Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
![](https://www.nma-fallout.com/xencustomimages/nma/nma_8.gif)
While I am sympathetic to this argument (and I've seen you make it in the past), it seems to be reliant on the assumption that what makes something an RPG is how closely it resembles traditional tabletop RPGs and their reliance on dicerolls, rather then NV's model of skill checks as being hard pass-fails or 3/NV's combat which is only partly reliant on the actual character sheet and much more so on traditional FPS aiming.There are no (apparent) Luck checks in Fallout 1&2 because it didn't happen in the foreground and/or dialogue options like in New Vegas. This is because LCK is actually checked alongside many other skills checks in the game, including but not limited to combat. Because I didn't know any better, I'm just going to assume that LCK is *literally* checked alongside other skills, no matter if it's lockpicking, hacking terminals, stealing from NPCs, when sneaking, in regards to random encounters, and most obviously combat in regards to scoring critical hits (or critical failures), etc etc. This is especially true when playing a character with Jinxed trait.
Will you critically fail when lockpicking, even though your character actually have high skill, resulting in that door's lock being jammed? Or inversely, will you actually critically succeed, even though your character have low skill, and just like that open that locked door?
Will you succeed to hit that enemy with your gun? Maybe even critically hit and instantly killing that guy in power armor in full HP? Or will you hilariously critically fail, resulting in either dropping your gun, dropping your magazines, or even worst lose your next turn altogether?
And this is why New Vegas could never be an RPG on par, let alone greater than, Fallout 1&2. Bethesda also literally drove themselves into a corner with the design decision to make it more shooter than RPG, but even from the start their new system in the new format is already too flawed to design a proper RPG. Not that I think they ever aimed to make a proper RPG in the first place, mind you. And I doubt modders could ever elevate New Vegas RPG quality to the heights achieved by its predecessor, unless they gained access to the game's source code and literally build it from the ground up.
This isn't to say that arguments wrong - after all, RPGs do literally begin with table top and that's the model that was present in most RPG video games prior to the late 2000s, and otherwise we have to actually do the arduous task of defining RPG without reliance on the table top game. Still, I think on some level the preference for the table top model is just that - a preference.