Fallout Creator Found Old Notes and Revealed the Full List of Character Traits from the GURPS RPG System

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15 May 03:00

Fallout creator Tim Cain recently published a new blog post dedicated to his memories of working on the game. He managed to find old handwritten notes that he thought were irretrievably lost:

When we switched from GURPS to SPECIAL in early 1997, I archived all the GURPS materials and put them aside. And it was all lost. There was a whole GURPS archive. I gave it to a vice president at Interplay who was in charge of archives. I gave it to him about a year before release — about 9 months before — and said, “Here, keep this.” I also had my own archive, which I was ordered to destroy when I left Interplay. But I assumed they still had the old version — and they didn’t.

In the end, Tim Cain himself was able to find handwritten notes and talked about the “GURPS traits” that were originally intended for Fallout (by “traits” he means a combination of advantages, disadvantages, features, and skills).

In addition to obvious attributes like strength, health, intelligence, and agility, the following advantages were planned for the character in Fallout:

  • Acute Hearing,
  • Acute Smell and Taste,
  • Acute Vision,
  • Alertness,
  • Ambidexterity,
  • Animal Empathy,
  • Several appearance options — attractive, beautiful, and very beautiful,
  • Charisma,
  • Combat Reflexes,
  • Common Sense,
  • Danger Sense,
  • Eidetic Memory,
  • High Pain Threshold,
  • Intuition,
  • Literacy,
  • Luck,
  • Peripheral Vision,
  • Night Vision,
  • Rapid Healing,
  • Several good reputation options — in the character's Vault and in different factions,
  • Strong Will,
  • Stamina,
  • Voice.

The idea was that these advantages would “intercept already made rolls and adjust them,” and sometimes could allow a roll or, in essence, slightly simplify some aspect of the game.

Interplay Inc., Bethesda Softworks

Advantages cost character points. The game also had “disadvantages” — a player could gain additional character points for adding such traits, but they would make the game more difficult.

For example, the developers planned to introduce:

  • Alcoholism,
  • Two disgusting personal habits — bad breath and nose-picking,
  • Color Blindness,
  • Hard of Hearing,
  • Low Pain Threshold,
  • One Eye,
  • Lack of Taste or Smell,
  • Overweight,
  • Thinness,
  • Stuttering,
  • Several bad reputation options — in the Vault and in different factions.

Tim Cain's video is available at the following link.