Traits, Perks

Redeye · Post by **Redeye** » Sun Sep 17, 2006 3:47 am

vx trauma wrote:also cha bonus from the warm gut feeling received from burning addict thrashing around completely on fire. along with 'chilling' agony shriek. flammenwerfer. swell party with farming community establishments and fauna.

Put that into FOOL and you could have a clan called the Burners -ala Jeremiah.

TriangleDragon · Post by **TriangleDragon** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 10:39 pm

St. Toxic wrote:Get one skill all the way down to zero for an extra stat, or vice versa, could be just the thing that's missing from your character to make it perfect, and with a little backstory it really adds to personalization.

Yes indeed, the Arcanum backgrounds were cool and pretty well balanced. To the extent where that you could choose not to have a significant background and thus your character remained unaltered, without being inferior.

This combined with the Fallout system should work fine.

atoga · Post by **atoga** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 1:26 am

I thought arcanum backgrounds were pretty boring for the most part. The majority just gave a bonus to some stats while taking off an equal (or slightly greater) penalty from others.

Backgrounds should be more unique than that. They should give the character something that they couldn't normally get just from throwing points at their stats.

Dreadnought · Post by **Dreadnought** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 5:05 am

Yeah. But arcanum was all about a fragile balance between technology and majick!
You could chose a background, where you got a talent on tech but 2 left hands on majick! Ideal for a tech char.
And there is (hopefully) no majick in F3.
So such backgrounds would suck in F3 because the Fallout world has no such boundries (balance: tech-majick).
A doctor also can shoot somebodys head off.
A merchant can punch the shit out of something.
And a fighter can also be intelligent and repair computers.

Fallout gives more possibilities than Arcanum.

Long story short:

No backgrounds.

(even if I once thought, i'd be a good idea to have them, but i changed my mind)

St. Toxic · Post by **St. Toxic** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 12:42 pm

There's more in backgrounds than statup/down and balance magic/tech. For instance we have stat-up/down in situation X/Y, where stats are modified only in certain situations ( as in, say, charisma up when talking to ghouls only ), which could be useful if you've planned to play as a ghoul friendly, ghoul wannabe ghoul enthusiast. That's an example.

Same goes with skills. For instance, REPAIR which can be used on both High-tech gadgets ( computers ) and middle-tech gadgets ( guns ) and low-tech gadgets ( masonry, wells and that lot ) can, by adding an appropriate background, get a percentage modifier that adds +successrate to YOUR pref. field of reparation ( as in, "Son of a gunsmith, +14% success at repairing arms, -7% successrate high&low tech repair" ).

Backgrounds can also add non stat&skill modifiers, or perhaps get you perks early on ( with a suitable trade-off of course ). If Fallout 3 has any dialogues ( signs point to no ) backgrounds could logically modify people's initial reactions towards you, and perhaps even topics in some cases.

Finally, a background gives you a pretty nice guideline to what you'll be aiming for at the more advanced stage of the character creation process. The option not to choose a background being present, makes any urge to complain that "Ogosh why can't I make the character I want to without being forced to get in line" redundant.

PiP · Post by **PiP** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 1:32 pm

also, a background tell you a story, and good RPGs are a lot about telling a good story. If you're that kind of player who likes immersion and appreciates it.