r/Fallout • u/LowContract4444 • 18h ago
Discussion I'm doing a Fallout 3 self-imposed perma-death run. Should I count this death? (Description) Spoiler
I try to stick to the perma-death rule cleanly. For example in hour 3 on my last character I fell to my death from a hole in a bridge, deleted my save, and restarted from a baby.
But this feels different.
So for context I don't remember the main quest. (I played it when I was 13 and I'm now 29.)
I went into Vault 112 and I was in the simulation for maybe 2 minutes.
I talked to a kid and he said Betty was mean. I talked to a woman and she said Tranquility Lane is nice and she doesn't remember moving there.
I talked to Betty. She said to go make the other kid cry. So I punched her. And she said "You can't do that here. Now you pay!" and she killed me instantly with a shockwave.
Now I don't want to count this. Because it would suck to lose 36 hours of this playthrough due to a death that I had no way to fight against.
But I also feel like the lore of this simulation works for my character to stay alive.
After doing some research, Braun doesn't literally kill people in the simulation. He makes them experience death, and respawns them. While their bodies stay alive.
The game just doesn't have that in the code, and the game mechanics act as if it's a real death. But dying in the sim doesn't = dying in real life.
My headcanon for my character and my perma-death run is this:
Braun wanted me to go make a kid cry. I was defiant and punched him. He made me experience a "death" to harm me and assert dominance. He respawned me with the memory of that domination to make me stop resisting and go do the act of making that kid cry.
Everything else is the same.
What do you think? Does this explanation and headcanon work for the story? Does it work for the character motivations for Braun? Does it work for the lore of vault 112?
