one thing i think later fallouts really fucked up is making it so you can see skill-related dialogue options even if you don't meet the requirements for them. and, honestly, maybe you shouldn't even be able to see when an option is related to your skills at all!
i'm replaying fallout using the 1 in 2 mod and went with a set of skills i'd never normally use, focusing on science, repair, and outdoorsman. i have no idea if any of these are good. but what i do know is that there are a lot of dialogue options in this game that i've probably never seen, such as the one i just ran into:
there's a farmer in shady sands you can talk to, and he'll tell you about his crops. apparently, with a science skill above 40%, you can tell him about crop rotation, and you get a few big paragraph-long dialogue options where you explain each detail about it. once you exit the dialogue window, you get 500 experience. i had no idea this was a thing! i don't think i've ever been here with a science skill above 40% (mostly because i'm not often talking to npcs more than once, which is maybe a habit i should break with this game1)
it's an incredible feeling stumbling upon these skill-related dialogue options without knowing they were coming, and it's an even bigger motivator for returning to the game another time with a completely different build just to see what happens elsewhere in the game, with NPCs you maybe thought were kinda useless at first. it makes you feel like your character is able to do these things because that's the kind of person you're trying to make them into. of course my guy who i'm trying to play as like an engineer/scientist type would walk up to the one farmer in town and go "hey man all your shits fucked. your freaking garbage kid"
if this exchange were in fallout new vegas, however, i'd probably have known about it on my first playthrough after i see it, make note of it, and then come back later when my science skill is high enough to pass the check. wow. that's so roleplaying of me. roleplaying is when your character goes "hmm i've just suddenly convinced myself to come back when i have learned approximately 23 more points worth of Repair"
in the original games, my character knows these things only because of their skills. unless i were looking up information elsewhere, i would never know to get my science skill to a certain level before talking to this guy. and that's really fucking cool! i don't want to just hit every dialogue option in one playthrough by planning out every interaction, and these games won't let you do that in the first place. sure, maybe you can play for a really long time and get all your skills super high and see most of it1. probably not all. but also the game state changes depending on how many days have passed so maybe that's not even an option! i don't remember anything about what changes so i can't really speak on it
in later games, though, you're given all the tools you need to just back out of dialogue, come back later, and suddenly know enough to fix a thing your character never actually heard about. you could always make some kind of roleplaying excuse like "my character got good enough at repair to realize how to fix this person's broken clock that they saw sitting on their desk and so they came back :)" but it's... inelegant, at best. it's a stretch. it's the kind of thing you have to put effort into suspending your disbelief on
i don't feel like i'm playing a character when i see the numbers all laid out like that. i just feel like i'm playing a video game
1: editing this in afterwards to say i just found out the quest that inspired this post is actually a one-time thing. if you talk to curtis about farming with too low of a skill, you can never bring it up ever again. so you couldn't even come back to it later with higher skills unless you just knew to not ask about it
