OC questions for Shaw: B) What inspired you to create them?, E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you? and J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character? Shaw looks nice :)

B) What inspired you to create them?

I mean, realistically speaking, coming home from GameStop on launch day and booting up New Vegas. Personality-wise they were... a blank slate, at first? But New Vegas is the game that completely changed the way I play RPGs, so that didn’t last long. At first, he was just a carbon-copy of my original Fallout 3 PC, but then I started characterizing him based on what I actually liked to do in the game; his extremely high Charisma score stopped being “a thing I did so I can game the system for better rewards” and became... the natural result of a very, very tired man who has spent years talking people down from fights. And he sort of went on from there.

There isn’t really any single inciting incident for Shaw, because there’s a million of them built up from nearly ten years of this character existing in my brain and slowly taking shape. However, I think the biggest leap from “generic Fallout player character” to Shaw The Person was in the span between the Dead Money and Honest Hearts DLCs coming out, where I’d become really frustrated and was like... okay. This game keeps asking Things of me that I’m not prepared to give. So let me take the few things I’ve learned about this game already, what I enjoy most and what I want to foster, and mix them up with the man I already have, head back to the drawing board, and start from scratch.

And then I replayed the whole game + Dead Money again and it was the best playthrough I ever had, and thus Shaw was more or less born, or re-born, or something like it.

E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you?

Oh, god, probably not. Years after the events of New Vegas, maybe! I think he finally learns to relax after he leaves Vegas behind him and settles down with his rival-turned-frenemy-turned-rival-again-turned-deepest-greatest-love-of-his-life, Felicity. For a long, long time he does not know how to relax and have fun.

J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character?

Sooooort of? Post-Benny-bullet amnesia is a huge chunk of his story, and that isn’t 100% supported by canon, but it also is, kind of? It’s clear from dialogue that the Courier has a lot of knowledge on, and even some memories of, places and their past. But they’re also able to ask a lot of basic questions, and there’s a lot you can roleplay them as being confused by. So to work around this, while really playing up the amnesia angle, I also have Shaw miraculously remembering the moments before Benny shot him in perfect, crystalline clarity, as well as occasional flashes of moments from his life before, and certain leanings toward feelings and opinions.

Is that how amnesia works? No, not at all, but media and fiction in general don’t really portray amnesia remotely accurately, and also nothing works the way it’s supposed to in Fallout anyway, so I took a little license there.

Luckily, beside that, the Courier is pretty much a blank slate. So it all fell into place!

Also, thank you! I think he looks nice too :)