Any advice for a weak, smart, and charismatic character?

[Jekyllstein Gray]

I'm playing a character with very low strength but exceptionally high charisma and intelligence. My intention was to talk my way though most quests, avoiding combat wherever possible. However, I don't see many options to do that. Any advice on using intelligence and charisma to solve the game's problems would be much appreciated.

[ZumZoom]

Well, no matter what - you will have to deal with random encounters, so you DO have to have at least 1 combat skill trained to deal with them. Although you can ran away from those fights into the world map. Also it's possible to enter combat mode preemptively, turn on the sneak, then walk by npc's that normally would attack you (they will still attack if they detect you in sneak) - sometimes pretty useful even with a low sneak skill. And of course if you are gonna have intelligence and charisma - then it's good to combine that with training respective skills - electronics and speech, as they will help with many quests.

[Jekyllstein Gray]

Great! Thanks for the tips.

[Curiousfellow]

One tip regarding the combat skills: It seems counterintuitive to pick a melee skill as a character with little strength, but melee and unarmed both actually start with more skillpoints than guns, meaning you'd have to invest less in your combat skills, and you need less strength to use knives and fist weapons than guns. Using guns is still viable though.

Regarding actually using non-combat methods, there are a couple of instances where you can have your character taken to a leader and talk/sneak your way out afterwards.

[Jekyllstein Gray]

Good to know. Thanks!

[Curiousfellow]

If you've got 3 strength or less, buffout doesn't actually add any damage to melee attacks. That doesn't make it useless though, a low strength character can use buffout to use weapons whose strength requirements are too high. It also raises your carrying capacity. When I played a character with 1 strength, I had to stuff all my things in a locker and take buffout in order to put on power armor.