Odbarc said:
The problem with 'everyone else' and 'raiders' is that there are SO many Raiders. It's like 90% of the human population. Or maybe even higher. Imagine playing Fallout and every person you came across took all your caps and equipment.
Suddenly Ghouls attack you but your too hungry to effectively fight back. You almost die. Then Super Mutants kidnap all your friends and eat and mutilate them. You feel sick but it's just radiation.
Then some guy in a blue unitard comes along and kills everything and says, "I've got a bed, food, clean water, walls, allies and television. No rent." Plus s/he's pre-war pretty and suddenly you notice another Raider/Super Mutant/Ghoul ruining all that he's made for himself and shared with everyone else. Do you say nothing or go to the 'solves every problem' Mayor 'Never-teach-a-man-to-fish'?
The chances are there's probably a lot of in-house slavery within Raider camps. You are either the leader who killed the previous leader who killed people to prevent people from killing him back or his/her slave bid to create or defend his fort so you can raid for resources to maintain dominance and not get killed by your own 'family'.
There isn't really a "new source of... [blank]" in the Fallout universe. It's just constantly passing around items based on moment to moment needs. Everything is run down. No one knows how to make something and if you did someone would break it or steal it immediately. People have nothing or next to nothing all the time. They're basically cavemen with laser guns.
And as the wo/man out of time, it's pretty fun to run around and being one of the few and only people in the world that knows what things were, why they were, what they did and do and how to manage and manipulate the world around them.
You can be sure no one is (really) educated like a school. You learn to shoot and that's about it. It's been a long time and people have 'figured out' the most basic of basics like making shelter in the crudest forms with the scraps that are lying around in the ruin and probably accidentally found out how to create food or medicine.
And the lore is pretty neat too.
I think 90% of the population is probably way too high an estimate, but I get the concept of what you're trying to put across here. Life in the Boston area is, however, considerably less harsh than other Fallout environments seemingly. They have actual wood - from trees - for one big noticeable thing right off the top of my head. The quality of "Junk" as well is much higher comparative to other game settings. We're pulling out elements like Copper, Silver, Aluminum, and Plastic out of them on the regular, and other people are too - otherwise those "Shipment of X Junk Item" wouldn't be up for barter at ever vendor. They've figured out a great deal more than you're giving them credit for - given the state of some of the actual settlements that exist, including Diamond City, which has full power, lighting, lifts, etc. I'm not seeing any evidence that they have running water, but shy of that things seem to be able to be arranged with some effort.
I realize that traditionally not having new sources of materials has been the norm, but that's being somewhat undermined by this game I think in terms of how much raw material is not just coming from scavenging stuff, but also seeing that there ARE trees here to cut down and turn into boards, with saws that we do have aplenty and there are rock quarries to be mined for basic stone, which we do have the shovels and picks and so on to do just lying around - finally, it seems, being picked up.... by Raiders for some reason I don't understand.
Also - there are people who are still "really" educated like a school in small pockets. Followers of the Apocalypse do that, some Vaults that didn't go insane do that, there are other examples of where education does continue and people are aware enough of things like math and science to measure out and administer medicine and set bones and so forth - Wasteland doctors, NCR medics, etc. etc.
Odbarc said:
I think we see we were in the army. As for a job, maybe we were an engineer? Or there's blueprints? Or we just have basic mechanical skills (everyone has in 2077?) and we just repair the tech that survived.
The male PC was in the military in some capacity; the female PC, his wife, was a lawyer. I would say that we would have a better general understanding of "how tech works" because we lived in a time when it was ubiquitous -- but so to do we live in a time as players where everyone has a basic understanding of how a cell phone or a microwave works because everyone has a cell phone and a microwave (in some areas of the world), but I couldn't
repair or
make a cell phone or a microwave by that knowledge.
Then again, it'd be a poor crafting system if we were too ignorant of how to craft to use it, so I think that's just gameplay demanding that some suspension of disbelief occur for the sake of the systems.
sanquin said:
I've read somewhere that, to have attacks on settlements be more rare, you need to have as much/more defense as food + water combined. Not sure if it's true, but I've been doing it like that and so far I've only had 1 attack in about 10 hours of playing. (Counting from when I actually started to get a few settlements. I have 4 or 5 with stuff in them at the moment.)
Yes, I've gotten most of my settlements to more defense than resources and that seems to have helped, but I still have a few I need to get up to snuff. I think I was getting attacked so often because I had so many settlements at once all just coming up together. It's still a pain, but it's a bit more manageable now. I did ignore an attack or two as well, so maybe they just aren't calling me as much. I had to stop caring a bit, it was driving me to dislike the game to keep on top of the settlement thing that got out of hand in how many and how much they needed too quickly on me.
