You know, this is something that I've been toying around with for a while now. But one of my favorite features from Fallout 3 - Wanderers' Edition was how you could breach locked doors and containers with explosives. It's gotten me thinking, what if the player could use more skills in a fashion similar to this.

How cool would it be if you could breach locked doors with your trusty shotgun using your gun skill. Or bash open a cabinet with your melee skill? Would if you could craft or purchase dues ex style hacking tools and lock picking tools for mechanically and scientifically inclined characters? Maybe they're talented enough in unarmed to kick down doors or rip them open? For Fallout 3 characters, big guns could waste any obstacle in their way. You could blast through things with your energy weapons skill. Heck, for Fallout New Vegas characters, why not use your survival skill to creatively solve problems?

I think this would add a lot of creative freedom and role playing options if you gave the player the option to utilize their skills in alternative ways. What do you guys think of this? If so, let me know, I'd love to hear from you!

Outer Worlds did it right, every skill should have more of a purpose than just skill checking, when needed. For example, high speech skill should be a factor, along with CH, on how well your companions fight, with very high speech and bad karma having a small chance of making enemies panic and flee during combat, high explosives skill should double as the "traps" skill from OG fallouts, letting the player know when there is a trap nearby, the higher the skill, the better the detection radius ect. If the passive effect of the skill is not determined by how high it is, there should be thresholds, with better effect for meeting every threshold(for example, repair skill should net more junk items starting at 20 repair skill, with low chance of finding rare or expensive ones from robots and loot tables at 40, and doubling the amount of loot found at 60, doubling the chance of finding rare loot at 80, full 100 repair skill doubles the amount of damage done to power armor and robots, and doubles the effects of mods that effect damage, condition or stats like idle sway or accuracy, ect). That would give players an incentive to get some skills up to a hundred as soon as possible, rather than just simply adding points into whatever you feel like you need at the moment

@ Sonichu_fanboy

I've been needing to check out the outer worlds, but it sounds interesting if that's how skills work in that game. Yeah, it would be totally realistic if you could salvage more parts from broken items with a higher repair skill, or similarly produce more potent medical items with a higher science skill.

I'm not very familiar with the original fallout games, but trap detection and things like that would be a perfect survival skill. Speaking of which, I would love it if you could place and rig traps yourself. Like bear traps, or rigged shotguns and what not. Fallout 4's level of customization would be crazy fun for trap designing. That would require a combination of skills. Repair / Science / Survival, and Guns / Energy Weapons / Explosives. That sort of thing.

Doors are awfully wonky in times [engine thing] but setting it to work with a very specific ammo type would make it balanced [ as 200 year old broken down wood doors would be awfully fragile but ey its a game ]
Traps are limited in the engine or at least know no proper way to put in newer traps and gizmos
probably nobody felt the need as they were never that deadly in the vanilla game
Xilandro took the FO4 intimidation to FNV where with the stats you can make an enemy surrender
act like the perk does in the 4th instalment , besides that explosive entry should be on the nexus somewhere as for the rest there was a mod that came out recently that let you make your own bots
As for the detecting traps , its kinda pointless as its a 3d world you can pretty much see everything
unless someone is willing to put in the work and effort to make perception usefull again
and put up text prompts on certain containers and have a pop up you got a explosive on it
Besides whats on offer I have no idea how much further the concept can be taken
aside putting up text windows and utilize the special stats at every given turn , ect go thought a air duck somewhere but you can do it only with 9 agility , or move a giant container if you have 10 str and open up a diffrent path

It's a very, very common videogame trope for doors to be largely unbreakable. I remember as far back as resident evil (the first) on the playstation. I was shocked when I fired a grenade launcher at a door, and it did... absolutely nothing. These days I'm much more jaded, it's not only not shocking, it's expected.

It's a delicate balance between offering creativity and character build freedom to allow skills a broad range of applications, while still having a sense of steady progression with encounters, area access, and not allowing player actions to break essential sequences and story moments. Planned from the start, something like this could work very well, as long as the applications are thoroughly thought out, but after introducing possibilities like this, you have to be careful not to blindside the player with an obstacle that logically could be solved in some manner they have access to, but can't be for whatever reason. This could set them up for disappointment.