One thing I wanted to do was to make sure every character’s special skills had some sort of application. For instance, I wanted there to be something for Sturges to repair, if someone picked that character. So, I had a “ruined Protectron” on the street scene, and the players noticed it right away (even without me calling it out as a scenery detail). While keeping hidden from the mutant hounds guarding the entrance to the Chryslus “Showroom Of Tomorrow,” they did some emergency repairs to add a Police Protectron to their number … but I played it up that the Police Protectron wasn’t just automatically going to follow orders from some random wastelander.
“Codsworth,” however, being such an expert on robot mentality (partly on account of being one) was able to recognize that what the Police Protectron needed was some context. As such, he talked the Protectron into believing that they were deputies, and that there was a hostage situation involving some terrorists in the “Super Mutant Gang,” and that those were some very vicious attack dogs out front. (In a manner of speaking, it wasn’t so much a lie, as a repackaging of the present situation in an attempt at Pre-War terms.) This was sufficient to get the Protectron to aid them, although they very quickly realized that the Protectron, though durable, was not the least bit sneaky, so they basically just instructed it to act as backup while they took the lead.
To reflect the difficulty in carefully phrasing everything for the Protectron to understand, I treated it as an action or quick action to give the Protectron new orders. This would be no big deal in non-combat phases, but in combat it could take time away from attacking, etc. I wouldn’t require a directive every single activation, but I would insist that the robot would rather mechanically keep carrying out its previous orders. If it was instructed to “apprehend that criminal,” then it would continue to do so until the “criminal” was “apprehended” (or otherwise neutralized). Despite the difficulties I introduced in instructing the robot, I left it to one of the players to handle the stat mat and die rolls for the Protectron.
NOTE: For this game, I tried to be very flexible in terms of how skills were handled. Unless there was a situation that I determined absolutely required a specific Skill Expertise, I phrased my requests for tests in the form of “Give me an Agility or Stealth roll,” or “Give me a Perception or Notice roll.” So, if I ask for “Agility/Stealth,” EVERYONE has Agility, so they can roll that. However, if you have Stealth as a Skill Expertise, then you’ve got that extra bonus die you can roll for it.
I only applied the massive -4 untrained skill penalty (for lack of a specific Expertise) in cases where I felt like it should be nearly impossible to do a task without at least the very basic of training (e.g., repairing a robot, picking a lock, hacking a computer, performing brain surgery, flying a vertibird).
Another benefit of my doing it this way was that I could get away with giving the players all half-sheet “character mats,” rather than necessitating the full page format (half of it taken up by an exhaustive list of skills, most of which any given character WILL NOT have). I made the sheets in cardstock, and put paper clips on the top wounds/rads counter section, for ease of keeping track of damage without having to mess with those tiny punch-out cardboard dots. (Also, for Luck Points, I gave the players Fallout-themed poker chips to use as counters.)