Fallout: New Vegas/Tropes A to L

This page covers tropes found in Fallout: New Vegas, tropes A to L. You can find tropes M to Z here.

A
"Joshua Graham: "This weapon was designed by a member of our tribe (the New Cannanites, a sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or Mormons) almost four hundred years ago. Mastering it is a New Cannanite rite of passage.""
 * Abnormal Ammo: 12 Gauge coin shot, a shotgun shell loaded with legion denari.
 * Acceptable Breaks From Reality: Hardcore Mode averts several of these. Ammo is no longer weightless, you need to eat and drink and sleep regularly to survive, companions can die permanently, and wounds are not instantly healed.
 * J. E. Sawyer himself released his own personal mod to avert this even more. In particular, Stimpaks are harder to make and have weight, base carry weight and health are decreased, primary needs increase faster and food/water loot is dramatically less common.
 * Alliance Meter: Used to measure your standing with the various factions. In the case of Mr. House though, he'll consider you his employee until the moment you act against him. The Alliance Meter is actually much more important than the Karma Meter in many ways. People don't care if you're good or evil out in the wasteland, they care if you've been killing their friends.
 * One unusual wrinkle to this trope is that fame and infamy do not subtract from one another. If you've been very good to a faction, then do something brutal to that faction, you'll get a "mixed" reputation that is not quite the same as a "neutral" reaction. People belonging to that faction will comment to you that they have no idea whose side you're on or what you're up to.
 * AKA-47: There are a lot more familiar looking firearms, most are given generic names:
 * The "Cowboy Repeater" is an old Winchester 1886 Lever-Action rifle; The "Trail Carbine" is a Marlin Model 336, and the "Brush Gun" while not a direct representation of any single real gun, is based on large-bore Marlin rifles.
 * The "9mm pistol" is the Browning Hi-Power, and the "9mm Submachine gun" is a WW 2 M3A1 "Greasegun".
 * The "Hunting Shotgun" is the Remington Model 870, the player even pumps it one handed after reloading just like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Speaking of Terminator, the lever-action Winchester 1887/1901 shotgun that Arnold uses appears as the "Lever-Action Shotgun" as well.
 * The "Silenced .22LR SMG" is an American 180, complete with optional drum magazines.
 * the Silenced .22 Pistol is the Ruger 22/45.
 * The "Service Rifle" is an AR-15/M16 with wood furniture, the Assault Carbine is an M16-based Colt Commando, and the "Marksman Carbine" is another M16-esque weapon with a variety of real-life modern features.
 * Word of God states that is inspired by, but not based on various para-trooper style rifles.
 * Strangely, the Assault Carbine and the Service Rifle/Marksman Carbine don't use the same ammo.
 * The "All-American," a unique Marksman Rifle that prominently bears the logo of the real-life 82nd Airborne Division.
 * The "Light Machine Gun" is a mishmash of the FN Minimi and M60.
 * Two of the weapons that come with the Dead Money DLC are the M1918 BAR and Colt Official Police revolver, appearing as the "Automatic Rifle" and "Police Pistol", respectively.
 * The ".45 Auto Pistol" in Honest Hearts is the Colt M1911.
 * This one merits special attention because Joshua Graham goes out of his way to tell you about the gun's history without actually naming it:

"Revelations 9:6: "During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.""
 * The Thompson Sub Machine-Gun appears in Honest Hearts DLC as the ".45 Auto Submachine Gun", and has a laser variant in the form of the "Laser RCW".
 * The "Grenade Rifle" is an M79 grenade launcher.
 * The "Grenade Launcher" (a different weapon) is a China Lake NATIC.
 * The S&W Model 29 returns from Fallout3 as the ".44 Magnum."
 * The ".357 Magnum" is a mishmash of the Colt Single Action Army Revolver and the Ruger Vaquero.
 * The "Hunting Revolver" is a Magnum Research Big Frame Revolver.
 * The "Single Shotgun" is the New England Pardner.
 * The "Anti-Materiel Rifle" is a PGM Hécate II.
 * "This Machine", as well as its non-unique "Battle Rifle" version from the Gun Runner's Arsenal, is an M1 Garand.
 * A ton of Fallout only weapons have their own in-universe brand names, obviously not being real guns but having real companies behind them.
 * The 12.7mm Pistol is a rechambered Sig Sauer 14mm pistol.
 * The "Plasma Caster" is a Winchester P94 Plasma Rifle.
 * The "Plasma Defender" is a Glock 86 Plasma Pistol
 * The 10mm Pistol is either a Colt 6520 or an N99 10mm. There are two brands.
 * Affably Evil:
 * The nice old lady
 * Benny,
 * Caesar. If you don't mind all the murder, misogyny, mass murder, and slavery, he's actually a nice guy.
 * Motor-Runner, provided you pass the Vault 3 speech check that allows you to sell drugs to him, is extremely nice - especially for a fiend. He treats you with a measure of respect, is willing to bargain for drug prices, genuinely cares about the Fiends under him (referring to them as "my people" and leading them to Vault 3 to help protect them), and will even graciously accept the player's challenge to a fight...despite having butchered the Vault's defenceless inhabitants.
 * After the End: Civilization is getting back on its feet quite nicely in this game, especially when compared to the total Crapsack World of Fallout 3. It is implied that California has now been mostly rebuilt and that it's Nevada that's the current "frontier."
 * The Alcoholic: Cass really likes her whiskey. You can become one, too.
 * Two former Followers of the Apocalypse. Both of them know they're addicted and really want to quit, but the withdrawal is too much for them - they've tried several times, already. Whether they recover or not, is up to you.
 * All Amazons Want Hercules: Red Lucy, who was probably named after Red Sonja, but doesn't quite fit that trope. You can sleep with her, but only after you've brought back eggs from the most dangerous creatures in the Mojave, which typically means raiding their nests.
 * All Crimes Are Equal/Shoplift and Die: You haven't lived till you've had all of Camp McCarran come down on you like the fist of an angry god after ganking one of their butter knives. It hasn't improved since Fallout3, where people would kill you for accidentally taking a tin can bound to their property.
 * Lampshaded in one of the loading screens, which mentions that NCR military aren't happy with their role as Mojave's police force, which is why they've made most crime punishable by instant execution.
 * The King has two places in which he sits when you enter the King's School of Impersonation. One of them is next to a Jukebox. Apparently turning a jukebox on or off is a crime worthy of being shot at, punched, hacked or stabbed by everybody in the building.
 * This could be a reference to Wasteland, where in the Quartz Bar several punks turn hostile for coming close to a jukebox playing Ratt.
 * Actually well justified in post-holocaust economy. In Real Life third-world countries theft is sometimes punishable by death as depriving someone of even negligible (from our standpoint) amount of resources may lead to death of the victim. On the other hand, the wish to attack with the bare hands a well-armed and dangerous raider type who took few of your caps counts definitely as Artificial Stupidity.
 * The Alleged Everything: Virtually all of the prewar technology left in the wastes is either no longer functioning or teetering on the very edge of breaking down permanently and irreparably. Some of the guns you can pick up are quite literally held together with electrical tape. Technology that was produced postwar, or which has been continuously maintained, generally averts this, though - the NCR and the Gun Runners employ some very skilled engineers.
 * All Girls Want Bad Boys: You can invoke the trope while trying to seduce, via Black Widow or charisma options. He is understandably disturbed by the offer... at least, at first.
 * All Hail the Great God Mickey: The Kings became a gang of Elvis Impersonators. After finding a school filled with memorabilia, instructions on how to act like him, and a metric ton of hair gel, they figured it must be a place of worship, and that they'd keep his memory alive. They're not wrong, per se...
 * All There in the Manual: Some bits of backstory, like what happened to the NCR in between Fallout 2 and New Vegas and what the Legion's territory is like, are only available to people who bought the Collector's Edition Strategy Guide.
 * Altum Videtur: Caesar's Legion uses a lot of Latin. Latin names, ranks, currency, uniforms, punishments, etc. You need to use it for a small side-quest against  They're also pronounced correctly (Caesar is pronounced with a hard C).
 * There's some debate over how "Caesar" would be pronounced. "Kai-zahr" is one interpretation to the original Latin pronunciation, as is "Kay-zahr" - or "Kay" (rhymes with say or day) plus "zahr" (rhymes with bar, car or star), or a softer "s" sound, such as "Kay-sahr".
 * Exclusively Evil: Jackals, Vipers, Scorpions, and especially the Fiends.
 * Caesar's Legion is an interesting example in that they're fleshed out, their leader is given an understandable motive, and you're allowed to join their side. However, they still match all the criteria of the trope: they're impossible to negotiate with in the long term (as a local mob boss puts it, "Caesar has no allies, only slaves"), they're hostile towards any other independent civilization, and the defection rate among Legionaries is virtually zero due to the ruthless nature of their society. In the end they're a rare example of making an Exclusively Evil faction without turning them into The Usual Adversaries.
 * Always Check Behind the Chair: Sometimes, supplies and other things are pretty well hidden behind something. You can easily miss the unique weapons Ratslayer, All-American, Compliance Regulator, Thump-Thump, and even Annabelle (if you think that the Nightkin on top of the radio tower is nothing special) if you don't bother to check unless you are reading a guide (that, and there is a tendency your follower may pick them up).
 * Always Over the Shoulder: When in third person.
 * Americans Hate Tingle: In-universe. While Sunset Sarsaparilla was popular in what became the Mojave Wasteland, where it was first produced commercially, it sold very poorly in the Northeast. This is also a Hand Wave as to why it didn't appear in Fallout 3.
 * An Aesop: The DLC, together, all pretty much end with the lesson, "Let go of the past." All the antagonists of the DLC are, in some way, unable to move on after a point in their life, to say nothing of the huge emphasis on old-world technology.
 * Anarchy Is Chaos: Both subverted and played straight.
 * This also shows in the ideology of NCR and, to some extent, also Caesar's Legion. Both factions consider autarchical communities and tribes as unruly and chaotic and they consider uniting them into one big entity an only way to maintain any kind of order. Given the Raiders' activity they are at least partially right.
 * And I Must Scream:
 * As a burn victim, Joshua Graham must undergo the experience of being burned alive every night he changes his bandages, unable to be relieved by chems due to being Immune to Drugs.
 * All of the personality constructs in the Sink of Old World Blues are stuck in the same three rooms together, unable to move or meaningfully interact with their environment in any way. Except Muggy, who is pitiable for a different reason.
 * They don't seem to mind it though, probably because that's what they are designed for. And some of the endings involve the constructs transferring to other facilities.
 * The Marked Men of Lonesome Road are ghouls with their skins torn off by the harsh winds of The Divide, only to be healed and kept alive by the radiation all over the place meaning that they're in constant pain.
 * And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing the Lonesome Road DLC awards, among other decent loot, two unique armors: the Courier's duster and Ulysses' duster. The former has a different symbol on the back and different stats depending on your positive or negative standing with the two main factions, as well as whether or not you killed House.
 * Animated Armor: Those Y-17 trauma override harnesses, which are sort of Powered Armor which can move by themselves.
 * Anyone Can Die: All but two characters in the game can die, even companions if it's set to Hardcore mode. Even quest important NPCs can die. Doesn't help when they somehow get themselves killed and fail a quest for you. The two invincible characters are Yes Man (so you always have one ending option available to you no matter who you kill or piss off), and the Gun Runner's Vendortron. Yes Man will simply download his software to a new robot body, and the Vendortron had an indestructible shed built around it to dissuade theft and burglary. All other characters, no matter how important they are to the story, can die. Mr. House, Caesar himself, the president of the NCR, you name it, they're mortal, and their deaths will not break the game.
 * Anything That Moves: An option, since the player can take the perks for both homosexuality and heterosexuality, as well as sleeping with ghouls and FISTO. A lot of the prostitutes are this.
 * Apocalyptic Log: The terminal entries at Black Mountain, recorded when the bombs fell. A particularly disturbing variation happens in Dead Money with the holograms. In the upper levels of the casino, holograms fashioned in the likeness of a guest have recorded their last words, which they repeat while they're trying to kill you.
 * Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can have only one humanoid companion and one non-humanoid companion at a time.
 * This leads to a rather unfortunate clash with the Guide Dang It aspects of the game. Every companion has a sidequest, which require specific in-world triggers to initialize. Your non-human companions get their quests at the start (Rex is practically required to complete his), but everyone else has to visit certain locations or talk with certain people while with you. Some triggers are location-based and can be repeated, but they'll be in places you'll likely never feel the need to go back to, thereby missing the quests entirely. Raul is the worst of the bunch, as it is almost a certainty that any player who does not know about him beforehand will exhaust all three of his triggers before ever meeting him (he's surrounded by Super Mutants, and you're not doing that quest until a very high level). Veronica is also rather buggy.
 * Arc Words: "Enjoy your stay."
 * "You can go home now, Courier."
 * "Let go" and "Begin again" stretch from Dead Money through Lonesome Road.
 * Armor Is Useless: Refreshingly, Averted. Due to the way armor is implemented in this game, if you don't match or exceed an enemy's Damage Threshold, you only do 20% of the weapon's damage. This makes armor piercing rounds, overcharged energy ammo, or high damage, long-ranged weapons like a sniper rifle (or a combination of the above) a necessity when fighting deathclaws, Brotherhood of Steel paladins, and the like. For melee specialists, a very big weapon like a super sledge will usually beat the resistance out of just about anything. There are DT-ignoring unarmed weapons, as well.
 * Deathclaws play this straight like they did in the last game, as they do a crapton of damage per hit. Since DT is additive instead of multiplicative, far less of the monstrous damage they inflict is negated by armor than in Fallout3.
 * The game also has some truly devastating perks that allow you to do the same. The Piercing Strike perk (which is annoyingly governed by Unarmed) makes both unarmed and melee attacks ignore 15 points of DT. For reference, almost everything in the Mojave has an armor rating at that level, which means you always do full damage except to the strongest enemies. The Shotgun Surgeon perk ignores 10 points for shotguns.
 * Armor-Piercing Slap: Literally, see above. Get your Unarmed Skill high enough and you can eventually take a perk that allows you to negate an enormous amount of an enemy's armor with your melee weapon or punch attacks. Combine this with the Bloody Mess perk that turns enemies into chunky salsa when they die, and congratulations! You are now the Fist of the North Star.
 * For bonus points, have Wild Wasteland and kill Rawr the Deathclaw in Lonesome Road. Turn his claw into Fist of the North Rawr. Even the developers agreed with this description!
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Some of the "alleged" negative effects of Sunset Sarsaparilla are: Kidney damage, bronchitis, sore throat, organ rupture... and halitosis. Halitosis, for the uninformed, is the absolutely devastating medical condition of.
 * The Artifact: The trope is invoked in some of the gameplay mechanics due to several traits and perks from Fallout and Fallout 2 being left in the game. Thes have gone from being anywhere from decent to some of the best options to being to being nearly useless due to the changes in the game engine.
 * Tag! is one of the more obvious examples. A tagged skill in Fallout and Fallout 2 leveled up twice as fast as a normal skill. This skill also became available around the same point in the game where Energy Weapons and Big Guns started to legitimately be useful weapons. Instead of the ignorable +15 skill points, the old version was +20 skill points and it now progressed twice as fast as normal like the other tagged skills. On top of that, it worked retroactively with skill points already spent in the skill. Taking this skill could basically turn a skill too low to be useful to being essentially mastered.
 * Swift Learner used to make at least some sense to take. You didn't normally hit the level cap in the old games unless you intentionally farmed random encounters for experience for a long time. In the newer games, hitting the level cap is easy, which makes taking this perk completely useless.
 * Life Giver was a much better perk in the older games. Even enemy mooks could potentially one hit kill you, so extra health was a legitimately useful thing to have. Even with enemies in Fallout New Vegas being more dangerous than Fallout 3, extra health just isn't that useful. Any enemy capable of killing you usually has no trouble going through the extra 30 health given by the perk.
 * The Pyromaniac Perk increases damage with fire weapons and was initially nigh-worthless, as the only real fire-based weapon (the flamer) was grouped with much more potent miniguns and rocket launchers. The Perk's requirements were based on Big Guns, the skill that governed said Flamer. In Fallout3, this was moved to Explosives, but when combined with the Melee Weapon, Shishkebab, produced the highest melee DPS in the game. It gains The Artifact status in New Vegas, where it is still dependent on Explosives, despite Explosives having almost no weapons that use fire damage (and those that do are grenades that are used up quickly), as opposed to literally every other combat skill having more reliable, fire based damage (The Shishkebab again for Melee, the Superheated Saturnite Fist for Unarmed, incendiary ammo for Guns, and a bevvy of flamethrowers for Energy Weapons).
 * Fast Shot used to be an amazing trait. You gave up the Aimed Shot skill, which is mostly useless (by the time you can reliably hit specific body parts, you should have little trouble just killing enemies), to reduce the AP needed per shot by 1. This usually translated into getting at least one extra shot per round. Depending on your weapon and Agility, this could very well mean you were shooting twice per round rather than once, meaning it doubled your damage output. The new version (due to the lack of the Aimed Shot skill) reduces accuracy for a minor AP reduction.
 * Actually, Fast Shot was only amazing for heavy weapon characters, since they couldn't perform aimed shots anyway. A targeted shot to the eyes (which wasn't all that hard to do if your skill was decent enough) with weapons like the gauss or laser rifle resulted in up to 5x normal damage, which was enough to kill an Enclave soldier or tough deathclaw with a single shot, or at least knock them out.
 * Skilled, a Trait formerly treated as something to avoid like the plague (it granted extra skill points, which most characters were swimming in by halfway through the game, in exchange for fewer Perks, which a character could never have enough of) is now a powerhouse that a character has to have a legitimate reason to not take (it now grants +5 to all skills in exchange for a permanent -10% XP debuff. Since enemies' levels are based on your level, this means the game just takes slightly longer). The fact that there's a bug to double the gain without altering the loss doesn't help.
 * Artifact of Doom: ARCHIMEDES I. Arcade Gannon will leave you on the spot if you use it to kill all the NCR personnel on the ground. He doesn't care about ARCHIMEDES II, though.
 * Unfortunately for its inhabitants,  is practically built on top of an Artifact of Doom, in the form of a   Similarly,
 * Artificial Stupidity: While the AI is better than in Fallout 3, you are still treated to the sight of a quest-important NPC strolling slowly through several mines. Companions still get stuck on obstacles (though they're better about finding their way to you), etc.
 * Veronica, why are you running across a minefield to punch a Bark Scorpion?
 * The game itself lampshades this with the loading screen tip concerning a certain perk: "Do companions annoy you by constantly running into the path of your lasers and missiles? Take the Spray and Pray perk to significantly reduce all damage you do to your companions."
 * The AI of enemies are still somewhat smarter though, that they will attempt to take cover if they are outmatched and some creatures won't attack you even if they appear red unless you get too close. However, they played deliberately straight Attack! Attack! Attack! on some enemies, Deathclaws won't retreat while fiends are generally too drugged up to realize that they are outmatched.
 * A particularly nasty case of this occurs with First Recon Alpha Team, Camp McCarran's elite snipers (Gorobets, Sterling, 10 of Spades, Bitter-Root, and Betsy). Upon wiping out the leaders of the Fiends, the entire squad will make the transfer to Camp Forlorn Hope, but the route they take going there -- by foot -- leads them past a Cazador nest. Typically, they will lose at least one or more members to giant wasp abominations of death, though only Gorobets' death is remarked on. Of course, this will only happen if you pay attention to them.Advance the clock a few hours and they'll bounce right to the camp no worse for wear.
 * Elements Do Not Work That Way: Scientist Keeley wants you to ignite flammable gas in Vault 22 to destroy a botanical experiment Gone Horribly Wrong. Keeley explains that you need to detonate explosives right next to the ventilation system pumping the gas because it goes inert when mixed with oxygen.
 * As the Good Book Says...: On the edge of Searchlight is a church with a sign with Revelations 9:6 on it. In case you've forgotten,, but then again, Revelations is rarely ever quoted when things are swell and dandy.
 * Elements Do Not Work That Way: Scientist Keeley wants you to ignite flammable gas in Vault 22 to destroy a botanical experiment Gone Horribly Wrong. Keeley explains that you need to detonate explosives right next to the ventilation system pumping the gas because it goes inert when mixed with oxygen.
 * As the Good Book Says...: On the edge of Searchlight is a church with a sign with Revelations 9:6 on it. In case you've forgotten,, but then again, Revelations is rarely ever quoted when things are swell and dandy.

"Jones is an adulterer and a communist! Vote for Jones!"
 * This is also prominent in Honest Hearts. The achievements are all taken from Bible quotes, and Joshua Graham quotes it frequently (including a Psalm 137-very dark passage). You even get an (unreadable) Bible at the end of the last quest.
 * Also played with the inscription on the unique gun you get . It is engraved with the passage from John 1:5 that reads 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it' in original Greek.
 * Ascended Extra: To the entire Nightkin sub-species. In the original Fallout, they were little more than an Underground Monkey variant of regular Super Mutants (being translucent). Now they actually have plot relevance.
 * Doctor Henry goes from being a random thievery target in a Fallout 2 side-quest and a way to get a cyber-dog if you do a bit of field-testing for him to being an important character in several of New Vegas' subplots.
 * Ascended Meme: One of the inkblot tests that Doc Mitchell gives you resembles something that isn't available as an option: "Two bears high-fiving". A PC mod rectifies that, and it also elicited a response from several devs that that's what they thought it looks like too. Lo and behold in Honest Hearts, there is a Dead Horse tribesman NPC armed with a Yao Guai gauntlet named "Two-Bears-High-Fiving". However he only appears with Wild Wasteland, so don't go wasting time looking for him if you didn't pick the trait.
 * Asshole Victim: An interesting example is Boone's wife Carla. Talking to the people of Novac makes it clear that she hated living there so much that she was prickly, rude, and aloof to pretty much everyone in town to the point that almost no one liked her. But even after all that, she didn't deserve to be enslaved by the Legion.
 * Another case is what happened to Nipton. Sure, it was cruel, over the top, and an incredibly dick thing for the Legion to do at best, but they (specifically Vulpes Inculta) invoke this trope to explain themselves, and if you look around for evidence to support those claims, you find they did have something of a point in hindsight.
 * Attack of the Political Ad: One vault was an experiment about how far people would go to keep on living, with the inhabitants being told that they had to regularly sacrifice one person so that the rest could live. The inhabitants promptly decided that the Overseer was to be the first sacrifice, leading to a system of electing Overseers that then are sacrificed at the end of their terms. As such, the walls are littered with attack ads from candidates smearing their opponents but with the twist that this is supposed to be encouragement to vote for the candidate's opponent.


 * Auto Doc: Appears as a plot device or for specialized procedures, but rarely used to heal the player. For example, the Autodoc owned by Caesar has had its diagnostic module burned out.
 * Autodocs appear in three of the four DLCs, many of which can be used by the player. The reason why they're here but not in the Wasteland proper is
 * Authority Equals Asskicking: Legate Lanius is a Made of Iron murder machine Averted with the NCR President Kimball and General Oliver, and even Caesar himself, who are all bog standard humans that go down after a couple decent headshots. Also a case of Asskicking Equals Authority, as Lanius got the job as Caesar's right hand man by singlehandedly killing off his entire former tribe in combat.
 * Marcus!. He has as much health as a deathclaw alpha, and his punches do as much damage as one too!
 * Tabitha, the Vault 34 Overseer, the Alien Captain, and Jean-Baptiste Cutting are all quite tough, each of them being a fairly worthy boss encounter.
 * Joshua Graham, the legendary Burned Man, is equipped with a powerful customized Colt .45 pistol and, despite only wearing a light kevlar vest for armor, has a DT of 50! For comparison, a full suit of the best Powered Armor in the game grants a total DT of 36. He pretty much laughs off anything short of direct headshots from the best firearms in the game.
 * Salt-Upon-Wounds, the leader of the White Legs and "final boss" of the DLC, is no slouch himself. He has more health and armor than a Deathclaw Alpha, and is armed with a custom Power Fist. Graham pretty much curbstomps him, though.
 * An Axe to Grind: A few of them, especially the fire axe.
 * Throw in some Rule of Cool and technobabble, and you get the Protonic Inversal Axe.
 * Awesome but Impractical:
 * The Alien Blaster falls into this trope due to the fact there are, not surprisingly, no sources of alien ammo outside of where you get the Blaster. It also requires the Wild Wasteland trait, which makes New Vegas funnier, but a whole lot less serious. It also replaces the YCS/186, the unique Gauss Rifle, which is the hardest hitting and longest ranged weapon in the game. The only thing that does more damage is the Fat Man, which fires nuclear weapons.
 * Speaking of which... The Fat Man! It's super-heavy, fires rare ammo (there's only 14 mini-nukes in the whole game!) and you tend to nuke yourself when using the weapon. The Gun Runner's Arsenal and Lonesome Road add-ons give you variations that can use extra nukes you can buy, but still, it's very pricey.
 * Euclid's C-Finder. Not only will you probably screw up your chances of getting it on a normal playthrough, but if you want to get it you have to sacrifice a skill book. But, assuming you do, the weapon causes a contained orbital strike to completely destroy anything it hits. Unfortunately, you only get one charge per 24 hour period, it can only be used outdoors, and it takes a couple seconds to actually fire while the satellite links up. Try to use it during the epic final battle, and it'll more than likely glitch your save. Also you can hit yourself with it if you're not careful. But MAN it looks cool!
 * ARCHIMEDES is a in-story example of Awesome But Impractical, as seen when Veronica confronts Elder McNamara at the end of her companion quest. Citing the long recharge time and the fact it can only be used outdoors, she explains that, far from being a game-changing doomsday weapon, the ARCHIMEDES system the Brotherhood sacrificed most of its members trying to obtain turned out to be essentially glorified artillery.
 * The Giant Robo-Scorpion from Old World Blues is another in-story example, suffering from the same issues as Liberty Prime from Fallout3. Sure, it's a nearly unstoppable walking tank, but the power requirements for it are so massive that it has to be powered by a direct connection to a building-sized power generator, meaning it can't leave the facility where it was built.
 * The Holy Frag Grenade, of which you get only three, causes an explosion on par with the Fat Man. Sounds great, until you try throwing it far enough that you won't be caught in the blast radius yourself. Add melee-oriented companions and the result can be nasty. Only happens with Wild Wasteland, though.
 * The Meltdown perk. Shoot an enemy with an energy weapon, and they explode, possibly causing chain reactions. The downside? Friendly fire possible, including SELF Friendly fire. You can shoot an enemy point blank with a laser pistol, and you take damage like a grenade went off in your face.
 * Most of the crafting recipes. By the time you've hauled the necessary items to the appropriate site, you could've bought a useable-to-better equivalent, without the inventory shuffle, or backtracking to clutter caches. And since the nifty weapon recipes of FO3 aren't craftable, there's never a significant payoff to carrying around vendor trash.
 * There are exceptions to this rule. In Hardcore Mode you need to eat to survive and Stimpaks aren't as effective, which greatly elevates some simple recipes like Gecko Steaks and Bloatfly Sliders. It's also worth mentioning two more: Doctor's Bags and Weapon Repair Kits. Doctor's Bags CAN be bought, but they are relatively expensive and only certain vendors have them. On the other hand, Weapon Repair Kits can't be bought at all and can only be found very rarely...
 * The K-9000 Cyberdog gun is made of awesome. It is a more than decent machine gun with added enemy detection beyond your normal capabilities and a night vision telescope to boot. It also has a dog's brain which makes it growl (to show detected enemies), bark happily (when equipped) or yelp tearjerkingly (when disappointed at being unequipped). But like all machine guns, it eats ammo, and rare one at that (especially if you upgrade it to FIDO), so after some fun you just can't use it anymore - or spend a lifetime crafting .357 magnum from collected other ammunition.
 * The Silenced .22 Pistol, Switchblade, Bladed Gauntlet and the BB Gun are all very, very weak (the BB Gun has a base damage at 100% condition of 3; your fists do more damage), but ammunition and repairs are extremely cheap, and they all have the "Bonus Critical Chance" trait times two. If you max out your luck, your skill with the particular weapon type, and take all the traits & perks that increase your critical chance, you'll be surprisingly effective. If you max your Sneak skill, you'll also do even more critical damage if you attack while hidden; almost everything will die pretty quickly. But your overspecialization will cripple your other skills and lock out perk choices, and anything that doesn't die will be able to kill you in short order.
 * On the more hilarious side, the Terrifying Presence perk is basically useless. It doesn't convey any significant benefit and uses up a perk spot you could have spent on something more useful. But it's also the single most awesome perk in the game, because you can send the biggest badasses in the wasteland running (momentarily) with a Badass Boast.
 * The Gauss Rifle. High damage, a zoom scope and enough power to knock enemies off their feet. The problem is it's very rare and thus you'll need a lot of Weapon Repair Kits to keep it in shape, and it costs five microfusion cells a shot.
 * The requisite BFG, the Anti-Material Rifle, is 10 gallons of ass-kicking for anyone that's maxing out their Guns skill. The problem is that the 10 gallons of ass-kicking comes in a 100 pound barrel: the AMR weighs in at a hefty 25 pounds, and the ammunition for it is, somehow, even heavier. 25 rounds of .50MG will hit you for thirteen pounds of weigh. It is, without a doubt, the single most damaging non-energy, non-explosive weapon in the game, and the Gun Runner's Arsenal DLC adds explosive bullets, but you're not going to be carrying much else with it. The only advantage is that by the time you're able to get and regularly use the gun, you don't need any other weapon.
 * Awesome Yet Practical: The Healing Poultice. Heals a good amount of HP and restores crippled limbs, all for the penalty of -2 Agility for a minute or two. They're even more useful in Hardcore mode when healing items are less effective and Doctor Bags don't heal limbs to full condition. The only catch is that the mixing compounds for it are a bit uncommon in the Mojave, but the poultice comes with the Honest Hearts add-on, and the ingredients are quite plentiful in Zion.
 * The Laser Rifle, with the right mods and perks, can easily carry players through most of the game.

B
"Dr. Klein: How dare you! Branial beam ocilation was solely my discovery! I expressly told you that and deleted all evidence to the contrary!"
 * Back Stab: In sneak mode, when you attack a target who has not spotted you yet, you deal an automatic Critical Hit and double your damage.
 * Badass: This is Fallout. There's... quite a few. Aside from the main characters, the main factions' top-tier NPCs get a special mention:
 * NCR Veteran Rangers wear dusters over riot gear, and are armed with either a revolver that shoots rifle rounds, the best lever-rifle in the game, or a .50 sniper rifle.
 * Legion praetorians, meanwhile, sport sunglasses and shotgun fists.
 * A single MK II Securitron essentially has more firepower than an entire platoon of NCR troopers. Armed to the teeth with an SMG, Gatling Laser, missiles, Grenade Machine Gun, self-repair, AND the kitchen sink.
 * Legate Lanius. In the G.E.C.K he even has the unique class "Legionary Bad Ass."
 * The Courier before the game even starts. His journey started at the Mojave Express in Primm, South of Goodsprings. Most people who have been working as couriers for a while should notice the local wildlife, and as many people discovered, there are Cazadores north of Goodsprings. The Courier's route would have led straight through the swarm if he/she hadn't been shot. Planning to go through a swarm of Cazadores is either badass or Too Dumb to Live.
 * Word of god is that the courier was unaware of the danger.
 * Ulysses braved the entirety of the Divide, on foot, alone, just to lay an elaborate trap.
 * Colonel Royez and Gaius Magnus. The first is a NCR officer who pacified the whole Long 15 (and still does today) and wears the Scorched Sierra Armor, a pristine Power Armor almost custom-made for him ; the second is a calmer clone of Lanius who assimilated his whole tribe in the Legion by force and received the Armor of the 87th tribe (his own version of the Legate armor) as a token of bravery from Caesar. Both  and, alone, WILL wipe the floor with anything in the game, including the Courier if  . Makes you wonder why nobody sent those guys to Hoover Dam.
 * Badass Boast: The Terrifying Presence perk gives you a few of these. Sometimes they're just something cool to say before you kill someone, other times they're vivid descriptions of what you're going to do to your enemies. But they're all so invariably badass that you can say them unarmed in your underwear, and they'll make fully equipped Brotherhood Of Steel Paladins run screaming from you.
 * Badass Bystander: The entire town of Nipton fell to the Legion with hardly any resistance... then you come across this one solitary house complete with landmines, rigged shotguns, a cage full of man-eating scorpions and in which every single drawer and cabinet is locked - making him smarter that about 90% of the Mojave residents. If the corpses littering the floor are any indication, this guy did not come quietly. Read some of his documents and you will find that he was a severely paranoid guy, who was convinced that everybody in the town was trying to sniff out and steal his "Vital Essence".
 * One house owned by a lovesick nerd contains not only a very hostile Mr Gutsy, but also roughly a dozen mixed weapons hidden conspiciously around the place, including a laser rifle in the bathtub. And out by the trailer park you can find a dead guy with another laser rifle... next to a pile of dust and a Legion armor. Nipton did not go quite as quietly as Vulpes Inculta would like to claim.
 * Badass Grandpa: "Cannibal" Johnson got his nickname from an incident where, outnumbered by Raiders and with his back to the wall, he tore out a Raider's heart and took a bite out of it, hoping to scare the others off. It worked. Incidentally, the Raiders in question were half his age.
 * Badass Longcoat: The NCR Ranger combat armor; it's the armor shown on the cover, also worn by the sniper at the wall around the Strip in the intro. Later DLCs add the Desert Ranger Combat Armor and the Elite Riot Gear, each Longcoat more Badass than the last.
 * The Lonesome Road graces us with the Courier's Duster, which can have one of four symbols (Vault 21 for Yes Man, NCR bear, Legion bull, or USA flag for House) on the back, and Ulysses' unique variant, which also uses the USA flag, both of which you naturally receive after the big finish. The latter goes quite nicely with Old Glory, a wooden staff capped with a golden metal eagle.
 * Ballistic Discount: Can be done of course, but many traders and shopkeepers are usually heavily armed themselves as well as having guards and the risk of making the whole town hostile. The Silver Rush is the epitome of this, as they have half-a-dozen guards and one boss character guarding the shopkeeper. Keep in mind that the merchants' inventory and money gets replenished every few days, so killing may be a bad idea for a different reason.
 * The Gun Runners take particular precautions in this regard - they built their reinforced, permanent sales booth around the Protectron who serves as their sales clerk.
 * Bastard Understudy: Benny tries to be this to Mr. House.
 * Bathos: The Naughty Nightwear gives a +10 Speech bonus, so it's generally a good idea to put it on before a dialogue that might include a Speech check. This can create situations where you come out of a deadly serious conversation about the fate of the Wasteland to reveal you've been wearing leopard-print pyjamas throughout the whole thing.
 * Beam Spam: Gatling Laser (again), and the smaller Laser RCW, which is basically a World War 2 Thompson submachine gun that shoots Frickin' Laser Beams.
 * The Beast Master: The Animal Friend perk is upgraded again from Fallout 3; this time it will also cause domesticated animals to fight with you, or even turn against their masters to help you.
 * Beef Gate: Used liberally in the beginning. The two north roads to Vegas lead you right into Cazadores and Deathclaws, the latter of which has twice as much health as a standard Deathclaw. To the south, straying from the road is a good way to get giant Radscorpions on your tail, and those things are hard to kill in the early game. It's a good sign that if something manages to kill you in two hits while anything you currently have can't inflict a single scratch in return, you should probably not be in that area yet. On the plus side, limiting specific monsters to specific ecological regions avoids the "anything can pop up anywhere" problem seen in Fallout3, where you'd have Deathclaws showing up just outside the walls of major settlements once your character reached a high-enough level.
 * Also, the final battle. To be user-friendly, most action games with open-world or RPG elements (including Fallout 3) have a final boss that is killable by the weakest possible player character that can reach the end of the game. This is not one of those games.
 * Being Good Sucks: Almost all of the Followers of the Apocalypse endings
 * In another ending,  It is not as bad as the other endings for the Followers.
 * Subverted with the Courier; even though Evil Is Easy, so much good karma is rewarded for winning unavoidable fights with evil enemies that no matter how much you kill and steal, you'll almost always be seen as a saint.
 * Also played straight in the Honest Hearts DLC.  Sure, sometimes it's only as bad as missing the paradise-that-could-have-been Zion, but it's very easy to make "good" decisions that cause him trouble.
 * Berserk Button: Boone hates the Legion, and for very good reason. It's impossible to get the Legion ending with him as a companion because he murders every single Legionnaire you come across.
 * Technically, you CAN get the Legion ending if you have him as a companion... As long as you only kill legionaries before entering the Tops casino and getting the Mark of Caesar. As to this, it is perfectly possible to get him as a companion, complete his companion quest (which itself involves killing legionaries and is obtained similarily) and then dump him afterward to support Caesar right after getting the Mark from Vulpes. Boone has specific legion endings programmed into the game for a reason.
 * Best Served Cold: of Dead Money is a firm believer in this. If you try to get the better of him in your first meeting (by beating him in a Barter check,) he'll patiently wait until the circumstances favour him again before stabbing you in the back.
 * Betting Minigame: As expected of a game with Vegas in the title; the game has a grand total of five casinos you can play in (and a few more you can't), each with their own theme and win limit. You can also play the Mojave's very own card game, "Caravan," if you're willing to learn the rules.
 * Beware the Nice Ones: The game's most powerful NPC is none other than Primm Slim, the Protectron sheriff robot in the Vikki and Vance Casino, who has more than 2,000 HP at level 30. That's just health, of course. It may take you a while, but he's a dolled-up Protectron and couldn't kill you if he wanted to.
 * Yes Man. Oh, how nice and helpful is he. He also has a sadistic streak that comes out in a few lines.
 * BFG: The Heavy Incinerator, Tesla Cannon, Grenade Machinegun, Minigun, Gatling Laser, Plasma Caster, Gauss Rifle, Light Machine Gun (note that 'Light' is a strictly relative term), and Anti-Materiel Rifle. All of them leave nice, chunky messes.
 * BFS:
 * The Bumper Sword.
 * Lily carries a BFS made from a Vertibird propeller blade.
 * Legate Lanius' BFS, the Blade of the East. It hurts. A lot.
 * Marked Men in the Lonesome Road DLC may carry imitations of the above weapon called Blades of the West. They hurt. A lot.
 * Big Damn Gunship: You can see up to two of them in the final battle, provided you do their prerequisites. First one is the Boomers in their B-29 Bomber, the other is the . It's even stated that the second one reminded everyone in the Mojave why they had feared the.
 * Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: in Novac.
 * Bi the Way: In one of her lines of dialogue, Cass says that once she is drunk enough, she doesn't care who she ends up in bed with whether they be male or female.
 * If you try to invite her into your party when it's occupied by someone else (male or female), she says "I'm not in the mood for a threesome...today".
 * Bittersweet Ending: The best ending you can hope for in Honest Hearts is
 * The "best case scenarios" for Arcade and Lily qualify big time. For Arcade, . As for Lily, her "good" endings either have her
 * Black and Grey Morality and Grey and Grey Morality with some occasional Black And Black Morality: There are no totally, completely good factions in the Fallout universe. There are plenty of pretty much outright evil factions, a lot of neutral ones, and a few that really are out to make the world a better place, but even they tend to use rather questionable methods at times. The closest you'll get to the unambiguously good are the Followers of the Apocalypse, who are a minor faction that it turns out raised Caesar and they are not proud of it, and the Kings, but the goodness only goes as far as their leader, his lower members are not as benevolent.
 * Lesser of Two Evils: On the other hand, while the NCR is Grey, the Legion is such a darker shade it's almost Black. The radio stories about the Legion include stories of Lanius ordering his men to kill each other while the NCR stories include troop redeployment reports. Furthermore, while few people are welcoming NCR with open arms, general opinion among the wasteland inhabitants is that the Legion taking control of them instead would be far worse.
 * Black Comedy Rape:
 * FISTO, initially. "ASSUME THE POSITION."
 * The Biological Station in Old World Blues threatens to seed the shit out of you, and has seeded Muggy before.
 * In the cut audio files for Cook-Cook (who could be approached as friendly), he will constantly hit on you and make veiled threats at rape. Talking to Driver Nephi as a female will have him repeatedly warn you not to talk to him.
 * Blatant Lies: Those radioactive barrels you see both here and in Fallout 3? In the REPCONN headquarters, they're "safety barrels", and being buried in the ground is supposed to be totally safe! Some extremist hippy whackos are just lying to you about their radioactivity!
 * Quite a few with the Think Tank in Old World Blues.


 * Blessed with Suck/Cursed with Awesome: The positive and negative effect of the trait Wild Wasteland is described as "Adds wackier versions of current content."
 * There's an example of this . He's really proud of it and brags that it will stop almost anything short of a plasma bolt. But due to its associations, wearing it could get you hunted down and killed, or if you're lucky, just thrown in an NCR jail for a long, long, long time. (Which  ) Uh ... thanks, man? What a blessing. Luckily, Story and Gameplay Segregation is in full effect if you decide to wear it.
 * Blind Without'Em: The Four Eyes trait, which gives a bonus to Perception so long as you're wearing glasses. Without them, it's a decrease to Perception. Will become useless later on, since power armor helmets, for obvious reasons, require you to take off your glasses. Again, this is assuming a character is even capable of / willing to wearing power armor helmets.
 * Of course, this also poses serious problems; mechanically it reduces your base Perception by 1 and makes every pair of glasses give +2 Perception. Fairly nifty, except that certain perks require moderately high Perception to get, which this perk will more or less lock you out of.
 * Bling Bling Bang: All of the unique handguns.
 * Blown Across the Room:
 * The Gauss Rifle often send the opponent flying for considerable distance. Anyone who's heard the spiel from the drill instructor on the Citadel in Mass Effect 2 will understand why.
 * Averted, however, with Armor Piercing rounds...which do a little LESS damage on unarmored opponents than regular rounds BECAUSE of their overpenetration, which is actually Truth in Television.
 * The Anti-Materiel Rifle can send Deathclaws flying back with a chest shot. It is not a gun that messes around.
 * Pushy. If your killing blow is an uppercut, you could easily send them 20 feet up and 30 feet away. If your unarmed is high enough, you can punch them with the force a football player punts a ball.
 * Dead Money perk "And Stay Back" grants 10% chance per shotgun shot of throwing the target back. The sawed-off fires 14 buckshot per blast, practically guaranteeing an airborne ragdoll if fired at close range.
 * The Fire Axe's special has a knockback effect; chaining the special lets you juggle an opponent in the air.
 * Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: Averted by the Followers of the Apocalypse who, despite being derided as anarchists by some, arguably are the only "truly good" faction in the game, next to the Kings.
 * Played straight by Samuel Cooke, the founder of the Powder Gangers, who was imprisoned by the NCR for being a literal example. The other Powder Gangers are aversions, however, as they are little more than another gang of raiders.
 * 'Honest Hearts' introduces the 'Fight the Power!' that gives the bonus in combat with members of 'lawful' factions. It is accompanied by the picture of stereotypical rioter with a scarf on his face and holding Molotov cocktail.
 * Book Ends: "War. War never changes."
 * Boomerang Bigot: One line used by Boomers states that they can take care of that robot problem for you. The same line is used by the robots on the base.
 * Bonus Boss: The four Legendary monsters. The toughest of them, the Legendary Deathclaw, is by far the most powerful thing in the entire game, with almost as much health as the final boss and an insanely high armor rating (significantly more than a full suit of the best power armor available!). Like all deathclaws, it is also very, very fast. He also one hit kills pretty much all but the toughest and most heavily armored of characters. Nice knowing you.
 * Old World Blues has the
 * Colonel Royez and Gaius Magnus from post-Lonesome Road,  They are two ghouls with utterly insane amounts of health (Capable of withstanding about five Holorifle shots to the face on Normal difficulty without dying), and constantly regenerate health as well. To make it worse, they both have high-end unique armor, one of which adds even more health regeneration.
 * Bonus Dungeon: Up to three are added by Lonesome Road, the Courier's Mile, the NCR Long 15, and the Legion Dry Wells. The latter two are only accessible if  None of these are particularly long, but they're overflowing with radiation and irradiated ghoul soldiers (causing them to hyper-regenerate) with some chests of high-grade equipment hidden in back.
 * Bonus Feature Failure: The various pre-order packs individually, or collectively as the Courier's Stash DLC. The items granted are of middling quality, and most are useful only the first half of the first act. Due to limitations in the game's engine, DLC cannot directly interact with other DLC, meaning the pre-order items don't work with DLC Perks at all. This leads to strange, counter-intuitive and anti-synergistic scenarios, such as the pre-order shotgun being the only shotgun not affected by the otherwise outstanding And Stay Back Perk. The Vault 13 canteen was the only truly useful item of the batch, being an item that would periodically automatically lower the player's dehydration level. However, dehydration is only tracked in (the entirely optional) Hardcore mode, where the canteen wasn't enough to survive on alone.
 * Boring but Practical: The Marksman Carbine. Powerful. Durable. Versatile. Ammo-efficient. Completely unspectacular and ugly.
 * The Recharger Rifle. You're most likely to find this weapon at the beginning of the game, and it does lower damage than many other energy rifles. However, it makes up for this by being rechargeable, rather than using energy ammo. That's right, it's an energy weapon that has INFINITE AMMO. Kinda makes up for the slight shortage of energy ammo in the game, huh? Becomes useless later when you can regularly find and recharge energy rifle ammo, though.
 * The Cowboy Repeater. Cheap to repair and uses powerful magnum ammo instead of rifle. Easy to make ammo, low AP cost, and incredible accuracy can make this a viable weapon for most of the game. As with the Marksman Carbine, the only problem is that it's obviously not full auto.
 * Most Guns-type weapons really. This is one reason why many players consider guns to be superior than the more flashy energy weapons, even after the latter was made more powerful.
 * Leg shots. Not as impressive or damaging as a head shot, but they slow down melee enemies significantly if you cripple the legs, and will save your life when you enter Deathclaw territory.
 * The Strong Back, Educated, and Rapid Reload perks. They don't do anything flashy, but pay off massively in the long run.
 * The simpler crafting recipes. Cooking meat into steaks and converting ammo into the type you need is always useful and worthwhile.
 * From Dead Money, the Cosmic Knives. Not only are they easy to find, but you can clean one and superheat it later to give it a massive stat boost and the power to set things on fire. Helps out in the first few quests, when you have almost no ammo or items. The Knife Spear (a stick with knifes taped on it) is even more useful.
 * The Police Pistol. All the other weapons are exotic and powerful, and this is just a bog-standard revolver. However, it hits hard enough to easily dismember Ghosts, and the ammo is everywhere.
 * The Holorifle from Dead Money looks like somebody took spare parts from every gun he could find to build the light-firing bastard child of a shotgun and a sniper rifle. It does damage on par with YCS-186 (the weapon with the highest damager per shot in the whole game and uses a rather common ammo. Aside from being hard to repair it's the BFF of any Energy-weapons based build.
 * From the Lonesome Road DLC comes the flare gun. Doesn't have the greatest damage, but uses a fairly common ammo type only used by a few other weapons in the entire game, and has the distinct power to SCARE DEATHCLAWS.
 * The humble throwing spear is an excellent choice of weapon for a melee character looking to stealthily take down opponents from a distance, and supplies are easily replenished by killing Legion Mooks.
 * The Grunt perk. It gives you a 25% bonus to all damage inflicted by weapons using 9mm and .45 ammo, as well as light machineguns, combat knives, service/assault rifles, and frag grenades. Coupled with a high Guns skill, and couple of other perks associated with guns/explosives, and you can become a titan of destruction with just a humble service rifle and a combat knife.
 * Bottle Fairy: Cass
 * Brain In a Jar: The Robobrains. There's also the Think Tanks of Old World Blues, who come with monitors for eyes and a mouth. Amazingly enough,
 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: The Courier's Stash and Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC, the former moreso than the latter. Courier's Stash is a compilation of several pre-order bonus packs which gives the player four full item sets at the start of the game, including a bottomless water canteen which reduces the amount of water you need to drink. No matter which set of armor you choose, you're a lot better off than in the vanilla game. Gun Runners' Arsenal adds a ton of new weapons to be purchased from shops, as well as weapon mods for them. At least these you actually have to buy in-game.
 * Broken Aesop: The overall theme of the DLC Dead Money is how greed can make people unable to let go of their own vices. To illustrate this point, the casino vault is filled with dozens of gold bars that are far too heavy for you to carry to escape alive, proving that even the player must set aside their greed in order to move on. ... Except that with a stealthboy and some very precise timing, it's fully possible to make off with all the gold without a scratch. So in the end the moral is 'you need to let go of your greed, unless you're clever enough to get away scott free'.
 * Obsidian realized this and patched a few of the easier exploits out; while it's still possible to get all the gold, you really need to go out of your way to break this Aesop.
 * Bullet Time: VATS of course. Turbo and the Implant GRX perk will also produce this effect.
 * Bullying a Dragon: Keith, a hustler at the Aerotech business park, gets cornered by Captain Parker after you provide Parker with evidence of Keith's misdeeds. Parker tries to arrest Keith, who resists. Keith then starts taunting Parker about how his wife left him. Which prompts Parker to let fly with his service rifle. Taunting a man armed with a military rifle about his estranged wife... smooth.
 * Butch Lesbian: Corporal Betsy from Camp McCarran. Just One of the Boys, though she's been hitting on every woman in the Camp after having been
 * But for Me It Was Tuesday: In the Lonesome Road DLC,
 * But You Screw One Goat!: It's heavily implied, but never said outright, that Cook-Cook (one of the fiends leaders) screws his brahmin, Queenee.

C
"Cass: "The NCR wants their hands on everything they see. Nobody's dick is that long, not even Long Dick Johnson, and he had a fucking long dick, thus the name."
 * The Cake Is a Lie: In Old World Blues,
 * Cane Fu: A favourite melee weapon for the White Gloves. While that doesn't sound too dangerous, remember that you have to go in bare-fisted unless you have a high enough sneak skill or can rob the cashier's room without getting caught. If your Unarmed skill is crap, you'll have a hell of a time doing the quest for their casino (the right way, at least).
 * Canon Shadow: Improved since Fallout 3; all your potential companions have their own storylines and faction alignments, and passers-by will remark on who you have with you. This can go so far as to affect how other quests play out; for example, if you go into the Silver Rush with Cass, Jean-Baptiste will shoot her on sight.
 * Cannibalism Superpower: The player character can literally gain cannibalism superpowers through a hidden perk.
 * Can't Get Away with Nuthin': If you attack any member of a major faction, the rest will know and you will lose reputation with them for it. They Hand Wave it with both sides having a "robust network of informants", but that's a shallow justification when you're killing Legion recruits in the middle of the desert. Strangely averted with the Fiends. So long as you do it in one shot, you can kill one ten feet from the rest and they won't notice. You don't even have to sneak.
 * Especially egregious with the faction hit squad spawning. Wipe out the Legion Raid Camp? Caesar will instantly know and teleport a hit squad to immediately retaliate.
 * The Caper: What the Dead Money DLC is all about.
 * Catch Phrase: The Yes Man thinks this trope page is absolutely great! And he's not just saying that because he has to!
 * Cattle Punk: The closer you get to big cities, the more it becomes like a gangster flick, but the more rural areas have a definite old west feel to them. What do you expect, it's set in Nevada. Let us count the ways: Two cowboy robots (Victor and Primm Slim), prominent revolvers, cattle barons, extra-big bighorn sheep, moody guitar riffs, "prospectors" as a euphemism for "scavengers," a Cowboy perk that makes you better at all things Gunslingers ought to be, a chain gang on the run... and these are all just in the first few hours of the game.
 * Chainsaw Good: As well as the Ripper, a full-sized chainsaw can be found . Thanks to its incredibly high-damage VATS attack (high enough to completely ignore a Ranger's DT and kill him in one hit), it is one of the best weapons for Sneak Attacks in the game. Despite whatever common sense may tell you about using a bulky, awkward and loud weapon for stealth work.
 * Chaos Architecture: Invoked if not displayed. In Old World Blues, Dr. 0 says that they can't give you specific directions to the labs in Big MT because "sometimes they move around. Or disappear. Or blow up."
 * Character Development:
 * Chekhov's Gun: As you're poking around your would-be gravesite in Goodsprings, you'll likely come across a bunch of Distinctive Cigarette Butts, as well as a distinctive lighter off a named Great Khan you can kill in Boulder City. Keep these items, they become useful when convincing Swank to turn on Benny.
 * In the Old World Blues expansion,
 * Cherry Tapping: One of the challenges added by Gun Runner's Arsenal is to kill Deathclaws with the weakest weapons in the game. Of course, it only says kill. There's nothing saying you can't horribly main them with your top shelf guns, first.
 * Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
 * Also, the Courier has the capability of betraying not one, not two, but all three factions, murdering all three leaders (and possibly even devouring them after he kills them), then taking over New Vegas in the resulting power vacuum.
 * And those are just the major factions. You can also get in good with EVERY minor faction in the game, provided you're clever enough not to alienate them by accident, and then, before the final battle, go in and wipe out ALL OF THEM. I Can Rule Alone, indeed...
 * There are also plenty of quests that end with the option to slaughter the people you're helping. Help a group of ghouls get to the rockets, then set them to crash into each other. Help restore power to Helios One, then set the defense system to kill everyone unlucky enough to be standing outside. Promise to cut off access to the sulfur mines under the Vault, then set enough explosives to take down the mines and the Vault. And then there's that self-destruct button in the Brotherhood of Steel bunker...
 * Church Militant: The Mormon Church it seems. According to Graham, learning how to handle a .45 auto is a rite of passage for New Canaanites. However, it's more that they're quite capable of defending themselves rather than being aggressively militant (Far from it actually). Also, one must remember that, After the End, you better damn well know how to kill or live around people that do.
 * Classy Cat Burglar: The sneak skill magazine '¡La Fantoma!' depicts one of these on it's cover.
 * Clingy Suit : Slightly subverted, while the Stealth Armor MK II in the Old World Blues DLC is't permanently attached, it sometimes begs you to continue wearing it and expresses sadness at being removed.
 * Cloudcuckoolander: Played with; No-Bark Noonan is actually pretty perceptive about strange events that are happening around Novac, and good at looking through people with less-than honest intentions. Too bad he blames them on the Chupacabra and the mole people.
 * The Think Tank and Doctor Mobius.
 * Many of the relatively sane nightkin, such as Lily and Tabitha, qualify as this
 * Cluster F-Bomb: Cass has a delightfully foul mouth, and can't help swearing repeatedly. The game plays with this during her side-quest, while, she states that they'll settle accounts with one group, and then go to the leader of the other group and "make that bitch eat her own hair." When you look in the quest menu, that statement is recorded word for word as your goal for this quest. Some characters have a wonderful way of personalizing their own quests, you know?
 * Cluster F-Bomb: Cass has a delightfully foul mouth, and can't help swearing repeatedly. The game plays with this during her side-quest, while, she states that they'll settle accounts with one group, and then go to the leader of the other group and "make that bitch eat her own hair." When you look in the quest menu, that statement is recorded word for word as your goal for this quest. Some characters have a wonderful way of personalizing their own quests, you know?

The Courier "Yeah, I kinda guessed that.""


 * Cold-Blooded Torture: One torture path available when interrogating Silus is to kill him for your personal pleasure. Of course doing so before he's said anything of importance just gets Captain Boyle angry. Still, you can simply beat him around until he relents.
 * Cold Opening: While the first 3 DLCs start with a narrated slideshow, Lonesome Road skips this in favor of dropping you right into The Divide.
 * Cold Sniper: Boone. He actually tries to keep you away, believing he's too cold to have a spotter and that it'll end in disaster. If he gets killed (or rendered unconscious), he'll creepily chuckle and say the he knew that you'd be the death of him.
 * Corporal Betsy in Camp McCarran deconstructs the trope by expressing regret over the job requiring such a cold personality.
 * She also subverts it with her
 * Ranger Ghost is somewhat of a subversion - she's cold and doesn't regret it, but the other NCR personnel think she's a prick and/or trying too hard.
 * Sergeant Bitter Root as well. The other 2 First Recon members, Corporal Sterling and 10 of Spades are quite friendly however are not cold snipers.
 * Collection Sidequest: The longest mission in the game, by logical extension, involves collecting special "star" bottle caps from bottles of Sunset Sarsaparilla and handing them in to an animatronic cowboy named Festus. There is also a snow globe collection game which nets you caps.
 * Colonel Badass: Colonel Cassandra Moore. She commands the garrison at Hoover Dam, within spitting distance of the massive Legion buildup at Fortification Hill. She's built up reputation as a hardass and a General Ripper (though justifiable due to the proximity to the Fort). She's had four tours against the Brotherhood of Steel during the NCR's war with them.
 * Competitive Balance: Every character build has a chance to survive and thrive in the Mojave Wasteland, whether he be a power armor-wearing sledgehammer-wielding maniac, a sneaky thief with a sniper rifle, or a smooth talker, Obsidian has made it possible for you to solve everything the game throws at you.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: NPC characters can reload some slow reload weapons such as Cowboy Repeaters and .357 revolvers as though they are reloaded with magazines or speedloaders. Thankfully, this also applies to followers.
 * Nowhere is this more apparent than the game's gambling. NPC card dealers will regularly deal themselves 20s and Blackjack several times in a row when your luck stat is below par. Maxing out your Luck stat allows for the game to cheat in your favour as well, elevating Luck from a level just above Dump Stat (only useful for critical hits, which several perks would cover) to Game Breaker (allowing a character to break the bank of every casino in Vegas in half an hour's playing time).
 * The Boomers. The artillery barrage you must run through upon approaching their base is a scripted event, and cannot be avoided in any way or gives any third options besides 'duck and cover'. Stealth won't work, even with Stealth Boys. You can't snipe the spotters, because there aren't any. You can't make them run out of ammo. You can't return fire with the Fat Man. All you can do is run and take cover and wait for the reloading breaks (which, given the number of shells they're shooting per barrage, implies they've got a 20-gun battery firing at you).
 * You can, however, use Turbo to run past them.
 * Continuity Nod: This game takes place in the same area as the canon but canceled Van Buren, so plenty of characters and elements in New Vegas are references to events from that game.
 * Fans of Fallout will soon notice the large number of references to towns from Fallout 1 and 2, such as Modoc or the Hub; understandable, since those took place in northern California, not far from Nevada, which is where this game takes place.
 * The reason the NCR can't torture POWs can be traced back to the administration of "President Tandi".
 * Who is one of the faces on the NCR currency, along with Seth and Aradesh.
 * Not just that, but the Chosen One him/herself is repeatedly referenced.
 * Remember the crashed vertibird outside Klamath? So does its pilot.
 * Lily's melee weapon is a large sword made out of a propeller blade taken from the same Vertibird.
 * A character makes mention of the mildly terrifying Mr. Bishop of New Reno, who seems more at home in the wasteland than the city. This, presumably, is the son a male Chosen One can have by either the wife or daughter (canonically the latter) of the head of the Bishop family at the time.
 * There are also a surprising amount of references to Fallout 3, both explicitly and thematically:
 * Veronica wishes the Brotherhood could help the ordinary people and look at changing the philosophy to fit the changing world they live in. This is basically what the Capital Wasteland BoS did. She even vaguely refers to this, mentioning that the BoS has had schisms and breakaway groups in the past (although that could refer to the Tactics BoS as well).
 * If you're low of intelligence, when asked about what you think about the Brotherhood of Steel, you can reply something along the lines of them being "giant monsters in power armour that shoot lasers from their eyes."...which is pretty much Liberty Prime in a nutshell, or Frank Horrigan.
 * The schism and breakaway part likely references both the Midwestern and Capital Wasteland Brotherhoods... but she continues by mentioning that one chapter even had a small civil war over it, which either references the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood/Outcast conflict or some other conflict we haven't heard about before or since.
 * ED-E is
 * The  show up if you have the Wild Wasteland perk.
 * Copies of Moira's "Wasteland Survival Guide" are skill books that increase your survival skill.
 * Yes Man mentions how nice it would be to stomp the Legion and NCR with a giant robot that shoots lasers out if it's eyes. This is a reference to Liberty Prime.
 * Doctor Henry in Jacobstown really knows his cyberdogs. He also happens to know a thing or two about mutations.
 * Remember Marcus, the friendly Super Mutant who helped Chosen One and wound up as mayor of Broken Hills in Fallout 2? He's back.
 * The Classic Pack gives you the equipment of both the Vault Dweller and the Chosen One.
 * Emily Ortal, a Follower and a native of Arroyo, may reward you with medical supplies for completing a small side quest she gives you. She hopes that they are of no use to you... just like Hakunin, the shaman from when it was still a tribal village, from Fallout 2. Except a little less cryptically.
 * Dog from 'Dead Money' seems to always need orders because he had a master as long as he remembers. Starting with The Master (the Big Bad from Fallout).
 * The Master is also mentioned by other Super mutants and Nightkin
 * You can get the recipe for the delicious Deathclaw omelet from the great niece of its creator, who somehow got a female Deathclaw to provide a steady supply of eggs in Modoc. Until some stranger came along and "shot it in the eye," anyway.
 * The Final Boss of Old World Blues is Dr. Mobius' Giant Roboscorpion, a Humongous Mecha only slightly below Liberty Prime's level. Lab notes regarding the Giant Roboscorpion can be found, mentioning that it's Awesome but Impractical: despite being almost unstoppable, it's weapons are such a huge energy drain that they have to hook the entire thing up to a power plant to run it, so it can't actually leave the lab (it's on-board generator provides barely enough power for it to move, with no juice left to shoot its lasers). These issues as the exact same problem faced by the designers of Liberty Prime.
 * Cool Plane: The Boomers' B-29 bomber.
 * Cool Versus Awesome: The central conflict of the game is basically the United States and the Roman Empire fighting over Viva Las Vegas, which is controlled by Howard Hughes and his army of robots and gangsters.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive:
 * Similarly, Heck Gunderson earned his power through forcing competitors off their land at gunpoint.
 * Courier: YOU! As well as the various other couriers that work for the Mojave Express.
 * Courier Needs Food Badly: In Hardcore Mode, you need to eat, drink, and sleep regularly, or suffer the consequences!
 * Cowboy: One of the perks, which makes you better with Revolvers, Lever action weapons, knives, axes, and dynamite.
 * Cowboy Cop: Meyers, one of the (better) options for Primm's new sheriff, was sent to the NCRCF for "taking the law into his own hands one too many times".
 * Crazy Prepared: Mr. House. He not only calculated the exact time and day of the nuclear apocalypse (and was less than a day off), but he also managed to prepare himself that he survived for two hundred years afterwards, as well as being able to remotely disable or shoot down all but eleven of the missiles headed for Vegas. And if he'd had the Platinum Chip, none of them would have hit.
 * The Courier. Hey, the weapons and supplies in the Courier's Stash DLC had to come from somewhere.
 * Crazy Survivalist: Randall Clark, a soldier from the Great War and the former owner of the Desert Ranger Armor in Honest Hearts. He eventually became a god-like figure to the Sorrows, whom he developed a Papa Wolf-like mentality towards.
 * More like a subversion of this trope. He is pragmatical, usually behaves cowardly (which saves his life on more than one occasion), displays bouts of survivor guilt, plans to commit suicide and tries to help others without risking direct contact. Not your average Crazy Survivalist.
 * Credits Gag: If you've got the Wild Wasteland perk, the credits are full of humorous notes, in-jokes, and nicknames.
 * Cruel and Unusual Death: The death animation of some weapons, or if you have Bloody Mess perk.
 * Cruel Mercy: One option in Cass' quest. If you spare, and give evidence of their crimes to the NCR, Cass decides that the NCR's bureaucracy and legal procedures will do them more harm than her bullets ever could.
 * You can also do the same to
 * In Honest Hearts, with high enough speech skill, you can convince Joshua Graham to do this to Salt-upon Wounds.
 * Crushing the Populace: Caesar's Legion if Legate Lanius comes to rule; he will murder anyone and everyone who he sees as an insult to the Legion, including the Followers of the Apocalypse as he claims they have "dishonored" Caesar's reputation. The Legion also does not treat its citizens well.
 * Cultured Badass: Arcade Gannon.
 * The Courier with high-intelligence.
 * Cute Bruiser: Veronica; her Weapon of Choice is the Power Fist. Give her a Ballistic Fist, and she will murder the crap out of just about anything.
 * Cute Machines: ED-E. That he communicates via little beeps and scratches helps.
 * Cutting the Knot: In the Old World Blues stealth lab, you have to sneak past laser tripwires and robobrains to grab a "secret document", in order to calibrate the stealth suit. You can pretty much blow the robobrains, and, if you have 55 Science/Repair, hack the tripwire IFF circuit/disable the tripwires to make your run a lot easier.
 * Curb Stomp Battle: The final battle at Hoover Dam can turn into this, especially if you got all factions to ally with the NCR, have a powerful companion with you (like Boone with Power Armor and an Anti-Materiel Rifle), have maxed out energy weapons and have saved all your alien blaster ammo. You can just go around disintegrating squad after squad of the Legion's Elite Mooks with no difficulty at all, while your allies just keep coming in and curb stomping the shit out of them in one Big Damn Heroes moment after another, finally culminating in defeating the Final Boss Legate Lanius in a few seconds.

D
"Veronica: (on the Boomers) "A bunch of shut-ins who show disdain for outsiders and hold technology above them. Huh. Haven't heard that one before.""
 * Damage Sponge Boss: Giant Roboscorpion and Deathclaws.
 * Damage Sponge Boss In Mook's Clothing: A way of instituting Fake Difficulty in the higher levels of the DLC.
 * Dangerous Deserter: You encounter a few in Primm, attempting to start a protection racket and attacking you if try to turn them in. They're survivors from a outpost that was overrun by Caesar's Legion, and think the NCR will be defeated by them soon.
 * Days of Future Past: In addition to the "retro 50s" feel of all surviving pre-war culture typical to the Fallout franchise, Caesar's Legion is obviously inspired by the Roman Empire, in-universe and out.
 * Dead Character Walking: Has a similar bug as Minecraft game. If you save while character just died, there's various bugged things that happen, from floating hollow heads to weird corpses that's still alive. Cracked explains it the best...
 * Dead Man's Hand: In the expansion "Dead Money", the player can get an achievement for getting the dead man's hand from the deadly, abandoned casino Sierra Madre.
 * Deadpan Snarker:
 * You, the player character; numerous dialogue options involve it.
 * Veronica, a recruitable sarcastic Brotherhood companion. Voiced by Felicia Day.

"Mr. House: Why is it so hard to find good help these days? (unleashes a dozen murder-bots on the Courier)"
 * Ghoul companion Raul also has a sense of humor that's as dry as his skin.
 * Arcade Gannon's ex-All-American sense of humor qualifies as well.
 * Rene Auberjonois brings a delightful snideness to Mr House. Especially if the Courier tries to get uppity with him.

"Gus Olson, Ombudsman: ...Choose a democratically, in the way that we citizens are accustomed to washing our hands of terrible deeds..."
 * Death by Irony: The Legion camp at Cottonwood Cove is built right underneath a truck loaded with barrels of radioactive waste, perched perilously halfway over a cliff. It's possible to dump the barrels into the Legion camp, killing all the Legion forces there, resulting in an ironic payback for their dirty bomb attack on Camp Searchlight (the NCR survivors of Camp Searchlight will appreciate the irony if you tell them about it).
 * If you opt for traditional Townicide while playing a female character, Sergeant Astor will also comment on the delicious irony of the camp being wiped by a woman, who are treated as incapable pieces of meat in the Legion.
 * Step one, buy a powerful shotgun. Step two, go meet Caesar. Step three, load the shotgun with Coin Shot (rounds made with coins that are used by Caesar's Legions, and bonus points if these are coins that Caesar himself paid you). Step Four, Render Unto Caesar That Which Is Caesar's. Step Five, fight your way out of the now angry horde of Legion soldiers.
 * Alternatively, reenact the Ides of March by stabbing Caesar to death with a knife or spear him in the head. There's a challenge for it in the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC, and if you have Arcade Gannon (history buff and Legion hater) with you, he'll commend you on your "historical propriety".
 * Death City: The Sierra Madre Villa is an isolated town choked by a toxic gas, inhabited only by Ghost People and full of traps. It only gets worse when you find out that not only the Casino itself was  but that the town was  . Ulysses even refers to it as a "special sort of hell".
 * The Divide in he addon Lonesome Road after suffering a regional Class 3 apocalypse in the last decade has become a death city all of its own. It is an almost completely inhospitable place to anything that hasn't mutated and adapted to live there, like the Marked Men, the deathclaws, and other... things that live underground that are making their way to the surface, which even in small groups can rip a deathclaw to pieces. In fact, the conditions of the Divide are possibly a good representation of how most cities like the capital wasteland looked in the first few decades after the bombs fell.
 * Deceased Fall Guy Gambit: The Legion version of the quest "I Put a Spell on You" has you pulling this on Pvt. Crenshaw
 * Deconstruction: If you're one of those players who likes to take the diplomacy route in quests and tries to play all sides for more quests and rewards, you are going to be sorely disappointed. Several quests run opposite to others and completing one may prevent you from completing others, so you will often be in the process of completing one quest when you'll suddenly get the message you failed another quest you may not even have received yet. In the main quests of the three factions (NCR, Caesar, Mr House) there is no way to give everyone a happy ending, as at certain points in all their quests dipolmacy leaves the table and your only option is to take out a particular faction. As well you have to pick a side, at certain points during those main quests the other two factions become permanent enemies and their quests fail. Even if you take the Wild Card route (serving none of them) and do everything exactly right (which is harder than it sounds), there's still going to be a lot of people unhappy or otherwise having negative reactions, most notably the Followers and the BoS. This is driven home when, during the final battle, taunt you for actually thinking you alone could make everyone happy and peaceful. Then again, the main theme of the Wild Card ending is that freedom and independence almost always come at a price...
 * The Fallout tradition of doing this to the value system of the 50s also continues; there's a great example in the REPCONN Headquarters and it's rather strict security.
 * Honest Hearts has some of Mighty Whitey; Both Daniel and Joshua are aware that them leading their respective tribes isn't healthy for anyone involved, but they don't know how else to handle it. Daniel's uncertainty is actually hinted as one reason for him listening to a complete stranger.
 * Defictionalization: The collector's edition included chips from the major casinos in the game as well as the Platinum Chip. In a less profitable vein, many fans play Caravan in real life.
 * Deliberately Monochrome: Camp Forlorn Hope is washed-out and has a heavy brown pallor over everything. Completing the quest "Restoring Hope" restores color to the area.
 * Democracy Is Bad: Vault 11.

"Raul: Right. Got it. I'll just stop using this melee weapon and instead use a melee weapon. Good idea, Boss. Veronica: *Being told to stay close a second time* This is as close as I get until you turn into a leggy brunette."
 * Resulting in the rather darkly funny 1950s style campaign posters which say stuff like "Haley is a known adulterer & Communist sympathizer, vote for Haley!" in bold red, white, and blue.
 * Department of Redundancy Department: All of the Think Tank doctors get into this, with Dr. Mobious's dome-shaped... dome in the FORBIDDEN ZONE (that is... YES!... forbidden! to you), and the the TESLA COILS... OF NIKOLA TESLA.
 * Desperately Looking for a Purpose In Life: Raul, if you follow his side-quest.
 * Determinator: The Courier, and Caesar calls attention to it. You survived being shot in the head. Twice. At point blank range. By a guy holding one of the most powerful unique handguns in the game. The doc didn't pull the bullets out of his/her skull, the Courier forced them out THROUGH SHEER WILLPOWER. If you have high Luck, the doc will even suggest that this should have happened.
 * Raul makes mention, during one of the conversations you unlock by talking to certain elderly people, about how he went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge when a girl who resembled his deceased sister was kidnapped by raiders. He tracked them for three straight days (they slept, he didn't), and she was dead by the time he got there. In response, he killed all seven of them by himself, soaking up bullets and staying alive on nothing but pure rage. After several days of lying near-dead on the ground, he pulled himself back up and went back home.
 * Also helps that being a ghoul he has a healing factor while near radiation, and this was taking place not long after the bombs felled.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Whenever you have a companion, try to give them an order you already gave them a few seconds ago and see the results.

"Courier: You sell plants here? Dr. Usanagi: Uh, no. Implants, not plants. They're little machines I can put inside you to make you faster, quicker, or smarter. I recommend the smarter implant. (She'll offer a discount on it out of pity.)"
 * Drop the barrels of radioactive waste on the Legion camp at Cottonwood Cove, and if you ever go there again to reach the Fort via the ferry, the ferryman will be wearing a radiation suit.
 * There are two quests that will end with you gaining the ability to wear Power Armor. One (For Auld Lang Syne) can only be completed in the third Act, and only if certain conditions are met. The other (Still in the Dark) can be completed at any time and is mandatory to finish Act 2 for three of the four endings. If you take the remaining ending and complete For Auld Lang Syne before Still in the Dark, the Elder will express surprise when he offers to teach you how to use Power Armor and you reply that you already know how.
 * There is another, unmarked quest near Goodsprings wherein you can be rescued by Victor yet again, this time from the various hostile wildlife off the main road. If he ends up trying to save you from something like a group of Cazadores, he will most likely be destroyed - and then he will inexplicably come back again, at which point you can ask him about it. He won't give a straight answer.
 * Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: You can meet a bodyguard for hire who  The problem?   Not played straight, though, as this is still a good way to increase the apparent need for his services and thus drum up business.
 * Did I Just Say That Out Loud?:, upon realizing that he's just admitted to in front of a banquet of   Of course, if you pipe up to early then it'll backfire on you.
 * Also Karl if the Courier taunts him into . While the  leaders are most likely sitting right next to him.
 * When you first meet the Think Tank, after convincing them of being sapient and capable, Dr Dala suggests to her fellow scientists that you'd probably be amenable to helping them with their problem, as long as they do not mention that they're responsible for your lobotomization. Yes, she says this while you're standing in front of them. Rather than being embarrassed about this, however, she will delightedly explain the whole deal if you bring it up.
 * Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Ulysses refers to the Think Tank as "the gods of the Big Empty," and remarks that not even he, or even "a hundred Elijahs" could defeat them.
 * Disc One Final Boss: Benny serves this role, being the main object of the player's pursuit for the 1st half of the main quest line.
 * Disc One Nuke:
 * The Ratslayer, a Varmint Rifle with all the mods attached to it and with more damage, and can be obtained early, if you know where to look. The catch? It's in a cave filled with the bigger Giant Rats. Thankfully, you can get Boone nearby.
 * 'Lucky', a unique and particularly powerful .357 revolver with a 2.5x crit multiplier (in Layman's Terms, it critically hits a lot). You can find it in Primm, which can be VERY early, if you can manage a buffed 75 lockpicking.
 * The Space Suit and Helmet you find at the REPCONN Test Facility is Disc One Armor. It has decent defense, is a Light-type armor, and has the added bonus of having as much Rad Resistance on it as an Advanced Radiation Suit. Also, it looks awesome.
 * A short ways north from the starting town (there's Cazadores about, but it's fairly easy to find a way around), you'll find Chance's grave. Bring a shovel, and you can loot it for Chance's Knife, which is the best melee weapon you can get for a long time.
 * Boone is a Disc One Companion. With his outrageously high Guns skill, he can and will headshot anything he gets in his sights. He also makes grabbing other Disc One Nukes that much easier.
 * ED-E can also count as this. He's the first companion you can find, and you can repair him with parts from Goodsprings if you loot the town. His Enhanced Sensors perk is the ultimate in enemy spotting, and his laser isn't that bad, either. He can't compare to Boone, of course, but pair him with Boone and you will have a murderous duo that will hunt down and kill anything that might dare to harm you.
 * A fairly subtle one is using the oft-overlooked 'drag' button when inside a shop. Using it, you can drag any object -- for example, a Plasma Caster in the Silver Rush -- to a corner of the store where nobody's looking and steal it with ease. You can then either keep that object and make things a lot easier for you in the early levels, or sell it and earn yourself a boatload of caps. You don't even need to have any points in Sneak for this to work.
 * "This Machine", an M1 Garand Rifle that deals incredible damage, has a semi automatic firing rate, has a larger clip size than any other rifle (save the Marksman's Carbine), and reloads very fast.
 * Though you will get the quest normally shortly before or after you get to Benny, and it will take some time, too. So Disc One is pretty much over before you get it.
 * Bonnie Springs is host to a small group of Viper gang members, one of which has the unique unarmed weapon "Love and Hate". For an unarmed character only Pushy and the Ballistic Fist have a higher DPS, except in the DLC.
 * Before a patch, with "Confirmed Bachelor" you can woo Major Knight in the Mojave Outpost to repair all your gear for free.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: It's implied that sold  to the Legion as a slave because.
 * From Dead Money Do anything to upset Dean, including behaving like anything other than his snivelling lackey and he'll try and kill you when you get inside the Sierra Madre.
 * The Ditz: Any main character with less than 4 in intelligence will often find themselves Completely Missing the Point, and can ask for the Layman's Terms if a conversation is causing them trouble.


 * Of course, you can evolve your character into a Genius Ditz if you spend your skill points in the right categories like Science or Medicine, resulting in a character that has a very low IQ but is surprisingly talented in his/her fields of interest.
 * Double Entendre: As a male with the Confirmed Bachelor perk, you can ask Major Knight in the Mojave Outpost if he wants to be "friends." He'll get really awkward and explain that he would like to have you as a "friend," and the NCR technically doesn't have rules against guys having "friends," but the outpost has a somewhat conservative climate and he can't afford to have a "friend" while having to get up and work with these people every day, but maybe you can be "friends" when he's transferred somewhere else.
 * Downer Ending:
 * Even the Legion ending is absolutely nothing compared to
 * Only if you
 * The Dragon:
 * You to
 * Legate Lanius to Caesar.
 * Jean-Baptiste Cutting to Gloria Van Graff.
 * Yes-Man to Benny and
 * Dragon Their Feet: Although it's possible to keep them alive, . Regardless,
 * Dressing as the Enemy: Can be done with some factions. Take note that the faction's oppositions will also mistake you for one of their goons and will open fire without warning. So don't go around wearing Powder Ganger armor without good reason since both the NCR and the Legion will try to gun you down.
 * Also, security guards and Elite Mooks will recognize you as a fake, so the only people that won't shoot at you are the mooks of that faction. Every other faction will open fire on an apparent enemy, and the guards will open fire on a disguised enemy. Granted, Legion/NCR armour is good enough, and Khan armour is pleasantly tribal.
 * Driven to Suicide:
 * In the quest "Return to Sender", if
 * Possibly
 * The final five inhabitants of Vault 11 decided that . The Vault's automated response   was enough to send four of the five into killing themselves.
 * The absolute worst possible ending for
 * Drop the Hammer: The sledgehammer and Super Sledge. Strangely, the tool hammers cannot be used as a weapon. Perhaps the best melee weapon in the game is the unique Super Sledge, Oh, Baby!, which can just about two-shot deathclaws.
 * Drunken Master: Cass, by extension, you with her companion perk. Normally alcohol boosts your Str at the cost of Int, but with Cass the reduction is removed and addiction is no longer an issue. She also causes whiskey to boost your armor.
 * Duct Tape for Everything: Duct Tape is a component for the Weapon Repair kit, which can repair any weapon, from a lead pipe to an Alien Blaster.
 * Also: Wonderglue!
 * This is somewhat lampshaded with the Jury Rigging Perk. With it, you can repair any weapon with something of its class (Bolt action, Automatic, Melee etc...), rather then an actual copy, so repairing Anti-Tank Rifles with your humble Varmint-rifle is possible. The Perk picture has the Vaultboy duct-tape a gun back together. "How did you repair it? No one knows but you..."
 * One of the conversation options with Doctor 8 in Old World Blues about masturbation of all things has the Courier explaining the wonders of combining Cram (processed meat) and a roll of Duct Tape.
 * Dull Surprise: Matthew Perry's surprisingly bad voice acting for Benny means that we don't just get Dull Surprise, but a whole range of lukewarm emotions from  to.
 * Dummied Out: During the battle of Hoover Dam, in what is assumed to be a developer oversight, . This suggests that the game was at one point going to feature a Playable Epilogue. Word of God has stated however that there won't be any DLC to play after the game finishes due to it having so many endings.
 * A fully voiced dialogue option to convince House that, has also been Dummied Out. Thank heaven for mods.
 * Apparently, at one point in development, you were supposed to be able to speak to the three Fiends members you hunt for Dahtri. Quite frankly, their dialogue is hilarious.
 * Dump Stat:
 * When picking S.P.E.C.I.A.L. scores, Perception is worthless. It doesn't affect your aim, only your ability to detect threats. ED-E's companion perk eliminates that weakness. There are about four or so high Perception checks in the main game, and a few more in the DLC. From a minimum of 1 you can buff yourself to 9 with various drugs and alcohol (7 in Dead Money, since some of the drugs don't exist in that add-on), more than enough to pass any check in the game. Its one, true use is meeting the requirement for Better Criticals (+50% critical damage), which you don't really need to kill effectively.
 * Perception does at least affect your initial skill with Energy Weapons and Lockpicking. The former is only useful if you make that your Weapon of Choice, while the latter is more useful to a Kleptomaniac Hero. And in both cases a high Intelligence stat can grant enough skill points to raise either skill if desired. The only major benefit to a high Perception thus being the ability to pick difficult locks at lower-than-normal levels.
 * As far as skills go, if you're not playing on Hardcore, Survival definitely qualifies. Survival's main benefit is that it makes food far more effective. Food is worthless outside of Hardcore, since you heal instantly and Stimpacks are abundant. It's not checked against very often, and it's usually low when it is. In Hardcore, however, it's a lifesaver. Sneak is next to worthless in both modes. There are next to no checks against it, and those that are tend to be 50 or below. It's main benefit is getting weapons into casinos, which you don't need a high Sneak to manage. There are enough Stealth Boys to get you through whatever sequences actually require stealth, even in Dead Money. Of course, having all the add-ons installed makes this a moot point, since there are more than enough points to cap every skill, provided you collect the skill books in the Mojave region (those in the add-ons aren't necessary).
 * Some perks require high scores in these. That is about it. If (and only if) you care about them, they either offset the worthlessness or make you begrudgingly waste points.
 * Dysfunction Junction: All of the Courier's humanoid companions have some sort of deep personal problem to be sorted out.
 * Arcade is trying desperately to live up to his father's name and to help the wasteland as best as he can.
 * Boone is trying to reconcile with his memories of Bitter Spring and Carla.
 * Raul is trying to find find meaning in his life.
 * Cass is trying to deal with the loss of her caravan.
 * Lily wants to recover her memories of her past.
 * Veronica wants to save the Brotherhood since she's the only person willing to look beyond the bunker's walls.
 * Dog/God is trying to find peace with his dueling selves.
 * Christine wants to finally deal with Elijah.
 * Dean wants to finally complete his revenge against Sinclair.
 * Joshua Graham wants to avenge his tribe and redeem himself when he was a Legate.
 * In Lonesome Road, ED-E wants to find Navarro, fulfilling his creator's last wish.
 * Christine wants to finally deal with Elijah.
 * Dean wants to finally complete his revenge against Sinclair.
 * Joshua Graham wants to avenge his tribe and redeem himself when he was a Legate.
 * In Lonesome Road, ED-E wants to find Navarro, fulfilling his creator's last wish.

E

 * Eagle Land: The NCR has evolved into a nice blend of Type 1 and 2. It certainly is safer in their territory, and their soldiers are generally well-meaning, but their high command is so bogged down with bureaucracy and carrying out the NCR government's aggressive expansion policies that the rest of the army suffers from being low on supplies and reinforcements. Not to mention that the guys at the top tend to work their own agendas at the expense of those they command. Oh, and they tax heavily.
 * And it doesn't help that they dashed into the Southwest with their fully-exposed assault-rifle shaped erections blazing at anything that opposed them, forgetting that overextension only gets worse when the Legion and the Brotherhood of Steel hate you.
 * According to the guidebook, a series of events after Tandi's death led to the hawkish Kimball getting into power, and also resulting in a wave of chauvanism against women in the ranks. Which makes the fact that Cassandra Moore is the colonel in charge of the Hoover Dam garrison makes her even more of a Colonel Badass since she also had to overcome inherent sexism that's creeped into the system. Unfortunately, she's a jingo like Oliver and Kimball as well.
 * Hey, what's left of the Enclave?
 * Earn Your Happy Ending: Regardless of who ultimately gains control of the Mojave Wasteland, typically the ending has some communities prospering, while others suffer (with much more suffering and less prospering if you sided with the Legion). However, it actually is possible to get a positive outcome for almost every community and character on the NCR and (to a marginally lesser extent) Independent routes. Doing so is difficult, however, as the conditions to bring about a community or character's positive outcome are not always obvious (and in some cases are even counter-intuitive), and often involve difficult speech checks or extensive exploration.
 * Ear Worm: Just about every song on the radio. Big Iron, Ain't That A Kick In The Head, Jingle Jangle Jingle, the list goes on...
 * Egopolis: Black Mountain is a borderline version; Tabitha renamed it as the "State of Utobitha".
 * Elaborate Underground Base: Numerous factions have them:
 * The Brotherhood of Steel (as has become traditional for them) occupy a complex of subterranean bunkers.
 * Mr. House has a built under the Fort.
 * The Fiends and one of the two Powder Ganger factions occupy abandoned Vaults.
 * The maintain an underground base, which doubles as an Emergency Stash.
 * Elevator Action Sequence: In a first for the series, Lonesome Road has you descending a lift platform to a nuke silo, with explosions and Tunnelers popping in and out spontaneously.
 * Elite Mooks: Each major faction has a couple different types of these guys. Typically, they have high-end weapons and armor, as well as Companion-level health that also scales up with the player's level.
 * Caesar's best Elite Mooks are his Praetorian Guard; hand-to-hand masters armed with the best punching weapon in the game. Next are his Centurions, who aren't quite as tough as most of the game's Elite Mooks, but come equipped with the best armor and weapons available to the Legion. Finally, if you really piss the Legion off they'll send a squad of crack assassins to end you.
 * NCR has the Veteran Rangers (the guys on the front cover of the game), who have excellent armor, high-caliber weapons, and an innate 30% reduction to any damage they take, making them some of the toughest human characters in the entire game. There's also the NCR Heavy Troopers, clad in salvaged Power Armor and wielding heavy weapons like miniguns or light machine guns. And don't forget 1st Recon, the NCR Army's elite sniper squad.
 * The fighting ranks of the Brotherhood of Steel is composed entirely of Elite Mooks, considering their standard equipment is Power Armor and some of the best energy weapons in the game. The drawback is they lack the numerical advantage of the other factions, who have enough normal Mooks to just swarm them into submission.
 * You will fight a large amount of these guys in the final battle depending on the side you choose. Thankfully, you will be helped by Securitrons or Elite Mooks on your side.
 * Elvis Impersonator: A whole gang of them, fronted by The King, one of the surprisingly nicest characters in the game.
 * Empathic Weapon: Old World Blues introduces the Stealth Suit Mk II, which has an on-board A.I. that makes idle chatter, lets you know when enemies have spotted you, and injects you with Med-X and Stimpacks if you take too much damage.
 * Also, the K9000 Cyberdog Gun. It's a dog's brain housed inside a machine gun. It growls when it smells enemies, even at extreme ranges, and whines sadly when you holster it.
 * Enemy Mine: If you're working for Mr. House or for Yes Man, if you save the NCR president and/or have done some good for the NCR, the NCR troopers will actively help you out in fighting the Legion.
 * Also, it's possible to get the Khans, the Brotherhood of Steel and to fight for the NCR despite historically being some of their greatest and most hated enemies (especially the Khans, who have been the NCR's enemies since the very beginning).
 * Epic Tracking Shot: One right in the beginning, from a poster of old Las Vegas, to the current New Vegas, to the less-than-friendly NCR sniper guarding it, to the raider he's sniping, to the Legion spies on the hills nearby, to the graveyard where you get shot at by the mysterious checker-suited gangster.
 * Everything's Worse With Yao Guais: Yao Guai make a comeback in the Honest Hearts DLC and unlike Fallout3, having the Animal Friend perk won't stop them from coming after you on sight. And now they come in giant size.
 * And then there's The Ghost of She. A GIANT Yao Guai. On fire. Oh, and don't forget that on the quest that sends you after her, the drugs you take make you see multiple and you have to fight all  of them.
 * Everything's Worse With Wasps: Cazadores, they hurt a lot, are fast, poison you and attack in swarms of 2-5!
 * Evil Counterpart: --if the player character is good, down to him being
 * Evil Is Easy: It's very easy to simply steal owned items for supplies rather than buying or looking for free ones, especially if those supplies belong to a faction you just butchered. Of course, doing so will bring your Karma down pretty fast, and earning it back isn't easy in the slightest in the short term. (Once you hit the mid- to end-game, though, you can build it up in no time flat. The Fiends are basically a positive Karma mine.)
 * Evil Is Petty:
 * Dean Domino
 * If Colonel Moore doesn't get her way (IE the extermination of the Kings and the Brotherhood of Steel) she'll not only get Ambassador Crocker fired but also start a smear campaign against you that lowers your NCR rep.
 * Evil Versus Evil: The entire, if the player character is evil.
 * Evil Versus Oblivion: Arguably, the entire Dead Money DLC if your character is evil. Evil!Courier is a horrible person, no doubt, but
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
 * Explosive Leash: Bomb collars make surprisingly frequent appearances throughout the game.
 * If one manages to find and enter the Brotherhood of Steel's secret bunker without being accompanied by a certain companion, they'll strip you down and force you to wear a bomb collar until you convince an NCR Ranger stationed nearby to leave (through speech or otherwise).
 * As mentioned above, in the Dead Money DLC, you and your companions are forced to wear these collars to ensure that you will aid Father Elijah in his quest to rob the Sierra Madre casino. Unfortunately, the casino is littered with speakers that interfere with the collar's operation and will cause it to detonate prematurely unless you get out of range or destroy the speaker.
 * In Old World Blues, one can find Little Yangtze, a concentration camp for Chinese prisoners from before the War. The ghoulified prisoners there are still wearing working bomb collars, which will detonate if they try to follow you out of the camp. In addition, you can find a few of Father Elijah's encampments, at least one of which is littered with disabled or otherwise broken bomb collars and a detonator.
 * Exposition Fairy: Lampshaded -- Doc Mitchell, who patches up your gaping head wounds and walks you through the character building process waves off your gratitude, saying, "It's what I'm here for."
 * Exposition of Immortality: Mr. House, once you finally get to meet him, reveals himself to be quite a bit older than you might have been expecting. He's got quite the collection of pre-war artifacts, and he's more than happy to pay you to increase them, too.
 * The Extremist Was Right: If you're familiar with the Nolan Chart, you'll notice that each of the factions is run by one of the corners, insisting that this is the case. And you get to choose who wins.
 * Caesar's Legion is as conservative as all hell. Harm their subjects and they will crucify you. Not Hyperbole. Cass outright states that while she refuses to deal with slavers like the Legion, a lot of traders work with the Legion because they're ensured safety. Even the Fiends are too scared of the Legion to attack caravans under their protection. His methods are harsh, brutal, and more than a little evil, but they've unified Arizona and made it a safe place to live. Even Raul admits that Caesar transformed Arizona into a much better place than it was before. As per Conservative economic policy, their currency is the strongest in the Mojave: a single Legion gold coin is worth 100 bottle caps.
 * The NCR is high-grade liberal. They are the only (known) functional post-war democratic government, and in many cases they greatly improve the standards of living for the common people living in their territory though building infrastructure and introducing social welfare programs using tax payer money. However, they have elements of Liberal strawmen. Their foreign policy is a good example of Liberal Idealism in that they believe in 'spreading democracy' to foreign lands. Political corruption is high, as organizations with political connections such as are running (sometimes even gunning) smaller competitors out of business. This(and the Legion destroying their gold mines) results in their currency being the weakest in the Mojave: five NCR dollars equals only two bottle caps.
 * Mr. House, a (ironically) Chinese-style Authoritarian Capitalist, is unquestioningly a hard-core statist. He provides stability, security, and wealth and generally doesn't demand personal worship. As long as you play by all his rules and pay his taxes on time, he will offer you a relatively comfortable and safe life surrounded by pre-war glory. However, he will not hesitate or show any mercy in eliminating any potential political opposition against his rule.
 * As for libertarians, they get the Wild Card ending, in which

F
"He said he'd be back with one of the greatest treasures of the Old World. Said he'd make the Mojave how it was meant to be... "wipe the slate clean""
 * Failed a Spot Check: Due to how SPECIAL stats work, you can sneak by NPCs in broad daylight provided that the their perception is low and your sneak skill is high enough. Compunded with what the game considers "dark area", you could potentially stand next to a high-perception NPC against a brightened backdrop, provided you're in the shadows.
 * This can be averted HARD when the developers don't want you to sneak past some enemies, and give them incredible perecption so they can find you when invisible.
 * Fake Difficulty: Cazadors have an ever-present bug (no pun intended) that makes targeting their heads in VATS impossible unless it's already targeted when you go into VATS.
 * Fan Disservice: Beatrix Russell, a cowboy-type with a taste for whips and domination. When you recruit her to work as a dominatrix at the Atomic Wrangler, she dons a Stripperiffic outfit consisting of a Black Bra and (leather) Panties, a Corset, cowboy hat, and chains. Only problem? She's a ghoul, so she looks like this.
 * You can sleep with her as well. The screen fades to black out and you don't see anything but you can hear...sounds...
 * Fantastic Racism: On both sides. humans call Ghouls "Zombie" and Ghouls call humans "smoothskin."
 * Also, the mercenaries that attack Jacobstown's Super Mutants.
 * And in the other direction by the way Rhonda and Best Friend Tabitha refer to humans on Black Mountain Radio.
 * The Farmer and the Viper: With Doc Mitchell as the Farmer and the Courier as the Viper, if the player chooses to side with the Powder Gangers in Ghost Town Gunfight/Run, Goodsprings, Run!
 * Fast Forward Mechanic: There is a "Wait" action.
 * Fate Worse Than Death: While Ghoulification isn't necessarily bad (it does makes you ugly), losing your mind and becoming a slavering, carnivorous zombie is pretty bad. Which is presumably why you get Good Karma for killing Feral Ghouls.
 * The
 * The "Ghosts" of Sierra Madre. The hazmat suits did a pretty good job when it came to keeping the guests and residents alive... Well, alive long enough to turn them into whatever they are now.
 * Life in the Legion, if you're a woman.
 * Having your brain, spine and heart removed and becoming a blood-thirsty 'Lobotomite'.
 * According to Ulysses,.
 * The "inhabitants" of Y17a Trauma Harnesses. Walking suits created to pick up wounded on the battlefield and walk them out. Somehow they forgot to walk them out so these wounded are kept within a walking suit which does whatever it wants without any chance of getting out.
 * The Marked Men found in Lonesome Road are unfortunates caught in the blast radius when nukes went off in First Battle of Hoover Dam four years ago who had their skin torn off by the force, then survived the intense radiation to become flash-ghoulified. Even though they were from opposite sides, they now work together against all others because their constant, intense pain is the only identity they have left.
 * The Federation: The New California Republic.
 * Festering Fungus: The spores of Vault 22, courtesy of the folks up in Big MT.
 * Fiery Redhead: Cass
 * Fighting for Survival: You can convince Goodsprings citizens to fight with Ringo against the Powder Gangers.
 * Firing One-Handed: Unless you're actively aiming down the sight, most handguns are held with just one hand. There's even a perk for one-handed weapons.
 * Fission Mailed: Collecting all 50 Star Bottle Caps grants you the reward of, followed by the "Quest FAILED" message. You then complain to Festus, who triggers a brief second quest to collect your real reward. It's particularly effective since there is an achievement/trophy for completing the original quest, though it's the follow-up that gives you credit.
 * Five-Man Band
 * The Hero: The Courier
 * The Lancer: Boone/Raul/Cass
 * The Big Guy: Lily/Boone
 * The Smart Guy: Arcade/Veronica/Raul
 * The Chick: Veronica
 * Team Pet: Rex/ED-E
 * Flaming Sword: The Shishkebab from Fallout3 comes back in New Vegas.
 * Flat What: In Old World Blues, if you have high enough Intelligence, you can inform Doctor O that he could simply draw a vertical slash through his name to specify "Zero" and not "O." He reacts this way.
 * Fluffy the Terrible: Super Mutants, eight foot tall muscular green monsters, have names like Neil, and Tabitha (and in one case, Cuddles). Though most of them are fairly friendly unless provoked these days. Emphasis on 'most'.
 * Deathbringer the Adorable: Mean Sonofabitch is just there to scare away any wannabe criminals and to bash in the heads of Fiends. He's a pretty nice guy if you get past his inability to talk coherently, actually. (His tongue was cut out.)
 * Footnote Fever: The REPCONN museum plaques.
 * Foreshadowing: All Roads dumps a few metric tons into you.
 * Right from the start, there's tons of mysterious foreshadowing regarding Victor, the cowboy-bot who apparently dug you up in the beginning after you were left for dead. What exactly is up with him remains mysterious, but it's clear there's more to him than meets the eye.
 * When Benny tells you that "the game was rigged from the start" it seems to just be a Bond One-Liner.
 * Doc Mitchell's medical examination on the courier at the start does offer one piece of foreshadowing...if you have the motivation to see it. To some patients, the last Rorschach card he shows you looks a little bit like a large needle-like tower shining in the darkness...a lot like the Lucky 38 Hotel.
 * Dead Money heaps a HUGE amount of it in the final act and the end.
 * The only way we know about Ulysses is through this. (unless you bought the limited special collector's ultimate edition and saw Ulysses as the three of clubs)
 * In Honest Hearts The Burned Man mentions Ulysses.
 * Johnston Nash on Ulysses: "Hope a storm from The Divide skins him alive!"
 * The Canyon Wreckage, located west of Primm, oozes this.
 * At first, the Canyon Wreckage just looks like a pile of rusted vehicles with some coyotes denning near them... until you see the graffiti, which mentions "Lonesome Road" (now the confirmed name of the last DLC), the Divide, and the cryptic message, "You can go home now, Courier". And, if you look on the map, you'll see that the canyon the wreckage is blocking is the only path through the western mountains.
 * The Northern Passage, though it lacks the graffiti and ominous location of the Canyon Wreckage, is the launch point for the DLC Honest Hearts.
 * The Mojave Drive-In seems like the last place to expect a DLC to launch, but nevertheless shows up in the trailer for Old World Blues, the third DLC. It's just a regular ruined drive-in movie theater... with a rather cryptic train tunnel to the south, that also shows up in the trailer, only from the other side.
 * The setting of Old World Blues is also alluded by Christine as she was trapped and experimented on within the Big Empty. She also mentions the aforementioned Ulysses as the courier who rescued her? Sound familiar?
 * Before Dead Money came out, Veronica had this little bit of dialogue regarding Elijah


 * Old World Blues is literally dripping with Foreshadowing for the last add-on, Lonesome Road, not only with the omnipresent symbol of the Old World America's flag left by Ulysses on several buildings and the holotapes of him but in the X-17 Meteorological Station, mentioned repeatedly to have been visited by Ulysses, is a map of what could very well be the Divide, the location of Lonesome Road.
 * Frickin' Laser Beams: Following Fallout3. Unlike earlier Fallout games, averted hard here as lasers are THE most accurate weapon in the game, especially outside VATS as the beams hit the target instantly. Still played straight with plasmas, but again, those are not laser weapons.
 * Friendly Sniper: Pretty much any member of 1st Recon, current or former, that isn't Boone.
 * From Nobody to Nightmare: Caesar was originally a member of the Followers of the Apocalypse, the least aggressive, and most humanitarian, faction in the wastes.
 * The player character starts out as a low-ranked delivery boy for a small-time courier company. By the end, he or she will generally be a battle-hardened veteran with either an arsenal of weapons to humble an army, an arsenal of skills sufficient to deal with any challenge, or possibly both with careful skill/perk/trait selection. Oh, and you can also
 * The Survivalist in Honest Hearts.
 * Fun with Acronyms: F.I.S.T.O. the Sex Bot.
 * Future Imperfect: Averted. Pre-war books are far less rare here than they were on the East Coast, civilization is far more organized, and the Followers of the Apocalypse, Brotherhood of Steel and New California Republic have done a pretty good job accurately preserving the knowledge of the past -- Caesar and his officers, for example, know more about the Roman Empire than most people in Real Life do. Of course, this has the added benefit of Las Vegas only being nuked 11 times - compare that to everywhere else.
 * Flunky Boss: Pretty much every boss in one way or another.
 * All the legendary creatures (including the Legendary Deathclaw) are accompanied by other, non-legendary (but by no means weak) normal creatures.
 * Legate Lanius is accompanied both by his Praetorian Guards and the various Legion soldiers around the camp that will come to attack you (though you can convince him to fight you alone with 80 speech).
 * Tabitha is in a building that's guarded by about half a dozen Nightkin, and you have to fight your way through a whole village of Super Mutant Masters just to get to her.
 * Jean-Baptiste is supported by no less than five heavily armed thugs with full body armor and plasma rifles.
 * Elijah in the Dead Money add-on tries to kill you by turning on a bunch of laser turrets while he hides behind a forcefield. Though, once they're dead, he comes after you with a Gauss Rifle.
 * The ghoulifed Vault 34 overseer is in his office with a pair of machine gun turrets on his desk, and a few ghoulified security guards helping him.
 * Caesar himself is probably the strongest example. Unlike previous Fallout Big Bads, he's just a normal human and only about as tough as a standard Elite Mook. However, he's surrounded by several extremely tough Elite Mooks armed with the best unarmed weapons in the game, all in a relatively enclosed space with no room to dodge or retreat. Attacking him head-on, even with a high-level character, will almost certainly result in you being dogpiled into a corner and beaten to death, especially in Hardcore mode where you can't instant-heal using stimpaks.
 * General Lee Oliver is also a very straight example, as the Veteran NCR Rangers he's guarded by are quite a bit more threatening than he is. Arguably a straighter example than Caesar because Legion players must fight Oliver, while killing Caesar is always optional.
 * Each of the fiend leaders (although they're really only bosses at lower levels) come supported by a gang of four to six fiends. Except Violet, who has around 8 dogs instead.

G

 * Gambit Pileup: The NCR, Caesar's Legion, and Mr. House are competing in a high-stakes tournament with New Vegas as the prize, and they're all trying to stack the deck in their favor -- and you're the Wild Card..
 * To elaborate; the core conflict is NCR and the Legion both fighting for control of the Dam and New Vegas. Beyond this basic plot,  That's about nine gambits, all trying to top one another. You decide which one (or combination of them) comes out on top.
 * Game Breaking Bug: Though it doesn't break the rest of the game, a glitch can completely screw over the town of Novac -- Chris Haversam randomly runs away and/or vanishes, preventing the player from finishing "Come Fly With Me" and thus getting anything other than a negative ending for the town.
 * Game Mod: As usual, there's an abundance of mods to change the game in minor to significant ways. Extending the game past the final mission is one of the big ones. It's recommended to grab some of the ones that fix obvious bugs, namely the fact that the Followers can't ally with the NCR properly. There's also the one that keeps ED-E from setting off mines, which no flying robot should do. A less important but still useful one is the mod that restores the option to spare the Brotherhood in House's questline.
 * Gameplay Ally Immortality: In normal mode, companions do not die. Hardcore mode, on the other hand...
 * Gameplay and Story Integration:
 * Looting some body parts from corpses actually causes the body parts to be ripped off the corpse. It isn't just treated as a random item in the inventory of the corpse.
 * Also, having too few skill points in a skill check during dialogue will display an option not as suave/competent as the one with the player having the proper amount of skill points in a given check. Unlike Fallout3, where the check is a matter of chance and gives the same sentence whether or not the player passed a speech check, passing or failing a speech check is directly tied to skill. Insufficient skill gives the option a different sentence (Hulk Speak or some overly emotional or annoying words when failing speech check for that option). Failing may also open up other options in some cases.
 * If you're wearing an NCR uniform, Lt. Haggerty at Helios One will figure out from the amount of blood on it that you looted it off a dead NCR soldier and will attack if you fail a speech check to convince her otherwise.
 * Even if you didn't loot it off of a corpse.
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation:
 * There's a Ranger outpost where you can find a Legion raid camp nearby, as well as Legion raiding parties spying on it from a nearby ridge. However, even if you're an NCR man, you can't warn the Rangers of the Legion presence or the raiding parties, even if you go up to and chat with the Legion raiders spying on the outpost, and when you come back later as part of a side quest, you'll find... well, suffice to say, it isn't pretty.
 * You can only use Empty Soda Bottles to make Cactus Water, and you can't fill these with water from other sources, either.
 * Fixed in Old World Blues, where a highly advanced, sentient sink can (with the proper software upgrades) fill any empty bottle with purified water.
 * Although that of course assumes the Courier was at full health when the scene begins. He/she is already captured and tied up, it's not a great stretch to imagine he/she may have taken some damage resisting earlier.
 * A wrench, which is used to craft a weapon repair kit, mysteriously disappers when the repair kit is used.
 * The Gold Bars added by Dead Money are supposedly twenty ounces of .9999 pure gold, they weigh 35 pounds each.
 * has no effect on the final battle at Hoover Dam, aside from royally pissing off the factions in question (and both factions will forgive you no-questions asked if you do this before you get their Get Out Of Jail Free Cards.
 * You can at any time after you meet Yes Man, but the Securitrons on the Strip won't treat you any differently.
 * Gang of Hats: The Three Families of New Vegas personify different sides of the city
 * The Omertas: Personifying the sleazy side of Vegas
 * The Chairmen: Personifying the "cool" side of Vegas
 * The White Gloves: Personifying the "classy" side of Vegas.
 * Gas Mask Longcoat: NCR Desert Rangers, as depicted on the box art.
 * Genius Ditz: The Think Tank in Old World Blues are a spectacular example. One of them is named Dr. 0 (the number), but since they can't differentiate, he gets called Dr. O (the letter). Point out that he could draw a line through it, and you'll be hailed as a visionary.
 * Klein repeatedly mistakes fingers and toes for penises. Dala can't quite understand why lobotomites occasionally attempt to wrassle each other and deposit fluids into each other, or why they are reluctant to do so while she's watching. All of them keep forgetting that you're sapient and talk around you like you're a pet.
 * Genre Shift: Dead Money strips you of all your equipment and money, and throws you into a hostile, poisonous environment full of deadly gas clouds, enemies that need to be dismembered to be killed, loads of booby traps, untouchable laser-firing holograms that must be outwitted rather than fought, and all with very limited resources. The "limited resources" part especially makes this add-on seem like the game has become a Survival Horror title.
 * Honest Hearts dumps you into a canyon full of greenery and wildlife, which is just plain shocking compared to most of the rest of the series. The primary conflict is between tribal natives, something that's been out of focus since Fallout 2.
 * Old World Blues is a decidedly silly adventure that plops you in the center of a Wide Open Sandbox full of Mad Science gone awry, presided by goofy brains in jars (when the quest called it a midnight science fiction feature, they weren't kidding). There is an objective to fulfill, but it's completely secondary to just running around, discovering stuff to upgrade your home with.
 * Lonesome Road takes place in one of the most devastated areas ever seen in the series, but the Genre Shift comes from the fact that your path through most of it is entirely linear, with only a few side-areas to explore.
 * Gentle Giant: Mean Sonofabitch, a super mutant living in Westside, is rather amicable and polite. Good luck understanding what he says.
 * "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: Both the Legion and the NCR will for one time only grant you amnesty for all previous aggressions against them if you go to work for them. This is mostly so that the player cannot too easily lock themselves out of one or two of the possible endings in the first half of the game.
 * GIS Syndrome: The very first result for "happy face" is used for
 * Except that the page it's used on is a blog post that was made a full year after the game came out. While the face certainly came from some kind of stock image archive, it's pretty unlikely that they found the face on Google.
 * Gladiator Games: A male Courier can fight slaves or prisoners in the Legion arena. Also, while you can just bet for the outcome of the fight in The Thorn, you can get better rewards if you come down and fight the monsters alone in the arena.
 * Global Currency Exception: Dead Money plays this hard, because you can't get any caps. Instead, you use Sierra Madre chips (for vending machines) and Pre-War Money (for holographic vendors, who are still programmed to accept it). Justified in that the Sierra Madre runs on old world equipment, and that the chips themselves are actually transmuted by the vending machine into the goods that you purchase.
 * God Guise: Randall Clark, a survivalist living in Zion area helps a group of kids living nearby trying not to be noticed (he drops medicines, food and tools near their camp at night). When he notices that the kids see his help as the gift from God or angels, he doesn't want to break this illusion and show himself as a dying old man. Shortly before his death he leaves the notes stating that he has to depart deep into the mountains but he will always watch for them. The kids were ancestors of the Sorrows tribe and Clark is a Father from the Caves from their legends.
 * Golf Clubbing: There are 9-iron golf clubs around, with the VATS "Fore" attack that aim for one particular region.
 * Golden Path: Depending on who you care about, the NCR, Mr. House, and Yes Man paths could be this. Though the implications of the  may make the latter two a bit questionable.
 * Finishing every companion sidequest (all seven), with reasonably good endings, is also a part of it.
 * Gonk: Grecks, a ghoul with a lazy eye. In order to achieve this he has a really...odd mesh. Just don't comment on it.
 * Good All Along:.
 * Good Is Not Nice: The player, if played as a strictly good character, still kills his share of characters and is generally a badass.
 * Gorn: Bloody Mess; you don't have to have the perk but it makes it happen more often.
 * Gotta Catch Em All: Star Caps, Snowglobes, Companions...
 * In-universe, even. People are willing to kill for more Sunset Sarsaparilla Star Bottlecaps. Just rumor there's treasure out there, and Gold Fever (or One Hundred Percent Completion fever) will take hold of people.
 * Hilarious in that the in-universe prize for the Star Caps is . It's Fridge Brilliance, actually;.
 * Gosh Hornet: Cazadores
 * Gray and Grey Morality:  Neither of them are any more villainous or altruistic than the other.
 * Greed: The main theme of Dead Money. All of the characters involved have been consumed by greed of one sort or another, and the mythical treasure of the Sierra Madre drives prospectors insane with it.
 * Grenade Tag: Reverse pickpocketing grenades.
 * The Guards Must Be Crazy: Some of the things you can do with a high enough sneak skill qualify as this. You can, for example, massacre an entire Legion camp without them ever making the connection between the large number of corpses with bullet holes in the back of their skulls and the 'profligate' with the silenced sniper rifle.
 * Guide Dang It:
 * The companion quests. Let's run down the list, shall we?
 * 1) Arcade's quest, "For Auld Lang Syne", requires you to find certain locations in the game and visit them, at which point he'll speak to you briefly. This one is actually fairly lenient, since the triggers are always there and fairly numerous. You also only need two "points" for it to count, and there are about twenty total based on location and dialogue choices.
 * 2) Boone's is similar, but both easier and more difficult. His dialogue isn't automatic most of the time, so you don't really know you're doing it right. The only ones which you can really be sure of are Legion outposts, which are automatic triggers. A plus is that if you take him to Cottonwood Cove and that the Fort (before or after killing Caesar, it still counts), you'll get four of the five points at once.
 * 3) Raul's is hands down the worst of the bunch. You have to talk to three specific old people in the wastes with him as your companion, and you cannot have talked to them before. This is really inexcusable because one of the three simply won't talk to you if you don't follow a very specific path of dialogue with him, and you are pretty much guaranteed to meet all three before you get around to murdering a dozen or so Super Mutants to reach Raul. What's worse, the same one who will stop talking to you is also buggy, so even if you do it right it may not be counted. It only seems to work right if you talk to him last, but he's the first that you meet.
 * 4) Cass takes a while to even unlock as a companion due to her tie-in quest that requires you to trek all the way to Vegas, but after that she has the easiest one since it's available from the start. However, it will ruin another quest if you complete it.
 * 5) Veronica's quest is similar to the first two, except buggy as hell. There are nine places in the wastes where you can bring her in order to trigger dialogue. Of these nine, only four are permanent (the remaining five are lines of dialogue from the first time you meet the NPC). Assuming you even know where to look, Veronica may take days to finally remember she's supposed to say something, so you can't trigger the quest until she finally decides to do it. It seems to work better if you meet her request for a dress first, but that in itself is Guide Dang It because the type of dress she wants is the kind worn by the White Glove Society, and you have to kill or reverse-pickpocket a member to get one if you don't follow a specific line in the quest. In other words, it's three Guide Dang Its in one!
 * 6) Lily's quest is fairly simple. It's not even a quest, really. You just have to stick with her long enough to get to the bottom of her psychosis (it only takes about an in-game day if you get into a fight where she goes berserk), then decide how much medicine she should take.
 * 7) ED-E's quest doesn't require you to do anything, but is still annoying. After the first trigger goes off, which conveinently has a waypoint, you have to wait nine days for the second to work. Then you have to find someone who can activate the trigger, and you don't get any clues. The third takes another three days, but is automatic. If you're not playing in hardcore mode (and therefore have no need to sleep 8 hours a day) you could easily finish the game without getting to the final part.
 * 8) The final one is Rex, and he's the easiest since his quest is given to you before you even recruit him.
 * For something simpler and earlier, there's the quest "I Fought the Law", which most good-inclined players will miss because they're likely to side against the Powder Gangers from the start, and because the inhabitants of the NCRCF will be hostile to them, making them likely to kill Eddie and immediately fail the quest. Or one might kill him because he's got a plasma pistol. Then again, the quest is bugged and leads to a bad ending even when it should be a good one, so that's for the better, really.
 * Are you feeling a little sympathy for Dean ? Let's just hope you never, ever once questioned him in any of your talks. Insult his fragile ego a single time? You lose.
 * Dean's case is arguably the worst of the lot. Why? In the very first conversation with him, you come to a choice between a Barter skill check and a normal dialogue choice. Almost any player will obviously pick the Barter choice if at all possible because skill-requiring answers are (and should be) superior to the ones available to all characters. However, in this case picking this choice will make it . Made even more egregious by the fact that the Barter dialogue choice is simply informing Dean that he isn't bargaining from a position of power because your collars (and thus lives) are linked and he basically doesn't have a choice but to work with you... which is precisely the truth!
 * The quest I Put a Spell on You is almost legendary for its unintuitiveness, aside from a plethora of bugs. Long story short, there's a spy somewhere in Camp McCarran, and you've been tasked to single him out. After finding out there have been late-night sightings at the comm tower, you have two mission arrows: one to the comm tower, and another to the man you're workign with, Captain Curtis.   Ergo, by following the directions you have failed the quest. You could still
 * Guile Hero: A viable option for the player character.
 * Gun Accessories: Unlike the previous game, this alone will make you think twice before using the unique versions of some weapons which have better stats but cannot be modded.
 * Then again, some like the Ratslayer are more or less fully-modded versions of the base weapon along with a bonus or two tacked on.
 * Gun Porn: Vault 34.
 * The Boomer's Armory
 * The Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC adds a whole lot more weapons in the game. Enjoy.
 * Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Inverted. In the main game, your male companions are a Cold Sniper, The Gunslinger, and a Badass Bookworm who, like all fictional smart people, prefers a high-tech Plasma Defender pistol over the ballistics, blades, and blunt force of the common rabble. Your female companions are a Nightkin with a BFS and a Brotherhood Scribe who wields a Power Fist. There is also a female companion who uses a shotgun, but unless you give her slug ammo she pretty much has to be in melee range for it to work anyway. Of course, everybody has a ranged and a melee weapon that you can order them to use, so you are welcome to have everyone play the trope straight, even if they won't be that good at it.

H
"Veronica: We'll die out. McNamara: *sigh*"
 * Half Truth: Elijah says that if you help him break into the Sierra Madre he'll let you go, along with all of your partners. He's planning to kill you all, of course, but he is letting you go from his control that way, nonetheless.
 * Hand Cannon: The .44 Magnum Revolver, 12.7mm Pistol, the Hunting Revolver and its unique version, the Ranger Sequoia. There are also the energy weapons Plasma Defender and "Pew Pew". (Yes.) Then there's the handauto-cannon, the 12.7mm sub-machine gun.
 * Old World Blues adds the Sonic Emitter. Initially its none too exciting and reasonably useful, but as you upgrade it with better soundwave samples it gets better and better special effects for critical hits, the ultimate one causing explosions.
 * The Ballistic Fist plays with this trope in a more literal manner: It's a gun grafted to a Power Fist that goes off when you punch someone.
 * Hand Wave: The makers of Dead Money must have wristlash. Any element not contrived was explicitly described as "unknown" or "unexplained" in Loading Screen tips and in-game materials, although the Old World Blues add-on does explain a few things. In particular, how the Sierra Madre casino transports people around in it is totally unexplained (teleportation? robot hands popping out of the ceiling? Who knows?)
 * Played for laughs in Old World Blues: the Think Tank explain that the Courier is able to move, think, and act consciously without a brain because "tesla coils" were inserted into his/her skull. Trying to further the line of questioning just exasperates them.
 * Healing Factor: Several perks. Solar Powered makes you heal gradually, but only outdoors during daytime, and not at a rate useful for combat. Monocyte Breeder implants heal all the time, but again not at any rate useful in combat, and at the price tag of 12,000 caps and taking up a spot that you could have used to buy an implant with actual value. Rad Child heals with varying rates dependent on your radiation poisoning level. Highest level heals at an astounding 8 HP/S, but at the cost of pretty hefty hits to your SPECIAL stats.
 * Heroic Albino: Ranger Ghost. She's not the most friendly person, but she's a dedicated ranger
 * Hero with Bad Publicity: It's possible to end the game with good karma and ridiculously low reputation with pretty much every faction, including the one you're working for.
 * Hey, It's That Place!: Yes, Primm is a real place, and it does have a rollercoaster (attached to the Buffalo Bill hotel -- all three hotels in Primm are much larger, but no one really cares), and does have Bonnie and Clyde's death car (not his gun, though, but it does have his jacket, and the car is in a mall attached to the hotels). Hoover Dam, Goodsprings, Black Mountains, Nipton, Nellis Air Force Base, and a lot of other real-world locations are snuck in as well (mostly things only native Nevadans would recognize, like camping sites).
 * Hidden Elf Village: Three of them, one each for the Brotherhood of Steel, the Boomers, and Marcus's Super Mutants.
 * Hide Your Children: Averted in the main game, where some some (albeit unkillable) children do appear. Invoked in all four DLCs, though this is addressed in the only add-on where their absence is noteworthy. (The Dead Horse and Sorrows tribes of Honest Hearts have already begun to evacuate, sending the children and elderly first. The other three DLCs take place in dangerous hellholes that don't have an actual community of humans living in them, thus the lack of children makes sense).
 * Historical In-Joke: The real-life Nipton was primarily important as a place where state lotteries were held during the early 20th century. The Fallout Nipton has an important lottery too...
 * The poster I Hate Nate in Vault 11 is a pun on the I Like Ike slogan from 1952 presidential campaign.
 * Arcade's ending ]
 * Historical Villain Upgrade: In-universe example. One of the first casinos you find, in Primm, is home to a historical gallery of a couple of Bonnie and Clyde knockoffs who were more prone to cashing bad checks than holding up banks and whose greatest claim to fame was being killed accidentally by cops shooting at bank robbers.
 * Hollywood Silencer: Guns equipped with silencers make the "fwip" noise and the silencers themselves are, for all intents and purposes, a metal tube stuck onto the end of the gun. Averted in that silencers are specific to different firearms and that none are available for shotguns or revolvers, are all permanent attachments (meaning they cannot be removed once attached), and aren't completely silent (shooting and missing someone may get you noticed). In addition, there are guns in-game that come with integral silencers, like the .22 silenced pistol and SMG.
 * Honor Before Reason: With high enough karma and speech skill you can convince Legate Lanius to call off the other legionnaires and fight you by himself. However, whichever allies and companions you have with you will keep shooting anyway.
 * Also


 * Horrifically Mutilate and Torture the Sons of Bitches: How Caesar's Legion rewards the people of Nipton (mainly the Powder Gangers) for luring NCR troops into a trap, and the townsfolk for agreeing to betray the Powder Gangers. Also, depending on how you look at it, Bitter Springs could be like this.
 * Hot-Blooded: A trait in Old World Blues makes you this, increasing your damage but reducing Perception and Agility while at low health.
 * How We Got Here: Expect to spend most of the first leg of the story missions just figuring out what the hell led up to you delivering a platinum chip that was worth being ambushed and shot over.
 * Hulk Speak: Much to the delight of old-school fans, this is back in, if you set your intelligence REALLY low.
 * 100% Heroism Rating: The karma meter is the same from 3 but is nearly useless. What really matters is your reputation with each faction. Since you can't lose popularity or infamy, people could end up singing your praises for all the Fetch Questing while grudging you over blowing up their outpost last week.
 * Hurricane of Puns: Benny's Pre-Mortem One-Liner at the start of the game is chock-full of gambling puns.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: All the guns and ammo you can carry. Made even funnier with mods that make you completely naked when not wearing some kind of armor (instead of the usual game coded underwear). Just where are you keeping all your guns and knives and ammo and food and water and other odds and ends when you're completely naked?

I
"The Courier: "Better raise the price or... or you're "chip outta luck".
 * I Call It Vera: Some unique guns, such as Maria, Lucky, Annabelle, and Big Boomer. In addition, Ranger Milo calls his Cowboy Repeater 'Carmine'.
 * I Can Rule Alone:
 * I Die Free:  Though he was well loved by Caesar, and thus probably lived quite nicely, he considered having to serve the Legion (even in comfort) a Fate Worse Than Death.
 * Idiot Ball:
 * It's actually acknowledged and explained if you discuss it via dialogue choices, though it does display an extreme amount of arrogance when it comes to you and your motivations.
 * YMMV, but even his arrogance can be explained (see Fridge Brilliance tab).
 * Idiot Hero: You can play as a 1-INT wasteland wanderer with hilarious moments of ditzy stupidity but the skill points you get are considerably less.
 * Idiot Savant: You can also play as a 1-Int wasteland wanderer and eventually acquire maximum skillpoints in at least one of the Science, Medicine, Repair or Speech skills, making you a complete idiot with genius-level skills in a specific area.
 * I Found You Like This: After taking a bullet to the head, the courier is dug up by Victor and brought to Doc Mitchell's house. He then brings you back to life through surgery and gets you back on your feet.
 * I Have This Friend: Turns out that the
 * I Love Nuclear Power: Taking the Rad Child perk gives the Courier a Healing Factor whenever they suffer radiation poisoning, offsetting some of the penalties.
 * I'm a Humanitarian: The White Glove Society used to be this. And, of course, the Courier can be this as well if the player so wishes. A later perk even expands it to super mutants and ghouls..
 * Immodest Orgasm:  in The Thorn,   in Vault 21, and any prostitute you sleep with. Also, you can hear a few while walking around Gomorrah and Casa Madrid. Dr. Dala in Old World Blues takes this Up to Eleven, despite (or because of) being essentially a brain in a jar.
 * Improbable Power Discrepancy: The White Legs in Honest Hearts are basically Veteran Rangers disguised as tribals. In addition to having as much health as the Veteran Rangers, they also carry as good or better weapons (like automatic shotguns, anti-tank rifles, Tommy guns, and 12.7 submachine guns) and are the most commonly found enemies in the DLC. The only break in your favor is that White Legs have poor armor and lack the 30% damage resistance that Veteran Rangers have.
 * Partly Handwaved in that the White Legs had raided armories in the past.
 * In the vanilla game, Veteran Rangers and Legion Praetorians were originally noticeably more powerful than Brotherhood of Steel Paladins. However, this got corrected after the most recent patch, where all non-named BOS NPCs have had their hit points doubled or more, putting them on par with the game's other Elite Mooks (and, with their power armor, giving them the higher edge).
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: Lots and lots of craploads of them.
 * Private Sexton in Camp Forlorn Hope runs a collection quest where you bring him the ear of any Legionaire you kill. Get it? Legionear? You even can call him out for making such a horrible pun.
 * The Dieary of Trash

Mr. House: "... Was that an attempt at humor?""

"Courier: Can you help me find some missing people? Slave trader: I don't know anything about the refugees going missing from the Aerotech Office Park."
 * I Never Said It Was Poison / Suspiciously Specific Denial

"Dr Klein: "WELL THEN. WE'LL JUST KEEP YOU HERE WITH OUR MOST POWERFUL OF TECHNOLOGIES. THE FENCE.""
 * Infinity-1 Sword: Several. The regular Gauss Rifle, the Holorifle, the 12.7mm pistol and submachine gun, the hunting revolver, possibly the Anti-Materiel Rifle, the Super Sledge, and the Displacer Glove, just to name a few.
 * Infinity+1 Sword: Whatever weapon you find north of Westside, whether it be the Alien Blaster or the YCS/186. They're both incredibly devastating weapons, capable of one or two-shotting all but the toughest enemies.
 * There's a suit of Infinity Plus One Armor out there, as well. The Remnants Power Armor, the complete suit having a DT 6 points higher than the T51-b and no faction affiliation. However, like all great ultimate items, you have to work for it: it's on the wrong side of the Colorado river and guarded by a nest of Deathclaws. Good luck getting there! (Or you could do Arcade's loyalty quest. You simply have to talk to 6 people around the Mojave Wasteland.)
 * Arm your humanoid companion with the highest weapons in his/her specialty and they become a walking Infinity+1 Sword.
 * Give Boone the Anti-Materiel Rifle or the Gobi Campaign Sniper Rifle.
 * Give Lily a Thermic Lance or the "Oh Baby!" Super Sledge.
 * Give Veronica the Ballistic Fist or the unique displacer glove, Pushy.
 * Give Arcade the Gauss Rifle or the YCS/186.
 * Give Raul the Ranger Sequoia.
 * Give Cass the Riot Shotgun.
 * Joshua Graham is the Infinity+1 Sword of companions. He's ridiculously accurate, carries a default pistol that does more damage (both per shot and per second) than about 90 % of the guns in the game, and has such a large damage threshold (50) that he's practically invincible. Unfortunately, he's only available as a companion during the final battle of Honest Hearts.
 * Ink Suit Actor: Doc Mitchell looks like Michael Hogan with a country doctor mustache.
 * Ambassador Dennis Crocker was originally white (his original appearance can be seen on some promo material) till his lines got recorded by a black actor with an obviously black voice. Crocker's new face sculpt strongly resembles his actor, but older.
 * Insane Proprietor: The Wind-Brahmin Salesman at Brooks Tumbleweed Ranch.
 * Insurmountable Waist High Fence: Example is northwest of Brooks Tumbleweed ranch, where a pileup prevents further movement northwest. Even though you could jump on one of the blockading vehicles, you're blocked from going further.
 * Lampshaded in Old World Blues, if you tell the Think Tank you're leaving and want nothing to do with their plans.

"Thank you, thank you. [Beat] All right, let's get the fuck out of here."
 * Interface Screw: The otherwise pushover Bark Scorpions have this as a really nasty surprise. If they sting you, the poison completely distorts your screen. Not the "crippled head" kind of distortion, but completely warping your entire field of view such that you can't even see the scorpion if it's in your face. They are deadly if you give them the chance.
 * Invisible Wall: As a definitive response to players notoriously finding ways to scale terrain intended to be unclimbable in Gamebryo engine games, invisible clip brushes have been added. No clever shortcuts for you.
 * If only the players hadn't discovered new ways to scale their own inventories with "armor hopping" and coupon stairs. The Legate Camp is a popular destination.
 * Ironic Echo: When Benny and the player character first speak, the latter is on his knees and Benny's about to kill him. Guess what happens in Caesar's camp?
 * Irony: Benny notes that the game was rigged from the start...
 * Doctor Henry in Jacobstown was once a member of the Enclave, a group that considered any outsider to be a subhuman fit for execution due to their exposure to radiation (no matter how minute). And what is his current line of work? Researching a cure to help Super Mutants with mental disabilities. Because they asked him.
 * Even more special is the fact that he's working for the Mutant that helped kill Horrigan and bring about the fall of the Enclave.
 * As a female character, if you either kill Caesar or help him, there's a delicious lump of irony involved given the status of, well, every other woman even remotely connected to the Legion.
 * Is This Thing Still On??: Though it doesn't have the payoff the trope normally promises, does this after his speech, announcing his desire to leave the stage before he gets shot. Given it was a PA system, however, maybe he just didn't care.


 * Item Crafting: Of three varieties! You can use workbenches to create weapons from spare parts, use reloading benches to make or customize gun ammunition, and use campfires to cook up food or medicine.
 * It Is Pronounced KAI-sarr/InsistentTerminology: Caesar's Legion uses the Latin pronunciations.
 * In fact, how a character pronounces Caesar is a pretty good indication of how much respect they have for him. Joshua Graham calls him See-ser when you meet him in the Honest Hearts DLC, though J.E. Sawyer states that this has more to do with him being educated enough to have known of the actual Caesar before meeting Edward unlike the other Legionnaires.
 * Strangely enough though, Marcus uses the Latin pronunciation.
 * It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time: The Courier can say this about killing Jeannie May.
 * I Was Quite a Looker: Pearl, you can see her younger days depicted as nose art on the B-29 Bomber you recovered once the restoration is well underway. Possibly Old Lady Gibson as well.

J
"Silus: You're getting nothing from me. Boyd: I'm getting entertainment. That's something. So what it's gonna be?"
 * Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Lieutenant Boyd will be more satisfied if you make Silus talk by repeatedly punching him in the face rather than using speech or intelligence skills. So will Boone, for that matter, but he'd rather Silus just die.


 * Jerk with a Heart of Gold: On the outside, Cass is a swearing, alcoholic, promiscuous, foul-tempered bitch. But she is a good person deep down. She's the only companion that will leave you if you have Evil Karma, rather than everyone else who leaves you based on your reputation wth certain factions, and she's extremely loyal to, and protective of, a Good-aligned Courier, and she gets quite riled up after hearing about what Benny did to him/her.
 * The Juggernaut: Deathclaws. Deathclaw Matriarchs. Deathclaw Alpha Males. The Legendary Deathclaw. Remember the old description of The Baron of Hell in Doom? "Tough as a dump truck and nearly as big, these Goliaths are the worst things on two legs since Tyrannosaurus rex." This perfectly describes an ordinary deathclaw, to say nothing of the alphas, matriarchs and the legendary one.
 * There are few weapons that can one-shot a Deathclaw. The YCS/186 Gauss Rifle is one of them, possibly the The Anti-Materiel Rifle is too. It's doubtful that any weapon can one-shot the Legendary Deathclaw.
 * Just Following Orders: Yes Man. Because his programming says so.
 * At one point, you can ask him if he should really have just explained the details of Benny's master plan to you; his response is that he was programmed to be helpful and to answer questions, and whoever had reprogrammed him must have forgotten to add in restrictions on whose questions he was supposed to answer.

K

 * Kaizo Trap: In the House and Independent ending pathes, . Your Securitron allies will gun him down easily, but they often fail to do so before his 5 Veteran Ranger Elite Mooks armed with the best guns in the game mow down your own character.
 * Karma Houdini: After destroying the lives of two innocent people and sealing their fates to die alone, miserable and in extreme pain, Dean Domino can just walk right out of the Sierre Madre two hundred years later to start over in the Mojave if you choose to let him live.
 * Then again, considering how easy it is to tick him off and make him plan to murder you (for example, by not constantly acting as his snivelling lackey) which results in his own death, you would really have to go out of your way to placate him - how to let him live isn't listed under Guide Dang It for nothing.
 * Karma Meter: Along with the karma meter, the reputation meter for each faction from Fallout 2 makes a return. Karma only seems to dictate perks and some dialogue choices, whereas the reputation meter is the main focus of the gameplay.
 * This is a good thing, because karma can behave odd at times. For example, killing Powder Gangers nets you positive karma, whereas taking their stuff strangely counts as stealing and gets you a bit of negative karma. The amount of it is negligible, but it's confusing nonetheless.
 * Lonesome Road finally makes good use of the Karma Meter in addition to the Reputation Meter. Depending on your Karma Level and who you're supporting at the time, will radically change how Ulysses views you and your actions. At level 50 there's even a karma-based perk.
 * Karmic Death:
 * Depending on how you deal with him, Benny can eventually ends up in the same position the player was at the beginning of the game: tied up and completely at the mercy of his captors and yourself. At this point, you can choose to execute him yourself, using either the machete handed to you - or the gun you may have concealed on your person.
 * Gun Runner's Arsenal adds a challenge for killing him with his own gun, Maria. You know, the gun he shot you with?
 * Allen Marks, the supposed Big Bad in the quest to collect the star bottlecaps,.
 * If you commit corporate espionage for Alice McLafferty and finish Cass' quest peacefully, then
 * One of the challenges for Gun Runners' Arsenal is "Historical Propriety", where you re-enact the Ides of March and stab Caesar to death with a knife.
 * Katanas Are Just Better: If you get the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC, you can have a Katana as a melee weapon. It's got decent attack power, but it also attacks ludicrously fast, effectively turning you into an honourable Japanese meat grinder.
 * Kick the Son of a Bitch: Caesar's Legions ending for the Mojave is an absolutely brutal Downer Ending... but in their ending they are at least kind enough to take out the Great Khans, the Powder Gangers, and the Fiends.
 * Kill Sat: The Archimedes II orbital laser. You can acquire a remote to it.
 * Kill Them All: This is the easiest way to complete some of the main quests. Doesn't work so well when dealing with the Powder Gangers and Legions, but really, who wants to have anything to do with those jerks?
 * Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Actually semi-justified, as Hoover Dam is the only genuine power source in the Wastelands (unless you get Helios One working) that could recharge energy weapons, thus it'd be far easier to use or manufacture bullets. The game actually intentionally makes pistol ammo be more prevalently dropped.
 * Most notably, the laser tommy gun (Laser RCW) is less damaging than the real tommy gun (.45 Auto SMG).
 * King Mook: In Old World Blues, each enemy type encountered has a unique, named, "boss" version of it somewhere in the Big MT. Each mini-boss is set at level 50, with matching health.
 * The Legendary Bloatfly takes this to an insane (and probably parodic) degree. Regular Bloatflies are perhaps the least threatening thing in the Mojave, second to Giant Mantis Nymphs or Radroaches and easy prey for even a low-level Courier. The Legendary Bloatfy is the second strongest enemy in the game (no, not Old World Blues. The game. Period). The thing is somehow more dangerous than every single Deathclaw you will come across, outclassed only by the Giant Roboscorpion, which at least appears in a room containing a few defences to turn against it and lots of things to hide behind. The Legendary Bloatfly appears in a small cave surrounded by regular Bloatflies and will likely notice you before you notice it. Generally, the player will round the last corner of its cave, oblivious, and be reduced to glowing goo with a single shot before they have any idea what the hell just happened. Unless they're at the absolute peak of damage resistance, in which case it might take two shots.
 * Kitschy Local Commercial: Load screens are almost entirely poster ads, billboards, and paper paraphernalia of pre-war Nevada. The ads are generally of mediocre quality at best; one shows a 50's style Strongman lifting weights with the caption, "Build Mass With Sass! Sunset Sarsaparilla".
 * Kleptomaniac Hero: You can help yourself to anything that isn't nailed down. The game does dock a few karma points for outright stealing, but the penalty is negligible and karma isn't that important in this game anyway (thanks to the new reputation system). This can lead to the amusing irony of the "Scourge of the Wastes" being one of the most beloved residents of the wasteland.
 * Klingon Promotion: You can convince Swank to let you bring in your weapons to kill Benny, and in Gomorrah you can help Cachino to kill Big Sal and Nero. They will take over their respective casinos once you have done that. Benny himself is also head of his casino due to this, having knocked off his boss when Mr. House first set up the Strip.
 * Furthermore, you can knock off.
 * Knight in Sour Armor: Chief Hanlon and Dr. Henry.
 * Furthermore, you can knock off.
 * Knight in Sour Armor: Chief Hanlon and Dr. Henry.

L

 * Large Ham: The Think Tanks.
 * Especially Dr. Klein. Even his subtitles are in all caps. It's lampshaded as well, with him constantly complaining that the volume control of his loudpspeaker is awry.
 * The Tick, Dr. Venture, and Captain Quark are 3 of the 6 scientists. Case closed.
 * Lampshade Hanging:
 * Leeroy Jenkins: The Kamikaze trait apparently.
 * Legitimate Businessmen's Social Club: Club Zoara, inside the Gomorrah Casino.
 * Lethal Joke Item: The Abeline Kid LE BB Gun is the Fallout New Vegas equivalent of the Red Ryder Limited BB Gun, which gives a bonus critical damage and bonus critical chance.
 * Boxing gloves, or the unique Golden Gloves. Very low damage indeed, but you will find out that even a character with low Unarmed skill can KO a deathclaw with it, allowing you to take your time dismembering it with a chainsaw.
 * Euclid's C-Finder, which looks like a child's toy, is actually used as a target painter for ARCHIMEDES II.
 * Lightning Bruiser:
 * Deathclaws can run faster than you can, do a lot of damage, and have very long melee reach. Thankfully, a couple of bullets to the legs willl gimp them.
 * Legate Lanius plays this even straighter. The man is straight-up faster than any human should be, continues to be faster than you even if you cripple both his legs, hits really hard, and has nearly as much health as the Legendary Deathclaw.
 * Any super mutant. Look at how fast they run, and how powerful their running stride looks.
 * Any Level 45+ player with high Strength, Agility and Endurance is this, especially if you have the best weapons and armor in the game.
 * Lightning Gun: The Tesla cannon, and the unique Tesla-Beaton prototype.
 * The LAER (Laser Assisted Electrical Rifle) in Old World Blues
 * The Arc Welder in Lonesome Road
 * Lipstick Lesbian: Veronica. She even gives you a quest to find her a pretty dress, complete with audible Squee if you find one and give it to her.
 * A subversion at the same time, since she shows you her gratitude for finding her the dress by teaching you a new way to punch people - in her words, "the gift that keeps giving".
 * Literal Genie:
 * Literal Metaphor: The Bloody Mess perk, which causes bloodier and more gore deaths if you have it, living a literal bloody mess of organs whenever you kill somebody.
 * The Load: Waking Cloud, a companion from Honest Hearts. Her only combat skill is Unarmed, the only combat skill in the game with no ranged attacks whatsoever (Melee Weapons has a handful of thrown weapons), but her hit points are so low she literally loses fights to plants with distressing regularity. Giving her a ranged weapon means she'll live an extra 2 seconds because now the monster she's fighting has to walk to her without her charging right up to it.
 * Loads and Loads of Loading: Probably one of this game's biggest flaws. The load times themselves aren't that long, but there's lots of them.
 * The load redundancy makes this especially eg-- For example, fast traveling places the player outside a location, without preloading the interior, which is the primary reason for traveling there in the first place. There's rarely a fast travel mark directly to commonly visited characters, some of which are instead two to four maps deep from arrival. It's almost as if they were relying on design shortsightedness to inflate the playing time.
 * One of the worst examples would probably be wanting to buy stuff from Sergeant Contreras. Fast travel to Camp Mc Carran (load), enter it (load), run a minute or two, to reach the terminal building (load) and now you can either go through the airfield (load, run a minute, load) or the terminal hallways (load, run a minute, load) to get to his shack. At least, after buying you can just exit the shack and fast travel away, since the airfield counts as an outside location.
 * Loophole Abuse: Katherine Stone, the Overseer in Vault 11.
 * Lost Forever: While it has improved a lot since launch, the game is still quite unstable, and odd glitches may still manifest that will prevent even the most able player from obtaining unique items and party members.
 * Love Dodecahedron: The employees of H&H Tools spent nine minutes out of ten planning romantic trysts. You can use terminals and read personal e-mails between them planning some horizontal mambo after-hours. In fact, a couple (as in married) make up excuses to not be away from each other so they can have a tryst WITH THE SAME GUY.
 * Noodle Implements: They were also very... interesting in their choice of love toys. Amongst those mentioned in the e-mails are an accordion, a riding crop, a stovepipe, souvenir moon rocks, rubber sheets and a souvenir elephant-foot trashcan.
 * Luck Stat: A Fallout trope in general, but Deconstructed in this game. It's actually an ability to calculate probabilities and know how to nudge them in your favor. The luckiest individual in the Wasteland,, can in fact predict the future with his ability. Not that it helps him to any extent should the player decide to cross him - and you can't see the NPC stats directly without console commands either. A better example of Doing In the Wizard on the matter of luck is that one of the implants you may obtain - a probability processing unit of sorts - actually increases your luck.
 * Vault 21's hat was that everyone was equal and conflicts were solved with games of chance, essentially an in-game deconstruction of luck. Unlike most of the other Vaults, 21 did pretty well for itself...until House showed up and won the whole place in a game of blackjack.
 * Ludicrous Gibs: The Anti-Materiel Rifle. What do you expect when you use a gun made primarily against tanks and vehicles on those poor, poor people?
 * Or when you use a weapon that flings projectiles at several times the speed of sound with magnets?
 * Don't forget about the Bloody Mess perk, which lets you make a splatter house on anyone or anything by coughing at them (just so long as it's the killing hit).
 * What's truly amusing about this is that it's not just showy, but practical. Is there a body hanging just out of reach? Gib it, and you can loot it through whatever pieces of it happened to fall in your direction.