A thing I have thought of while waiting for email boxes to move from server to server

[camwyn]

I'm currently playing the main character of Fallout 3 at Milliways. Her journal is aaaaaaaagh_sky, and it's spoilerriffic with no lj-cuts, fair warning. I've been writing up different sections of the game so far as narrative in her journal, much like I did with Gordon Freeman and Half-Life. Problem is I just ran headlong into something on the Wasteland Survival Guide quest.

I'm up to the Arlington Library portion of the quest. In game, you meet a Scribe of the Brotherhood of Steel at the remains of the Arlington Public Library. She tells you the Brotherhood is there gathering what few readable books remain for entry into their archives. If you're on the quest, you're there to download the contents of the card catalog, with the option of finding a terminal that still has access to the full archives of the library. The archive terminal is deep in the library and there are radroaches and raiders out the wazoo between you and the terminal. Find a prewar book in readable condition and bring it to the Scribe, and she pays you a hundred caps for it. You can come back to her throughout the game with any readable prewar books you find and get all that cash.

Thing is. I can't imagine the character I'm playing- a high Good Karma individual with a gentle temperament and a respect for knowledge, as she was raised a scientist's daughter- not offering the Scribe the library archive contents once she gets them. She met the Brotherhood Outcasts first, and they were jerks, but then she met Paladin Hoss and his crew in Falls Church, and she wound up respecting them. Finding out what Scribe Yearling was there for would probably tip her further in the respect direction, since Scribe Yearling's pretty decent- a little stiff at first, but she's not a jerk. Ellen- my Vault 101 Dweller- is on the naive side, or at least tends to assume the best of people until they actively treat her like jerks, so I can only assume that she'd offer Scribe Yearling a copy of the archive contents. Which, according to all the dialogue in the game, is the contents of every book in the Arlington public library as of late 2077.

Having all the info obviates Scribe Yearling's mission at the library. Am I justified in having her pack up and leave the library as soon as she's verified the archive contents? Nice as a constant source of caps in Arlington might be, it's not as if Ellen has the ability to Fast Travel that you have in the game. I don't want to ask too much realism of Ellen's setting, because it is Fallout, but there ought to be at least a modicum of plausibility in human behavior. And if you have the contents of ALL THE BOOKS EVAR in a library where you were originally just hoping to recover a handful, well, that's sort of grounds for going home, isn't it?

Comments

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

I thought that it was just the card catalogue of all the books, rather than all the books themselves. Fallout World doesn't seem to be the kind of place that would have gotten all the books onto computer to me. Just saying.

[camwyn]

Card catalogue is at the front desk. The terminal all the way inside the library is labeled 'complete archives'. And these are the dialogue options you get when you talk to Moira if you've downloaded the complete archives:

If you have Agility 7 or higher: "The place was a death trap. But I got in and out as quick as I could."
If you have Int 7 or higher: "This is an entire library's archives. You know how valuable that is, right?"
Generic answer: "The archive was probably the most useful information in there."
If you have Endurance 7 or higher: "Now you can protect and catalogue all of the information it once had."

Emphasis mine in both cases. The implication is that there's a HELL of a lot more information in the Archive download than there is in the card catalog one- especially given that the Endurance answer says Moira's going to need to catalogue it.

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. I usually crank my Dex to be my highest stat, rather than Int or End, so I hadn't seen those options.

[camwyn]

Yeah, I pump my Int so that I don't have to spend as many points on skills later. The Endurance thing cropped up once after I took ant nectar or boozeahol or something, I forget what.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

In the older Fallout games, pumping Intelligence was a good thing. It allowed you all sorts of interaction outcomes. Of course, dropping your Int made things entertaining as well.

[kotorjedi-amaya.livejournal.com]

This I found out via walkthroughs. Also keeping old armor was a good thing, sometimes!

Having really only played DnD-system RP video games, it took me a little while to adjust to Fallout games.

[miss-yt.livejournal.com]

I see your issue here. You could, in Millicanon, have Yearling move somewhere else for her research - like the Library of Congress (unless the Arlington library is supposed to be a stand-in for it). Then Ellen can still bring her books.

[camwyn]

We've never seen the Library of Congress in game, unfortunately. I'd be willing to bet that it was one of the buildings that actually got destroyed- that, or it's effectively unreachable. You can find the National Archives, sure, but not the Library of Congress.

[miss-yt.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking Millicanonically. The basic idea is just that Scribe Yearling could move somewhere else (the Library of Congress was just a suggestion) where Ellen could still give her books. She could even move back to the Citadel and Ellen could stop over there occasionally. She couldn't go in, of course, but maybe Yearling could meet her at the door. She might be willing to step down from her high horse for some pre-war books!

[camwyn]

I may wind up sending her back to the Citadel, yeah. I was actually sort of thinking of invoking one of the bugs that happens from time to time with Paladin Hoss and Initiate Pek.... for some reason, the first time I played the game through, my character once woke up in her Megaton house and AAAGH Pek was standing there next to the bed. Not that he's not cute but JESUS warn a person first- anyway, when I tried to talk to him he said 'you saved my life, I'm in your debt' and then ran away. It's a programming bug, that's all. Happens with Hoss, too- but I was thinking that since the archive download is so huge, Yearling probably hasn't got caps on hand to cover it at the same rate as all the books. I might just have her give Ellen some caps after the initial download, then once she goes back to the Citadel, have her send Pek to Megaton with the rest of what she owes.

And after that, yeah, Ellen's going to have to go to the Citadel and trade books across the doorstep.