Fallout: New Vegas/Tropes M to Z

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

M
"Courier: Why don't you talk to him? You know I'm just going to tell him to leave, right? Joshua: Perhaps, but I think he's learned too much from me already."
 * MacGuffin Location: Hoover Dam, source of clean water and free power to the Mojave, is being fought over by both the Legion and the NCR.
 * To the extent that the NCR has holed up most of its troops there, leaving the rest of the border poorly defended, and the Legion - despite the poorly defended border and the success of their raiding parties across the Colorado - will not attempt to invade the Mojave without first capturing the Dam.
 * Machete Mayhem: One of the more powerful and reliable melee weapons in the game is the humble machete. This is a staple weapon of low-level Legionnaires in Caesar's Legion, and there's even an advanced version called a machete gladius and the unique Liberator.
 * Macross Missile Massacre: Gun Runner's Arsenal gives us hive missiles and Tiny Tots mini-nukes, which let you fire 9 projectiles from your missile launcher or Fat Man. Cue memories of the Experimental MIRV. An honorable mention must also be given to Lonesome Road and the Red Glare, a fully automatic rocket launcher that can be upgraded to have one of the highest rates of fire of any weapon in the game. While it doesn't fire rockets (NOT missiles; it uses its own ammunition) simultaneously, it puts them out at an almost comical rate.
 * Made of Iron: Most notably there's Legate Lanius. A lesser example would be Jean-Baptiste Cutting, The Dragon to Gloria Van Graff, and of course high-level monsters such as deathclaws and sentry bots.
 * A character can be specced to become this. If you have Remnants power armor, both ranks of the Toughness perk, the big brained and reinforced spine perks from the Old World Blues DLC, and the sub-dermal plating implant, you can have a DT of 53! If you have Cass as a active companion and drink Whiskey, you'll have a DT of 57! Also, if you have Endurance 10 and Life Giver at level 30 (45 if you have the three DLCs), your HP will be a whopping 620 (770)!
 * The Courier being Made of Iron is pretty much required. Over the course of the game, the Courier is shot in the head (Twice. At point blank range. Before the game even starts.), knocked unconscious and dragged for miles (Dead Money), survives having his heart, spine, and brain removed, eventually swapping them and their prosthesis out at will (Old World Blues), and can optionally waltz through three separate ground zeroes within hours of their creation. And that's without all the decision-dependent beatings s/he takes and survives. Two of the three highest-level Perks lampshade the fact that the Courier shouldn't be alive (they're called "I'm Lucky to Be Alive", and "I Thought You Died").
 * Not to mention that the player can LITERALLY be made of iron if you buy the 8000 cap sub-dermal armor implant. It works by infusing your cells with iron.
 * The backstory of the game also has Joshua Graham. In fact, a few Legion characters will mention that while Legate Lanius is a more intelligent tactician and strategist, Legate Graham was an even more powerful warrior than Lanius. It's worth noting that the seven foot tall heavily armored killing machine that fights by swinging a huge blade around was the brains relative to Joshua Graham.
 * They're not kidding. Joshua Graham was covered in pitch, set on fire, and thrown over the edge of the Grand freakin' Canyon. Not only did he live, he climbed out again and walked all the way back to his home in Utah. And not only that, Graham didn't even scream when he got thrown off, further emphasizing the fact that he's one tough cookie.
 * Mad Scientist: The Think Tanks of the Big Empty.
 * Magikarp Power: Explosives, arguably. It's a near-useless skill on a normal playthough, as even a number less than 10 is sufficient to disarm proximity mines (i.e. the only mines that matter). However, get it high enough and take the right perks (Demolition Expert and Splash Damage), and the blast radius and damage of any explosive is significantly increased. This turns weapons like the missile launcher, grenade machinegun and the Fat Man into THE MOST damaging weapons in the game. The only problem is ammo, about which this game is not kind.
 * This trope is taken Up to Eleven with the new Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC. Mini nukes and missiles that fragment into 9 cluster bombs, plasma and pulse grenades for grenade launchers, the return of the Nuka Grenade, and extremely easy-to-craft explosives made from microfusion cells and pistol powder.
 * Sneak too. With 100 sneak skill, you can sneak past most human enemies, which form the bulk of the game, or even better, put yourself in position for a sneak attack critical (an automatic Critical Hit with damage doubled).
 * Mama Bear: The Mother Deathclaw. Shoot one of her little babies and prepare for pain.
 * The Man Behind the Curtain: Mr. House, the perpetually sequestered leader, face of New Vegas, and leader of a vast army of killbots, is.
 * Man in the Machine:.
 * Match Maker Quest: Jack and Janet, another way to increase your reputation with the Boomers.
 * Matter Replicator: The Sierra Madre vending machines, which uses Sierra Madre chips as both a form of currency and base matter.
 * Meaningful Name:
 * Jason Bright, leader of a religious cult for ghouls, is a Glowing One: a ghoul so dosed up on radiation that he emits a radioactive glow. Lampshaded if you ask him about his name.
 * The name Lanius means "butcher", a word that certainly describes the Legate's approach to battle.
 * The man in charge of New Vegas, playing the NCR and the Legion against one another for his own gain? Robert House, as in "the House".
 * In the cases of Bright and House, those were the names they were born with a good 200 years previously. Foreshadowing indeed.
 * Each of the scientists in the Big MT has a name referring to an endless loop. Dr. Klein refers to the Klein bottle, Dr. Borous refers to the Ouroboros (and with a high enough INT, you can point out it's spelled wrong), Dr. Dala comes from "Mandala", a Sanskrit word meaning circle, Dr. 0 is obviously a loop, Dr. 8 is an infinity symbol turned on its side, and Dr. Mobius is named for the Mobius strip.
 * Medieval Stasis: A higher-tech version than usual, but consider, it's been 200 years since the bombs fell and the Brotherhood of Steel (in particular, the Nevada chapter you deal with) is falling into a serious rut..
 * Meet the New Boss: Caesar's manifesto will seem pretty familiar to those who've played the original Fallout and faced down The Master. In many ways, the Legion is simply the Unity all over again. You can even talk to Marcus about Caesar, and while he doesn't make an obvious direct comparison you definitely get the vibe that he's seen it before and knows it can never lead to anything good.
 * Mega Corp: The Crimson Caravan Company is the closest thing to a Mega Corp that you can get in a post-apocalyptic world. They dominate most of the commercial activities on the west coast, have offices and trading outpost all the way from California to Utah, and have lot of influence in the NCR government.
 * The Mojave Wasteland under the control of Mr. House is basically a Mega Corp in the form of a nation state.
 * The Gun Runners, while very specialized, excel in that specialization. They have access to every firearm in the Wasteland due to their ability to factory-make their own firearms, which in this post-apocalyptic wasteland is a huge deal. They are also the sole provider of weapons to the entire NCR. Their only real competition is the aforementioned Crimson Caravan and the Van Graffs, who provide energy weapons and caused the Gun Runners to drop their energy weapon lines. However, in comparison to the Gun Runners, the Van Graff's operation in the Mojave is pitifully small.
 * Mega Manning: The super-secret hidden perk Meat of Champions..
 * Mercy Kill:
 * At Nipton,.
 * Mighty Whitey: Played with a lot in Honest Hearts; both Daniel and Joshua are Mormons who have become leaders of tribal societies. Neither is terribly happy that they're interfering to such a massive degree, but they don't have/know any other way to help. Daniel in particular is incredibly indecisive, worrying about whether he's doing the right thing, and both of them put major decisions at your feet because they're uncomfortable with their level of involvement in everyone's lives. Joshua even says this to you outright about Follows-Chalk (paraphrased).
 * At Nipton,.
 * Mighty Whitey: Played with a lot in Honest Hearts; both Daniel and Joshua are Mormons who have become leaders of tribal societies. Neither is terribly happy that they're interfering to such a massive degree, but they don't have/know any other way to help. Daniel in particular is incredibly indecisive, worrying about whether he's doing the right thing, and both of them put major decisions at your feet because they're uncomfortable with their level of involvement in everyone's lives. Joshua even says this to you outright about Follows-Chalk (paraphrased).
 * Mighty Whitey: Played with a lot in Honest Hearts; both Daniel and Joshua are Mormons who have become leaders of tribal societies. Neither is terribly happy that they're interfering to such a massive degree, but they don't have/know any other way to help. Daniel in particular is incredibly indecisive, worrying about whether he's doing the right thing, and both of them put major decisions at your feet because they're uncomfortable with their level of involvement in everyone's lives. Joshua even says this to you outright about Follows-Chalk (paraphrased).


 * The Courier may complicate this even further depending on the skin tone you chose for him/her at character creation. Amusingly, the hidden quest to talk to Follows-Chalk about his desire to leave the tribe is called "Civilized Man's Burden".
 * A Million Is a Statistic: A strange meta-example with the Mr. House quest to . Of the available options are going in, guns blazing, and killing them all, or sneaking in, and blowing the whole place up. Of the two options, both give negative Karma, but the latter significantly less-so, because it's one large karma hit, instead of many smaller (but still reasonably large) hits.
 * Mind Screw: The Lonesome Drifter's.
 * Minigame Zone: The casinos, of course:
 * The Tops, which is basically the Sands Hotel After the End. Lampshaded by the fact that the main act in their theater calls itself the Rad Pack, and the ruling family calls itself the Chairmen.
 * Gomorrah, a Den of Iniquity run by The Omertas.
 * The Ultra-Luxe, which caters to a more refined clientele, run by the White Glove Society, which is made up of.
 * Mismatched Eyes: Some dogs (e.g. ones at Gibson scrap yard) have one brown and one blue eye.
 * Mix-and-Match Critters: Nightstalkers are coyote/rattlesnake hybrids.
 * Molotov Cocktail: The firebomb from Honest Hearts gives off this vibe, as it is made from a beer bottle and uses a lit rag as a fuse. In gameplay, it's more of a weaker, craftable Incendiary Grenade.
 * Money to Burn:
 * Legion Coins may not be exchangeable as currency in many places, but you can use them as ammunition if you're playing a particularly creative character who's good at tinkering with ammo.
 * Of course, the perennial favorite "Bottlecap Mine" (an IED made with Caps, the region's popular currency, as shrapnel) makes a return in this game. The head of Crimson Caravan even lampshades it.
 * Monty Haul: The Dead Money DLC is named quite appropriately. After the very frustrating and aggravating campaign, you are rewarded with Gold Bars which are worth 10000 caps each, the very high tier weapons and armor from the campaign, and over 10000 Sierra Madre chips if you gambled at the casino. Also, every three days, you get 1100 Sierra Madre chips at the Abandoned Bunker. Think they're useless now? There's a vending machine in Elijah's room. That means a practically infinite supplies of chems, stimpacks and weapon repair kits!
 * The ending of Dead Money may be a Monty Haul, especially if you win as many chips as possible and use them for free gear or trade them for pre-war cash to sell, but the campaign sure as shit makes you work for it.
 * Mood Lighting: Camp Forelorn Hope gets a brown color wash. If you play on a low detail setting, the color is instead much more desaturated than normal.
 * Morality Pet: Tabitha (the Black Mountain super-mutant radio personality) apparently relied on her robot, Rhonda, to make decisions for her. After Rhonda broke down, Tabitha became significantly worse, as her schizophrenia manifested as an imaginary Rhonda supporting her darker thoughts (the Rhonda you can hear on the radio is just Tabitha distorting her voice).
 * Mordor: The Divide.
 * More Dakka: The iconic minigun, of course, but also the light machine gun, the assault carbine (which can burn through its 24-round magazine in less than three seconds) and the many variations on the theme of submachine gun. Old World Blues includes the K9000, a Cyberdog Gatling Gun that fires magnum rounds.
 * Mugging the Monster: Freeside Thugs bring this trope to untold heights of absurdity.
 * Terrifying Presence allows your dialogue options to occasionally lampshade this.
 * Multiple Endings: Four proper endings, plus a variety of "segmented endings" for different communities and characters that all depend on the choices you make.
 * Mushroom Samba: One quest in Honest Hearts has YOU go on one.
 * The game also has the potential for a user-induced one, in that if you take multiple substances together, the visuals change. If you take every mind-altering chem and drink at once, you can make yourself temporarily go blind. Bonus points for taking enough antivenin to poison yourself and add health damage and even more visual distortion
 * Musical Theme Naming: Almost every quest is named after a classic song, along with an Incredibly Lame Pun or two ("Ant Misbehavin'").
 * My Country, Right or Wrong: Cass believes this about the NCR. While she loves her country, she just wishes that the leadership of the NCR would get their heads out of their asses. Boone has hints of it as well.
 * Elder MacNamara also has this attitude.
 * My Greatest Failure: This attitude is commonly held of by those who were there.
 * Mysterious Protector: Two of them, Mysterious Stranger and Miss Fortune, the latter simply knocking people out instead of killing them. You can get both.
 * The Lonesome Drifter is an NPC you can find along the road to Vegas. If you ask for his story, it's heavily implied that he is the Mysterious Stranger's son.
 * And a step further, you can get his Mysterious Magnum. It even plays the Stranger's theme when you draw and holster it.
 * Myth Arc: The DLCs all hint towards the Courier's confrontation with Ulysses, which is settled at the Divide in Lonesome Road.
 * Mythology Gag: "I'm looking for a man in a checkered coat. Have you seen anyone like that?"
 * A side-quest for the Kings will have one suspect identified by the name "Lou Tennant", the name the dumber Super Mutants called The Dragon in the original Fallout.
 * The friend of the witness who provides that little gem even calls him "dumb as a mutant".
 * Cannibal Johnson remembers Sergeant Dornan giving a private that had wandered into Navarro without a uniform the most blistering rant known to mankind.
 * The components needed to craft stimpacks and super stimpacks are the same ones used in Fallout 2 if you asked Myron to make them for you.
 * Near Novac you can find a busted old Highwayman. Moreover, its trunk is filled with various energy weapon ammo, hearkening back to players storing such items in the trunk as spare Highwayman fuel.
 * Does Julie Farkas's hairdo remind you of anyone? Say... Nicole, the founder of the Followers of The Apocalypse?
 * Several characters, including Yes Man and Caesar, speculate that the secret weapon Mr. House has stored in the secret bunker underneath Fortification Hill is a giant war robot he's going to use to curbstomp everything. Yes Man even massages the Courier's ego by telling him that he's such a badass, he doesn't need a giant robot to do all his work for him.

N

 * National Weapon: The tribes in the Honest Hearts DLC each have a signature weapon. The Whitelegs use Submachine Guns, the Dead Horses use War Clubs, the Sorrows use Yao Guai Gauntlets, and the New Canaanites use .45 pistols.
 * Nerf:
 * The Sniper Rifle, with its 5x crit chance multiplier all but guaranteeing crits outside of sneak attacks, was toned down in the same patch that de-nerfed the low-tier energy weapons.
 * The Feral Ghoul Reavers got nerfed massively as well. In Broken Steel, they were one of the nastiest enemies in the game, with health to rival a Super Mutant Overlord and a deadly ranged attack. Now, their health got cut significantly and they lost the ranged attack. They're still extremely dangerous, but not as ridiculous as they were.
 * The Slayer perk was nerfed from previous Fallout games. "All hand-to-hand attacks become critical hits" was seen as a bit much even for an endgame perk, so instead, it was changed into a perk that increased attack speed by a third.
 * Fire Geckoes, while still somewhat nasty, are no longer the Demonic Spiders as they were in Fallout 2.
 * The Varmint Rifle got nerfed hard in a patch since it gets the damage decrease of the Service Rifle without the rate of fire boost, that it is almost impossible to kill anything with it in a single VATS round.
 * The benefit from the Grim Reaper's Sprint perk was reduced from a complete refill of AP for a VATS kill to a refill of 20 AP, making it a lot less useful in clearing out hordes of enemies without ever having to fight in real time.
 * Never Found the Body: . He is so widely speculated to be alive that Caesar has forbidden his name to be spoken, mostly due to his reputation as the ultimate Implacable Man who miraculously survived fatal wounds on an almost regular basis.
 * Never Mess with Granny: Lily, a Nightkin supermutant who is roughly 250 years old and alternates between talking about her grandchildren and chopping enemies in half with a helicopter blade. And she has a split personality where she blames all her violent tendencies on "Leo".
 * Never Trust a Trailer:
 * The Blue Moon trailer features a gorgeous view of a fully illuminated New Vegas in the background. In the actual game, however, only the four casinos are actually lit up. The trailer, as well as some bits in the intro narration, suggest that Obsidian might have intended New Vegas to be a completely pristine pre-war city. In the actual game, it is revealed that the city had undergone centuries of dilapidation until Mr. House decided to repair the casinos as a means of welcoming the NCR. The Limits of the game engine might have something to do with this, as the game's intro also shows Vegas as a near pristine pre-war city.
 * New Meat: 10 of Spades. He's called that, because he's too green to earn Ace of Spades as his callsign.
 * Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
 * If you (check the bottom of the note if you don't believe us).
 * Also gets rather ham-fisted in Lonesome Road, where it's made clear, in no uncertain terms,.
 * Nigh Invulnerable: With the Stealth suit Mk II (a suit of sentient Powered Armour) you get in Old World Blues, when you hit relatively low (about 40%) health, you have a stimpak and Med-x administered. And the rate of it is insane - about 1 dose of Stim per second. This renders you almost invincible in Casual, as long as you're not being wailed upon by about eight enemies at once, or fighting the Giant Robo-Scorpion with it's near insta-kill laser.
 * Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: This game loves playing with this.
 * First, there's Victor, the cowboy robot unicycle.
 * Primm has Primm Slim, who is another robot cowboy. Amusingly, there's a bit of dialogue where you have to clarify which robot cowboy you're talking about.
 * There's also Raul Tejada, the 230 year old ghoul vaquero mechanic.
 * And let's not forget cowboy-ghoul-mercenary-dominatrix Beatrix Russel.
 * Nintendo Hard:
 * The game gives you the option of Hardcore Mode, which simulates the post-apocalyptic experience. What does this mean? You have to eat, drink, and sleep regularly to survive. Ammo has weight. Stimpacks heal over time instead of instantly. They also can't heal limbs any more; you need a doctor's bag or and actual doctor for that. That said, doing this is at best a minor annoyance for a decent player: there is more than enough food, water and beds to cover your needs. The only thing in short supply is doctor's bags, which can be supplemented cheaply by actual doctors.
 * Then there's the DLC Dead Money, which was apparently written by a Killer Game Master: you lose all your gear at start and are given low-condition, barely protective junk in return. There's toxic gas clouds all over causing a constant HP drain. The puzzles are a tad harder. There are traps everywhere. The good supplies are hard to come by at first. The Ghost People within can't just be beaten to death without a huge health drain (because they level with you). The whole thing is in a dark, terrible tint that will make you want to punch the screen. It also helps with not seeing the freakin' bear traps. Which are everywhere. And to top it off, there are speakers and radios which set off your explosive collar; Save Scumming is the way to find and deactivate (or outrun) them. At least you're warned.
 * Don't forget to play it on Hardcore mode! Enjoy your stay.
 * Whereas Dead Money was Nintendo Hard in terms of dungeon exploration, all the DLC is Nintendo Hard in terms of straight-out combat. All the enemies level with you, which actually makes being at high levels a disadvantage, since every single normal enemy is tough enough that they'd be considered a major boss character in the vanilla game. And you'll often have to fight several at once. This is especially bad in Dead Money though, because you don't get your high damage weapons, and the Ghost People don't take extra damage from headshot.
 * The game's project director Joshua Sawyer made the JSawyer mod, essentially a Director's Cut that rebalances the game to how he originally envisioned it. Your base carrying weight is reduced by 100, your hit points, XP gain rate and max level take sharp drops, and most stimpaks have lost effectiveness while all start having weight. All the stuff you get from pre-order DLC you have to find hidden in-game. Hardcore is on by default and your survival values start dropping a lot faster than in the base game. Some of the more common weapons and armor have been buffed (and most armor also has some level of damage reduction), which helps you in the short-term but also means the high-class gear doesn't put you at as big an advantage. It also means you die a lot faster.
 * No-Tell Motel: Bison Steve was this BEFORE the war. You find a ransom note. A skeleton on the bed next to a blood stain that's at chest level then another skeleton in the tub with a knife and surrounded by drugs. Murder-suicide, anyone?
 * Maybe it's a Stealth Pun, since the real-world equivalent is "Buffalo Bill's".
 * No Campaign for the Wicked:
 * The game prides itself on making certain that none of the factions are straight out "good" or "evil", with reminders like NCR being ineffective at defending its interests in stark contrast to the Legion inspiring such strict order that even the Fiends won't attack their territory, but... of the companions for the Courier, nearly all fall under either pro-NCR or neutral, and two will even abandon you outright for supporting the Legion. Couple that with a lot of doors being closed to players for throwing their lot in with the Legion... yeah. There aren't a lot of incentives for siding with the Legion for anything but the different story missions.
 * Honest Hearts also plays this straight: despite your ability to side with the Legion in the main game, you can't side with the White Legs in Zion, who are attempting to join the Legion. There are numerous potential Justifications/Hand Waves available, but none are brought up.
 * Word of God also alluded to this concerning Joshua Graham—his Fallout: Van Buren counterpart, The Hanged Man, was a Token Evil Teammate played quite straight, with great stats, but severe social consequences for bringing him along. For his appearance in Honest Hearts, this was deemed too bland a character, and wouldn't be interesting. Considering how conflicted he is when you meet him, this was clearly the correct move.
 * Ironically, when programming a character along the lines stated above (powerful, but antagonizing), the end result was Boone, who is essentially the "good" counterpart to the above character: very powerful, but attacks Legion on sight, essentially creating instant enemies for otherwise neutral player characters.
 * Ulysses was also a Token Evil Teammate, however according to the developers he can persuaded to serve a different cause completely.
 * No Celebrities Were Harmed:
 * Mr. House basically is Howard Hughes.
 * His securitron friend Jane is based on Jane Russell.
 * Several casinos and landmarks were given this treatment, such as Bison Steve = Buffalo Bill's, Dinky the T-Rex = Dinny the Dinosaur/Mr Rex, and The Tops = The Sands.
 * Benny is based on mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, right down to the tacky suit.
 * Mr. New Vegas is Wayne Newton, famous announcer known as "Mr. Las Vegas". And literally so as the character is actually voiced by Newton.
 * No Fair Cheating:
 * Have the PC version and used the console? No achievements for you! Even if you do it to fix a Game Breaking Bug. Achievements can re-enabled by saving and quitting, then going back to the game.
 * If you are in a casino, saving the game also shuts down all the gambling options for a minute as an "anti-cheat" measure to prevent save-scumming.
 * Similarly, you cannot click through the type-up sequence for the hacking minigame if you just exited and re-entered the computer terminal, until the "SECURITY RESET" warning at the very top of the monitor goes away. All this means is you just have to wait 5-10 seconds before you can try again.
 * Which is strange compared to Fallout 3, where doing this to avoid getting locked out of terminals was actually recommended in one of the loading screens.
 * Non-Action Guy:
 * The idea behind the Good Natured trait. Your combat skills take a hit, but a whole bunch of non-combat skills get a boost, and since you have the option of getting a couple of party members to do the fighting for you, you can still survive when violence becomes necessary. That also does not prevent you from taking a level in badass by putting skill points appropriately.
 * What's funny is that this trait actually has the opposite intended effect. Since you can't max out skills like in Fallout 3, you have to decide which skills you want to build up. This trait takes points away from the combat skills you will never use (depending on how you like to play, you'll only ever use one or two combat skills, maybe three at most) and puts them into skills you will, almost certainly resulting in a net gain. By putting skill points into combat skills anyway, your character can deal with practically any situation.
 * Even better, the Old World Blues DLC has the Skilled trait, which gives you +5 to all skills at the cost of a -10% exp gain. Combined with the Good Natured Trait, this is a net gain of +10 to a lot of skills while also removing the -5 penalty to your combat skills. The experience loss can be negated by a perk which you can get at second level.
 * Sort of. The 10% penalty is applied first, then the 10% bonus is applied to the intermediate calculation, giving a net loss of 1% XP (1*.9*1.1=.99).
 * Nonstandard Game Over:
 * In Dead Money,.
 * Also in Dead Money,.
 * Noodle Incident:
 * You can find a computer log in Old World Blues which says steps are being taken to avoid a repeat of Incident:PLAYTIME . There were cyberdogs involved, and fixing it took up a good portion of the research budget.
 * Pete, the Boomers' historian, makes an oblique reference to at least one occasion in which the Boomers set off a nuclear warhead, and implies that the incident resulted in the otherwise heavily pro-ordnance Boomers banning the use of atomic weapons.
 * No One Should Survive That: The response you will get when you catch up with the people who shot you in the head and buried you alive at the start of the game.
 * No OSHA Compliance:
 * Standard for the course in the Fallout verse. Though the Bison Steve hotel gets kudos. Pre-War there was a platform that led directly to the tracks for the Roller Coaster. Not to the loading/unloading platform, just in the middle of the tracks.
 * Subverted with the Hoover Dam. There are guard rails and there is a fence to block anything going into the intake valves, including stray players trying to sequence break.
 * Followed through in many other cases where toxic waste is dumped in places such as a fire station. The REPCONN headquarters' tour guide also lampshades this by constantly reassuring you that no safety measures are required for toxic waste dumps because "nothing bad will ever happen."
 * Not So Different:
 * are extremely similar. Both are or were members of . Both lost their fathers at a young age. Both are well educated . Both believe in the greater good, even if it is at the expense of the individual good . Both prove to be.
 * Veronica also points out that both the Boomers and the Brotherhood of Steel are quite similar, both being aggressively xenophobic hoarders of technology.
 * The New Canaanites and Tribal clans in Honest Hearts, which is lampshaded by Joshua Graham. While the Mormons wear more clothing and retain a number of Pre-War customs and technologies, like their would-be converts, they're a spiritual people who treat one another as belonging to one large family.
 * Not Staying for Breakfast: If Benny survives his night with a black widow Courier, he leaves a note that manages to be infuriating and endearing at the same time.
 * NPC Scheduling:
 * In the Lonesome Road add-on, there are many instances where you will find a cache of goodies and opening it or merely approaching it will cause a group of angry npcs to kill you. It helps immensely to lay frag mines down in the entrances to buildings before you go in.
 * Extremely obvious in Old World Blues, when you find an item titled "Take [X]" instead of the standard "name-weight-value" readout. Taking the object spawns another wave of baddies. Fortunately you can grab it without taking it and carry it to a safe location, as they only spawn once you put it in your inventory.

O
". . ?"
 * Obvious Beta: As one might expect of a game developed by Obsidian, the story is unique and lovingly crafted, but the bugs and glitches are plentiful and the game is prone to crashing even after several updates.
 * Off-Model: Strafing to the left as a female Courier causes your left arm to suddenly gain a new joint. Pre-patch, there were some that were unintentionally hilarious.
 * Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The description of Elijah's escape from the Big Empty and the aftermath of it paints a darn impressive picture of it, as does the holotapes and terminal entries left by him, Ulysses and Christine. But the description is somewhat vague and unreliable (it is given by members of the Think Tank), the holotapes and terminal entries only touch on the impressive things, and since it happened before the Courier got there, and Elijah doesn't tell us much of what happened when the Courier meets him, it remains mostly offscreen...
 * Offscreen Teleportation: Both of the Mysterious Protectors. Victor seems to always be one step ahead of you, but it turns out he's got a justification for that.
 * Oh Crap:
 * Probably the best Oh Crap to come from Benny is if.
 * Probably the best Oh Crap to come from Benny is if.

"Courier: I got better."
 * If you tell the lone NCR Ranger attempting to use a bunker as a safehouse that the Brotherhood of Steel have you hostage - "Ha, ha, not a slaver collar... hey, what's that noise?".
 * In the Wild Card ending,.
 * Jessup gets one in Boulder City when he recognises the Courier, remarking that he saw you get shot in the head by Benny in Goodsprings and you're supposed to be dead.
 * Jessup gets one in Boulder City when he recognises the Courier, remarking that he saw you get shot in the head by Benny in Goodsprings and you're supposed to be dead.

""The way I look at it, there must've been some cloning accident in the past.""
 * Omnicidal Maniac: The Toaster. No, you don't need to have Wild Wasteland enabled to see this.
 * One-Hit-Point Wonder: The Cloud in Dead Money can turn you into this in Hardcore mode if you don't have the stims to keep your health up, especially in the early game. Half the time you'll be throwing your companions at enemies to avoid using your precious healing items.
 * One-Man Army:
 * The pro-NCR path more or less requires you to be this. Even if you aren't following that path, a high-level character with the right equipment can literally be this.
 * Ranger Stella, one of the possible opponent in the arena. She apparently refused to be given a machete in the arena, prefering to fight with just her bare hands, and she wasted just about anyone thrown at her, from slaves and recruit legionaries up to veteran legionaries and an elite centurion. When you fight her, she can cripple limbs with one hit.
 * Randall Clark, the Survivalist, wiped out most of the cannibalistic Vault 22 dwellers through guerrilla warfare after they killed the Hispanic refugees he was watching over. The Vault dwellers took to calling him the Evil Spirit.
 * One-Time Dungeon:
 * The Securitron Vault was intended to be such, with the player being unable to re-enter once it is completed, and the guard's dialogue not permitting you to leave until you complete the task. However, the actual implementation permits you to leave (using dialog or killing the guards) as long as you don't complete the section.
 * The Dead Money DLC cannot be visited after it is completed, unlike the Old World Blues and Honest Hearts add-ons. In said DLC, the vault of the Sierra Madre is also closed off after you leave.
 * One Stat to Rule Them All:
 * Like all Fallout games, Intelligence is the most important stat. Period. It determines how many skill points you get each level up and figures into several speech checks. Following close, but not strictly necessary, is Luck. Luck allows you to win the casino games, specifically blackjack. A minimum Luck of 7 (which is easy enough to get thanks to the Luck implant, Naughty Nightwear, and the Lucky Shades if you can manage the Legion rep) will ensure that you win almost every hand. You'll be able to clean out every casino on and off the Strip. The combined payout for every casino comes out to about 40000 caps, which means you're set for life. Luck also provides the most skill points, since it grants a +1 boost to every skill for every two points invested.
 * Repair and Barter are useful skills if you want to make a LOT of money. You can sell higher and buy lower with the Barter skill, and repairing items significantly increases the value of it. For example, having 90 repair and Jury Rigging will allow you to repair a near broken super sledge with a shovel, increasing its value by over 2000 caps. It's dozens of times more lucrative than Luck if you keep everything you loot and wait until you have the perk.
 * Speech and Science are unquestionably necessary to achieve the best endings in the game, and they need to be really high at that. You need to manage 90 in both to get the best endings, and a full 100 to talk down the bosses.
 * Only One Female Mold: Even the old wrinkle faced women have young shaped bodies.
 * Only Six Faces: For no good reason. Face Gen isn't cheap to lease, and anyone who's created a character for Oblivion knows the breadth of customization possible. The same software was leased for this game, yet every character looks like one of a small handful of clones.
 * This is probably a shout out to a joke from the earlier Fallouts in which there were only 6 sprites and it got mercilessly lampshaded by the same developers as this game.

""Numbness will subside in several minutes.""
 * Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
 * Sort of. One minor Frumentarius that you meet greets you for the first time with "Hail Caesar" (hard C) and the very next sentence says it again, this time with a soft C.
 * Cachino speaks with an Italian accent when you first meets you, but then drops it after you show him his journal. Justified because, like all Strip families, the accent and attitude is part of his family's "character" (mafia), which he doesn't need in personal conversation.
 * Santiago also loses his accent when you reveal that you were sent to settle his debts with the Garretts. He even admits its an act so he can charm his way out of this sort of thing.
 * Optional Sexual Encounter: Let's see. There are the hookers in New Vegas, Freeside, and Westside, in the Thorn, Sarah Weintraub in the Vault 21 hotel if you bring her enough Vault Suits, and  with the Black Widow perk. Finally, there's Fisto, who, as the name implies, is a robot that performs special services.

"Courier: Raise that gun and I will kill everyone in this room."
 * Oracular Urchin: The Forecaster.
 * Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: The 12.7mm submachine gun is one of the few weapons in the Guns category with no real-world counterpart or inspiration. It looks like a brick. Add the silencer mod to it (which is far larger than the silencers other guns get), and it looks like a brick with a piece of pipe on the end. Also, the laser pistol and laser rifle retain their rectangular appearance from Fallout 3, but the rifle can be made to be even more boxy by attaching the scope to it. The result is a box with another box suspended several inches above it. A scoped laser rifle actually takes up so much of the screen in first person mode, it can make seeing things to your right difficult.
 * Outlaw Couple: Vikki and Vance, who, according to the claims of the robot that works as a tour guide in their museum, were not copycats of the former Trope Namers, as they began their own "crime spree" two days before Bonnie and Clyde began theirs. The pair's crimes were, however, pretty low key, and consisted mostly of shoplifting and con artistry. Their story still ends in a tragedy as they were unfortunate enough to caught in the massive crossfire between the police and a bunch of bank robbers, which resulted in them getting shot to pieces.
 * A couple of idiots try to emulate them by stealing their clothes and gun, but it's pretty easy to convince them how badly this will go.
 * Outscare the Enemy:
 * This can work against Caesar's legion on one occasion..
 * With the Terrifying Presence perk, you can intimidate hardened badasses in cowering like children. Of note, you can scare the crap out of Caesar himself, turn Jean-Baptiste Cutting (a murderous psychopath who vaped a dude for fun) into whimpering wuss, and scare an entire team of Brotherhood soldiers into submission when they both outnumber and outgun you. It may be a largely useless perk, but it's easily the funniest.

"Courier: "I'll wear your heads like you do that dog's." Vulpes: "Legionnaires! We have a problem!""
 * Terrifying Presence is essentially made of pants-shittingly terrifying speech checks. Like scaring the dog-helmeted Vulpes Inculta, right after he slaughtered the entirety of Nipton.


 * Also of note is convincing some mercs to leave quaint, idyllic, Super Mutant owned Jacobstown alone because if they don't, instead of dealing with a village of pissed off Super Mutants, they'll have to deal with you.
 * North Vegas has a similar instance with a Speech check. You need to scare off some squatters. After you ask nicely, and they refuse, you can inform them that you only ask once. Later on in the same mission, squatters in the sewers can be made to fear a mob bearing down on them if they continue to make trouble.
 * Out with a Bang: Killing is easy with the Black Widow perk.

P
"In-Game Warning: You get the premonition that while you'll be unable to return to the Mojave until you solve the mysteries of the Big Empty, you WILL be able to take anything you can carry with you, and you WILL be able to return to the Big Empty any time after completing this adventure. Courier: If you stole my brain, then how the hell am I still functioning? Dr. Klein: WE HAVE NO IDEA! THIS LINE OF QUESTIONING ISN'T IMPORTANT TO US NOW! WHY MUST YOU ASK THESE TANGIENTAL QUESTIONS! STOP IT!"
 * Pacifist Run: It's possible! It may be easier if you get someone else to do the killing for you.
 * Painting the Fourth Wall:
 * Obsidian addressed complaints about Dead Money in regards to personal item whereabouts and the ability to return in the newest DLC, among others:

"Boone: *smug tone* Thumbs down, you son of a bitch."
 * The Old World Blues epilogue actually calls the player out if they rush through the main quest, since several of the good endings rely on you reaching every location and finding every single upgrade for the Sink personalities.
 * Paper-Thin Disguise: Partially averted with the faction disguises. Coming near enough to interact with members will reveal you to any, even to the lowliest mooks if your infamy is high enough. But still, you're wearing the same hat, tailed by the same companions, and they don't seem to take notice of a female wearing legionnaire armor.
 * The Password Is Always Swordfish:
 * Every password you steal is always something very silly or at least words that can be found in a dictionary. Such as 123456789 for Raul's cell. All hackable terminals all have passwords in the form of words which can be found in most dictionaries.
 * Seemingly averted on the HELIOS ONE terminal passwords, where the two terminals have super long passwords with seemingly random letters and numbers, until you find out that the number sequences can be converted from hexadecimal into ASCII, producing the phrases "My voice is my passport" and "Too many secrets"—both encoded phrases from the movie Sneakers.
 * It is implied the reason the passwords are so simple is because of your own hacking skills essentially resetting the password into a guessing game.
 * In the latter case, it was Raul himself who programmed it, thinking that no one will ever bother reading the terminal where he writes down the password. He is Surrounded by Idiots up in Black Mountain, after all.
 * You can get past the REPPCON HQ security on the top floor by guessing the password, 'Ice Cream', by being lucky or stupid enough.
 * Many passwords set by technicians are good (even if they are common words they at least have non-standard capitalization or elements of 1337 sp34k) and common passwords are more than likely a reference to Real Life practices. The hacking minigame can be also considered a Story and Gameplay Segregation designed to convey the 'vintage' feeling of the hex editor.
 * In Vault 11, the password to a computer is kept in an unlocked footlocker in the same room. The note simply reads "This password was found shamefully close to its user's terminal."
 * Pay Evil Unto Evil: The 'best' path for the "Eye for an Eye" quest (which gives you the best NCR rep boost) involves . Before doing this though, hopefully you remembered to get the family in the slave pen out first. The strung-up Great Khan on the outskirts of town will live through it just fine.
 * Percussive Maintenance: When a low-condition gun jams, the Courier smacks it once or twice during the reloading animation.
 * Plea of Personal Necessity:.
 * Plot-Powered Stamina: Normally played straight, but averted in Hardcore mode - going too long without sleep (or food or drink, for that matter) will increasingly weaken your character, and ultimately kill them if allowed to get bad enough.
 * Point of No Return:
 * Once you choose to undertake the mission, there's no turning back, though the game does at least warn you about this, unlike the corresponding situation in Fallout 3. However, unlike Fallout 3, there are four ending paths to Fallout: New Vegas and each ending montage varies greatly depending on your actions throughout the game. Trying to program a Playable Epilogue that takes all of these factors into account would be an entire game in itself.
 * There's also a lesser Point of No Return in the form of which faction quest you choose to pursue. There's a lockout point in each questline which alienates you from the other three. The only two questlines that can be played concurrently are Yes Man and Mr. House, and you still have to choose one prior to the final mission.
 * Yes Man is the only one you can never alienate plus if killed as he will just respawn in another Securitron. This is to make certain that the player cannot render the game unwinnable.
 * Once you complete the Dead Money DLC, you may stay as long as you like, but you can't return to the Sierra Madre casino once you do leave. Might be worth going back and getting everything you want. Also, you can't return to the Mojave until you complete the DLC's questline, as Elijah has a explosive collar on you, and he can blow it up at any time if you don't cooperate.
 * Poisoned Weapon: A Courier with a decent survival skill is able to concoct poisons of varying lethality, then apply them to melee weapons. It's more of Awesome but Impractical as the poison is removed after one strike, but it's worth it to stealthily toss a throwing knife at a deathclaw and watch its health bar drain completely.
 * Politically-Incorrect Villain: Caesar's Legion makes no pretense about it: they think women are inferior to men physically and mentally, and should Stay in the Kitchen. Also, they think of Ghouls and Super Mutants as nothing more than savage beasts, even though the majority of them actually aren't so bad. Just one more reason to remember they represent sociological regression, not progress. This is arguably part of the idea, though. Caesar is trying to turn back the clock, and values have to come with that package.
 * Post Mortem One Liner: Boone gives us a very good one after :


 * Power Fist:
 * The Power Fist makes a comeback, but the big daddy of them in the game is the Ballistic Fist: a glove with a SHOTGUN attached to it which triggers on contact. AWESOME!
 * Power Fists and other brawling weapons are Veronica's Weapon of Choice.
 * Power Perversion Potential: A memo describing a shipment of Stealth Boys with some missing is followed by another memo alluding to regulations regarding sexual harassment and the unauthorized use of military hardware.
 * Praetorian Guard:
 * Caesar's personal guards: they are even called that in the game.
 * The Centurions, Caesar's elite, wear armor made from pieces scavenged from defeated enemies. This armor includes pieces scavenged off of Brotherhood soldiers and Super Mutants. Badass Army indeed...
 * The Veteran Rangers serve in this capacity for President Kimball and General Oliver.
 * The Prankster: Private Davey Crenshaw.
 * Precision F-Strike:
 * This exchange:

"Don't do that, baby. Not crucifixion. I could be up there for days with those twisted creeps laughing and pointing. The Courier: Pass the time thinking over your mistakes. You sick, vindictive fuck!"
 * Also:

"..
 * Let President Kimball finish his speech at Hoover Dam for a classic Is This Thing Still On? Moment.
 * Prepare to Die: Done as a joke by, of all people. :

."


 * Press Start to Game Over: Once you start out in Goodsprings, try heading directly north to New Vegas through deathclaw infested territory. See how far it gets you.
 * Properly Paranoid:
 * Mr. House believes that it is only a matter of time before the NCR betrays him and use military force to annex New Vegas. The NCR on the other hand thinks that Mr. House will use his robot army to betray the Republic and drive them out of the region after they defeat the Legion at Hoover Dam. They were both correct.
 * His half-brother Anthony was improperly paranoid about a lot of things (like germs, foreigners, and people trying to steal his "thought energy"), but he was bang on the money in thinking that RobCo was trying to drive him out of business. It was... because it was secretly controlled by Mr. House, who was looking for revenge for Anthony stealing their father's company from him.
 * One of the Vaults has its citizens sectioned off into "red" and "blue" factions and is filled with HAL-9000-looking security cameras. Most of their journal entries display paranoia towards the people on the other side, but one person believes that the entire Vault is part of a psychological experiment, and they've all been drugged to forget that they used to be patients in a mental institution. He seems to be right, but he can't trust himself because he now knows that he's insane.
 * Pstandard Psychic Pstance: The holograms in Dead Money will do this before attacking.
 * Psycho for Hire: Jean-Baptiste Cutting.
 * Psychopathic Manchild: If you read the fluff text in the back of the collectors edition guide, it's revealed that Caesar is pretty much this. He also has a pretty impressive moment if you bluntly refuse to serve him.
 * Punch Clock Villain: It seems every Vault Overseer loyally went ahead with their experiment protocols, despite knowing full well that the world had ended and they were on their own, even in cases where it should have been obvious to anyone with any common sense that the experiment would not only kill the Vault inhabitants, but likely result in the Overseer's own death as well.
 * For Vault 34 though, this is the case of the inherent flaw (there were just too many guns around and the vault was overpopulated), and even when the Overseer has no interest in the vault experiments, not much could be done. It was probably designed to be a power keg waiting to blow.
 * Punched Across the Room: If you have high enough Unarmed skill, this can be one of the death animations. Veronica frequently does it as well. If you're using the Power Fist or Ballistic Glove, this will happen to everything you punch to death. The Greased Lighting from the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC, with its boosted attack speed, will frequently uppercut enemies into the air.
 * Pyromaniac: Cook-Cook, one of the Fiend Bosses.
 * Pyromaniac: Cook-Cook, one of the Fiend Bosses.

Q

 * The Quisling:

R

 * Ragnarok Proofing:
 * An integral part of the Fallout universe, but the example that truly shines is the Lady. This universe's WW 2-era engineers must have been remarkable,.
 * A B-29 really did crash into Lake Mead on July 21, 1948. And given the report recently done, is still mostly intact.
 * There are numerous wrecks at the bottom of freshwater lakes and some rivers. Due to low corrosion and few animals living that deep, they do tend remain in fairly good shape.
 * Averted with most other Pre-War stuff left behind in the wasteland, which are either so decayed they're useless or on the verge of breaking down entirely. With the exception of those still being maintained, like the Las Vegas Monorail, most tech (including firearms) is by this point produced long after War ended. Even household appliances that are seemingly intact are no longer functional.
 * It is also lampshaded by the, who are a bit surprised to find that their bunker is still in more or less good condition and not caving in after years of neglect.
 * Rainbow Pimp Gear: As usual, a possibility.
 * Rape as Drama:
 * Cook-Cook is a notorious rapist, so much so that a male bounty hunter and even a lot of NCR soldiers are afraid of him..
 * Siri, a slave in the Fort, implies that this is the lot of almost every woman under the Legion. And if you play a female Courier, that some legionaries plan on doing it to you.
 * Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: The Greased Lightning power fist from the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC has a ridiculous attack rate at the cost of reduced damage. With the right perks, you can hit roughly three times per second.
 * Real Is Brown: New Vegas plays around with this; there's a surprising amount of color in the Mojave Wasteland, especially New Vegas itself, but as you approach Camp Forlorn Hope, the color is leached out of the setting, making everything appear in shades of dull brown.
 * Recycled in Space: Caesar's Legion is the Romans IN POST APOCALYPTIC NEVADA ! The Romans take offense to this horrible slur.
 * The game itself is The Western After the End.
 * Red Oni, Blue Oni:
 * For the NCR, Colonels Cassandra Moore and James Hsu are red and blue, respectively. For example, Colonel Hsu prefers to resolve the problem with the Kings peacefully by providing supply for The Kings, while Colonel Moore just prefer to kill them all.
 * In Honest Hearts, Daniel is the blue while Joshua Graham is the red.
 * Veronica calls attention to this between the Followers of the Apocalypse and the Brotherhood of Steel, though it can be difficult to tell which is red and which blue. The Followers have a good cause, but a woeful lack of resources, while the Brotherhood is practically second only to the Enclave in resources, but lacks any legitimately good cause.
 * Refuge in Audacity: You, Boone and ED-E storming Caesar's fort and killing everyone inside, Caesar included. Boone even comments on it. Lampshaded by Mr. New Vegas later, though he was rather surprised on how the assassins evade heavy security even though the truth is you just storm your way in, killing anyone that gets in the way.
 * The Remnant: The remnants of the Master's Super Mutant army, which has split into the State of Utobitha and Jacobstown. In addition to them, there is the, composed of the scattered handful of remaining members. . The Brotherhood of Steel chapter you find hiding in Nevada is also a Remnant and a shadow of their former power.
 * Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: The "Thought You Died" perk from Lonesome Road.
 * Retcon: Used to explain the significant departure from the plasma rifle as seen in previous games to Fallout 3. The classic Plasma Rifle is now the "Plasma Caster", while the new truly rifle-shaped plasma rifle is a format encouraged by a Colonel Moretti. You see the name turn up on the "Future Weapons Today" cover on a loading screen: "Colonel Moretti slams the venerable P-94!" And in several terminals in the Repconn HQ, you find a weapons project that was authorized by the same Colonel Moretti and resulted in the Q-35 Matter Modulator, which appears to be the first functional prototype iteration of the Plasma Rifle as seen in Fallout 3 and as a low-mid tier energy weapon in Fallout: New Vegas. The explanation for why it shows up on the east coast is easy: the Enclave refined it to field-deployable status it and produced it over there. The reason for its apperance on the West Coast since Fallout 2 could be explained by the Van Graffs or other energy weapon manufacturers salvaging the field-ready plasma rifle design from ruined Enclave bases.
 * Retired Badass: You can recruit a squad of them to aid you in the final battle..
 * Retired Badass Roundup: The entire quest of "For Auld Lang Syre".
 * Retro Universe:
 * It wouldn't be Fallout without it. Though it manages to not only have a 1950's vibe in it, but also combines that with a late 19th Century Western feeling in the more rural areas outside the Vegas Strip itself.
 * A late 19th Century Western where one can easily find HK 416 carbines with ACOGs on their MIL-STD-1913 rails and digital camouflage, anyway.
 * Revolvers Are Just Better: When an old cowboy-style revolver badly outclasses a plasma pistol that was cutting edge before the Great War, you know this trope was overplayed.
 * Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves:.
 * "Ride of the Valkyries": Plays during the launch at the end of "Come Fly With Me".
 * Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The Courier, if they so choose, and Boone, in two of his endings. Ulysses, as well, though most of it occurs off-screen.
 * Robosexual:
 * The owner of the Atomic Wranger.
 * You as well, if you decide to test it out before delivering it to the Atomic Wrangler.
 * ASSUME THE POSITION.
 * Robot Buddy:
 * ED-E. Flies, allows you to spot enemies from really far away... And kick some ass with his laser while playing a bugle sound.
 * Invoked with the Mk II Stealth Suits AI from Old World Blues, a slavishly loyal and eager to please Robot Girl, who whines when you put her away and sadly asks "Will you love me if I help you hide?" when you put her on. She also feeds you Stimpaks and Med-X when you're hurt.
 * The appliances in Big MTs "Sink" facility can all speak and offer useful services, at least once you find their personality backups.
 * Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Caesar's Legion (Romanticism) versus NCR (Enlightenment)
 * Rousseau Was Right: Vault 11. The mainframe requires one resident to sacrifice themselves each year, or all life support will be turned off, dooming the others. As it turns out,.
 * Rule of Three: Quest-givers give three tasks, with few exceptions.
 * Rule of Three: Quest-givers give three tasks, with few exceptions.

S
": It is I, Doctor Mobius, transmitting from my dome-shaped... dome in the forbidden zone. A zone that is... yes... FORBIDDEN to you!"
 * Sadistic Choice: The player get to make one at the end of Lonesome Road.
 * Samus Is a Girl: Nightkin, like other Super Mutants, have no secondary sexual characteristics, so the ladies sound just like the men chewing gravel. This is used as a point of humor a few times with some plot-relevant Nightkin.
 * Sanity Slippage:.
 * Sarcastic Confession: If you ask Arcade Gannon about his past, he will originally be evasive. If you ask him why he is dodging the question, he will jokingly reply "Only to obfuscate my previous association with a fascist paramilitary organization.".
 * Save Scumming: This plus a Slots Machine equals easy but boring money-making... until the casino kicks you out. When doing this, trying to use the slot machines (or the Black Jack or Roulette tables) within 60 seconds of reloading produces a message stating that it seems to be resetting itself as an anti-cheating measure. This also applies to most merchants. Talk to the Gun Runner's Protectron within 60 seconds of reloading your game, and he'll inform you that a transaction is already in place, and to wait for it to end.
 * Sawed-Off Shotgun: In addition, there is also the laser version (Tri Beam Laser Rifle).
 * Scars Are Forever/Wound That Will Not Heal: The Marked Men get their skin ripped straight off of their flesh by the searing winds of The Divide, but because The Divide is so full of radiation, the Ghoulified soldiers are kept alive through it all, and are unable to die as their skinless bodies are put through mind-breaking agony year after year after year.
 * Scenery Gorn: Camp Searchlight.
 * The Divide.
 * Scenery Porn:
 * Lake Mead Cave, covered in glowing, beautiful, bioluminescent fungi.
 * Jacobstown. You've been traipsing around the Real Is Brown wasteland, and then you go up that long road. The trees are green and lively, the mountaintops are white with snow, and it's gorgeous.
 * New Vegas itself. Being hit with all that color after going through Freeside and outer Vegas is pretty amazing.
 * Zion Valley from Honest Hearts: a lush, forested series of canyons and valleys.
 * Schmuck Bait:
 * Vault 11 is deliberately designed like this. Really, when there's an option to open the on a terminal, you just know the end result will be bad. But you'll do it, because you've come this far and you need to know (and have to in order to complete the unmarked quest). Curiosity demands it!
 * The radio which starts the Dead Money DLC. "Oh look, a radio, let's go touch--*choke*"
 * At the end of the Dead Money DLC,.
 * You can find the Thump-Thump, a variant of the regular Grenade Rifle during the quest "Ant Misbehaivin'". Said Ants have been eating gunpowder, and you were told in advance of fighting them that they'll pretty much explode if you look at them the wrong way. The chances that this is a coincidence are extremely small.
 * Science Is Bad: Discussed and ultimately defied in the Old World Blues ending. Unless, of course, you finished it with a negative karma rating.
 * Scratch Damage: Sufficent BBs will take down a Paladin.
 * Screens Are Cameras: The members of the Think Tank in Old World Blues each have three mounted screens displaying their eyes and mouth separately, and are capable of seeing through their "eye screens".
 * Screw Yourself: It's possible to flirt with your own brain in Old World Blues.
 * Sealed Army in a Can:.
 * Secret Test of Character:
 * Vulpes claims the lottery in Nipton was this. He relates how no one fought back when their loved ones were killed or crucified with each drawing, and he mentions that he was amazed that the townsfolk were so cowardly as to not fight back against the half-dozen Frumentarii under his command. It seems that the people of Nipton had several opportunities to impress Vulpes, at least one of which would have saved them, and they failed every time. However, it is shown that at least a few fought back, with some success at that. Unless Vulpes dismissed a large portion of his invading army then held the lottery, it's unlikely they ever really stood a chance.
 * Self-Imposed Challenge: The in-game challenges. They range from normal things (heal 10,000 damage with Stimpacks or do 10,000 unarmed damage, for example) to more specific ones (cripple right arms, blow off limbs). Gun Runners' Arsenal adds some truly absurd challenges, most of which involve killing specific things with specific weapons. The three-star challenges are the worst, like having to kill Deathclaws with (among other, slightly more reasonable things) switchblades and boxing tape.
 * Sequel Difficulty Drop: The DLC have done this so far: Dead Money is Nintendo Hard, not least because you can't bring your stuff. Honest Hearts lets you bring some items based on weight (the good stuff is generally heavy), but hands you quite a lot of good equipment along the course of the story. Old World Blues doesn't restrict what you can carry at all, and even hands you three free perks near the beginning (with different versions available to replace them at the end). Old World Blues does not have companions at all, and there are a great many level scaled enemies, but there are some massive perks you can pick up along the way bolstering your power more than enough to deal with them. In Lonesome Road, there are some very difficult enemies; however, unlike all the other DLC, if it ever gets to be too much, you can always go back to the Mojave and resupply on caps, stimpacks, missiles, mines, gauss rifle ammo... provided only you don't mind the long walk back...
 * Sequel Hook: You can go home now, Courier...
 * Serious Business: To many, choosing what factions to side with in this game is serious business. People have written entire essays about this. See the Headscratchers page for some examples.
 * Sexy Discretion Shot: Everytime you get some, it fades to black before any clothing comes off.
 * Shaped Like Itself:
 * Doctor Mobius of Old World Blues breathes this.
 * Doctor Mobius of Old World Blues breathes this.

"Arcade: Great. Glad we're on the same page. I mean, I didn't expect that you'd want to... activate the super weapon or anything. Heh."
 * And the Tesla coils! The coils of Nikola Tesla!
 * Short-Range Shotgun:
 * The Sawed-off Shotgun returns to affirm this trope, but every other shotgun in the game has a tighter spread, making them actually useful for medium range combat. Ballsy players may choose to use a modified Hunting Shotgun to snipe. In addition, there are also Slug shells, which makes the shotgun otherwise behave like rifles. Higher tier shotguns are also superior weapons to submachine guns and most handguns in medium range combat even with just buckshot shells.
 * As of patch 1.3.0/1.5, all shotguns are now decent weapons at medium range due to vastly reduced spread, including the sawed-off. With slugs the range is increased while reducing close-range crowd control.
 * For Energy Weapon users, there are the Tri Beam Laser and Multiplas Rifle. The base game version of the Tri Beam good for crowd control but degrades fast and burns ammo faster along with being pretty hefty at 9 weight units, so the Laser RCW is better at the job. The Gun Runners Arsenal version, however, can accept mods to increase durability from 245 shots to 745 shots before it becomes unusable along with increasing damage and ammo capacity. The Mutliplas Rifle is similar to the base game Tri Beam in that it drains the microfusion cell quickly but it is lighter and cheaper to repair at the cost of having no GRA version.
 * Shotguns Are Just Better: The Shotgun Surgeon perk, along with other things (see Short-Range Shotgun above), allow shotguns to become viable all-situation weapons. As well, a perk can be taken that give shotguns a chance of knocking down enemies. Due to the way the perk is implemented, you can effectively stun lock enemies if you keep shooting them. Combine this perk with the Riot Shotgun, with its ridiculous firing rate and its 12-shot drum magazine, and most enemies will be gibs within seconds.
 * The Multiplas Rifle is topped only by the Gauss Rifle, Big Boomer (the unique sawed-off shotgun) and Anti-Materiel Rifle in damage per shot. Granted, the damage is split up between three sub-projectiles, but it's still a lot of damage for a mid-tier weapon. Its main disadvantage is its ammo consumption.
 * The GRA version of the Tri Beam Laser has mods that lets it last much longer, shoots harder, and drains the microfusion cell much slower (from 24 to 48 shots) than the base version. While the Laser RCW shoots faster, the GRA Tri Beam will last the player longer as spare laser rifles are easier to come by to repair with the "Jury Rigging" Perk.
 * Shout-Out: Being Reference Overdosed is standard for the Fallout series. There's so much Shout Outs in this game that it demanded its own page.
 * Shown Their Work:
 * "Caesar" is pronounced "kye-zar" and "ave" is pronounced "a-weh", reflecting prevailing academic opinion of ancient Roman pronunciation as opposed to the medieval "Church Latin" pronunciations used today.
 * The fluff about the Legion fits both in-universe and in the meta. The Legion features far too many accurate reflections of the Roman Empire's nature to be coincidental. Most notably the Frumentarii, who play an important role in the plot. They were rather obscure group, virtually nonexistent in any popular media (and even many historical textbooks).
 * As mentioned above, the vast number of towns and landmarks that appear in this game (even the starting town) that are closely based off those in real life, if a bit space-compressed. For instance, the Goodsprings General Store and the Prospector Saloon do exist and look exactly as they do in-game (except that it's the Pioneer Saloon). The Goodsprings Schoolhouse, cemetery and the sign leading out of town also exist, and look almost identical to their in-game counterparts. Not exactly general tourist knowledge.
 * On the AER14 Prototype Laser Rifle (a unique variant of the basic laser rifle), there is a sticky note on the back: "Focus: 1064nm, 532 nm (SHG), 8.18 pm!!!". It means that it has a primary wavelength of 1064 nm (infra-red range), a "second harmonic generation" (SHG) that doubles the frequency to a green-wavelength 532 nm., and the 8.18 pm is beam divergence, or how wide the beam gets as it leaves the laser (usually measured in picometers per meter).
 * Silliness Switch: The Wild Wasteland trait, available when you're making up your character, changes some dialogue and adds in some extra bits to the game to make it... weirder.
 * Sir Swearsalot: Boxcars is among the most foul-mouthed people in the wasteland. Justifed, because he's been through a lot. Cass as well.
 * Sitcom Arch Nemesis: Depending on how you play the game, Benny could be one.
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:
 * Idealistic, but less so than previous Fallout games. On the grand scale, civilization is mostly rebuilt. However, the two largest nations are the corrupt and inefficient if progressive New California Republic and the brutal and repressive, yet efficient, Caesar's Legion. Within the city, the Kings and Followers of the Apocalypse are working to help Freeside, while all those with real power are ignoring or exploiting the horrific conditions. The Brotherhood of Steel, present in every Fallout game thus far, are finally dying out as a result of their xenophobia, a stark contrast to the stretched-but-altruistic Brotherhood of Fallout 3..
 * Most of the DLC takes a hard right-wheel into cynicism. Dead Money is about how people's sins corrupt them and lead the world to ruin, and . Honest Hearts makes the point that . And Lonesome Road is a fight against a small-minded man with a personal grudge against the Courier, a grudge that might wreck the fragile civilization of the West, and even a complete victory . Old World Blues, by contrast, is perhaps the most idealistic portion of Fallout: New Vegas, and it's the one DLC where you really can make the world a better place through the power of Science!
 * Smart People Know Latin: Your character can use Latin phrases in certain trees provided their intelligence is 8 out of 10. The lower ranks of Caesar's Legion seem only to know "vale" and "ave", while a centurion POW you meet seems to be fluent.
 * Sniper Pistol: The Hunting Revolver comes with a scope attatched and is accurate to boot. The .44 magnum and 9mm can also be modded to have a scope.
 * Snuff Film: does these, though they're audio tapes rather than video.
 * So Long and Thanks For All the Gear: A companion exiting the party takes the gear with them. In case of the ED-E retrofit, the gear is lost forever. The only exception is if you complete Arcade Gannon's quest, where he gives you all the gear he was carrying.
 * Sophisticated As Hell: Dean Domino.
 * Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Being an RPG, this obviously isn't played very straight, but most weapon types have a noticeable pattern, about 4-6 weapons in rough order of power. Keep in mind they don't necessarily have to be found in order:
 * Semi Automatic Pistols: Silenced .22 --> 9mm pistol --> 10mm pistol --> .45 Auto Pistol (in Honest Hearts)--> 12.7mm pistol --> A Light Shining in Darkness (.45 pistol from Honest Hearts) --> Lil'Devil (in Gun Runners' Arsenal)
 * Energy pistols: Laser pistol --> plasma pistol --> Recharger pistol --> Plasma defender --> Pew Pew --> Alien blaster
 * Revolvers: .357 magnum revolver --> Police pistol (Dead Money) --> .44 Magnum revolver --> That Gun (post 4/25/11 patch) --> Hunting revolver --> Ranger Sequoia
 * Lever action rifles: BB Gun --> Cowboy repeater --> Trail carbine --> Brush gun --> Medicine Stick
 * Bolt action/semi automatic rifles: Varmint rifle --> Service Rifle (post 4/25/11 patch) --> Hunting rifle --> Sniper rifle --> This Machine/Anti-materiel Rifle/Marksman Carbine
 * Automatic guns: 9mm submachine gun --> 10mm sub machine gun --> Assault carbine --> Light Machine Gun/12.7mm submachine Gun/.45 Auto submachine gun (in Honest Hearts) --> Minigun/Automatic Rifle/Bozar
 * Energy rifles: Recharger rifle --> Laser/Plasma rifle --> Multiplas/Tribeam rifle --> Gauss rifle (or YCS/186) --> Holorifle
 * Shotguns: Single shotgun --> Caravan shotgun --> Lever action shotgun/Sawed-Off Shotgun --> Hunting shotgun --> Riot shotgun
 * Explosive launchers: Grenade Rifle --- > Grenade Launcher --- > Rocket Launcher --> Grenade Machine Gun --> Fat Man
 * Hand-thrown Explosives: Dynamite --> Frag Grenade --> Pulse Grenade/Incendiary Grenade --> Plasma Grenade --> Holy Frag Grenade
 * Proximity/Remote Explosives: Powder Charge --> Frag Mine --> Pulse Mine --> Plasma Mine/C4 Explosives
 * Space Compression: The Real Life area covered by the Mojave Wasteland is about 10,000 square miles. The in-game version is much smaller. This is most noticable around Hoover Dam and the Colorado, which look alright in-game, but grow by several orders of magnitude when overlaid over the real area.
 * Spin Attack:
 * Can be done with some melee weapons, though some requires sufficient melee weapons skill.
 * The Ranger Takedown. When used in third-person view, to preform a leg sweep.
 * Squee: Veronica has this reaction when you give her a formal dress.
 * The Starscream: It seems this happens a lot in the Mojave Wasteland. Cachino wants your help to take over the Omertas, Head Paladin Hardin wants you to help him overthrow Elder McNamara, and while Pacer doesn't particularly want to lead The Kings, he does try to overthrow The King if you succeed in negotiating a peace treaty between The King and NCR. And of course,.
 * STD Immunity: Averted. Benny remarks at one point that he "doesn't need another 'social disease'.
 * The Stoic: Boone.
 * Stop Helping Me!: Played straight and spoofed with the Stealth Suit Mk II. The suit's AI will remind you, quite often, that your Pip-Boy light is on if you use it. Spoofed when it warns you of incoming hostiles then retracts it as a joke.
 * Stuff Blowing Up: The Powder Gangers' Weapon of Choice is sticks of Dynamite and power charges. Cranked Up to Eleven with the Boomers, who venerate anything that goes... well, boom.
 * Stupid Crooks: The Freeside Thugs, they seemingly do not understand the stupidity of luring someone in Power Armor and carrying a Machine Gun into a 'trap' they set, when all they have is just pool cues and meat cleavers.
 * Suicidal Overconfidence:
 * Tying in with the above, some people are just too self-confident for their own good. Special mention goes to Caleb McCaffery, who you have to find for the "Debt Collector" quest. He is easily the most unjustifiably arrogant man in the entire Mojave Wasteland. Yeah buddy, you're really such a bad-ass that you can take the Power Armor-wearing, Plasma Caster-packing celebrity who people publically know armed with only a low-level shotgun. Even pacifist players will have a hard time fighting the urge to paint the sidewalk with this guy's brains.
 * The Fiends, Powder Gangers, Vipers and Jackals, just like the raiders of Fallout 3, seemingly do not understand that the One-Man Army with the Power Armor and Minigun is not the best person to mug. Justified with the Fiends, who are all insane drug addicts, and NCR military police (provided you massacred one of the casinos) due to, er, having some pull with the NCR, but the Powder Gangers have no excuse.
 * This is actually built into Fallout: New Vegas and 'Fallout 3'''s game engine; every enemy has a "confidence" attribute as part of their programming: the highest level means an enemy will never avoid a fight, with the ones right below that not offering them much better chances.
 * Suicide Pact:.
 * Super Prototype: The Q-35 Matter Modulator has several superiorities in comparison to its more production-rate plasma rifle brethren: a higher crit chance, higher crit damage, faster rate of fire, less ammo used per shot, and faster projectiles.
 * Survival Horror: The Dead Money DLC in spades. You go around travelling with companions solving puzzles and fighting abominations in hazmat suits and gas masks that wield knives, spears and bombs. Ammo is limited, you have to search hard to find the best weapons, and medical supplies are very scarce, so you have to not lose a lot of health. The "climax" of the first portion of the DLC is this - you must fight your way, badly wounded, through hordes of Ghost People, to the Casino.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial: After Arcade gives you his opinion on where to direct the power from Helios One, you can agree with him straight off. He evidently doesn't expect it.

T
"Who's the homo that insisted on being so heavy handed with the gay dialogue and references in the game? Alarm at the presence of homosexual dialogue topics is pretty interesting considering the majority of them only appear if you voluntarily take a perk that identifies your character as homosexual."
 * Take a Third Option:
 * Don't like NCR or the Legion? Go to work for Mr. House, or anyone not those three! Or, if you don't like them either, take over, yourself!.
 * In Honest Hearts,.
 * Take That:
 * When you are researching weird NCR broadcasts, you can ask one ranger station about reports of domesticated Deathclaws and they reject it out of hand as impossible.
 * A response to a rather inbred question asker in J.E. Sawyer's talk page:

": If our situations were reversed, I'd see you hang.
 * As a in-game example in Old World Blues. Dr. 0 made Muggy, a tiny, neurotic Securitron obsessed with coffee mugs as a cheap joke at the expense of Mr. House, who he hates.
 * Take Your Time:
 * No matter how urgent the quest giver's language, you can leave and circle the map a few times and pick up where you left off. The only exception is the President's visit, which will run according to scripted schedule.
 * The Dead Money add-on practically requires you to do this in order to survive it. It doesn't help that the whole atmosphere of the Sierra Madre makes you want to run through it and get the hell out as quickly as possible.
 * This trope is especially noticable in relation to Honest Hearts. No matter how imminent the Second Battle of Hoover Dam is, no one takes any notice if the Courier leaves the Mojave for almost a month.
 * Talking the Monster to Death:
 * Diplomacy (and judicious use of seductive perks like Black Widow or Confirmed Bachelor) can open as many doors for you as a lock pick or a hacked computer terminal. The speech stat still reigns king, however: if you're lucky, you can pass a speech check that doesn't require speech or barter, such as using your intelligence, explosives, et cetera rating instead. Passing speech checks is no longer percentive, either.
 * Fallout: New Vegas continues the Fallout tradition of . It then turns this option into the ultimate Infinity+1 Sword in story terms..
 * There are two examples in the Old World Blues DLC. The mad scientists can be peacefully talked down by some high-level speech and skill checks, and the Giant Robo-Scorpion can be turned off by hacking a Very Hard terminal.
 * Technical Pacifist:
 * O'Hanrahan, one of the misfits. His squadmates think he is a coward, though if you did follow his advice on squad improvements, he has no problem kicking legionaries' asses in the final battle. According to him, the behavior is because of his upbringing: he was always very phsyically strong, and his mother told him something to the extent of "with great power comes great responsibility", which he readily took to heart.
 * Daniel in Honest Hearts, though he is close to being an Actual Pacifist. He has no desire to attack the White Legs (nor does he), but is fully capable and willing to kill any that try and sneak into the Sorrows encampment.
 * Teleporting Keycard Squad: Used in some areas, most notably Vault 34. All of the DLC use this a lot - reaching an objective site or picking up supplies will often spawn a formidable ambush behind you.
 * Tempting Fate: One too-proud-for-his-own-good NPC just doesn't know how to take the hint.

Courier: ?"


 * Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Female Nightkin lack standard sexual characteristics and rely on props. Lily wears a strawhat, while Tabitha sports a pair of heart-shaped pink eyeglasses and an adorable blonde wig to look feminine. The result is... interesting.
 * There Are No Therapists:
 * Thoroughly averted. Standard medical training seems to include psychiatry in the Mojave: Doc Mitchell gives you a mental health examination, the Followers of the Apocalypse help with the mental health of the people they care for (one of their biggest jobs in Freeside is helping addicts), Lt. Markland at Bitter Springs asks you to find psychology textbooks to help him help the refugees, and your character's own medical skill allows some dialogue options in which you diagnose mental trauma or disease. The Auto-Doc in Old World Blues can also give you a one time psych exam (read: A second chance to pick your traits).
 * During "Beyond the Beef", you can psychoanalyse Philippe, the Ultraluxe's master chef in order to get access to the kitchen. It only takes a few suggestions to make him recall a ludicrous amount of over-the-top childhood abuse (from his entire family, too) he's been repressing, causing him to flee the kitchen and hide in his room.
 * In fact, given the very high amount of wacked out lunatics in the Fallout universe, the intro at the start of the game where Doc Mitchell specifically wants to find out out if you're all there make perfect in universe sense, especially given the paranoia that led to the post-apocalyptic war and all the crazy people who tried to make the lives of the post-apocalypse population suck in the previous games. That said, it makes good sense for him to want to make sure you're not batshit insane.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: One of the Gun Runners' Arsenal challenges takes this to its logical conclusion. You are tasked with killing twenty non-mutated animals (dogs, coyotes) with mini-nukes. This is the only challenge where killing yourself by mistake is more of a concern than the threat your enemy poses (which is to say, none whatsoever).
 * Title Drop: Three out of four DLCs have them.
 * The Dead Money Jumpsuit and Dead Money Collar from Dead Money.
 * Old World Blues has a quest of that name, and the jukebox in your room is willing to explain the expression (focusing on the glory lost during the apocalypse, rather than hope for the future).
 * The Lonesome Road Perk granted at the end of Lonesome Road.
 * Token Good Teammate: A good karma Courier can be this if working for the Legion.
 * Tomb of Horrors: Dead Money's Sierra Madre is like the Fallout version of this classic D&D dungeon. Everything, literally everything is trying to kill you. Traps are everywhere. Sometimes any decent loot you find and desperately need is boobytrapped. There are half-alive abominations stalking the streets that move like creepy ragdolls and will try to tear you apart on sight. Radio signals will set off the Explosive Leash around your neck and turn your head into paste. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. It may have been a calculated decision by Obsidian Entertainment (for the same reason Gary Gygax created the Tomb of Horrors) to create an addon pack that wasn't a Monty Haul like Fallout 3 and the rest of Fallout: New Vegas is. The entire addon is Nightmare Fuel from beginning to end.
 * Too Awesome to Use:
 * The Fatman, which has less than 20 mini nukes to use in the ENTIRE game, at least until Gun Runners' Arsenal came out and added more to purchase and new variants. The three Holy Frag Grenades which are even more powerful than the Fatman can only be obtained in a special encounter. And the Alien Blaster, a ridiculously powerful energy pistol that comes with a limited supply of ammo that you only get once.
 * Early on, any weapon that uses the devastating yet rare .44 magnum rounds. With the addition of ammo crafting at sufficiently high levels, you can make your own .44 magnum rounds by breaking down your less useful bullets. Not so with the alien energy ammo or the mini nukes, though.
 * Turbo. It puts everything around you into Bullet Time, causing enemies to move and attack ridiculously slowly while you continue to fight at normal speed, rendering even the Legendary Deathclaw a sitting duck for its duration. Unfortunately, there's only a handful that can be found or bought right off the bat, and to get any more than that you have to learn an extremely rare crafting recipe that requires you to hunt Cazadores (one of the hardest enemies in the game) for ingredients. The only other option is the Implant GRX perk in Old World Blues.
 * Nuka-Cola Quartz and Nuka-Cola Victory; they're about as close to Infinity Plus One Food as you can get (the former gives you night vision and a DT boost, the latter gives you extra action points, and neither have a chance of addiction), but there are only a handful of each scattered about. However, the Nuka Chemist perk lets you craft them both using regular Nuka-Cola, which is plentiful.
 * The Proton Inversal Throwing Axes in Old World Blues. There are, at best, around thirty total with random spawning on corpses. You're lucky if you find ten. They are the single most-damaging thrown melee weapon in the game, but there's no way to get more.
 * Too Dumb to Live: There are a lot of people in this game that would earn a Darwin Award.
 * Mister RADical, who found himself a radiation suit and assumed it made him totally immune to radiation because he couldn't "feel" any radiation in a highly radioactive area. Just in case you don't know how radiation works, you don't feel it, only its after-effects. Radiation poisoning takes time to develop fully, which incidentally it did for Mister Radical, who passed it off as food poisoning. You find the idiot dead near a radioactive dump site, probably either been killed by his radiation poisoning or by the Golden Geckos inhabiting the place (which is itself Too Dumb to Live), and according to a log he had on him, he was preparing to drench himself in a fluid that was so horribly radioactive that, had he done so, it would have killed him and turned everything within a hundred feet of him nightmarishly radioactive in seconds.
 * Then there's Trash, a girl who decided that life as a human sucks, so she'd become a ghoul. How? By exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation, naturally. She lives in a shack on the southern edge of the map, in an old nuclear test site. How she even got there is a mystery considering it's surrounded by tough-as-nails feral ghouls. Of course, the odds of ghoulification are roughly one in one million, but she assumes it's a sure thing, and when you reach the shack where she's staying, she's usually dead (she may spawn alive as a bug). Basically, mixing radiation and idiots are a fatal combination, at least for the idiot.
 * Freeside Thugs. They're armed with knives and lead pipes, maybe a sledgehammer at best. They aren't even a threat to you when you enter the city, much less later when you're walking along in Powered Armor with a sniper rifle that can punch a hole in a tank. To wit, they will attack you and your companions despite the fact that said selection can include a robot attack dog and a Nightkin with a BFS, among other friends who may not look as threatening, but are every bit as dangerous. Not to mention the fact that the entire freaking city is hostile to them on sight.
 * Any of a number of female characters in the game who openly support Caesar's Legion. It's not as if it's a secret what they do to women. Though at least one of said characters was lied to.
 * At Goodsprings Source, you can find a man named who claims that his girlfriend is nearby just beyond a nest of Geckos. After you get done massacring them for him it turns out that there is no girlfriend, just corpses and a cache of food and supplies.  then approaches, apologizes for tricking you into clearing the way to the cache, and then tries to kill you because you're of no use anymore. It is a severe case of Darwinitis on his part since you have not only just survived being shot - point blank - in the head, you have also just killed the bunch of Geckos that he couldn't kill himself. Vicious mutated lizards that swarm prey in large numbers.
 * Took a Level in Badass:
 * The Courier takes several levels of badass over the course of the game, both game levels and in-story levels.
 * Do you remember those poor Deathclaws in Fallout 3 and how easily you could slaughter them after a few levels? Try it with a Deathclaw in this game and see how that works out for you. Lampshaded in a player dialog response to someone warning you of the problem. "I'm not afraid of Deathclaws."
 * Raiders to a lesser degree. In Fallout 3, Raiders used low-grade melee weapons and small fire rifles like hunting rifles, sawed-off shotguns, very rarely you'd find one with an assault rifle or a flamer, and their armor was constructed of random scrap. In the Mojave, Raiders are packing SMGs, energy weapons, chainsaws, and it is not uncommon to find them wearing leather armor or metal armor. They're still not a threat, but their equipment is much more impressive.
 * Numerous weapons are far more useful from Fallout 3 with the addition of weapon mods. Remember the humble laser rifle? It gets two mods that greatly boost its damage output, and a zoom-in scope. Enjoy your laser sniper rifle. A fully modified Laser Rifle is incredibly efficient as they have really good aim, can zoom like hell and have a lot of firepower. You can even singlehandedly take down a Deathclaw with less than one magazine if you're good enough. Ammo is relatively easy to access.
 * The Luck stat. In Fallout 3, Luck just gave you a minor boost to all skills of maybe a few points and affected critical chance. Now it still does those things, but at higher levels it noticeably tips the odds of the casinos in your favor, even letting you know when Luck has influenced the cards in Blackjack. With an implant, Intense Training and two equipment pieces you can get 10 Luck from a base stat of only 6 (and can get 10 from 5 with Lonesome Road). Eventually, the casinos will ban you from gaming because you win too much, but by the time they do, you'll be walking out the door with several thousand caps, and can just head next door into the next casino. Breaking the bank like this can take as little as an hour.
 * Torture Always Works: An interrogator constrained by NCR regulations asks the player to rough up a captive for her. The man allowed himself to be captured rather than dying because he was confident that he could withstand any torture, a pride he could only take if he believed Torture Always Works in the first place. Of course, he cracks under sufficient brutality. Averted, however, if you opt for psychology rather than punching.
 * To the Pain:
 * The Terrifying Presence perk is pretty much based around this. It causes NPCs to flee for a little while after you make scary threats like "I'll carve myself a knife out of your bones."
 * What Caesar did to Joshua Graham.
 * In a sense, what you can do to Elijah if.
 * Training the Peaceful Villagers: One of the options at the end of the Honest Hearts DLC..
 * Trauma Inn:
 * There are always certain places you can bunk for the night especially if you're running with hardcore mode on.
 * Averted with the Dead Money expansion, where there is no place any sane person could feel safe sleeping in.
 * Trial Balloon Question: Veronica.
 * Tribal Face Paint: In the Honest Hearts DLC, one of the two tribes of Zion Canyon, known as the Dead Horses, has a custom where members earn a facial or body tattoo for every major achievement they accomplish.
 * Two Lines, No Waiting: The Myth Arc of the DLC has very little to do with the buildup to the battle at Hoover Dam. Even will not even significantly alter the force balance.

U

 * Undefeatable Little Village: Goodsprings is one of these, if you decide to help them drive away the Powder Gangers.
 * Unexplained Recovery:
 * Also when.
 * It's subverted in context, however, as it's clear that Doc Mitchell gave the Courier facial reconstruction surgery and nursed them back to health.
 * The Unintelligible:
 * Mean Sonofabitch, on account of having his tongue cut out. Even his voice actor doesn't know what he's saying. One line has him mention "Wesibe" (Westside), and he pronounces it "wes-see-bay".
 * Dr. 8 from Old World Blues can only speak in static and scrambled audio, though if you ask him his name, you may notice an "8" buried in the center of his garbled symbols.
 * Universal Poison:
 * Played straight in the main game, as the generic item "antivenom" will cure you instantly, whether it be a simple radscorpion sting or a nasty Cazador attack. Averted in the Honest Hearts DLC, where the local poisonous plants have their own type of antivenom.
 * On the other hand, the effects themselves differ wildly by toxin source.
 * On the other hand, the effects themselves differ wildly by toxin source.

V

 * Vendor Trash:
 * Much of the Misc Item category is this. None are immediately useful like ammo, weapons, apparel or aid items. Many can be used as crafting items. You can even make your own vendor trash in the form of tanned hides, which makes them much more valuable (especially the tanned golden gecko hide).
 * The Old World Blues DLC does its level best to subvert this. The personality constructs in the Sink can break down completely worthless items and turn them into incredibly useful crafting material. The Book Chute can turn pencils and clipboards into scrap metal and duct tape weighing twice as much as the materials you recycled, Muggy turns worthless dishes into valuable gun materials, and the Biological Research Station turns plants you don't use into a generic slop which can be converted into the kinds of plants you do. The whole place is a hoarder's wet dream.
 * The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Divide acts as this for the DLC. It's an uninhabitable (even by wasteland standards) stretch of ruin, filled with radiation, windstorms, and scattered nuclear warheads. It's populated by Deathclaws, Tunnelers (innumerable subterranean creatures that can kill Deathclaws), and crazed skinless Marked Men armed with the various military weapons scattered all over the place. And worst of all,.
 * Video Game Caring Potential: ...
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential:
 * Those Deathclaws mentioned earlier, and how terrible they are?.
 * If you'd like to blast at your comrades' kneecaps so they have to limp on broken legs across the Wasteland, sell them to cannibals, sell them to slavers, or bring them along and make them watch as you usher those they hate to new heights of power and influence over the helpless people of the wastes, New Vegas has you covered. There is plenty of opportunity for depravity, if that's your thing...
 * A slave girl in the imperial prison camps asks you to get her teddy bear back for her. Once you have it you can either give it to her or gleefully tear it up right in front of her face.
 * In the Thorn, in Red Lucy's bedroom, there's an option to release all her caged monsters including powerful nasties like Cazadors and Deathclaws. When you exit, you're treated to a massive battle between the beasts and their former captors. Then you get to the surface and see the beasts have made it top side... and are wreaking havoc in the poorest part of Vegas, Westside. Oops.
 * If you take the Animal Friend perk (and/or a similar Ghoul themed perk), various beasties will no longer attack you on sight. It's useful enough for avoiding random encounters but you can abuse it for easy kills turning animals into walking meals just waiting to be harvested.
 * Video Game Cruelty Punishment: ...until you find out exactly what happens if the people of the wasteland decide you're too cruel.
 * Villain with Good Publicity: The Courier can be one if you decide to work for Caesar's Legion while simultaneously keeping the NCR (and most of the other neutral and good factions) happy and unaware of your plans to stab them in the back when the time comes. In fact, it's probably for the best to play the game this way if you decide to work for Caesar since a good chunk of the quests in this game come from the NCR.
 * Viva Las Vegas: Most of the game takes place in and around Las Vegas (now called New Vegas), which still offers many of the same attractions to tourists and thrill-seekers as it always has.
 * The Voiceless: Christine from the Dead Money DLC, due an Auto-Doc malfunctioning and cutting her vocal chords out..
 * Vomit Indiscretion Shot: A few NCR soldiers on leave in the Strip can display these.
 * Vomit Indiscretion Shot: A few NCR soldiers on leave in the Strip can display these.
 * Vomit Indiscretion Shot: A few NCR soldiers on leave in the Strip can display these.

W
""Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a Nuclear Winter." "When I got this assignment, I thought there'd be more gambling..." "If you were enlisted, you'd be halfway to General by now." "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a Nuclear Winter." "Ave, true to Caesar." "RETRIBUTION!" "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a Nuclear Winter.""
 * Walking Techbane: Dr. 0 of the Think Tank takes pride in his ability to nullify, deconstruct or otherwise neutralise any machine. Extra ironic, considering that he himself is a cyborg. Unsurprisingly, he despises Mr. House.
 * Warrior Therapist: The Courier's companions all have baggage that he can help unload.
 * Alternately, the Courier may often end up unloading baggage onto them.
 * Weaksauce Weakness:
 * Abominations (including deathclaws and tunnelers) are scared for 10 seconds if you shoot them with a Flare Gun and run away from you.
 * Holograms in Dead Money are invincible, powerful, and reasonably perceptive. However, even one hit to their sensitive emitters turns them off completely.
 * Weirdness Magnet: The effect of the "Wild Wasteland" trait. Chris Avellone outright used the title of this trope to describe it.
 * Welcome to Corneria:
 * "MURDERER!!!": Shouted by an NPC if you kill another NPC of the same faction nearby. Which in most cases is perfectly appropriate, but in the case of the Powder Gangers, it just sounds ironic.
 * Speaking of Powder Gangers, helping them fight of authorities makes it silly too. Even if you've never attacked the NCR, they'll all gun for you. And if you defend yourself and kill ONE: prepare for an endless "MURDERER! MURDERER! MURDERER!" chorus until you get the last one.


 * Dr. 8 does have dialog as shown in the game's text files. However, he has a limited amount of responses to the Courier's lines, often repeating them in the same conversation.
 * Wham! Episode: Vault 11. The Vaults were never meant to save anyone, and this is the Vault that proves it...
 * What Happened To The Abominations: Lonesome Road features the Tunnelers, mutated humanoids that can tear apart Deathclaws. Ulysses mentions that they're slowly tunneling their way towards the Mojave, which would be utterly screwed when packs of super-strong abominations pop out of the ground without warning. And yet you can do absolutely nothing about this, and its never mentioned again.
 * What Measure Is a Mook?:
 * The final ending to Joshua Graham's path in Honest Hearts depends solely on how you treat the White Legs captured leader, Salt-Upon-Wounds. If Joshua Graham spares him, then Joshua will become much more merciful and pleasant. Apparently, the dozens of White Legs he slaughtered to get to that point don't matter.
 * The dozens of mooks he slaughtered to get to that point doesn't matter that much - there wasn't much of an alternative to killing them once one had embarked on smashing the White Legs so the Sorrows could stay in Zion. The two White Legs at Graham's mercy that are killed just before Salt-Upon-Wounds appeals to you to stay Graham's hand, on the other hand...
 * What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Aside from the ghoul and mutant companions in game, you also have Victor, a robot who think he's a cowboy.
 * What the Hell, Hero?:
 * You will get a small one from the narrator if you get the Legion ending with good karma, or the NCR ending with evil karma.
 * The Great Khans will not shy away to tell the player that you're traveling with a murderer if Boone is your companion.
 * certainly tries this on you when you kill him, and just rubs it in further. Whether or not you agree or not depends on your personal beliefs, of course... And whether or not you finish reading the obituary to the very end.
 * If you go through the pains and labors of convincing Boone to reconcile with his past only to bail on him at the last second, he will give you one of these.
 * As part of the "Come Fly With Me" quest, you descend into a basement filled with Nightkin and have the option of negotiating with the only sane one of them to leave peacefully. Kill too many of the insane ones, however, and he will attack you.
 * If you take the job to help guard the Silver Rush for the Van Graffs, one of the NPCs that approaches the store will have bombs strapped to his body. If you let him in, he'll detonate the bombs and kill everybody inside. The door guard instructing you, Simon, berates you for putting him out of a job and opens fire.
 * Where Are They Now? Epilogue: As per the tradition of the original Fallout games, you get an epilogue informing you what happened to all the settlements you visited and the companions that you had depending on your actions. Some are nice, some are bittersweet, and some are just nasty.
 * White-Haired Pretty Girl: Ranger Ghost under her hat.
 * White Mask of Doom: The White Gloves Society. Of course this is obviously also their weakness.
 * Whole-Plot Reference: To The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Dead Money.
 * Wicked Cultured: Caesar, the Legion's intelligent and charismatic leader. He is a talented anthropologist, linguist and historian that speaks fluent Latin and knows all about both pre-war and post-war history. In his free time, he likes to read and debate about political science and philosophy with other educated people. He is also the founder and leader of a faction of imperialistic slavers that kills the weak, enslaves women and children, and engages in war crimes.
 * Wild Card: You. Potentially you could side with the Legion, NCR, Mr. House or with nobody but yourself. The game lampshades this by labeling a specific set of quests "Wild Card".
 * Wolverine Publicity: The Ranger Combat Armor, which is featured on the cover, title screen and intro, and can otherwise hardly be found anywhere in-game until near the end. Recent patches, however, have aleviated this somewhat and made it available earlier and more easily.
 * The Worf Effect:
 * The Powder Gangers are a major enemy in the area of the Mojave where you start. At Nipton, you learn that they are no match for the Legion.
 * In Lonesome Road, the first Tunneler you see kills a Deathclaw (admittedly, with the Living Anatomy perk and a quick hand in V.A.T.S., you can see it only has 35 HP... but it's the thought that counts).
 * A World Half Full:
 * Unlike the Capital Wasteland, the Mojave Wasteland has very few abandoned or destroyed buildings in it, with most of them being just outside the New Vegas strip. Even then, most of them are boarded up and inaccessible. Civilization is firmly in control at this point and most peoples' lives don't revolve around struggling to survive. The Mojave feels more like it has returned to the wild west and less like a hopeless irrecoverable hellhole (then again, The Wild West is still a wasteland, and even the good endings are going to lead to someone suffering).
 * Though the further away you get from Legion or NCR areas the more violence and despair there really is. Most of Utah is considered a horrible place to live, and Raul even says how before the Legion took over Arizona that the the whole state was overrun by raiders and warring towns.
 * World of Ham: Old World Blues. By Oppenheimer, Old World Blues.
 * Worst Aid: Sleeping to cure crippled limbs. Possibly for convenience, since Hardcore Mode disables it.
 * Worthless Yellow Rocks:
 * Inverted: bottlecaps, once worthless, are now the currency of the wasteland, so when you find a cache full of them, it's an unexpected good reward.
 * The most valuable (currency-wise) item in the game are gold bars from the Dead Money DLC. However, they weigh 35 pounds, and most vendors don't have over 10000 caps on them at a time. On the plus side, if you can manage to drag out the entire set, you could purchase the entire inventories of the Gun Runners and Van Graffs and still have leftover change.
 * This is the reason NCR used to back their money with gold (rather than water, as they did back in Fallout 1 and during New Vegas). It has very little use post-apocalypse, unlike water, which everybody always needs.

Y

 * Yes but What Does Zataproximetacine DO: Sunset Sarssparilla apparently has a long list of "side effects". You have to ask Festus three times before he'll tell you about them.
 * You and What Army?: . One of the quests even has it in the title.
 * You Bastard: Cass is one of the few who calls the Courier out for consistent enough bastardry to earn bad karma. Arcade Gannon calls the courier out on some events in opposition to the Follower's ideals, but it is sometimes possible to avoid distrust in these actions.
 * You Have Failed Me...: The story behind the Burned Man.
 * You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
 * in Goodsprings Source. He should have known better.
 * Caesar's Legion is really fond of this trope, to the point that with a high enough Speech skill you can convince some of the Legion's allies to abandon them by pointing out the faulty logic of working for someone who's obviously going to kill or enslave you as soon as they win.
 * The leadership of the Omertas comes down to those who drug and enslave prostitutes, or those who "only" physically abuse them. Or you can wait until they turn their backs after they trust you.
 * Logan and his group of prospectors. They enlist you to help them acquire some radiation suits and scavenge Camp Searchlight. Once everything of value has been found, they try to kill you and fail.
 * Elijah in Dead Money. Though he leaves the decision of whether your former comrades live or not up to you, he encourages you to kill them once they become of no further use (ironic given that he also encourages you to actually work with them or else you'll all die). And then he tries to lock you in the underground vault forever.
 * You Have Researched Breathing:
 * The Great Khans can teach you how to throw a handful of sand in an opponent's face.
 * You need training from the Brotherhood in order to figure out how to wear Power Armor. The Courier is the only character in the game who requires this training.
 * Old World Blues requires you to find two holotapes in order to fill a bottle of water from a sink.
 * Your Head Asplode:
 * 'Splosions happen quite often if you always aim for the head. Subverted in one quest where you are instructed to score no headshots on the bounties since their heads are required as a proof. The First Recon squad that are sent to help you kill Driver Nephi is apparently unaware of this and occasionally headshot him.
 * In Dead Money, if you hear a beeping coming from your collar, leave the area immediately.
 * Old World Blues reverses this at the Little Yangtze camp, where its inhabitants were given similar collars to keep them within the camp: when you find them as Ghouls, they immediately try to run to attack you with their fists, which will almost always result in their heads popping when they reach the gate.
 * Your Princess Is in Another Castle: ...?

Z

 * Zeerust: Obviously.
 * Zombie Apocalypse:
 * And Vault 34, a vault that, only a short time ago, experienced a critical reactor leak, turning more than half the residents into feral ghouls and promptly killed anyone who wasn't killed by the radiation.
 * The Ghost People were all residents or guests in the area of the Sierra Madre Casino. It turns out those Hazmat suits worked too well...
 * The Marked Men are what's left of the Legionaries and Troopers who were stationed in the Divide. They changed.
 * The Marked Men are what's left of the Legionaries and Troopers who were stationed in the Divide. They changed.