I just realised how unoriginal Bethesda is...

There's no problem with the protagonist being a Vault Dweller, in fact it's being a tribal in Fallout 2 I have serious issues with. Even assuming the character can read, which isn't a given, the character should have no ability to pick up complex skills without years of schooling, something beyond the purview of the game.

Moreover, the SS is a Vault Dweller can only be considered a 'Vault Dweller' only in the loosest sense possible. If the character lived more than half their life in a Vault, or was born in a Vault, only then do they qualify as Vault Dweller. Suspended animation simply doesn't count.
 
The chosen one was raised in a village that could have transmitted the memory of vault dwellers and that do have contact with other cities. They could have extended more into that, but it isn't like they were totally isolated. Beside, you DO need months\years to improve your skills. Experience earned to doing a lot of things emphasises the time you spent to improve your skills. While leaving Arroyo, you are not the best scientist in the world, you cannot charm people like you had 300% speech and most human raiders can singlehandled obliterate you. It is not like Fo3, where you can destroy an entire gang of raiders a few seconds after you left your vault.
 
Good point...Right out of the tribe, you're a weak sack of shit who can be kicked around by even a single decent raider in a jacket with some knuckle dusters.

Out of Vault 101, I remember beating a giant crab to death with a baseball bat, eating it, then destroying like 20 raiders armed with automatic rifles and handguns.
 
ThatZenoGuy said:
Good point...Right out of the tribe, you're a weak sack of shit who can be kicked around by even a single decent raider in a jacket with some knuckle dusters.

Out of Vault 101, I remember beating a giant crab to death with a baseball bat, eating it, then destroying like 20 raiders armed with automatic rifles and handguns.
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Well to be fair the Lone Wanderer has Bryan Mills for a father, so they would be badass.

/s
 
naossano said:
The chosen one was raised in a village that could have transmitted the memory of vault dwellers and that do have contact with other cities. They could have extended more into that, but it isn't like they were totally isolated. Beside, you DO need months\years to improve your skills. Experience earned to doing a lot of things emphasises the time you spent to improve your skills. While leaving Arroyo, you are not the best scientist in the world, you cannot charm people like you had 300% speech and most human raiders can singlehandled obliterate you. It is not like Fo3, where you can destroy an entire gang of raiders a few seconds after you left your vault.
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I agree partially, but for example I think that the presence of any knowledge of the use of computers/science is a little questionable. It doesn't appear like the average city slicker has much exposure to these things, so the idea that a tribal would, even minimally, is a little silly.
 
Also, you spend a lot of time between when you leave your tribe and when you get access yo your first computer, enough time to get your hand on science books. (although, one stretch is that you can increase your speech skills by punching radscorpions in the groin, but most rpg are guilty of this. At least, many provide you enough time so your slow skill rise make sense in context)
 
naossano said:
Also, you spend a lot of time between when you leave your tribe and when you get access yo your first computer, enough time to get your hand on science books. (although, one stretch is that you can increase your speech skills by punching radscorpions in the groin, but most rpg are guilty of this. At least, many provide you enough time so your slow skill rise make sense in context)
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I am now imagining that all radscorpions talk, and punching them in the groin makes them beg for mercy, improving your speech skill by talking back to them.
 
naossano said:
The chosen one was raised in a village that could have transmitted the memory of vault dwellers and that do have contact with other cities. They could have extended more into that, but it isn't like they were totally isolated. Beside, you DO need months\years to improve your skills. Experience earned to doing a lot of things emphasises the time you spent to improve your skills. While leaving Arroyo, you are not the best scientist in the world, you cannot charm people like you had 300% speech and most human raiders can singlehandled obliterate you. It is not like Fo3, where you can destroy an entire gang of raiders a few seconds after you left your vault.
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Of course it isn't like f3 but that's beside the point.
About the rest of your points, i think you're being too forgiving:

The arroyo tribals could have transmitted the memory of vault dwellers and kept contact with other cities, i guess, but there's no indication of that whatsoever.

There's no gun on the village for example, yet your character can have guns tagged. We could assume that there were guns in the village or that he/she had some contact with the outside settlements, but the story plainly contradict this. And that's just for small guns. When you tag energy weapons, science, big guns, doctor etc there can be no logical explanation for the "chosen one" knowing these things no matter how you strech it.
And yeah, it's not 300% but a tagged skill can be 40-50% at game start and easily up to 70% by the time your character leaves arroyo.

Furthermore, the dialogue is somewhat inconsistent. In some cases the dialogue ( even all available choices for a particular option) indicates that the character is an ignorant tribal to the point where roleplaying otherwise is rendered meaningless. Remember the sherrif in redding asking you to kick a lady off her house? If you want to pay her rent yourself instead of kicking her out, you're forced to chose the line " i'm the chosen one, i don't need any money " to which she replies that she wouldn't like to take the money of someone touched to the head.There are many moments like this.
And yet in other places the character seems far more knowledgeable and less "tribal".

All these things of course, even arroyo itself ( hakunin, the elder etc ) are meant to be funny and not consistent. Like, the elder is literally just the daughter of the vault dweller, so why is she speaking about chosen ones and holy gecks etc? And while they are hilarious, i can't help thinking that fallout had a more interesting world that could be taken seriously and that also allowed deeper roleplaying - even if it had fewer options.

I do like many things F2 added to the lore though, like NCR, VC, The Enclave, in fact i consider them as fallout as can be. And it's a great game as a whole, to be sure.
 
I think its easy to handwave excuses to the more esoteric tagged skills.

Tagging a skill doesn't make it 'that' big.

A tagged energy weapons LV1 dude is still fucking terrible when armed with a laser or plasma weapon.

For all we know, he read a copy of the Cat's Paw with energy weapons in it, or witnessed an enclave dude vaporise someone and learned from watching.

Big guns, maybe he's just more attuned with big guns, skills aren't gained just by learning and such, some people are just good at different things.
 
ThatZenoGuy said:
For all we know, he read a copy of the Cat's Paw with energy weapons in it, or witnessed an enclave dude vaporise someone and learned from watching.

Big guns, maybe he's just more attuned with big guns, skills aren't gained just by learning and such, some people are just good at different things.
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It doesn't bother me that much but I can't fully agree with this.

An example: tag small guns. There has to be some reference to guns and how they work in Arroyo for the Chosen One to know how they work, or at least have another villager who has that knowledge to teach them. You can't just do something without any prior knowledge on how to do so. I might be really talented at cooking, but unless I have the basic knowledge on cooking how can I just cook out of the blue?

Tiny Tim said:
There's no gun on the village for example, yet your character can have guns tagged. We could assume that there were guns in the village or that he/she had some contact with the outside settlements, but the story plainly contradict this.
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Given that Vic was the one who the Village Elder got the Vault 13 canteen from though it's plausible either he or someone else traded books or other items to Arroyo. The Chosen One could know how to use guns from having read a gun manual. The original Vault Dweller's jumpsuit is still kept by the village along with his Pipboy, so they may have also kept other books and information.
 
You guys are overthinking Arroyo to defend the premise, which is just terrible. I don't say that because I despise tribals, but because it doesn't make sense. Even assuming basic literacy with these yokels is a stretch, but fine, let's give it. Computer literacy, much less the ability to hack things, take a long time for people to learn. And clearly the dipshits who followed the Vault Dweller deliberately went out of their way to go as primitive as possible or they would have settled in Klamath, or I dunno, never left southern California. Fallout 2 is a fun game, but it's premise is utter garbage.

At the very least, if they wanted you to be a tribal, they needed a group skill table, where each person in the group contributed their skills to the table. That's precisely why I hate the five companion limit: nobody like Myron, but the little shit has the science skill that he's an essential teammate.

The other way I headcanon it is the character is actually buying optical flashes and time in VR in Vault City and thus giving himself an education in far more than real time. To do that, however, I have to use the save editor to first put the skill books in my inventory and then sell them to the Amenities Office for nothing, then buy all the books back and read them all at Intelligence 1. It's very very awkward but it increases my immersion, with imagination making up for the clunky mechanics. But none of this is supported by a mechanical system which is wholly inappropriate for a primitive ignoramus.

As far as starts go, Bethesda's premises work far far better, although I'd argue that a fully educated adult of the pre-war world should be at level 5 or 10, with perks spread between things the player feels the character would have learned in their pre-war life. All in all, it's a small complaint though.
 
You seem to be under the impression that 'tribal=stupid retards who can't operate anything'.

Fallout 'tribals', are more akin to what you see in Africa today, or Australian Aboriginals.

They DO use spears and hunt animals, but they DO know how to operate stuff, they just choose not to, its their lifestyle.

They made the damned temple of trials, which has fucking automatic giant stone doors, and pressure plate traps.
 
ThatZenoGuy said:
They made the damned temple of trials, which has fucking automatic giant stone doors, and pressure plate traps.
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Where did you get this? If anything, it was presumed (in the wikipage) that the building was actually a museum or something. So the only thing(s) added by the the Arroyo tribal would be most likely the pressure plates and locking the doors for the Chosen One to solve.

Also, you didn't really need to think too hard to find an explanation as to why the Chosen One would know shit about engineering and/or science, let alone how to handle a (Small) gun. The Arroyo tribal are literally the descendant of the Vault Dweller and the bunch of other Vault 13's dwellers who left the vault after Jacoren banished the Vault Dweller. It's not much of a stretch to think the Vault Dweller and other V13's dwellers taught everything they've learned from their days in the vault to their children, and then their children also passed it down. It's only literally only 2 generations from Vault Dweller, too, after all. As to why they chose tribal life, most likely because of the place they chose to live at. Not much resources to build your own proper, 'civilized' town, but why they avoided already established settlements and towns like Klamath are the more important question here.
 
ThatZenoGuy said:
You seem to be under the impression that 'tribal=stupid retards who can't operate anything'.

Fallout 'tribals', are more akin to what you see in Africa today, or Australian Aboriginals.

They DO use spears and hunt animals, but they DO know how to operate stuff, they just choose not to, its their lifestyle.

They made the damned temple of trials, which has fucking automatic giant stone doors, and pressure plate traps.
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I won't speak of modern indigenous peoples, but tribals ARE stupid primitivist retards who have specifically abandoned civilization and supposedly are 'more spiritual' in way of compensation. I actually believe in the supernatural and even I'm not buying this bullshit trope. The shaman is the most egregious example of this. THereare no books in Arroyo, and they don't have any technology that they'd need it for. And the thing is, you can't have a modern education or any semblance of it based only on oral tradition. If they had anything like a Vault Education they would have used that knowledge to not live in conditions so primitive they were ass backwards in the Bronze Age. For whatever reason, the Vault Dwellers forsook civilization entirely. Their degeneration was as voluntary as it was complete. That's not only the situation presented in the opening, it's also the only reason to go the better part of a 1000 miles into Oregon.

Whoever the cannonicalVault Dweller was, he was a messianic moron to get people to come up that far. My Vault Dweller would have stayed with the Followers until search teams found her and told her she could come home. In fact, because my characters can talk to me, I can tell you exactly what she was working on: she says there's a huge desalination plant in Santa Barbara that has the capacity and pre-war pipe systems to turn all of Southern California green, because that's what it did before the war. It just needs to be repaired. In any case, there's little compelling reason for any Vault Dweller that was actually played to walk to Oregon with a hundred unarmed, unarmored refugees being harassed and shot at the whole damn way. It would have made more sense to take them to Shady Sands.
 
Charwo said:
I won't speak of modern indigenous peoples, but tribals ARE stupid primitivist retards who have specifically abandoned civilization and supposedly are 'more spiritual' in way of compensation.
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And yet Sulik, a tribal, says he is good with just about any weapon, guns included.

Looks stupid.

Talks stupid.

ISN'T stupid.
 
ThatZenoGuy said:
And yet Sulik, a tribal, says he is good with just about any weapon, guns included.

Looks stupid.

Talks stupid.

ISN'T stupid.
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That's true. I'd still like to see him repair anything that doesn't require hammering or sewing. I'd like him to learn to be a doctor who can talk about combat implants in Vault City, or use a computer in any capacity. I expect a tribal's outdoorsman, melee and unarmed to be through the roof. I'd expect middling competency in traps, first aid or barter. But barring a special perk bestowed by time heavy education, he should be utterly barred from any use of science, repair, doctor, gambling and firearms. It doesn't take all that long to becoming mediocre with a gun, but to know how to use a gun well enough to make aimed shots, to clean and maintain a gun, much less an energy weapon, that should require training.

The thing is, in every other game, including Bethesda's two lucklusters, you can assume the training. My Lone Wanderer is a medical student, but spends her free time in VR to the point she's better with weapons than she is with a scalpel (much to her dad's disappointment) My Courier is 'a Ghoul' who had all the override codes put in her PipBoy as a contingency, as a result can hack and disable anything even though she forget those skills a lifetime ago. She's had years to become proficient in energy weapons and learning to repair things for maximum profit. All the customization is more difficult in Fallout 4, but I can justify it by favors owed to Sturges.

My point stands: the protagonist as Vault Dweller isn't unoriginal, it's probably a very good thing in both keeping the character relatable and justifying whatever skills you want to play with.
 
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