I can't tell if it's sarcasm or not.
No, I'm actually serious. He might have looked at the opportunity to turn himself into a Greek statue and decided that's not the life for him.
I wouldn't. I'd be as buff as the Raikage, with beautiful hair, and a face that would give Narcissus a hard on. And of course a platinum super shlong, with golden hair on the balls.
Did he? He saw a book with a fallout character. For all he knew a higher power was trolling him. Also what's with those charisma checks? Why was he surprised by them if he knew the mechanics? Is that even what cha does in the game? Never played it.
He threw caution to the wind and made assumptions. The smartest strategy is to not drain much of anything and to be well rounded, at the cost of not being able to specialize. But he was adventurous and decided to take a risk.
Oh, Charisma is usually such trash. I drain it to 1 in every single build in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. In Vegas, it has an effect called "nerve" that raises the damage companions do. And not much else. It's mostly an atrophied stat that was supplanted by the speech skill.
Basically, when you talk to other characters, sometimes a check comes up that'll let you end situations peacefully or in your advantage. It completely breaks the game in many cases since you can just talk people down rather than having to fight them. Cool from a roleplaying perspective, not so much from a gameplay perspective.
For example, you could walk into a bar and a bunch of people are pointing guns at each other. With one, maybe two speech checks, they'll all put their guns away and walk out of there, possibly giving you a reward in the process. This is often treated as the "correct" way to play the game, as you'll end up having to kill a lot of people in avoidable ways if you can't pass the speech checks.
Charisma is very rarely used for checks of any sort and because you can save and reload your game, you can prepare for these moments. There's a variety of items that boost specific stats in the game and they all stack if they have different names. So you can walk around with a relatively high charisma from your gear and get even more from consumable items.
It's another reason people frequently also drain strength a bit, because there's a steak in the game you can eat to gain 2 strength points.But that's a matter of personal taste for your build, since obviously a melee fighter would want strength.
He's probably surprised that the game treats Charisma as an actually useful stat rather than a dump stat that the developers gave up on. Considering the "real life" nature of the world he's found his way into it, it's one of the best stats because he can create situations that'll cause charisma checks and get him free stuff. Speech remains a god tier skill.