Everything Waltorious said is spot-on.

chight10, I suspect you're either creating a character that isn't specialized enough, or your character creation is fine but you're not role-playing it (so you're getting into too many fights with a sneaky character, for example).

That's what's absolutely GREAT about the first two Fallout games. They're really role-playing games, not just character-stat-building games set in a fantasy universe.

If you're still having trouble, I recommend searching for "Fallout 2 character build" or some such and find a site where people post a detailed description of how they specialized their character and how they assigned their points. Find a character type that sounds appealing -- I really like playing smooth-talking sharpshooters, but there are also awesome melee-brawlers, sneakers-thieves, and characters who use big guns or energy weapons -- and build that character. Then play it thematically.

If you're still not sold on Fallout, maybe you're too used to today's super-easy games. :)

I always put my perception up really high and used the hunting rifles. It was generally pretty easy then. If you're really having trouble you might consider playing an evil character - think of him as an incredibly pragmatic character who's doing anything to survive, if you don't like the idea of being evil. If you kill a shopkeeper in Fallout, you can loot everything they had in their shop off their corpse. Not the first town you get to after Arroyo but the second - has a Brotherhood of Steel compound and a scrapyard IIRC - there's a shop with an asshole that runs it. If you can kill him, you'll have craploads of guns and ammo and some decent armour.

Also, dynamite is incredibly helpful. You can pickpocket someone and plant the dynamite on them before running off and watching them explode from a safe distance. Fun trick, actually: drop everything apart from a stick of dynamite and set the timer to about 30 seconds or so. Then walk all around one of those pickpocketing kids. They'll auto-pickpocket you and the only thing they can get is the dynamite - they run off with it and then boom. And if I recall correctly, you don't get the blame for it at all.

More helpfully, you can use it in desperate situations to kill someone much stronger than you - in fact, groups of people much stronger than you. Another good tip at that Metzger part is to utilise the fact that lockpicking an open door will actually lock it again. So go into the room where he is and lock all the doors but the entrance (if they're not already locked) and then go into the hallway between the front door and his room. Lock both doors. So now you're locked in the front hall with a couple of guards. Kill the guards. No one else can get to you but when you're ready you can move to the window through to Metzger's room and shoot at him before taking cover again - throw some grenades or whatever - maybe you can plant some dynamite on him with a very long timer set so when you're safely locked in the middle room, he takes massive damage.