's the fact he's doing what the organization was born to do: atomizing amoral glowBlack folk. And (if the BoS ending is canon) he succeeds with flying colors while carrying on the lessons Lyons was trying to teach the org in DC and demonstrating just how effective they've made his force while still keeping to the core tenants of the order. And from a strategic perspective, he also eliminates what would have eventually been an existential threat to the BoS while securing the technological treasure trove that is Boston for future salvage. It's a very big win for the Brotherhood.
>Also: I have a theory since we see airships in the Fallout show and it's set in California that the Western Brotherhood is planning a complete evacuation of California to move out east.
I figure it's either evacuation or reinforcement. By the time of the show, the NCR was forecasted to be undergoing an ecological collapse due to resource mismanagement (which they were hoping to stave off by taking the Dam, and thus a new source of water). This was apparently something the OSI predicted and was working to avert during New Vegas; it's also why the NCR is interested in whatever is going on in Vault 22.
If the show writers are rolling with that forecast, the eastern BoS might be rolling in to reassert their dominance in California and replace the losses for the other chapters.
Ofc. this all assumes the show writers actually know what they're doing.
>yfw you realize they are ISIS before they existed
on the other hand you have the NCR who are clearly making all the mistakes of the previous generation that destroyed the world. It takes a special sort of american smoothbrain to assume NCR = good and Legion = bad
Both are shit. But the NCR is obviously presented as a better option. You meet, and likely help, shitloads of NCR people before you meet your first Legion soldiers. The NCR is represented as having genuinely altruistic goals they just aren't always capable of fulfilling. Their obvious incompetence doesn't get a lot of lip-service in the setting, and they get a legitimate reason for overstretching themselves with the Legion poised to invade. Meanwhile the first thing you see of the Legion is them crucifying people after playing a sadistic game, and the next time you see them it's when they've set up a slaver camp. They're also the invading force.
The Legion would be more sympathetic is they were more Roman, ironically. They could still have their slavery and crucifixions, but if that's mostly happening to those bothersome raiders who like nailing babies to walls that's going to look a lot more like tough love than oppression to most people suffering under those raiders. Especially when the alternative is the NCR's ideal of a resource-heavy prison system that has already failed miserably in-setting. After all, what the NCR was doing with the Powder Gangers already was slavery.
Everyone they nailed to the cross WAS a raider. That entire map was nothing but raiders running everything from the towns to the strip itself. When society has fallen that far, degeneracy must be purged through extreme means. You sound just like liberals who promise all of these 'altruist' things yet never seem to accomplish them. The NCR wasted all of the resources it had to wage an endless war against a faction trying to bring true civilization and morality back to a godless country. If the corrupt politicians in the NCR stood down and allowed the Legion to root out the degenerates then there would be no more war. Instead, the NCR elected to waste thousands of lives to take one dam because of their ego.
>Instead, the NCR elected to waste thousands of lives to take one dam because of their ego.
It's not ego. Hildern says the NCR is facing a food and water crisis. They NEED the Dam because they need Lake Mead. The NCR is forced to continously expand due to resource mismanagement but their corrupt politics causes them to underfund and undersupply their wars of conquest.
Nobody wins, except the Brahmin Barons
war never changes, huh
That post doesn't say that the NCR is good, only that the legion is written as over-the-top villains
Yes.
Every single person in the game whose been to Legion territory tells you it's legitimately safer for normal people than the NCR is.
The NCR frontier, anyway. The NCR proper is supposed to be pretty safe now (raiders killed, tribals on reservations, roads patrolled). But if Cass is to be believed, tolls are bullshit and the tollkeepers may be skimming from the top.
Not only is the NCR Frontier dangerous, they actively make it worse. Giving a bunch of convicts dynamite? What genius came up with that one?
It might work for nonviolent cons, especially if it was a work-release scheme where you finish the rail, get released, and get a parcel of land to settle. But they mixed in serial killers and terrorists. Farcical fricking bureaucracy.
It's not even the worst thing they're doing. Between forcing people off their land for not paying "taxes," killing locals for "stealing" water from Lake Mead, contracting mercenaries to torture POWs, and contracting an assassin to murder a head of state with whom they have a peace treaty, there's a real layer of slime under their shiny exterior. They ironic thing to me is that Bitter Springs isn't even that bad; the Khans have always been rapers and raiders and hadn't changed their ways before the NCR moved east and they picked a fight with them. An ex-Khan will even tell you they regularly use women and children as soldiers, so 'muh noncombtants" is pure cope. It might be a bit more ethically dubious if, say, Colonel Moore had deliberately ordered their civilians killed and simply lied about it being a mixup. It's something she would do. But by all appearances it was a genuine error.
>giving a shit about bosses
Opinion discarded.
It's not even the greatest Fallout game.
Fallout: New Vegas isn't even the greatest Fallout game ever made.
Also it's GURPS.
Fallout is based on GURPS.
Run it in GURPS.
I only have GURPS Space, Spaceships and Mars
Stalker is a Roadside Picnic game, though
Fallout 1-2 are better. The best game ever made are either Tetris, Doom or Mario.
I would run a Fallout campaign using some homebrew based on a resistance system from Spire/Heart, but more streamlined. With SPECIAL instead of both skills and domains. And with managing 4 or so meta resourses for survival. Like health+food+money, lets call it half-life, ammo+durability, fuel+charges, and for example hope that is wasted on failed speech and stealth checks.
Doom is probably the most important video game ever made going by its continued relevance and life. No one plays the OG Marios for anything but nostalgia and the only innovation on Tetris is online competitive play. Doom constantly sees new content and iteration on a game engine that is older than most of the people in this thread.
Doom is an awesome set of levels but its continued relevance as a mod framework is basically unparalleled in Video games ye.
Original tetris had records set this year, grandpa. In the past 10 years lil tards have even figured out how to go faster in it, by rolling the controller.
No one plays doom without z-look (the original has no up down view, just left right) they all want brutal doom, doom eternal, doom with quake levels etc.
>No one plays doom without z-look (the original has no up down view, just left right) they all want brutal doom, doom eternal, doom with quake levels etc.
Oh, you don't know what you're talking about.
Tetris doesn't need updates because you can't improve perfection.
>desert setting
>greatest anything
it was over before it even started
She owed me sex, simple as.
And she'd be happy to give it to you and would have done if she'd been able to find you after the 2nd Battle for Hoover Dam. If the drunken Vegas Wedding quest hadn't been dropped you would, at least for a time, have been her husband and sex would have been had.
We can only assume that there would have been and Endurance test you'd have had to pass. 2 END or lower would have been a game over screen, 2 - 4 would have been both legs broken and half hitpoints lost, 4 - 6 would have been some leg damage and 25% hitpoint loss, 6 - 8 would be no damage and 8 and above you don't need a speech check to convince her sto stay married to you.
>Run it in the aftermath of the game
Fallout: Dust.
If I have to stay within the Mojave, then I'd probably run a prequel to NV where my players are Desert Rangers fighting off raiders and eventually Legion.
If not, I'd just use all the stuff I have written up for Utah and Colorado. It's mostly about a Legion Civil War and a group of them converting to Mormonism.
I think there's a lot of potential for exploring the Legion-Rangers War. I think everyone agrees the Rangers are fricking awesome, and fleshing them out as a distinct faction would be real cool.
Another possibility is the Legion split the Rangers in two, and there western ones shacked up with the NCR, while the once cut off in the east are rebranded as the Texas Rangers fighting off the Legion essentially by themselves.
Also- a lot of prequels often have campaign outcomes be something where it's like it can go either way- sort of like how choices are handled in telltale games. Which is to say they branch out, then reuinite and you didn't influence anything.
It doesn't work with telltale since you see the full storyline and how little variance there is, but I think there's room for prequels so long as you make it more an issue of interpretation.
As an example- say we take the Brotherhood and their ideological splits between reformists and traditionalists. You could side with one or the other faction in a prequel game, and I think we'd all understand why that conflict might stay intransigent in a future game since that conflict basically informs their entire history. In fact- that's basically Veronica's storyline in New Vegas. She's a reformist, but supporting her basically does jack shit for the Brotherhood in the long-run- MAYBE the Mojave Chapter reforms and even allies with the NCR, but the brotherhood in the longrun will continue to entrench itself in hyper-conservatism.
>Fallout: New Vegas, the greatest video game ever made.
False. It's not a masterpiece, it's not the greatest game ever made. It's a mediocre RPG with a bunch of shitty railroading despite being an "open world" game and the worst map in all of the 3d Fallouts that tells you to follow the road or get fricked.
I think there are two kinds of fallout fans, and one are much louder than the others.
Roleplaying fans care about the ability to roleplay and the story and lore of a Fallout game. And that stuff is important, but I wouldn't say it's the only metric to judge a game on.
The other may enjoy those parts of the game, but are more interested in the gameplay and exploration. And the Mojave despite being a desert is ironically much more fenced off than Fallout 3 or 4, and the gameplay is more static as most encounters are pretty pre-designed with not that much iteration on replays. I think this is also why the basebuilding in 4 was incredibly hit or miss for players.
The story fans are the loudest, so New Vegas is an untouched masterpiece (and it undoubtedly has the best written story and lore) while every Bethesda game is treated as having zero redeeming value.
>And the Mojave despite being a desert is ironically much more fenced off than Fallout 3 or 4
I always feel like I'm taking crazy pills for preferring F3, but the wasteland feels much more alive in some way.
I liked 4 alot more. better dungeons, replayability and roleplay, better lore, music.
I understand. Like I said, the lore fans are just the really really noisy ones.
Now ideally the perfect Fallout Game would have both great gameplay and a great story. Not to say the gameplay in Fallout New Vegas is bad, but it's held back by a lack of dynamic encounters and a smaller more boxed in map design.
A full on Fallout New Vegas Remake with the gameplay improvements of 4 (and I include basebuilding in that list though I think you would want to be tactical where you set those up- also a small tweak should be the ability to link caravans with major pre-existing settlements) and a map that's twice the size would be the perfect game.
The other problem I think is how completely stuck-up the Lore fans are thanks to talking to each-other in a vacuum for years on end between the release of different games.
Literally all Fallout 3 is good for is mindless dungeons. That's the only thing New Vegas lacks - more dungeons.
>I watched a video complaining about Bethesda on youtube, I am expert now
You seem really defensive over your Toddslop, lol. I'm not going to take it away from you.
You don't need snowflake dice for any snowflake dice system, but it's an extra layer of inconvenience and there's always one of you people along to pull apologies for it.
According to Sawyer, the Legion was never intended to be a "grey" faction or a viable alternative, they just wanted to show more of why people accepted them in the east. There's very little of that left beyond Raul pointing out how much worse the raiders and tribals used to be.
Probably better to go with Utah, since even by the time of New Vegas it remains 'contested' territory, with no one really able to exert control across the state. The problem with prequels - assuming you don't let players change major details - is that the outcome is a foregone conclusion in some factors.
>You don't need snowflake dice for any snowflake dice system, but it's an extra layer of inconvenience and there's always one of you people along to pull apologies for it.
It just uses d6's. This isn't like genesys where it actually would be a huge inconvenience, you're crying about literally nothing.
>According to Sawyer, the Legion was never intended to be a "grey" faction or a viable alternative
I know. And according to Avellone, they were. That was my point.
>Roleplaying fans care about the ability to roleplay
Which New Vegas also fails at, especially compared to the older games but even compared to 3. In 3, you have to actively roleplay and choose your skills to get certain options because, like in real life, if you lack the knowledge of something you can't realistically do it and wouldn't be able to consider it.
>the story and lore of a Fallout game
NV's "story" is incredibly basic and boring, and a lot of the lore that it canonizes from 1 and 2 (such as the Chosen One killing the deathclaw mother that belonged to the mother of the lady in Sloan whose name I forget) ruins the older titles.
>And that stuff is important, but I wouldn't say it's the only metric to judge a game on.
It's important, but like a good TTRPG the real importance is the ability to frick around and find unconventional ways to solve problems, which NV really sucks at.
>but are more interested in the gameplay and exploration.
It's more I want to be able to actually roleplay and make choices instead of being railroaded down one of a few very limited, boring paths. TTRPGs have spoiled me, if I'm being honest.
>And the Mojave despite being a desert is ironically much more fenced off than Fallout 3 or 4
IMO the worst part is the mountains in the middle of the map. Without those (where the only way through is the Primm pass that is guarded by a deathclaw) it'd be a far better experience, but still lacking in terms of the quests.
>he gameplay is more static as most encounters are pretty pre-designed with not that much iteration on replays
That's also a problem, no random encounters makes the Mojave feel ironically more dead than the capital wasteland which really sucks cause it could have been great to see the consequences of your actions in real time through new encounters based on what quests you do instead of just having the hit squads in pre-set spawns.
I think Fallout 3 handled random encounters the best out of a Fallout Game. You had some notably wild ones, but I think what was best was how they different factions of the Wasteland would come across each-other and fight making it feel more alive.
You had the neutral Brotherhood Outcasts who were buttholes but would usually shoot whatever is trying to kill you. Talon Company Mercs gunning for you, but also not being on the side of random raiders, super-mutants, or mutated wildlife. Who in turn were also not on each-others side and would also fight each-other. Felt like it was a proper warzone.
I think everyone agrees they love factions in Bethesda games. But I think what would help them feel a lot more alive is to see them in the overworld and see who they get into fights with. Like- I think everyone can agree the Skyrim Civil War would have been better if you saw random patrols of Imperials and Stormcloaks spot each-other and get into fights. Same for the NCR-Legion War too come to think about.
Naturally certain groups will have territories and not be spotted that far out of them, but still you can have those random encounters at different spots in the map.
Oh god are you that guy who constantly makes FALLOUT 3 GUD threads?
>it undoubtedly has the best written story and lore
Compared to 1 and 2, frick no it doesn't. The story is one-note and two-dimensional with Mass Effect 3 tier endings where all you get is a different colored slide and 3 of the 4 endings are literally just you going down the dam the same way fighting random literallywhos while one is going backwards. Not to mention the shitty speech ending for Lanius which shouldn't even be an option because of who he is and who he's built up to be. Not to mention how shallow the Legion is as a faction, it's the fastest option hands down after Wild Card.
It's the random encounters. The fact there's so many and some that are the result of your choices in some quests means that NPCs will get into fights and you'll bumble into them. New vegas is a post-post apocalypse game, it's not a Post-Apocalyptic Roleplaying Game. Everything is so ordered, so sterile, that the world feels too manufactured and streamlined to really get immersed in.
Fallout 3 has some of the best environmental storytelling, and in a visual medium like video games it does show not tell a thousand times better than New Vegas, which has a note or a holotape or a computer entry or an NPC expositing literally everything.
Anyway, on topic, just made my own TTRPG system for fallout because none of the existing options were quite what I wanted. Very heavily draws on NV/3 for mechanics but I've done stuff for every numbered entry and NV for weapons, equipment, etc. Even stole the mods from WMX for NV for the weapons or copied them for weapons that didn't have them.
>Not to mention the shitty speech ending for Lanius which shouldn't even be an option because of who he is and who he's built up to be.
Newsflash genius, Caesar is a LIAR.
He reinvented himself into a God of War, not the scrawny nerd he actually is, and he's done the same with Lanius. Lanius is hyped up to be a big brute moron who kills his own men for fun. It, like the whole legion, is a lie that Caesar tells enough to make it true.
His men believe it, the NCR believes it, but when you actually meet Lanius he is reasonable, intelligent and willing to talk. Because pinning your hopes of winning a war on a brutal moron commander is stupid. Lanius isn't that. The whole game shows how the Legion's newest war plan is crippling the NCR, they're destroying towns, cutting supply lines. Lanius, the general, is already winning before he even begins the battle for hoover dam, which is more than Joshua Graham accomplished.
Legate Lanius isn't the monster of the East. Just like how Edward Sallow isn't Caesar, the roman god of war incarnate. Caesar lies. Lies about who he is. Lies about his understanding and education on classical history. Lies about why he's attacking the NCR. Why would he be telling the truth about Lanius? Lanius serves him better as the monster of the East than "Legion General #2"
being able to wander in any direction is not good exploration.
its just mindless exploration.
you’d think a game based around surviving the post apocalyptic world would understand this.
It's about freedom.
See in Fallout 4 they stick you in the northwest corner of the map. You have a bit of room to explore west and north, but not much though it's the easiest areas with the weakest enemies. The further you go from Vault 111 is harder and harder, and there is a path for you to go on, but it's very gentle encouragement to go there.
Contrast the enemy placement in New Vegas that plants huge beefgates at Sloan and Goodsprings Pass with Cazadors and Deathclaws, there is a singular path the devs are almost mandating you go to get the right story content. This wouldn't be as bad if they at least gave you a few 'dead-end' paths to explore and test out the game, but really it's just 'go to Sloan, do a few minor sidequest and turn back'.
Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Oblivion all start you at the center of the map, they point you clearly where you should go next if you wanna do the story, but outside of some bonuses you get for doing the beginner quests there's no reason to go there until you decide you want to.
Put another way- the way they drop you into the world should appeal both to roleplayers, people pretending they are invested in the main questline (I'm not saying that in a derogatory manner) as well as those who really don't care much about the story and want to just start exploring and see what they find.
Except you can very easily get past the death claws and cazadors and super mutants with no trouble.
Compare to fallout 3 where the republic of Dave is past the hardest spot in the base game with all the death claws. Or skyrim where nothing is challenging at all because of level scaling.
Freedom is seeing the gates and still being able to walk past instead of shit just being pasted without cohesion.
You- someone who has played the game several dozen times can get through them easy. Someone who either is starting fresh, or doesn't want to cheese the game cannot.
Both Fallout 3 and 4 ease you into the difficulty throughout the map- the further you are form the start, the more difficult things are. You grow stronger with the environment around you, and while you might find a spot where the difficulty of the environment has outpaced your character, it's not a beefgate because you still have plenty of other areas you can continue to explore.
Skyrim also does this to a lesser extent despite having level scaling, notably in enemy types. One example being how Frost Trolls are more dangerous and only found in snowy Holds, so i does gently encourage you to stay in the beginning areas until you've leveled up, but the level scaling does mute things slightly.
I'm positive everyone who shits on Bethesda never played any game prior to 3. I think Bethesda Fans are a lot like Star Wars fans. They play the games over and over and over again, and what start as minor complaints grow and grow over time as they become so familiar with the property. Like say- compare how a non-fallout fan might approach Fallout 4, with say someone trying to play through the new Suicide Squad game, you know?
In addition- I think you have a lot of gamers who become immersed in the worlds of Bethesda games, but then upon replay they find out that the world isn't as deep as they thought it was, and they get jaded as a result. Partly due to genuine flaws with Bethesda, but also just due to the constraints of what you can do with such games in the first place. Then they take that disappointment and the throw it onto the company.
>I'm positive everyone who shits on Bethesda never played any game prior to 3. I think Bethesda Fans are a lot like Star Wars fans. They play the games over and over and over again, and what start as minor complaints grow and grow over time as they become so familiar with the property. Like say- compare how a non-fallout fan might approach Fallout 4, with say someone trying to play through the new Suicide Squad game, you know?
>In addition- I think you have a lot of gamers who become immersed in the worlds of Bethesda games, but then upon replay they find out that the world isn't as deep as they thought it was, and they get jaded as a result. Partly due to genuine flaws with Bethesda, but also just due to the constraints of what you can do with such games in the first place. Then they take that disappointment and the throw it onto the company.
I started with Fallout 1 and 2, and I'm definitely going to shit on Fallout 4. Not so much on 3, which was still a pretty good game. Fallout 4 is just genuinely bad, though.
Fallout 3 is an alright game, but the writing in it is generally wretched. Not by "Fallout" standards, but by "sentient human" standards. You don't even need to go with the easy target of the nonsense ending for that.
Occasionally cute quest writing and fun environments makes up for a lot.
Sure, but a bad writing can be compensated for by strengths elsewhere, just like good writing can compensate for flaws elsewhere. I'm not saying that Fallout 3 is a masterpiece, and "alright" is an apt description of it. It's definitely a whole lot better than Fallout 4, at the very least.
>You- someone who has played the game several dozen times can get through them easy. Someone who either is starting fresh, or doesn't want to cheese the game cannot.
My first time playing Fallout 3 I lost a gunfight with an eyebot. The world was impenetrable, and Megaton was a safe haven instead of a hub to trudge back to with loot.
>In addition- I think you have a lot of gamers who become immersed in the worlds of Bethesda games, but then upon replay they find out that the world isn't as deep as they thought it was
Very true. It's a very different experience after hundreds of hours, but how many games can even survive playing hundreds of hours?
>I'm positive everyone who shits on Bethesda never played any game prior to 3.
I've seen 3 categories of Bethesda haters.
>genuine or fake grogs who want 2d back or imitated as closely as possible
>FNV players console warring with 3 and 4
>anyone who doesn't realize that Bethesda died after M$ and anything to the contrary is an illusion
3 is the oldest Fallout I've played (although I've played a lot of Morrowind) and I don't hate Bethesda games from that era, although in hindsight I can count their good games on one hand.
>I'm positive everyone who shits on Bethesda never played any game prior to 3.
I started with 3 as a kid but loved New Vegas more almost immediately. I've since played the originals a couple of times through but neither can compare to New Vegas. Fallout 1 has the best story but 2 has more interesting content and world building but is ruined by popculture references everywhere and a lackluster uninteresting antagonist faction. Fallout 3's enclave is better than the Enclave in Fallout 2. There's at least a factional split between Colonel Autumn and President Eden. F2 has nothing that interesting, it's just them wanting to kill everyone on the planet. It's disappointing compared to the master and his army, he had ideas for the future, you can see how he came to his conclusions. Then in Fallout 3 you've got Colonel Autumn using Eden to LARP as the true American government when really he's just trying to be an unelected military dictator.
The originals are by no means perfect but they at least set a good foundation fir the setting
>The further you go from Vault 111 is harder and harder
That's also not true. The hardest point is probably the glowing sea to the south but the first raider boss you find has a guy in power armor with a fat man and that's literally 30 minutes into the game.
The furthest point is literally the best and easiest part of the game with a massive island settlement.
Plus those bloodbugs are literally one shot potential outside Concord. Which would be good game design if they were supposed to keep you from going that way hut they aren't, they just have a minimum level of 6 when you're level 2 because Bethesda has forgotten how to make encounters without leveling bullshit.
Okay it's not strictly true everywhere, it's still broadly true. I don't know what you mean about the 'first raider boss you find', the one in Zimonji Outpost has power armor and a Fat Man, but that's very far east from Vault 111, so yeah that's where I'd expect difficulty to increase. The first raiders around Concord are very low leveled with basic weapons and armor. The SaCom array has Ack-Ack who has a minigun and that's reasonably difficult given the distance I'd say.
I'd also point out that the Glowing Sea is literally outside the map, so yeah it would make sense it's the hardest location in the game, it's the farthest away from the starting point you can get.
>Contrast the enemy placement in New Vegas that plants huge beefgates at Sloan and Goodsprings Pass with Cazadors and Deathclaws, there is a singular path the devs are almost mandating you go to get the right story content.
homie, if you want to go that way just engage with the fricking mechanics and find a way to leverage your skills to do it. There's a good reason they give you access to a Stealth Boy and a Stealth skillbook in Goodsprings
>Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Oblivion all start you at the center of the map, they point you clearly where you should go next if you wanna do the story, but outside of some bonuses you get for doing the beginner quests there's no reason to go there until you decide you want to.
> the way they drop you into the world should appeal both to roleplayers,
Fricking lmao, there's no way you can pretend Oblivion and FO3 are giving RPers a free hand to decide what they want to do next. The former starts with an imminent apocalypse and gives you the job of delivering the MacGuffin ASAP, while FO3 pre-sets your goals and motivation for you and gives you a goal that's only going to get harder the longer it's delayed (namely, tracking someone down). That's one of their most pointed problems from a RP perspective; there's no real off-roading from the main storyline to give you a chance to go off and engage with everything else without having to assume your character is clinically moronic
I mean if all you're gonna do is retread the same arguments made on the internet over and over again without any sort of original thought, then okay.
I wasn't kidding about my youtube expert remark, I genuinely wonder how many people who shit talk Fallout 3 have played it.
4 compromised the aesthetic, dumbed down and ignored the parts of the setting that people liked, and persisted in this delusional "post apocalyptic means people live in rusting shanties in the bombed out ruins of various monuments" instead of what Fallout is actually about and what makes people like it in the first place, which is that you have POST apocalyptic societies where you're navigating ethics and ideology in aiding or subverting them. FO4 doesn't just have bad writing - of course, it absolutely does - but is actually not even trying to appeal to people who like fallout in the first place. It's a game for the 'atompunk' fans who want kitschy 50s-esque Nuclear Americana and WACKY reddit memes, it's a parody of Fallout, and it's a bad one at that. Not to mention, for all the vaunted improvements to the gunplay, it manages to have worse weapon variety and far uglier and dumber weapon designs than any other FO. Top to bottom, FO4 is dogshit.
I'll give FO4 one thing and one thing only - power armour being a walking tank you hop in and out of was cool and better than its previous 3D depictions. Otherwise 1000% agreed.
Lmao, I'm working on a New Vegas conversion for Dark Heresy 2e as we speak, using my vast Black Crusade Homebrewing experience.
Didn't know there were more people interested in such a thing.
>define characters through ten characteristics, complemented by the classic 7 S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats
How does this even work? When do the SPECIAL stats come into play?
Perhaps the most cursed elevator pitch I've ever seen, thank you.
>system
build your own
>how to run a campaign?
Either post NV, or Pre-NV
>How to Courier?
Don't. If you're doing a post-NV campaign, don't make him a character. Have him be mentioned in passing. Maybe let the players find one of his lost guns here or there, but don't make him a prevalent character.
It's Reddit: the video game. Standard shitty obsidian writing. It's the $20 Patek Phillipe imitation, the Chrysler 300 with Bentley badge, Ready Player One wrapped in Ulysses dust cover. A game by fedora for fedoras. It's the quintessential pseud game. A pedestrian easily accessible basic game covered in several coats of faux intellectual paint and featuring just enough quasi-philosophical meandering to turn away both the ones looking for a fun adventure and those looking for a serious game - it has become the Holy Grail of pseuds. Quite obviously more mentally stimulating than Fallout 3, yet never as much as to take the viewer out of the comfort zone of the usual in video game storytelling and babby's first political dichotomy - it's the perfect cultural artifact to attach to for someone desperately longing for the image of "thinking man" or "intellectual", while not actually being interested in challenging their own thoughts or developing authentic taste. It's a game for smart-but-lazy dropouts, for young adults who sincerely use the word "normie", for men with "So it goes" tattoos rereading Hitchhiker's Guide for the third time, for community college freshmen that write posts starting with "as an engineer", for "I love Nietzsche! Nihilism, frick yeah!" people, for those that have buried themselves so deep in irony so they can't even be honest with themselves anymore. The sort who will make fun of ham-fisted Black Mirror VR episodes in one thread and expunge upon "deep" connotations of holographic waifu in 8000 character multiposts in another, the sort who get off on reddit gold received for their standard issue incoherent teenage "philosophizing" dreck spiced with 'human condition' and 'Hegelian dialectic', the enlightened-by-their-own-intelligence crowd.
>How would you run a campaign in this setting?
Throw in some quirky NPCs some with odd proposals or misleading small tasks.
I had mixed feelings about the survival aspect so i let them count their ammunition but i ignored rations more or less as long as they bought/acquired some every now and then.
Outside of cities you could use irradiated areas for some high risk-reward, maybe a group of ex-mercs got their hands on some hazmatsuits and are now larping as raiders killing nearby trader/civilians and retreating into these zones afterwards.
The irradiated areas could be used to railroad your group if they stray afar but then again how would they be able to detect radiation.
In New Vegas you have the obvious basic-politics plothook and maybe even more hardships for the civlians due to the recent big fight.
I let it take place after the NV ending, so i could rely on the lore/world building of the games but also make up some new stuff
> What System?
I used Savage Worlds and a modified d20modern for a few short campaigns.
>How do you adapt the courier to a party?
I dont.
Maybe he is dead, maybe house won and he is like a vice-mayor.
Maybe the NCR won and they dont need a hero besides the NCR so he "tragically" dies in the fight only for the player group to stumble upon some hints that the NCR is behind his death.
Maybe he leaves the city because reasons and nothing happens
If your setting is not in NV you could you some lore-friendly inspiration from the HOI4 Old world blues mod for nearby factions
I think the name for the mod is dumb since it doesn't take place in the Old World, nor does it have anything to do with the DLC of the same name.
Outside of that, I approve how they use lore from cancelled games and such to help fill out the map.
I'd just prefer they balance things a bit better. The Brotherhood should act more like a coherent faction, or at least have the possibility to. I think they could also stand to give the NCR like glider scout planes to start with give them that slight edge (maybe also some air units to the Brotherhood after Navarro), and give some of the coastal nations some proper navies. I think having to go from like galleys to cutters and such makes sense with the post-apocalypse armies, but I think like settler tier nations should start with the 1700's era tech rather than the classical era tech. Brotherhood should start with a couple of Ironclads.
There's also the fact that the Legion is gunning for them. They need to defeat the Legion at some point, and would you rather fight them in Nevada, or California?
The only reason the NCR population is war-weary is because they are in the middle of a much worse (though winding down) war with the Brotherhood that is more pressing because it's on their doorstep and the average citizen is much more familiar with the Brotherhood than the Legion.
Veronica > Cass
Who ever came up with the idea of a tomboy brotherhood scribe companion is a genius.
How'd you start designing waifu's for Fallout 5?
My pitch is a game set in Chicago against a villainous Brotherhood and siding with Enclave Reformers (while having to purge Enclave Reactionaries to do so). A major character would be Col. Autumn's daughter (blonde, sultry southern accent, dommy-mommy vibes) who guides you through the internal politics of the Enclave and allying with the other major factions in the area against the Brotherhood.
Thinking on it too- Fallout's companions I think have gotten better with each game, but I don't think they're quite perfect yet. I think tying a perk to each one's personal quest in Fallout 4 was genius as it gives a gameplay reason to seek them all out and learn about them. But I wonder if it'd be equally smart to give each faction a companion that takes you through their questlines. I think that allows a lot more writing opportunities from something everyone likes in the games (factions) and helping flesh both them and the companions at the same time. The only downside would be you're forced to have certain companions for certain quests, but I don't think it would be too unlike how they handled Serana and the Dawnguard DLC.
Besides PnP fallout there is also exodus, which is a d20 fallout conversion. It’s not ‘technically’ fallout but it’s everything fallout has but off brand.
Regarding worldbuilding, how do you handle cars/vehicles?
I want them to be somewhat available (luxury/military) and fuel should be managable for a larger faction in e.g former canada, the gulf or texas area. The oil sources should not have dried up completely and be sufficient for a now very small population.
As for fusion/fission im not sure. Basically free energy almost forever should be priceless but in the games all these robots are just strolling around and nobody cares. Whats the difference between a fusion core and a fusion engine anyway? One appears to be eternal and the other one is expended within a day (power armor).
I like the idea of combustion engines that utilize grain alcohol making a comeback in certain parts of the New World. You'd need a pretty stable area to justify using food crops for fuel, and to obtain the technical knowhow for building the engines, but production for them would be doable even on relatively small-scale farms and they'd be a huge boon to areas of flat, open country like the central U.S. Although I've heard that the Great Plains are supposed to be kind of like the Divide writ large, so idk what settlements in that region would look like.
As for fission/fusion: my impression is that the stuff that runs robots is not usually very high throughput, and so isn't necessarily worth the trouble for the average wastelander to pry out of an active unit. Especially when robots will turn and defend themselves with laser fire (you take a potshot at an assaultron, see how it works out for you). And I don't think your basic scavenger actually has access to much that they could run off of a battery unit without some good electrical know-how anyway, which worsens the risk/reward proposition.
We do see some homes in New Vegas powering themselves with fission batteries though. Mostly lights, IIRC. Maybe household appliances like the fridge. They probably last in this use case for quite a while but there's no telling, really.
>fusion cores
I sorta just ignore them. They were invented as a part of balancing FO4's decision to hand the player power armor so early in the game and didn't exist prior to that. T-45d ran off a bank of Energy Cells, which resulted in the suits being shelved due to poor operational time in field conditions. T-51b can run for centuries right off the assembly line due to its perfected reactor unit, and mirrors other Pre-War tech just kind of going on and on like the Energizer Bunny.
>cont.
As for how I'd handle the players having a car... idk tbh senpai.
My first instinct would pretty much be to rip FO2 and have it be a fast travel method that consumed salvaged/recovered fuel. A fusion powered car would probably work on the same principles, if we take FO4's coolant refill stations at face value. Just you're looking for a different consumable. The utility here would be more apparent if the players were having to race against the clock on something; failure to keep the car running could put a major crimp in their plans, or force them to burn more resources on dealing with encounters along the road.
Tangentially, one idea one of my current party members thought up, and I think is cool as frick, was the idea of the party getting their hands on a land train and decking it out as a mobile fortress/faction base. If I do ever get the itch to put a Fallout game together I am 100% working that into the campaign somehow. We know the tech for stuff like that exists too, given the Enclave's mobile command center in FO3.
My only real bugbear with the idea is that I'm not sure how encounters involving it would work. Intuitively, it'd basically be a base defense mission but I worry that would result in the players feeling too penned in.
I think that larger technologically advanced factions would have them, but use them sparingly.
So like the NCR and Brotherhood. In fact, there's placement of vehicles in the Broken Steel DLC that implies they were using vehicles to transport supplies.
I figure though they are either restored nuclear engines, or electric engines.