I've recreated my original character, Ivan, the Hispanic energy weapon wielding lock-picker only rather than develop his speaking skills I've focused on medicine seeing as the FWE modded wasteland is a much more dangerous place now where limbs can be crippled very easily and food doesn't heal you up, only stimpaks do. As a man of medicine I can fix crippled limbs in the field using surgical supplies and medical braces, and stimpaks and rad meds are more effective.

Interestingly my repair skill was high enough to fix the leaks in Megaton and because of my specialisation in medicine I was able to convince the doctor to tell me about Leo Stahl's jet addiction. Unfortunately my speech skill wasn't high enough to convince him to drop it so I... well, I cheated and loaded my save before talking to him until I succeeded. Why is there a percentage chance of convincing people? It's so annoying. In Planescape: Torment, high charisma or high intelligence (or even low intelligence I've heard) would open up their own dialogue trees which you could 'fail' by choosing the wrong things to say -- there was no percentage chance of failing, it was all down to your decisions. It's a real shame FO3 doesn't do this more with the speech skill because it's always nice to see new dialogue options cropping up for high intelligence or high medicine or high endurance or whatever.

My first stop after Megaton was Springvale Elementary School to test and fine tune the FWE modded combat. As it happens, so much as farting in the dark alerted the entire school's population of raiders. Well, okay, a gunshot in the dark alerted everyone, and yes, that's realistic, but it's not particularly fun being gang banged by about 8+ raiders. I lowered the sneak settings so that enemies were sensitive enough to commotion but no so much that they became docile sandbags and so far everything seems doable but nevertheless risky. The increased accuracy and damage multipliers make combat so much harder so you have to scout about, consider your options and be opportunistic. If it wasn't for VATS I'm not sure I could manage it to be honest, crippling enemies' arms and legs has been my favoured tactic so far. FWE's bullet-time mode is pretty sweet and useful in certain situations too.

Okay this is getting long so I'll finish up by saying: I spoke to Uncle Leo after nearly shooting him, poor fella. I encountered my first Deathclaw Matriarch and after trying my luck against it with several bottlecap mines failed miserably so decided to give it a very wide berth. Also: Naughty Nightwear and Lug-Nut wtf?