| I think RPG's should strive to implement ways for skills to be as interactive as possible, even to the point of including a "mini-game" as a way for the player to demonstrate their own deftness at the particular skill, if possible (or necessary).
Some skills (such as repair, for instance) tend to lend themselves more towards simply having a stat which governs it and not much of an interactive component, so that basically you just equip the item, choose "repair", and it gets fixed to the extent that the governing stat allows it to be.
However, other skills tend to lend themselves towards having some sort of interactive component to it. For example, with the stealth skill, while you have a governing stat which determines how effectively your character sneaks in all areas, the developers can still make it interactive by making it so that in addition to toggling it on and off, the player can only sneak in certain poorly-lit or well-concealed areas, so that the player is forced to carefully apply the sneak skill in order for it to work.
Then there are other skills which can even allow for mini-games, such as lockpicking (as in Oblivion or the Thief series) or computers. As pure speculation, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lockpicking mini-game in Fallout 3, or perhaps some sort of computer-oriented mini-game instead (similar to Deus Ex: Invisible War). If it's well received enough in Oblivion, I could also see a persuasion mini-game similar to the one in Oblivion being included (although the jury is still out on the Oblivion mini-game, since Oblivion is one of the first games I've heard of to implement a persuasion mini-game; dialogue trees don't count).  |