Roscoe here. Seeing how heavily traveled these forums are, I figured I'd start a thread for the Monday night Fallout game.
So far I've been fairly impressed with the system. Atmosphere is the most important part of a game as far as I'm concerned, and Fallout has that in spades.
The system itself though is pretty wonky in a lot of respects. I guess I'm not going to worry too much about accuracy when it comes to a post-apocalyptic future game (although that is lacking in a lot of items,) but the one thing that does get me about the system is the 'economy.' I just can't imagine some dude setting down a dufflebag full of bottlecaps to pay for, say, a pistol that is almost identical to a different pistol that costs half as much. Consequently, a rifle costs the same as a drugged stick of gum.
Basically, I think the game designer shot too high on the prices, when he could have achieved the same effect of rarity by just limiting cap distribution. (Also, stims are probably grossly overpriced. See the gum = rifle train of thought for more on this.)
Do not confuse this as complaining mind you! I enjoy the hell out of our game and don't think that the issue of currency significantly affects the game in any way. (We are obviously doing fine.) It's just the largest hole I see in a relatively untested system. That said, I like the way that the weapon categories balance out. Melee/unarmed both have significant enough advantages over firearms and vice-versa to not make any of them a clear cut choice.
BUT- I do feel pretty bad for those players who invest in Big Guns, and don't really find anything. Big guns also suffer from the "…shit that's expensive" train of thought worse than other weapon categories. I think Big Guns could benefit quite a lot from an affordable low end weapon that could 'tide over' a player until they could afford something better, so as to prevent feelings of being totally hosed. There's not a damn thing wrong with Big guns after you get 1000+ caps though.
The other thing that I think could use discussing is the armor system. The house rule that we've been playing by is like, 4 points of Damage resistance = 1 point of damage tolerance. I think it's a great idea to change DR into something more manageable, and converting it to DT seems a great way to do it. The scale is probably way too high though. Consider this - a leather jacket converts to a Damage Tolerance of 5. A knife does 1d10 damage. On an average hit, a leather jacket, much like the one that may be hanging in your closet, will completely stop the knife from hurting you. I almost feel like the DR should convert more like 10 DR = 1 DT. Since a leather jackets DR of 20 would stop 2 damage of 10 by the raw rules, but with the house rule, stops more than twice as much. This basically makes armor THE most important item you can get. More important than an awesome weapon in my opinion, since mid range armor will be stopping 80% of the damage you take.
Anyways! Discuss. Am I nuts for thinking these things need tweaking?
