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Nora's Training

  • February 18, 2020

     One of the greatest criticisms of Fo4 is that Nora's cannon backstory makes her an unlikely survivor in an post-apocalyptic wasteland. An apparently untrained lawyer dropped into the middle of a radioactive hell, able to not only survive but use power armor to defeat a death claw right out of the gate?
    Granted, this is a problem on its face, and I've always thought that being that her husband was a military man and it was a time of war, it's reasonable that he'd at least teach her how to use a gun and maybe some basic tactics. But more recently I've become enamored with another idea: what if Nora were a J.A.G.?
    The Judge Advocate General corp. is basically the legal arm of the U.S. military, they're trained in military and civilian law in addition to being a commissioned officer in the military. Now I only have a basic Wikipedia reading of the program (barring watching episodes of a certain tv show) but my thoughts go something like this:
    Nora was also a military officer and was trained in combat and military tactics, perhaps during her time in the service she met and fell in love with Nate. eventually she entered the program to be trained as a Lawyer in return for a commitment to service as a J.A.G lawyer for several years. However she took a break from active duty when she became pregnant with Shaun. 
    Now there are some problems with this theory such  why Ironsides accessed her drivers license records instead of military but it's something to consider.

     

  • February 25, 2020

    Huh, that's a pretty interesting take on her history, actually makes for a rather solid starting point for the character if you don't want to buy into the 'Synth Theory', or just ignore it to create a character. I'll admit that I've never really bothered with making concrete backstorires for my characters in Fallout 4 because I tend to ignore the Main Quest as much as possible so anything important never really comes up and I can just pretend my character started when they left the Vault (or shortly afterwards). 

    Suppose just in general that's the flaw of roleplaying with a set backstory, but I think it's pretty great to see a way around this little issue to make roleplaying more interesting. Might have to give it a shot as the justification for Nora if I ever get back into the game...

  • March 13, 2020

    I agree Dragonborn, I really didn't like that they gave such a specific backstory for the chracters at the beginning. But you can do a suprising amount of twisting with it with some consideration. And it doesn't nessisarily mean she wasn't replaced by a synth at some point.

     

    I have played the open background strategy as well. You're probably aware but there are mods that facilitate this; I often use Start Me Up by TinyManticore

    https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/18946a  as it gives you some good options, including just starting vanilla