You can also do that in AoD. For example, when dealing with the Aurelians at the mines near Teron, you can poison their supplies. With simple rat poison, you can simply lower their health, but with much stronger poison you can even have some of them killed and the rest much easier to deal with.Yes, in Fallout, I would have been able to get the drop on those people. Get them drunk with beer to lower their perception/ranged accuracy, plant timed explosives on their bodies, then mop up from a more advantageous position.
I think you're missing the point, Black. Can you do this at every encounter in the game? It's a difference between organic interaction and script interaction. It's a design issue. Some games are made based on the principle that you have certain tools (mechanics), and you can interact using them however you want. Other games are made assuming you only have access to certain tools (mechanics) when the context allows. Most, however, are more or less in the middle.
For example, in Fallout you can activate the Dynamite item in your inventory and set a time. However, by using the Steal skill, you can access inventories of other characters. Combining the two, you can access inventories of various characters and plant Dynamite within them and move away, just waiting for them to explode. There really isn't a clear limit, and you can essentially do this with any character in the game. Because this is an organic interaction, it emerges from the mechanics of the game. An extreme example of such a situation is the stupidity of Skyrim's NPCs, where you can put a bucket in their heads so they won't "see" when you're stealing items that are right there. Obviously, there are good games and terrible games with organic design, and different levels of success in implementing that idea. But overall, organic games allow you to solve a situation in different ways.
But in games like AOD, you are only able to make an interaction uniquely and exclusively when there is a script that determines what check will be made. I can have steal at level 10, but no matter how many times I click on any of the characters around, I cannot use this skill except on the specific NPC where VD decided that I could steal from. I can have sneak at level 10, but when I click on a door, my character will automatically enter into a dialogue with the NPCs inside the house and a fight will start, I cannot activate my sneak before and sneak in to give them a stab in the back - except at the two specific times in the game where he determined that this can be done. Your skills can only be used when and how the creator of the game determined in an already written scenario.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Organic design games are immensely more complex to make and often lead to situations that the creator didn't anticipate. For example, in an Underrail quest on Junkyard, you can force Grover to meet Treasa and then you can kill her to get her Plasma Core. But when I played I found another solution: I activated sneak and stole her Plama Core from behind before starting the dialogue. In the game version where I did this, the conversion didn't reflect this option and I was required to follow a script as if I still didn't have the item. I commented this right here on a Codex topic, and Styg read it and added a new option where you can now dismiss the two NPCs. And that's great, but this is just one example of how organic mechanics can get out of hand and create unexpected situations.
Games like AOD offer several options, yeah, but these options usually follow a pre-determined script. It's no surprise therefore that many players feel trapped on a rail when they play the game. It still can be a good, fun and well written rail, of course.