Van Buren skills Skill advancement . Skills started at 0 with Tag Skill s starting at 20 . They would not have a % symbol behind them , as this concept was ruled generally frivolous , seeing as players could go far beyond 100 % in previous games . Point weighing was to be implemented sooner in order to make skills more difficult to get good at . The cost on a per - rank basis was : Each rank bought for a tag ! skill was doubled . If you had a 55 Medic , it would cost you two points to increase it one rank — but you would get an additional rank for free . Each skill had a bonus applied to all rolls that was equal to three ability score values ( AG * 3 or CH * 2 + IN or ST + AG + PE , etc . ) . Perks that require skill values only looked at the rank , not the rank + bonus . For example : you wanted to take Advanced Research ; the prerequisites were IN 8 , PE 6 , science 175 . If the character ' s science only has 168 ranks , but it ' s effectively 182 because of his high IN and PE , he wouldn ' t qualify . Tag bonus . It was possible that the tag bonus would be 24 , since that would have made the bonus equally divisible into 1 , 2 , 3 , and 4 . However , + 20 was considered a rather hefty bonus on top of what was already accelerated points to rank ratio . A tag bonus of 12 was considered as well because it would fit the first pre - requisite ( Being equally divisible ) , but it ultimately still didn ' t solve the bonus problem if the skill rank " crossed the barrier " during the increase . Unspent fractions would probably be lost in this scenario . List of skills . There were to be 13 skills in " Van Buren " ( originally 14 , one " stealth " skill was cut ) . Speech skills . There were several ideas for broader application of archetypes that are often called " Charisma Boy " or " Diplomacy Boy " skills . In Fallout and Fallout 2 , such characters could focus on two skills with good , but fairly limited applications : Barter and Speech . Barter affected buy and sell prices , Speech affected dialogue options ( along with certain attributes ) . " Combat Boys " by contrast , not only have skills but tools that helped define their characters . Three characters who focus on Melee can all use different weapon sets for different purposes . This gives a level of depth to match or exceed that character type ' s skill breadth . It was generally held by J . E . Sawyer ( though he noted many might or would disagree ) that the " Charisma Boy " had neither depth or nor breadth in character development as ; " He ' s got two skills , one with no depth , one with slight depth . Barter is pretty flat . It ' s just a score that goes up and changes store prices . A player can ' t do much with it to change his or her gameplay experience other than dump points into it and save money . Even the perks available for Barter don ' t really allow the player to do anything new with the skill . " He went on to explain that Speech opened up a lot of dialogue options , but that was in the end , its whole point . It did not go beyond that . " Attributes can be checked with Speech in dialogue , but ultimately those static checks are just pass / fail . Randomized checks in speech are easily overcome by the ol ' " uncontested reload " , so there ' s not much point to them — they need to be static checks because of the environment in which they appear . " For these reasons he wanted to keep Barter , but divide Speech into two skills : Deception and Persuasion . However , this division was potentially harmful unless the Deception and Persuasion skills had a broader application in the game outside of standard dialogue and , objectively , one could argue that this would not solve the issue of depth that Sawyer had with speech , but possible introduce two newer , shallower skills .