#percentiles

As Willy Wonka said, you gotta go forwards to go backwards, or something like that. So let’s look at Fallout 1 and 2 for a little bit. Character creation had you set your SPECIAL stats, tag three skills for faster improvement, divide up skill points among all those skills, and select traits or opt out of traits. Perks were awarded every three levels. Fallout 3 did the same thing with slightly different skills, tossed traits out the window, tagged skills just added bonus points, and perks were awarded every single level. New Vegas rearranged skills again, brought back traits, and cut back perks to every other level. (Yes, I know NV was made by Obsidian and not Bethesda. Bear with me.)

When Fallout 4 came along, ALMOST ALL of that got upended. All character attributes were abstracted first through the SPECIAL stats, then through an array of ranked Perks indexed by SPECIAL scores first and character level second. It was a pretty dramatic change. Some people liked it. Others did not.

The rationale behind the change, if memory serves, was that the percentile skills added a layer of complexity to the character creation and improvement system that interrupted the flow of the game. Based on my own personal experiences, I am inclined to agree with that position. I still have sheets of writing paper in my room from the last time I played New Vegas (years ago) reminding me of what skill levels I needed for specific skill checks, and where those checks were, in order to get better quest rewards or bonus experience. Heck, the early game quest with the Powder Gangers and getting the folks in Goodsprings to fight back involved Explosives, Barter, Speech, Sneak, Repair, Science, and possibly Guns. All that added up, and it was all in the first area of the game. I also remember setting arbitrary limits on how high I would raise my skills using skill points, so I could make the most of all the skill books.

Condensing all of that down into a chart of Perks didn’t do away with that “Character Accounting” process but it did simplify it. That said, there were some complaints about the combination of perks and skills into one system; in previous games when you leveled up, you were assured of improving some skills and, depending on how the game handled perks, you could get an ability that had nothing to do with skills. Not so in Fallout 4; you got one point every level and you had to decide if you wanted to use it on improving mundane useful stuff like combat skills or sneaking or lockpicking or hacking, or special abilities like breathing underwater or hacking robots or scaring enemies into backing down.

In a way, the Fallout 4 perk system was basically the Skyrim Skill Trees system, without the skill trees and constellations. (Feel free to joke about Todd Howard getting people to buy Skyrim again.) Progress went from simple basic stuff to advanced abilities, only Fallout 4 had no branching specializations inside the skills themselves because Fallout 4 had 63 distinct perk tracks (7 SPECIAL stats times 10 levels, minus the 7 stat boost options at the top of the chart) versus the 18 skills in Skyrim. Some of those perks in Fallout 4 fit the criteria for unique abilities in older games, like Aqua Boy / Girl and Action Boy / Action Girl, Awareness and Grim Reaper’s Sprint, Robotics Expert and Nerd Rage. Others fit within the metric of simple skills; small guns, large guns, explosives, melee weapons, unarmed combat, sneaking around, and of course picking locks and hacking computers.

What I find interesting about the transition from percentile skills to pure perk trees is that Bethesda has already created a “soft” perk tree system in Fallout 3, and Obsidian had done the same thing in New Vegas. This is easiest to see with Lockpicking and Science skills. In the FPS games, all locks and computer terminals fit into five categories: Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard. These corresponded to skill levels of 15, 25, 50, 75, and 100 in their respective skills. If you put skill points in one of those skills during a level up, and you didn’t cross a threshold of ability, you didn’t see any immediate payoff for those skill points. In New Vegas, the crafting requirements for different explosives, medicines, tools and ammo did the same thing for skills like Repair, Medicine, and Survival. So already, there’s effectively a perk progression system there. Fallout 4 just made it official.

This kind of raises the question of why percentile skills were a thing at all, and that’s a bit involved but the short answer is that older games often used percentile abstractions because they were based on pen and paper games that did the same thing, or something similar. The games handled skill checks by rolling virtual dice, and some games still do that. Most games, though, have streamlined EVERYTHING for a more action oriented experience overall. This includes Action RPGs that are trying to tap the popularity of pure action games from a marketing standpoint as much as a position of player experience. Also, keep in mind that originally Fallout was slated to use the GURPS engine, but the deal fell apart and the SPECIAL system was invented from scratch instead. Instead of virtual d10s, skills might have used virtual d6s instead.

If there is a point I’m trying to make in all this, it is that percentile abstractions can work, but the game itself has to be designed around it. Each lock needs a percentile difficulty rating, each computer needs a percentile rating. Crafting skills need to reward improvement according to performance, rather than threshold, and the same goes for skills like haggling and medicine; you need to see an obvious result in hitpoints healed per healing attempt and money earned per trade. Perk trees can also work, but the idea that skills and special abilities are totally distinct means that any system like Fallout 4′s that puts mundane skills like marksmanship and medicine next to superhuman mutations will raise some questions in and out of the game.