The idea of forcing players to deal with the consequences of their actions in a potentially negative way isn’t something we see in a lot of RPGs and other games which want to send players on a power trip. In games like Fallout and The Outer Worlds, though, part of the joy of the experience comes from watching how the world reacts to your sometimes bad decisions. In fact, there are times when those bad decisions end up being more memorable than the good ones.

To illustrate that concept, Cain recalls a time when a friend who played GURPS (an old tabletop RPG) decided to play as a “one-armed alcoholic fighter.” Why? Well, he was trying to take advantage of the fact that the game let you build a character with inherent disadvantages in order to gain bonus points that can be assigned to other aspects. He was trying to game the system, but his plans were derailed when his group encountered a ladder in a sewer.

“There were these rungs leading up to a manhole, and so he got to it and I asked ‘Oh, by the way, have you drunk anything today? You need to make a dexterity check,'” Cain says. “It turns out he had, and so he fell, and the rest of them didn’t want to stop and help him, so they all climbed the ladder and ran away while he died…The rungs didn’t mean anything to them, but to a one-armed drunk fighter, it was life or death.”

Memorable incidents such as that helped inspire Cain and Boyarsky to assign a different (sometimes slightly twisted) internal logic to their RPG adventures. Arguably the most impressive implementation of that logic involves how the pair justify allowing a created character like a one-armed alcoholic fighter assume the “hero of destiny” role that was common in so many fantasy stories and pre-Fallout video game RPGs.

“When we made the original Fallout, one of the other designers once told me, it’s like ‘If you pick a character that’s really stupid why would the Vault send that person out as their savior?'” Cain recalls. “I said, ‘Well remember it’s that they drew straws. So they drew straws because you had to go out in the radioactive wasteland, and the really dumb guy got it.’ Well, they sent him out, but they were probably like, ‘Okay, let’s wait a week and then send up the next person.'”