Replace CH3 Check
I enjoy the concept of needing a check in order to trade/talk, although it is one of the worst things that promote alts.
My issue is with a special check, as special is not cuszomizable. What i mean by this is we know the perks we need in wasteland so it dictates our specual and theres not much room to really flesh out a chracter with a dynamic role.
Currently, if you are not strong enough or have low perception, you can invest skill points gained from intelligence to balance out this gap in order to gain a good ToHit%.
This is not the case for Talking, and i dont see why not.
The new mechanic:
What i am suggesting is to replace the CH check with a speech check, some core mechanics would need to change for balance reasons however.
CH 3 now starts with 15% speech due to the formula speech = 5xCh Note: Wiki says 25% + (2% x Charisma), but this forumlar was from observing the FCP
So this would be the check, if you had 15% speech you could talk to people, if you did not have CH 3 you could invest SP into speech.
The problem here is a balance issue, obviously putting 10 sp for the ability to talk with CH1 is imbalanced compared to old system.
So change the formular to Speech = 30xCh (or something abit more clever), this way, one would need to invest 60 SP to charm the NPC into trading/quest giving. (or some other balanced number, this is not really important for conceptualizing the idea)
Mentats and beer would be an issue but there may be a work around (suggestions?).
The main thing i wanted to bring up is that special checks are not very effective in the multiplayer RPG realm because there very fixed. Skillpoints, we have hundreds of, and can distribute them a little bit easier.
edit: formatting.