Fallout Pen & Paper

>D20
>Not percentile via d100s.

you shame the name of fallout.

Well here's a tough one. Stat boosting gear that isn't powered armor. Yes or no?

Sure, Bethesda started it, but Obsidian didn't remove it in FNV.

I'd say it depends highly on the gear and what you can get away with in terms of "explaining" the stat boost. A pair of mirror shades, for example, can reasonably boost CHR by 1 point with the explanation of "the other person can't see your eyes, thus you're harder to read and can more easily bullshit."

I've run 2 Fallout campaigns to completion (one being a reboot of the other and having a similar setting which ended up diverging heavily in plot anyway), played in 2 others and was heavily involved in another game that I was not a player to but watched and kept up on, and am currently running a new game. All of these games used the Fallout 2.0 ruleset, which is based heavily on the classic Fallout games and how they worked: d100, roll-under. I'm also using a splatbook with new stats for guns called Guns & Ammo as written by me and one gun-loving Polish friend of mine.

I still remember the time they accidentally nuked Chicago. Don't critfail your rolls while piloting a bomber carrying a nuclear payload.

For the game I'm running now, I decided to place the game post-New Vegas and canonically decide Caesar had died one way or another, so the Legion was a shattered mess at each other's throats. That's already a good hook for conflict, but when you factor in the possibility of the NCR and the original Brotherhood moving in to gain territory or mop up the region of Legion, and placing them beside the midwestern Brotherhood from Fallout Tactics (which I am both considering canonical for the game's purpose and bumping its timeline date up to be closer to my timeframe of 2283), you've got the staging area for one big-ass fucking war.

So our 3-person party ranges from 17 to 25 in age, and we've got, from youngest to oldest: a mechanically-apt melee-centric girl who invented beatboxing after growing up hearing the percussion of gunshots fending off raiders, a hunter-sniper with a penchant for traps and outdoorsman skills, and a fresh-from-the-vault (literally by hours) greaser speaking in 50s lingo who honed his driving and shooting skills playing arcade games when one machine's fusion core malfunctioned, exploded, and irradiated him, turning him into a ghoul with a pompadour wig (he always had the wig, it didn't come with the mutation).

50's lingo is fuckin' /weird/, man.

I have no issues with it, personally, but it's a dealer's choice kind of thing. At least it's an excuse to wear things other than basic armor.

The armor/weapon upgrading in Fallout 4 was actually one of their better design choices, as was, I would argue, how Power Armor was treated. Though admittedly it didn't QUITE make sense how the damn things could open and close sufficiently to maintain the seals against radiation, etc. The skills system was such a watered down joke, though, and almost everything revolves around guns guns guns. Such a shame to see it further devolve into a first person shooter with the RPG elements as lackluster as the overall storytelling.

It really is a shame. Things like the Minutemen could have been a really nice addition. The idea of good people banding together for common defense, forming basic militias to meet challenges, thematically linked to the history of the region, yeah, it could have been nice. Instead they were the most goddamn annoying faction, mostly because of how buggy the settlement system is and how they can't protect themselves for shit. I've given a settlement something like 500+ defense rating, laser turrets, rockets, the entire area is walled, and thanks to Automatron they have goddamn sentry bots - and they can STILL fail to protect to defend themselves if you don't rush back to hold their hands for them! Such a goddamn joke, especially when you're in Far Harbor or Nuka-World when one of the settlements starts pissing itself.

I can only assume this is why their grand finale DLC lets you become a dickbag raider who destroys all the settlements you worked to build up. It's stupid, but also cathartic.

If anyone cares to read up on the session, we're just getting on our feet and one of the players is not so good at roleplay but she's trying.
pastebin.com/0LuaTqGj

And for anyone who wants or needs the rules I used and mentioned.
mediafire.com/file/779ocuy1quxa7qb/Fallout PnP Complete Kit.zip
pastebin.com/0LuaTqGj

I'd still love to see a Fallout game that doesn't just take place in America. At least the Raiders would probably be far more colorful (okay, the Beatles are 60s era but screw it, I just want my damn yellow vault-tec survival submarine).

It's weird only not since Bethesda gives zero shits about lore that the East Coast is far less prone to wastelanders forming tribal groups. It's not like their Vaults faired any better. It's only slightly weird that they keep having hyper militaristic high-tech mercs from Talon Company to the Gunners, but okay the Gun Runners more or less started the same way only they were a gang who set up shop in a still functioning factory and realized they could have a better life selling high quality weapons (maybe I'd be better comparing them to the Regulators). Even something like Project Purity is the kind of social project the Followers might attempt if they were ambitious enough.

>It's only slightly weird that they keep having hyper militaristic high-tech mercs from Talon Company to the Gunners,
At least they gave the Gunners an origin that made sense. A vault full of Child soldiers in a eugenics program actually fucking works as a reason for their tech.
>and placing them beside the midwestern Brotherhood from Fallout Tactics (which I am both considering canonical for the game's purpose and bumping its timeline date up to be closer to my timeframe of 2283), you've got the staging area for one big-ass fucking war.
My main issue with FoT is how wide-ranging the campaign was, from fucking Chicago to goddamn Cheyenne mountain.

I also think that ED-E's mention of a Chicago Enclave gives a good reason for the Midwest BoS being able to BUILD new Power armor and for said power armor looking like a halfway between East and West coast Enclave armor.

The only question is: what happened to the Enclave whose bunkers they stole? (Or was the ED-E recording supposed to imply that they wanted to retcon the Midwest BoS into the Midwest Enclave?)

>At least they gave the Gunners an origin that made sense
I thought that was their origin too but I noticed in the Fallout wiki (for whatever that is worth) that the Gunner's origins are unknown and they're merely occupying the Vault. Admittedly one suspiciously tailored to their military fetish. Maybe it's assumed because none of the child soldiers graduated and they were all put down, the best of them harvested for tissue. Only the ones promising enough to join the science team survived, at least until the uprising. Still with that much indoctrination and training the survivors going on to become the Gunners still makes sense.

Oh well, it's not like I really give a shit about the faction. They're just an excuse for "raiders" with better armor and tech.

Indy Vegas with the Courier not appearing and Yes-Man self-reprogrammed to Victor.

Players are recruits for New Desert Rangers that are gonna go East or do some other stuff, mostly because most of the securitrons ended up tied down at the excavation around the edge of the divide. (Going to bedrock and creating a killing field for Tunnelers.)

I know you think I was joking, but your kind are worse than redditors, rpg.net, and maybe even somethingawful. If you stopped posting and took your own life right now, the hobby would be better off.

>The idea of good people banding together for common defense, forming basic militias to meet challenges, thematically linked to the history of the region, yeah, it could have been nice.

Hell, that's where the NCR came from, too.

I don't quite equate the two but only because there is a distinction between the Minutemen as a mutual defense force and the formation of a local government. The reason is because there WAS an attempt to create a Commonwealth Provisional Government. Nick tells the story that several settlements tried to form a government only for synths to show up and murder everyone at the meeting. The Institute, however, claims the whole thing was their idea in the first place but it was the humans who attacked each other and the synths merely got the blame.

Can't say which is true. The Minutemen lasted longer but still eventually fell to infighting. Of course they MIGHT have held Quincy if they hadn't been betrayed and outmaneuvered. Whether they could have used a victory there to reclaim their former glory, hell, we'll never know. Course all it eventually took was a 200 year old frozen popsicle.

I wonder what settlements were even involved. Diamond City is pretty damn bigoted (did they kick the ghouls out before the Institute co-opted the mayor?), Covenant is a full on bag of dicks, and...I guess Quincy was okay before becoming Gunner bitch territory? Concord and Lexington have nothing but raiders and ghouls. Some places you can create settlements have a handful of people each, so hardly civilization.

Which raises the question, if using Bethesdaout as inspiration or source material how much do we consider representational only? Oh hell, New Vegas too. All the towns are way too small and sparsely populated. Nowhere near enough to sustain themselves and fend off raiders and avoid the inevitable incestuous pairings. Just like how Vaults are supposed to hold up to 1000 residents but we only ever see enough rooms for maybe a couple dozen at most, and that's typically when people like the gunners turn rooms into barracks. Similarly to the settlements you create really only contain max 20 settlers (with a few ways to get around it)? Are you really just dicking around creating glorified campsites or can we assume that you're really bringing a slice of civilization back to the Commonwealth?

This thread ain't doing so well but what the hell, any excuse to share some Cold War era old time radio inspiration:

Orson Welles' narrating Civil Defense:

archive.org/details/otr_civildefensewithorsonwelles

The Fifth Horseman series, a collection of very loosely connected stories you can listen to in any order. I'd recommend at least listening to Doomsday and Aftermath.
archive.org/details/The_Fifth_Horseman

Both of these series are far more upbeat than Fallout. Humanity survives without massive Vaults and less of the world is smashed up. Still they set the mood, especially coming from a time when own fear of The Bomb was extremely high. The Civil Defense even has proto-raiders, albeit very briefly, as survivors who fled the cities began raiding outlying farms for any supplies they could and killing anyone in their way.

>I'd still love to see a Fallout game that doesn't just take place in America
The main problem with that is that the vast majority of Fallout's elements are canonically exclusive to America. Power Armor was an American invention to turn the tide in Anchorage. All those companies like Vault-tec, Rob-co, and Med-tek were either American-centric or contracted by the US. Everything about the Vaults, including all their technology, was exclusively American. Super-mutants were created through FEV, which was a top secret American invention.

That's no real barrier. Globalization by the year 2077 very likely spread those companies all over the place. They can certainly be contracted elsewhere, too. Vault-Tec, for instance, was so twisted would you really be surprised to learn they were even selling to the Chinese? War and turmoil had broken out in the Middle East and Europe, meaning American units, including power armor, could very well have been deployed in allied countries. American embassies could have had power armored units to show America's strength. Enough to justify allowing a player in a non-American territory to pick up a suit. And that's if they don't want knockoffs or parallel development in non-American nations. And hell, it's not like Bethesda seems to give two shits for the lore anyway. At the very least there was certainly shared military tech. The gauss rifle from Fallout 2, for instance, was of German design and yet the gauss rifle became a mainstay of power armor units and a favorite among the Enclave (at least in Fallout 2, they seem to prefer plasma weaponry in Fallout 3, not to mention the new Hellfire units thanks to DLC). You could even have the BoS show up this time in refurbished naval vessels, even a submarine (if you can find a working 200 year old sub in the Boston harbor then why not?). Or just aircraft. I wouldn't put it past the BoS to attempt reconnecting with other parts of the world or following the trail of some fantastic foreign tech they want access to.

I think it's fair to point out we really don't know the history of much of the world in Fallout EXCEPT America and China. And you can still have FEV in foreign lands. Thanks to Bethesda it seems like EVERYONE had access to the damn stuff, though perhaps that isn't too egregious. FEV research was leaked in 2077 prior to the war, and prior to this was the New Plague. According to Van Buren (may or may not be canonical) the New Plague was created by the US to sterilize enemies but was accidentally released after Chinese agents managed to steal samples only for the vials to be broken when the agents were killed. This lead to research in the 2050s to create a way virus to kill the plague which by the 2070s lead to the Pan-Immunity Virion Project.

You could do everything from captured FEV, universities in Europe and elsewhere who took part in FEV research or a colleague with West-Tek leaked info to them. Or just attempts to recreate the experiment from the leaked data on the FEV prior to the war. You could have planes that were carrying FEV samples that crashed during the war or actually have the Enclave attempt to weaponize it for viral warfare which was deployed during the war. You could do a variation of Van Buren's B.O.M.B.-001 where a satellite responding to quarantines was meant to drop modified FEV intended to counteract plagues with virus killing bombs. Have one malfunction and drop a Super Mutant creating bomb anywhere in the world. It's the kind of really unwise decisions the world of Fallout has in spades.

Really you could do just about anything and frankly Bethesda already has. If their version of MIT had FEV and was creating mutants for scientific shits and giggles then just about anyone could.

What about Hawaii, the Phillipines, or other areas under US influence, especially a heavy-handed one that felt justified in conquering Canada?

This is doable with a Fallout game taking place in Canada or Alaska. At least one remnant of the Master's army was said to have travelled north. Super strong, durable, heavily armed mutants could easily pillage their way up the west coast. Theoretically even cross over into Russia, but honestly Stalker has that kind of thing mostly covered.

Also some curious tidbits, the Master thinks the reason Super Mutants tend to be so dumb is radiation damage on the wastelanders he's dipped. His Lieutenant, however, had the theory that the FEV vats under Mariposa were cracked during the war and exposure to radiation lead to FEV mutating and going airborne. A much weaker strain that potentially inoculated wastelanders against FEV, enough to fuck with the results of being dipped anyway. Could even be both explanations. Generally for best results it's considered best to use Vault Dwellers. My point is that by now FEV could be very widespread. Could mutate again, or could be isolated and "harnessed" by any post-war group with enough science savvy.

Hm. You know there's some potential for a Fallout: Japan. Checking the wiki there's almost no info on Japan but with the US at war with China the US could have very easily tightened their grip over the territory so they could have naval and air bases on China's doorstep. You could do all kinds of fun shit with that, like Japanese robots tending towards Liberty Prime size or attempts to adapt Power Armor into being able to combine into larger combat forms.

Forget Bethesda, this is a pnp thread. It just has to be justified enough to your own satisfaction and your players, too.

Fallout: London. Protectron police models whose heads are modeled after bobby helmets.

>(did they kick the ghouls out before the Institute co-opted the mayor?)
They leave that Vague, Hancock says he HOPES so but a pessimistic part of him doubts it, and it doesn't matter anyway, after all the rest of the "city" went along with it.

There COULD be crashed US navy vessels bringing various tidbits of tech. Had an idea for Fallout Australia that had settlements in ruined US and Chinese fleets that ran aground.

Also Plasma Defenders are Austrian, Gutav Glock became a gun inventing supercomputer.

I thought Japan had fallen to China, but may be remembering wrong.

>I thought Japan had fallen to China, but may be remembering wrong.
It would make sense China would at least invade, they wouldn't stand for an enemy that close, but I can't find any details:

fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Japan

I replayed Nuka-World recently. Still a bitter disappointment but I do like a few parts of it. I'm really interested in the idea of an off-world Vault-Tec colony. The player starts as a member of the colony on a world whose surface is supposed to be too harsh for human existence, thus they live underground. Shit goes bad, some crisis or other, and the player is forced to take an escape rocket. G-forces cause you to black out before it crashes. At first you think you're on some hellish world with giant insects and mutants, least until you come across pre-war ruins. Somehow it seems you managed to make it all the way back to a post-apocalyptic Earth.

Of course later on it turns out that the whole thing was Vault-Tec being dicks as usual and the experiment was recording the stress and viabilities of a potential off-world colony, you were always on Earth, nobody in the Vault knew the truth*. The escape rocket was very short distance.

*While I like to think everyone was duped, even the Overseer, with Vault-Tec intending to remotely observe the experiment I like the idea that the Vault was sending mining robots to the surface. Most would come back and need to be decontaminated for radiation, as expected for the harsh world they think they are on, but occasionally robots would return with bullet holes which raised uncomfortable implications for the Overseer who had it covered up. I think it befits Fallout that enterprising players poking around where they shouldn't be would find records in terminals, maybe even damaged robot parts.

I just realized something, in FNV the Sunset Sasparilla company didn't just replace its normal workers with protectrons, they replaced their *TRUCKDRIVERS*

I really want to see a protectron driving a truck now.

>somethingawful
sa is good again

Stop being a fag

>D20
I really think that's a terrible idea. I basically ripped off Only War to use for mine. Was much easier to convert stats and such over.

How many profligates will be in this game and how will your players execute them?

>D20 modern
>random encounter %
>using fallout 4's stupid synths idea

Dude that runs Savage Worlds for it has the right idea. Are you seriously considering running a D20 modern game?

Grab something else you fucking retard. Savage Worlds, GURPS, fucking anything but D20 OGL bullshit.

You realize Veeky Forums is a spin-off of SA, right?

I'd love for Sawyers SIMPLE system to have a pdf so i could print it out and read it properly

Also anybody got a copy of the bigapplewasteland thing

creator pulled everything for some reason

It really isn't.

It's a spin off of 2ch after Lowtax told animufags to fuck off.

Thats about as close as SA and Veeky Forums ever were.

Thinking it was anything else is retarded and I've been a goon since before Veeky Forums was born.

I think synths are stupid, but that's because Fallout 4 throws them into everything and doesn't really use them well. Don't you think a competent GM could at least in theory use them more effectively than 'oh ho ho am I your brother or am I a synth?'

A competent GM can make anything effective. Unfortunately OP wants to run some OGL D20 modern game, so he's clearly a terrible decision maker.

That said, most of the original stuff Bethesda added -- mindlessly evil non-nightkin Super Mutants, Synths, "Good Guy" BoS -- is fucking retarded. Should be scrapped entirely if you're running a Fallout game.

I think Synths are fine if you actually do quests with them

Fo4 tried using it as a metaplot without actually engaging the player (except with danse and that was hardly a good quest or an engaging decision)

So just make that a big plotline. Make it so that players have friends who are getting replaced. Make the synths legitimately believe they are the players.

Maybe replace a player if they consent

Or let the Institute upload software that makes synths go haywire

*believe they're the guys getting replaced
sry

Veeky Forums was started by moot, an SA user, off of a SA anime sub-board, primarily as a hangout for like minded fags. It expanded from there.

Veeky Forums 'comes' from SA in a strictly technical sense, but had it'd own distinct and unique identity and mostly unaffiliated user base by 2005 at the latest.

Only technically speaking. See , Veeky Forums owes none of its culture to SA and the two are basically incompatible. Your average goon is a dumber, more hostile redditor, with the same propensity to adapt Veeky Forums memes while railing against doing so.

Why does everyone hate the piss out f d20 modern?

I'm just using it because I've only llayed pathfinder, and the two guys I played with are in this campaign and barely know the fucking rules. For simplicity I stuck with it.

I'm using Exodus (Fallout PnP).

Cuz fo1-2 used percentile rolls

Can I keep the Outcasts, but have them try to head back west and end up getting stuck and forming a midwest chapter? I think their colors, outlook and relative helpfulness, and use of robots to make up numbers is cool. I hate that Fallout 4 just handwaved them away.