You're quite vague about this, leading me to wonder if you have a coherent point to make.
The —point— has been so oft repeated for years now, that no longer interesting to repeat it in detail; and shouldn't need it IMO.
However, I will make an exception.
When people roleplay IRL, they carry out the character's actions. Ditto for LARPING. There's nothing about roleplaying that requires detachment from the character one plays. In fact roleplaying is specifically about the exact opposite of that, and ingraining it into the structure of a game doesn't change any of this.
Now who is being vague. I disagree with that BTW. I'd say that roleplaying is impossible unless you are detached; so as to not cloud the reactions with your own.
In FPS Fallout games the characters skills and strength are part of what determines accuracy.
This allows the player to actively and directly experience the limits and abilities of their character, rather than being a spectator to their character's nature.
It's negligible, and the game is crap. Fallout is a superb RPG, FO3 is equivalent to a Fallout themed experience, in relatively the same way that the Luxor casino equates with a trip to ancient Egypt.
In FO3 the player can compensate for the accuracy penalty—improving the PC's shooting accuracy beyond their defined skill. The player can shoot the BOS paladins, and then later return to ask admittance to the Citadel. The player can shoot the PC's dad in the face 50 times with the BB gun, and then ask for (and be given) more BBs to do it again. It's a garbage RPG.
VATS was a map location in Fallout 1, V.A.T.S. in FO3 is a magical 'I win' button that lets the player unfairly slow time to a crawl whilst they shoot multiple times at their defenseless enemies, and they are given a 90% damage shield towards incoming attacks while they do it. VATS is broken, for this reason, and because it aims from the hip —literally, so even head shots can miss partially obscured targets if they are behind a waist high obstruction.
*VATS is assumed to be a nod to turn based, but it's not. There is no turn, just a cheat against the AI, and the AI never gets pull this trick on the PC. In Fallout the combat is fair; in FO3 the NPCs usually have unlimited ammo, and they will soak damage at peak efficiency until the very last hitpoint, then fall dead.
In FO3, the player can have the PC do unspeakable evil, then regain their good reputation by handing out bottles of radioactive water to vagrants. The game is incorrigible, and unsalvageable as a Fallout sequel, and a piss poor RPG in its own right. In FO:New Vegas, the PC can be lynched by an entire casino for picking up a cigarette butt off of the floor. In both games the skill system is bad, (due to thresholds, and skill merging; in NV's case also due to what are essentially skill potions).
In Fo3 one cannot even attempt a thing until success is assured, and in NV you can make the attempt—but will either always fail, or always succeed.
In other words, the PC is either inept or infallible. (But even then, you can always use a skill potion)
When you merge skills, you eliminate speciality. For instance, it is impossible to have two weapons experts who are not both each equally skilled in both weapons if the game has only one catch-all melee weapon skill. It is impossible in the later Fallout games to have an expert in first aid, who is not also a surgeon. In Fallout it's impossible to have have a character who is expert with a pistol—and who is not equally skilled with shotguns, sniper rifles, and light machine guns...but in NV it's also impossible for them to not be equally skilled with rocket launchers and flame throwers.
Roleplaying isn't an act of spectating. It's explicitly participatory.
How so?—by doing things
for them? It's certainly not supposed to be. The player is not there in situ; for all intents they are non-existent within the game, except as an invisible observer. If the PC is illiterate, they should not be able to read text for them. The player should not be able to answer riddles for the PC; they should not be able to make leaps of logic and perception for them that the character is not capable of achieving themselves.
The beauty of roleplaying games is that this [ideally] works both ways, and so the PC with exceptional intelligence and education should be able to answer questions, and perform tasks that the player is totally unfamiliar with... and they should not be hamstrung by the player's own shortcomings.
In this way, roleplaying a Bruce Lee style character allows the player to influence the game world with a consummate martial artist when they themselves are not; one who knows better than they, how to handle themselves in a fight. In this way, roleplaying a Seinfeld or Carlin style character allows the player to influence the game world with a silver tongued comedian—which they are probably not. This PC knows how to handle a crowd, sway them, and entertain them. This is
not something Rambo could do, despite all of his exceptional military training. He could not walk out on a stage and handle a crowd like George Carlin or Jerry Seinfeld. This is why the character skill is what matters, and why player skill should not even be considered for influence in RPGs.
Honestly, it's almost like you have to forget what you're talking about, the games and the concepts involved, in order to make this claim. That's about as gentle as I can put it. Either way, roleplaying games don't have to be like conventional tabletop rpgs. Which themselves are not the end all be all of roleplaying in game design, or the purest form, or the archetype against which all others must be judged. You really need to start thinking outside the box you're living in.
The box in this case is Fallout, and the problem we have is that the developers were thinking outside of the box; Bethesda was thinking within a different box entirely... when they released an Oblivion clone as a Fallout sequel.
To no one in particular: before anyone trots out the usual 'but what about simulating randomness' bit, I have to ask, are you roleplaying as a subatomic particle? No? Then there isn't any randomness to simulate. For everything else there are dynamic systems...and they can be simulated with dynamic systems. Ta-da, no need for virtual dice rolls, no need at all.
This is BoguS. Randomness facilitates impartiality, no one is perfect—except when they cannot fail unintentionally. That's what you get when you discard unpredictability.
Fallout had a maximum of 95% success rate, but even an expert can fail, through their own fault, or no fault of their own; like a professional locksmith who fails to unlock the door to their own house on their first try—while using their own keys... what do you think the odds of that are? But it happens all the time; it's called dropping one's keys.
A random system weighted by character skill & aptitude represents the character's overall expectation and confidence in their ability to influence the situation. It doesn't guarantee their outcome, but it ensures that the expert usually succeeds while the novice typically fails a lot on the path to getting better at it.
Ideally it doesn't matter if the player 'rolls again', because time is the important factor. Anyone can pick a lock (or solve puzzles, disable a trap, or generally succeed at something) if they have as much time as they need, but the expert can reliably do it on demand, while under pressure; where as the novice will have a harder time of it, and might not be able to succeed quickly enough. That's all that's necessary for the skill system, and that's how Fallout worked.
NV really annoyed me once when my character was out in the middle of nowhere, with no one for miles, and before him stood a little rundown shack with a locked door; and he had a minigun, but could not open the door
In essence, the random roll represents the abstract difficulty of a task in the moment, and the character's skill at the task is their ability to succeed under [changing] adversity. This adversity can be anything at all—anything; blood pressure, sand in the pants, a previous burglar damaged the lock; a fly landed in their eye, or crawled up their nose; the ground is damp; the wind is cold. It's an abstraction of the situation, and their relative confidence and ability at the task—that may or may not be enough to succeed in the moment.
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Gameplay-wise: None of the followup Fallout games share its gameplay; they are all loosely based on TES, and FO4 loosest of all. These are entirely different games that share only the IP world setting, and some cherry picked names. Gameplay matters; it's paramount. If it were not so, then a Diablo sequel could be a collectible card game, and the next TES game could be a Torchlight clone.... but no, no, no—that's sacrilege, and yet it's just fine when it's the other guy's favorite game.
When the gameplay is no longer built upon improving the foundation that preceded it, (and what generated the reputation), then it no longer deserves that reputation. If TES six played like Titan Quest in Tamriel, it would not matter how superb, nor how fantastic the lore and ancillary gameplay elements were... it would still be seen as completely wrong at its core experience, because it's not even trying to deliver on it.
With Bethesda's FO games, they are not even trying to deliver on it.
