Making fallout game

Wasn't the transistor just invented way later (2020s-2030s) or was that the retcon

If I'm remembering correctly, the transistor wasn't invented until the late 2060s, which is why so few electronics made use of it. That's old lore from the Fallout Bible, however, so I'm not too sure if it's still canon to Bethesda.

>Iv been wanting to make a board game
>Since its fallout id definitely go RPG. Maybe pen and paper
>Maybe pen and paper
>pen and paper
>Maybe

what is this thread
how did you even get here
I am befuddled

I started replying on the assumption he was a newfag getting his terminology confused, especially with him listing setting, plot and items. But now you quote that I'm befuddled as well.

Btw my posts so far have been:
and

Correct. I am newfag

So by "board game" you actually mean Tabletop Role Playing Game, right?

Yes

Please lurk more before posting a thread.

Starting with homebrew is the worst possible thing you can do. Instead you want to start by playing other TRPG systems, for complete begginers (and I know I'll get a lot of flack for this) I'd reccomend Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition using one of the official campaigns in the Forgotten Realms setting. Even if you aren't into high fantasy (and FR really is garbage kitchensink fantasy) it's simply and easy to learn. Start lurking in the 5e General thread and look for D&D related stuff on youtube, especially DMing guides.
DO NOT TRY TO MAKE FALLOUT USING THE D&D RULESET. IT WILL NOT WORK.
Stick to what you know until you have some experience then graduate to a system like GURPS, or whatever else you like. Try not to fall into the D&D trap where you play nothing but that forever, or if you do go to OSRG. Avoid Pathfinder like the plague, it is pure cancer.

I'll find a couple of other starter systems for you to consider in a moment.

Ryuutama is often reccomended to people as a starting system, although I haven't read or played it so I can't vouch for it's quality personally.

>kotohi.com/ryuutama/the-world-of-ryuutama/

There already is a fallout pnp. It's called fallout pnp. It's not that good. Basically just fallout 2 rules for table top. Tons of incorrect lore

> Mfw when half mutants are a thing in it
> Mfw when deathclaw and dogs are playable races

Because you are new here and come across as fairly gullible I'll tell you the meme systems to avoid completly rn, although some of them are decent you don't want to try them.

4th Edition D&D - Very mechanic heavy system but fairly good for running certain campaign types. Avoid it for now and don't take anons advice to refluff it for Fallout, thats a meme.

Maid - It's an TRPG based on anime, specifically slice-of-life and moe stuff. Avoid it unless your a total weeb who wants to make Fallout Japan about Nekos in power armour defending their cafe from rampaging hordes of dual-katana wielding ghouls wearing nothing but a black-coloured piece of string, before eventually realising the power of friendship and teaming up to kill god.

FATAL - Considered to be the worst TRPG system ever made. The entire premise of the system is a crude joke. It is designed to be as generically offensive as possible, as in you can rape someone to death in combat with your inch long, foot thick penis, that streches their asshole past its maximal anal circumference giving them a permanent gape.

I ran a game using Dark Heresy once. Change the names of some skills and it's good to go.

Bumping to get more beginner systems for OP. Provided they are still here of course.

Still here

That's still homebrew, and you're understating it as the entire setting would have to be replaced. Considering OP didn't even know that a TRPG differed from a board game, a TRPG based on a Wargame is going to confuse him even more.

So what do you think of the options so far?

fallout.ru/projects/pnp/fallout_pnp_2.0.pdf

Right now just considering all the options

To be fair talking deathclaws are canon in Fallout lore.

fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/fallout/

>NCR
>Arizona
Nigga, Arizona is completely controlled by the Legion, and before the Legion was nothing but a bunch of tribals; the NCR was stationed in California and expanded east, but never past the Colorado river.

Did you even play New Vegas?

I think you should consider sometime going to /gfg/ (Game Finder General (it's not always up but there was one earlier today, check the catalog)) and asking whether you could spectate one of the games. Im sure somebody will let you watch for a session to get the gist.
It's more likely to be an accurate representation of the hobby than watching Critical Role, which is basically the root of most misconceptions.

Thinking that the plot would be the NCR trying to take control legion territory. Still just an idea tho

>

Doesn’t anyone play This Is Not a Test? It’s an RPG / Skirmish miniatures game set in a NOT-Fallout setting.

God this thread is a state, read the whole thing before posting please.

They're already stretched super thin in Vegas, logistics being an absolute fucking shitshow and all that, they managed to hold off the Legion in Boulder City sure but the result of that lost then a ton of soldiers, and on top of that they were also fighting the Legion at its weakest point and still were stuck in a stalemate, attacking them on their own groups would be suicidal.

Fair point. Still want to have the NCR in there somewhere though. Maybe further north would work?

Utah has a really heavy Legion presence apparently, but so little is really known about the place in Fallout lore that you could probably put a small NCR presence there around or a little after New Vegas (assuming the NCR took control of Vegas in your story, otherwise I can't really see them pushing up into Utah)

>Not liking playable deathclaws

What's your damage? Talking deathclaws are, as other anons have pointed out, canon.

Deathclaws are fun to play when balanced properly.

But, yeah, Exodus and the D20 Fallout were both ass.

Yeah, is probably the most helpful post so far if you're wanting rpg, OP.

GURPS as a system is very well suited to Fallout. There are some really cheap sourcebooks which do almost all the work for you. After the End 1: Wastelanders has some templates for classic post-apoc tropes. After the End 2: The New World has some good worldbuilding junk, some good prepackaged threats and simplified mechanics. There's a fan-made supplement, which is of dubious balance and quality, but has some good material; certainly some good equipment.

GURPS default lethality might be a little rough, if you're thinking of cinematic goofiness. I like it, but you might want to use Gun Fu for some cinematic gunplay, and use the Survivable Guns rules.

Good luck, user.

Yeah I've never watched it but a friend of mine got into ttrpgs when he started watching.

What is it about the show that gives such bad habits.

More like Fallout WAS GURPS until Steve Jackson sperged out about Vault Boy’s look. Then the Devs created SPECIAL as a replacement.

It's an act, a grand illusion. It gives people clinical narrativist entertainment. The kind of stuff you'd see in your latest hollywood blockbuster.

Nobody is actually a budding roleplayer, just a group of professional actors and performers who operate on scripts, with some freeform and improvisation of course to make it believable. But it sets people expectations up like they're the heroes of the world, everything has to go their way and it must be grandiose to the self-starring climax.

Also the quirkyness and memes, that everyone begins forcing in to your games.
And the pandering ideology underhandedly inserted into it to, but that isn't worth caring so much about.

Maybe I've just a cynical idiot with no place to talk, I haven't had a group in a year for god's sake. But, thats why I think it's so derided by us.

Anyway, sorry for the overly flowery language, just binge-read the whole of Flowers For Algernon. I'm distinctly unimpressed with the novel. It all came off as preachy and self-masturbatory. The concept was solid and the characters intriguing at first, but slowly they just boiled down into nothing. The biggest problem was the author thinking himself able to portray a man with an IQ of 185, yet always falling back upon the same descriptors regarding appearances.
Anyway I digress.

Critical Role isn't particularly bad, nor good. Just not worth your time.

>Steve Jackson sperged -> No gurps for fallout!
I dunno. I've heard several conflicting reports on the topic. I refrain to pass judgement on either SJGames or Interplay on the matter. I know that if Steve pulled the plug (which seems odd to me, as all the reasons cited don't line up with his attitude about, e.g, Munchkin), he screwed himself and his company out of much notoriety, fame, and potential revenue. I wonder how the rpg market looks in the alt-universe where it went down differently. Either way, that's heavy speculation about opportunity cost.

All the same, GURPS remains an excellent system for running Fallout-esque games. Even on mostly default settings, GURPS runs it pretty well.

>FATAL - Considered to be the worst TRPG system ever made. The entire premise of the system is a crude joke. It is designed to be as generically offensive as possible, as in you can rape someone to death in combat with your inch long, foot thick penis, that streches their asshole past its maximal anal circumference giving them a permanent gape.

Don't forget the game system is itself completely broken and unplayable. Many are the newfags who say they're gonna run a game of FATAL for shits and giggles only to discover even parsing out the rule book is an exercise is frustration.

deathclaws as a playable race sound pretty rad

Setting: Denver
Plot: You must find the man who killed your father. Find him, and kill him.
Items: Motorcycles

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Short version: Steve Jackson did not like the execution scene from the intro movie. He wanted it pulled. The development team offered to tweak it but felt it was important to set the story. SJ treatened to not approve the release at the absolute last moment by using a clause in the contract and that forced IP to renegotiate. Steve didnt want to fo that, and the contract was cancelled.

Steve also didnt like the look of the Vault Boy on the Skilldex cards, and the dev team didnt want to change that, but that was relatively minor compared to the intro movie.

The dev team sent SJG a copy of the Alpha for review. SJG sent a letter with 21 or 22 items to change. The dev team agreed with everything but the intro movie and the Vault Boy, suggested a compromise that would partially censor the intro movie execution scene and we told SJG that everyone else who saw the Vault Boy loved them. So, we wanted more info on why SJG didnt like the skilldex images or if there were specific images that needed tweaking.

That's when SJG threatened the game's release. SJG had final approval rights as late as 48 hours before release. If we didnt pull the execution scene, SJG would not let IP release the game. IP didnt want to chance that happening and so wanted to tweak the contract. SJG refused. IP use a clause in the contract to pay off SJG and end the contract early.

Source: I was on the Fallout 1 dev team, saw the initial email from SJG, and talked to the producer during and after the contract bruhaha.

We had plans to make a whole series of GURPS games. We really wanted to do some genre mashing like dimensional travel, but couldnt afford the art budget for some of our initial concepts, so finally settled on post-apocalypse and Fallout was born. Had GURPS Fallout been successful, we would have done the larger dimensional hopping game next. Bummer SJG and IP couldnt work it out.

>I was on the Fallout 1 dev team
Well that's pretty damn neat. Got any other secrets to share from those days?

I've been playing ttrpgs for twenty years now and I started with a homebrew of my own creation. What you're saying is asinine.

Here's an early story from the pre-Fallout days. Brian Fargo wanted to make a new RPG. He sent out an email asking the devs about three IPs: GURPS, Vampire the Masquerade and Earthdawn. Most devs were playing GURPS at this time, so we voted for that. Vampire was a close second and a couple votes here or there, that would have been the game.

But we selected GURPS and spent some time working on different concepts.

Fallout was originally going to be called Armageddon, but another team at IP wanted to use that title. We switched to Fallout. And the other teams project was eventually canceled.

Steve Jackson flew out to IP once and we took him to dinner at Club 33 at Disneyland. Up until the contract debacle, SJG was easy to work with and seemed very positive about the game.

The best bug was shooting a rocket launcher for the first time, but the ammo graphic was set to Dogmeat, so you'd fire and Dogmeat would go running across the ground and then blow up the target.

During development, IP licensed AD&D from Hasbro/WotC and from that point on upper management pretty much ignored us. Which was fine.

I killed Brian Fargo with a hernia during a review meeting. That was fun. We had a little script on a manhole cover that required a strength check to open. If you crit failed, it did one or two points of damage. Brian got in a fight with some ghouls, got low on health and then tried to open the manhole. I thought it was funny, but Brian was not amused.

We had a good time making the game, which shows in the final product. Wish FO1 had sold better. It really underperformed and we devs were disappointed with the sales figures. But FO2 sold more copies and Bethesda had done wonders with the franchise.

Thank you for that bit of history! I don't have any reason not to believe you, so I do. It still seems like its out of character for SJG, given my limited knowledge of the company.

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Personally, I've always wanted to play an Only War-style campaign set during the war in Alaska.

It just seems like it'd be cool to have a campaign when the pre-war militaries were in their heyday, wartime weaponry like power armor in it's prime.

Also, there's an opportunity for a lot of creative freedom since, according to canon, the Anchorage simulation from FO3 was altered by the general in charge to the point that it no longer represented the actual battle, so a GM can run their own interpretation of the conflict.

Why do you want the NCR to be involved? It seems unlikely to encounter them in any significant manner outside of existing settings, so think about what you want to get from putting them in the game and come up with your own, creative alternative.

Here's a good idea: the entire world is covered in FUCKING ANTS THAT BREATHE FIRE and CAZADORES THAT FLY AND HAVE MASSIVE JAWS THAT WANT TO MUTILATE YOU ALSO DID I MENTION THEY'RE THE SAME SIZE AS AN ADULT HUMAN MALE so everyone with half a brain has put a bullet in their brains or slit their own throats so now the only human beings left in this world are fucking raiders without any sense of fashion who are somehow too dumb to realize how fucked they are in a world ruled by giant fucking insects I mean holy shit what loving deity would allow such massive insect creatures to walk the same planet as humans small insects already scare the shit out of me that reminds me that a few years ago I bought Fallout 3 but I never bothered to complete it because fucking insects AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

@56624490
Thank you for your post, it was helpful and of good quality.

>so I was planning to start a Fallout Setting General to compile this sort of stuff
There have been attempts in the past to make a Fallout general, but it's never been active enough to maintain a constant presence.

steal the plot from the fantastic fallotu resurrection

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>nobody posted the Wasteland2 rules which not only are not a shit d20 but a superior d100 system but also have ready to go enemy encounters, items, a shitton of traits and perks + actual working rules that are not convoluted

Played for like half a year with this system its FUCKING AMAZING

attached pdf is a previous version had to upload Wasteland 2 rule to here (file-upload.net/download-12806929/FalloutWastelandsv2.0.pdf.html) due to file size

With that wargame by Mophidius and that upcoming boardgame by FFG, there might be more activity.

Fucking hell OP, THIS!