What would the character sheets of the show’s main characters look like?
When I watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, I spent half the movie trying to figure out everyone’s subclass and abilities. (Clearly, the DM house-ruled how many times a druid can use wildshape per day.) I can’t help it, there’s a part of my brain that thinks about everything in game terms. I couldn’t even watch Game of Thrones without analyzing the Battle of Winterfell as if it was a game of Warhammer.
It’s particularly bad with videogame adaptations, which beg for this kind of thinking—and none more than Amazon’s Fallout series, which feels remarkably true to the games. I half suspect the series bible includes character sheets for all the protagonists, complete with tagged skills, perks, and full SPECIAL stats. Since I don’t have access to that, I’ve just had to base mine on what we see on-screen during the first season. Lucy McClean, Vault Dweller
During Lucy’s first scene she helpfully lists three of her best skills: Repair, Science, and Speech. It would be easy to put those down as her three tagged skills and move on, but she goes on to say, “I also participate in Gymnastics Club, Fencing Team C, Intermediate Phys-Ed, and I dabble in Riflery, though I’m not very good.” During the montage we see her win a wrestling competition, and she demonstrates above average hand-to-hand combat skills when fighting a bunch of Vault dwellers later in the series, so her Unarmed skill should be right up there. How did she get such a wide spread of abilities?
By taking the Skilled trait, which gives bonuses to all skills across the board at the cost of slowing down perk progression later on—a classic noob trap that’s not worth it in the actual games.
