J.E. Sawyer Interview
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Q: In Fallout 3 you merged 3 combat skills into Firearms and split Speech into Persuasion and Deception. Why? It's more of a general "character system" question, but using a good example is always better. Drawing a parallel with DnD games, do you think that a game with 3 combat skills: melee, ranged, unarmed would offer the same depth as a more detailed system?
A: The only way a designer can really decide on a skill set for a system is within the context of the game being made. I think the first two Fallout games were very gun-heavy. It was possible to play as a melee or unarmed character, but I do believe it was significantly more difficult.
There's a good reason why people use firearms in our world: they're much better at killing people than bare hands, brass knuckles, or a big sword. So I thought firearms still needed to be powerful in the Fallout world, but they should be limited in some way if people really liked the style of using melee and unarmed. I thought the division of firearm skills in the first two games felt clumsy and effectively forced a continual point dump if characters wanted to use them throughout the game.
In Fallout 3, I wanted to make a serious attempt at balancing firearms through the availability of ammunition. I believed that ammunition as a valuable commodity made sense in a wasteland environment. Low-power ammo would be relatively common, but the stuff found in high powered rifles, machineguns, plasma weapons, etc. would be much rarer. The firearm specializations would have come through perks. I didn't really want to take depth away from firearms; I wanted to make firearm depth comparable to the depth of the unarmed and melee skills. As long as the nature of firearms and ammunition was made clear to the player, I think it would have worked.
I divided the speech skills because "Charisma Boy" characters seemed to have no hard choices to make during character development. One skill covered all non-Barter aspects of talking, so it was pretty much a no-brainer. If you wanted to talk well, you tagged Speech and had high IN and CH. I also designed a lot of new perks that worked off of those two skills, so raising one or the other felt like they gave you significantly different options.
As for whether or not coarse combat skill divisions could work in a fantasy game like D&D, I think so. D&D is sort of bizarre in how it divides things: it's a game that has two different skills for looking at things (Spot and Search) and one score (Base Attack Bonus) that represents basic capability with all weapons. Excluding spellcasters, most D&D characters differentiate themselves in combat through the use of magic items, feats, and special abilities (which might as well be feats).
