So, you're getting killed by the rats right outside the vault door? Having trouble taking care of a few Radscorpions? Can't get any respect from those Raiders? How about when you get to town, are the prices outrageous?

Whatever is happening to you later in the game that has you totally at a disadvantage can usually be attributed to what you did earlier in the game, this is the beauty of Fallout. One of the most important things to remember is to create a good character at the beginning! It is no fun to have to reload the raider camp 20 times because you can't negotiate with them or shoot them! Now, I don't know how many people actually have problems like this early on in the game, but I'm going to assume at one point or another that it has happened to everyone and might be happening to you since you are reading this! By the way, if you are having trouble figuring out the interface i.e. picking up things and shooting things...RTFM!!!

What is the best thing to do during character creation? Well, that depends on how you want to play the game! As Fallout is a ROLE-playing game the idea is to play a role! So what do you want to play? Well, I'll let you decide that, but here are a few tips to keep you going in the early on and therefore get you into the latter portions of the game.

Attributes:

Picking attributes is up to you for the most part, but a word of advice would be to not lower any of them below four as this tends to impact more heavily on you in the game.

Low Strength: You can't carry as much, hand to hand damage reduced. The first thing is the most annoying, you are extremely limited if you cannot carry at least 150 pounds.

Low Perception: You are unable to attack at range very well, you are the last one to attack, and you don't notice even the most obvious things. If you have this below four you can't hit the broad side of a barn until you stand in front of it, the barn will fall on you before you can react to it and you won't notice important things like the secret door in the side of the barn.

Low Endurance: You don't gain as many hit points per level and your resistances are lowered. The resistance thing is more of an annoyance than a real threat, but you definitely need hit points down the road or you will be gobbling stim packs like they were candy on Halloween!

Low charisma: People don't react to your dialogue or you as positively i.e. they don't believe you and you get less dialogue options which can suck if you want to do anything but kill people.

Low Intelligence: You are a dumb bastard and it shows! You get less skill points per level and less dialogue options. The first one sucks for any character as you cannot improve yourself as quickly and once again if you want to do more than kill people the second one is important. This modifies a lot of skills at the beginning as well.

Low agility: My second favorite attribute after Intelligence and if you don't have it people hit you more easily as you have a lower armor class and you can't hit them as much as you have low action points. This would be the ultimate bummer to have an extremely low agility as you have to fight a lot of things throughout the game no matter how you play it and a lower number of action points just plain sucks

Low luck: You are more likely to get hit with criticals and you hit people less with crits and you don't come upon as many cool encounters in the wilderness. This is one of those stats that does not have all it's cards on the table at the beginning, but if you have a really low luck you basically don't come upon things like alien blasters, and dinosaur footprints at all, and bad things happen to you more often than good things.

You also will not be able to choose certain perks if your stats are too low (see manual page 5-24). Taking things to the extreme i.e. dumb, unlucky, really fast, strong guy can seem appealing, but often using your voice as well as your fists has it's advantages in the game and vice versa. So minimize the negative in your attributes and maximize the positive, try to keep most of them in the 5-6 area and your important ones max out. If you want high attributes the best thing to take is the optional trait of Gifted, the disadvantage being that your skills are much lower at the beginning and you gain less skill points per level (a good way to offset this is to max your Intelligence).

Skills:

At the beginning of the game the skills that you want to have are not necessarily the skills that you should have. Making that Thief character is great, high lockpick, high steal, high sneak, sure, but that doesn't matter much when you have the random encounter with the Rad Scorpion in the desert! My point in this regard is Tag the Small Guns skill at the beginning, you will save yourself a lot of grief in the short and long run. Unarmed combat might seem attractive to use, but guns are much easier and Fallout just doesn't let you develop unarmed combat enough to make it worthwhile, not enough variety, wait for Fallout 2 in that regard.

Other skills to look at that make life easier are Barter, and Energy Weapons. Barter helps lower the prices that you will have to pay for merchandise, without a decent barter skill you will have a hard time even getting ammo for your guns, it also helps in other encounters. The other skill that definitely needs to get tagged is Energy Weapons as later in the game you want to use these weapons exclusively and tagging it enables you to jack up your proficiency that much quicker.

If you are planning on talking your way through the game Speech and Barter are definitely the skills to have. It is not a bad idea to put a few points into the Speech skill after two or three levels as it enables you to more easily convince people of your point of view and the gun doesn't always work in that regard.

As you go on in the game you will find that the Lockpick skill can come in handy for those times when it pays to be a bit sneaky.

Optional Traits:

This is definitely a mixed bag. The only one of these that I would recommend with any great regularity would be the Gifted trait and only in combination with a high intelligence to offset the loss of skill points. If you want high attributes the Gifted trait is the only way to go other than hacking the saved game. Bloody mess is a fun attribute as everyone explodes in the worst way when you kill them, but after a while it becomes boring. Depending on the character you want to play and the level of difficulty you are willing to put up with any of these traits can be applicable.

Part 2: Shady Sands and Beyond.