As far as I'm concerned, building your character is part of the fun of RPGs, so I never used the pre-made ones. Plus, each of them has a horrible trait (Bruiser, Night Person, Skilled) that negatively effects gameplay.

As for melee character, in the early to mid game the main advantage is the lower AP cost. Weapons that use the unarmed skill have a base AP cost of 3, while melee weapons are 3 or 4. Small guns, big guns, and energy weapons are 5-6, except for rare, only one per game weapons like Gizmo's Mauser (good luck finding enough ammo), the Turbo Plasma Rifle (best weapon in Fallout, AP cost increased to 5 in Fallout 2), the Red Ryder LE BB gun and the Alien Blaster (only found in special encounters) which all cost 4. With the right traits and perks, you can use most ranged weapons 4 times per round, as opposed to 12 times for most HtH weapons.

Plus, with HtH weapons, you don't need to reload at all for most of them, and less often for the others. The Cattle Prod needs to be reloaded the most often, after 20 attacks. The only ranged weapons that beat that are the Alien Blaster (30) and the Red Ryder LE (100). And by the time you're close enough to use the Alien Blaster, you're practically in melee range anyway.

The only nifty effect you get with HtH but not with ranged attacks is knockback. Sometimes annoying, sometimes useful. A good hit with the Super Sledge in particular will send an enemy sliding on their back until they hit an obstacle or the edge of the map.

For the endgame, once you hit level 18 you can select the perks Sniper (for ranged combat) or Slayer (for HtH combat). With Slayer, every hit is a critical. With Sniper, your chance of a critical hit is basically your Luck*10. So unless you have a high Luck, that's a clear advantage to HtH combat.

Sure, using guns is easier. It's a bit too easy once you've played through a few times. The Turbo Plasma Rifle is pretty much game-breakingly powerful, with that and Power Armor you can wade through anything in the game, which is probably why the TPR got nerfed in Fallout 2. Playing a HtH character adds some extra challenge, so does playing a character that focuses on stealth or diplomacy instead of combat.

I don't think I tried to play the game with a pre-made character in any game which allows you to create your own.


As for the melee, I guess one would choose to play as a melee only character if for example he/she wants to roleplay as such a character.

Without going into detail, a melee character will sometimes find alternate solutions to problems. It's actually quite a fun way to play, IMO.

personally i always make my own characters if whatever game i am playing allows it.

usually the presets never have skill sets that appeal to me XD

It's entirely possible I've never used a pregenerated character in any RPG, ever, don't mean to either.

Unarmed can be fun, especially in fallout 2, there's a bunch of attack animations you only get in FO2 when unarmed skill is high enough. There's something very neat in taking out a supermutant with a single spin kick into the eye.

But it's not more effective than using guns.
It's just a bit different, completely viable strategy.

A lot of people are dissing the pre-made characters. It is a symptom of a mindset that ruins all cRPGs or at least make them always work differently than the designers intended. Yes, all three characters have at least one "horrible" design decision that prevents them from becoming min-maxed gods that can complete all of the game's content in a single playthrough, especially with judicious use of save scumming to avoid damage, failed speech checks and critical failures.

I often play pre-made characters precisely because I'm interested in ALL the aspects of a cRPG that makes up a story. My character was too stupid to know the right conversation option to get the best reward out of a quest. Maybe he was too stupid to even get the quest in the first place. Maybe my character declined the quest because in my opinion he wouldn't want to be every random stranger's hitman or errand boy immediately after introducing himself. My character lost an eye and nearly bled to death in a desperate fight that would permanently set him back for the rest of the story. Emergent gameplay and emergent story telling, the wonder of computer gaming as a story telling medium. Forget about treading some optimal path based on your "meta" knowledge of the game story.

The pre-made characters in Fallout 1 and 2 are not the excellent generalists one could make. Many of them have traits that limit their potential, or have stats that are wasteful. Their stat sheets are laid out to tell a story of who they were before the game started. I like continuing those stories as I see fit. They are all capable of completing the main story, and they will do it in ways your soulless GameFAQ writeups can never teach you.

I truly liked every word you said. Kudos to you for saying what some of us think but are afraid to say, because "it's the internet" and people are going to be mean if you stray away from the majority's train of thought, and it's your fault for not having "thick skin".

I agree with everything you said. Boiling it down to the word "role" in role playing game, it's up to the player to decide what kind of role they want to play. Usually, the definition means putting yourself in someone else's role, someone with a past and a history, and continuing from there. For those of us who tend to look for that definition of role playing, that's why the preset characters are there. I love building my own character, mind you, I just happen to enjoy playing with pre-made characters just as much. It's a different kind of experience.

Great post Sufyan. I have a very bad habit of making a very specific type of character in RPGs, never deviating from it. Right now I'm replaying the entire Fallout series and for Fallout 1 I took the premade character Albert. He offered me a number of options I usually don't try in Fallout like being able to talk the Raiders into just handing over Tandy as well as talking the Master into self destructing. After beating the two Brotherhood spin-off games (Tactics & Brotherhood of Steel on XBox) I plan on playing as pre-made Chitsa in Fallout 2 as she seems to be the most likely descendant of the Albert character from Fallout 1 (Both diplomacy characters).

It depends. I like to create my own character in RPGs (computer or pen-and-paper), but like greasydogmeat I often find myself creating the same confortable archetypes again and again, so when I get out of my "confort zone" and use a premade character, it makes for a far more memorable gameplay (again both for CRPG and tabletop). For me, a big part of the "role" pleasure of an RPG is stepping into the shoes of another person.

So in Fallout 1, I made several characters, but my only "complete" playthrough was with plain old Albert :)

But I know my brother is the opposite and he wouldn't dream of playing an RPG without creating his own avatar (in fact, he refuses to play games like the Witcher where he can't customise the character, and a tabletop game with pre-made characters is a complete no-go, even for a one-shot test game)

I keep doing this thing where I spend 2 hours OCDish-ly tweaking a character with "just right" stats and then not far into the actual game I start wondering "what if I had made a character like (so and so) instead" and then I start over.

That's my brother. I don't think he ever "finished" any CRPG, but he sure starts often. On games like Skyrim or Dragon Age, he had 5 characters for 1 of mine. :)

I have a similar problem, but mine is not that I'm trying to create the perfect character but rather "Hmm, this is not exactly how I wanted my alcoholic janitor with a gambling problem and PTSD to function at this point in the story, maybe if I start over with some small changes and...".

I even do this in games that do not have stat progression, like GTA. I played GTA V from start to finish four times before I was happy with how all characters progressed through the story, even though there is no real book keeping in the game itself but only in my memory of the journey. I rebooted the story another five or more times during those playthroughs.

I think the key to avoiding playing the same character over and over again is to have a number of archetypes rather than just one. The optimal generalist that makes it possible to do almost everything in the game is common and gets boring quick. I like to switch it up with something like a hideous solo sniper. You set your charisma as low as it will go and tag Small Guns, Sneak, and Outdoorsman (or whatever the last skill in the called - I can't bring it to mind ATM). You're a loner because you're ugly and nobody likes you.

Another good one is a wasteland doctor. Tag Science, Doctor, and Energy Weapons.

There are certain tag skills that are "the best," - Speech, for example - so just come up with something that doesn't use them.

If you've never tried Heavy Weapons, it's pretty fun.

I'm the same way. Before now I didn't know of anyone else who was capable of restarting as many times for the smallest of details like I do. If the story and/or characters don't progress in the way I had envisioned, I get unhappy and start over, this time with a (presumably) clearer idea of how I want things to turn out.

I finally broke this endless restarting process with Planescape: Torment, which I made myself play all the way through. I certainly plan on playing it again, not only because I enjoyed the game so much but because I want to get it "just right" next time. Playing through that first time gave me a better grip on the characters, their personalities, how they should progress and why. When I play again, even though I won't have quite the same experience as I would have the first time through, it'll be the one that feels closest to "perfect" to me.