Fallout 3: Difference between revisions

== Tropes 0-C ==

* [[Abandoned Laboratory]]: Vault 87

** Nearly all of the Vaults you encounter are the unfortunate aftermaths of one of Vault-Tec's experiments that [[Gone Horribly Right|went horribly right]].

* [[Another Mans Terror]]: One vault in ''Fallout 3'' will put the PC through a lot of this.

* [[Anticlimax Boss]]: {{spoiler|The Enclave's Autumn, Eden, and Sigma Squad}}, ''Mothership Zeta's'' Captain, ''Point Lookout's'' Professor Calvert. All are weaker than or fight by proxy using types of [[Mooks]] you've killed hundreds of by the time they decide to show up.

* [[Apocalyptic Log]]: The computer entries of vault residents. Also the holotapes found in Lamplight Caverns of a schoolteacher and her students trapped in a cave after the bombs fell, and after she is gone, the tapes of the first kid elected mayor of Little Lamplight. Nancy Croydon's logs outside Germantown Police HQ.

* [[Apocalypse How]]: Class 1 and class 2, depending on the area. Events in the story lead to the possibility of a class 5.

* [[Arc Words]] and [[Arc Number]]: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely." [[The Bible (Literature)|-Revelation 21:6]]

* [[Arrow Cam]]: Used for some bullets fired in VATS.

* [[Black and Grey Morality]]: Many of the sidequests, although the [[Karma Meter]] will often have its own ideas about Good and Evil.

** Professor Calvert is a [[Card-Carrying Villain]] who has a bevy of mindless cultists at his disposal and should you choose to serve him, {{spoiler|tries to kill you}} while Desmond is simply someone from before the Great War who has scores to settle. He's also a [[Jerkass]] master of the [[Cluster F-Bomb]], so pick your poison.

* [[Black Widow]]: The name of a perk, that enables a Female PC to deal more damage to men, and also opens a [[Femme Fatale|lot of dialogue options]] while talking to them. It also has a [[Spear Counterpart]] for male PC's called "Ladykiller" that has the same effect for women.

* [[Blasting It Out of Their Hands]]: Can be done by aiming at the opponent's weapon, in VATS or manually, though it will damage the weapon and you'll need to repair it if you plan on picking it up to use after killing the enemy. Alternately you can shoot the arm being used to hold the weapon, and the enemy will drop it.

* [[Blinding Camera Flash]]: Your character being blinded by one on his birthdays as a child is used to transition to the next point of your character's childhood/the tutorial.

** Combined with [[Sneak Attack]] [[Critical Hit|Critical Hits]], most enemies can be taken down with a [[One Hit KO]].

* [[Boring but Practical]]: The hunting rifle (and especially its unique incarnation, Ol' Painless). Bolt action, ugly as sin. Will kill what you need dead, spare parts and ammo are staggeringly abundant. Until you get into the game's top-tier items it remains a workhorse gun for most encounters, and some players stand by Ol' Painless as one of the best guns in the game.

** [[Guide Dang It|If you can find it,]] the Xuanlong Assault Rifle. A unique Chinese Assault Rifle, with an expanded magazine and jacked up stats. More than powerful enough to buzzsaw Raiders and Mutants apart.

* [[Bullet Time]]: VATS, which for all intents and purposes causes the game to lean a bit closer to be a turn-based RPG.

* [[Bully Hunter]]: You have the option to exact revenge against Butch DeLoria should you choose.

* [[Call a Smeerp A Rabbit]]: These ain't your daddy's [[Breath Weapon|Fire]] [[Big Creepy Crawlies|Ants]]...

* [[Calling Your Attacks]]: Happens once early in ''The Adventures of Herbert 'Daring' Dashwood,'' when Herbert and Argyle need to get past a guard:

* [[Cluster F-Bomb]]: Both in [[NPC]] dialogs as well as [[Enemy Chatter]].

** In particular there are Mayor MacCready of Little Lamplight (particularly striking since [[Troubling Unchildhood Behavior|he's eleven at most]]) and Desmond Lockheart from Point Lookout. Neither of them seem capable of forming a sentence without swearing.

* [[Collection Sidequest]]: Finding all of the Vault-Tec Bobbleheads in the Capital Wasteland; collecting all 100 steel ingots in ''The Pitt''; finding thirty Nuka-Cola Quantum for ''The Nuka-Cola Challenge.''

* [[Color Wash]]: The entire game is overlaid with a very noticeable green color filter, which can be disabled via modding.

* [[Comically Missing the Point]]: Sierra Petrovita in Girdershade is blissfully clueless that her self-appointed protector Ronald Laren is only sticking around in the hopes of having sex with her. Even when he's obviously (to the player) hitting on her.

* [[Continuity Nod]]: At the end of the ''Trouble On the Homefront'' quest, {{spoiler|Amata's informing you that you must leave the vault forever now}} intentionally mirrors the ending of the first Fallout.

* [[Cool Plane]]: The Enclave's Vertibirds.

* [[Cool Shades]]: Lucky Shades

* [[Dirty Communists]]: How Liberty Prime views whatever it fights. [[Irony|Ironically]], he continues to do so even when fighting against the staunchly ''anti''-Communist Enclave, on behalf of the proto-communist Brotherhood of Steel.

** The Mr. Gutsy robots do the same.

* [[Disc One Final Boss]]: The (most likely) first Behemoth you come across, {{spoiler|just outside of Galaxy News Radio.}}

* [[Disc One Nuke]]: The Replicated Man's plasma rifle can be obtained ''very'' early in the game if you know where to look for it; getting it doesn't involve combat or dungeon exploration, and it is one of the most powerful weapons in the game.

* [[Egopolis]]: The Republic of Dave, formerly the Kingdom of Tom, and potentially later Bobland or Bobtopia.

* [[Eldritch Location]]: The Dunwich Building. {{spoiler|You have hallucinations showing you how the place used to look in prewar times, doors open and shut randomly, and some items move about at their own accord. And then there's the Obelisk, with its highly radioactive nature, and ghostly whispers emanating from it. And the kicker? You enter the building from the north...but once inside, the door you just came in through is at the ''southern'' end.}}

** It's also later involved in disposing of a "holy" book with decidedly Lovecraftian elements.

** The game in general suffers from spatial orientation issues. It is very common to enter a door facing one direction and come out of a door not facing the opposite direction.

* [[Fantastic Racism]]: According to the Enclave, their ultimate goal is to ensure Humanity's survival... too bad their definition of Humanity is Enclave and Vault-born Humans only. If you were born in the Wasteland, the Enclave considers you ''impure''.

** This potentially may be part of the reason why {{spoiler|The Overseer despises the Lone Wanderer and his/her father. Also why drinking tainted Aqua Pura kills you.}}

** This makes the mutual non-aggression between the Ghouls and Super Mutants stand out more, even if the reason is more practical than ideological. The Ghouls just want be left alone. The Super Mutants leave the Ghouls alone since they're terrible (or even non-viable) as mutation stock.

* [[Fantastic Slurs]]: Ghouls calling unmutated humans 'Smoothskins' (weirdly enough, even some who don't seem to mind humans overall still use the epithet), humans calling ghouls 'zombies', and Three Dog and the Brotherhood of Steel calling Super Mutants 'Frankensteins' and 'Uglies'. Even 'ghoul' presumably started out this way, before being [[Appropriated Appellation|reclaimed]] once they started forming their own societies.

** Buy Charon's contract, and he'll part ways with his loathsome former master with a shotgun to the head. If you have bad karma and release him from the contract, he'll try the same on you.

** Revelation 21:6 starts, "I am am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end..." The first time you hear this as at the beginning of the story (and of your life). Guess at what other point this passage becomes relevant.

* [[Friendly Neighborhood Vampires]]: {{spoiler|The Family}} is a group of reformed cannibals, modeling themselves after classic vampire lore to curb their cravings for human flesh. Most of them, including their leader, are quite friendly and civil, and are [[Noble Demon|Noble Demons]] at the very worst. You'll have the option of making a deal with them to secure blood packs so they no longer have to feed on people, and protect the settlement that was once terrified of them. You can even become one too.

* [[Future Imperfect]]: Rivet City historian Abraham Washington. Justified to an extent by the loss of records in the war.

* [[Have You Tried Rebooting]]: The computer used to reach Vault 87 appears to be non-functional. To proceed, you have to ask one of the children why it doesn't work (that child turned it off), and ask him to head to the terminal to turn it back on.

* [[Herr Doktor]]: A [[Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate|Morally Ambiguous]] one named [[No Celebrities Were Harmed|Braun]], no less...

** [[President Evil|President]] [[Heroes (TV)|Linderman]] [[Star Trek Generations (Film)|drops bridges]] [[A Clockwork Orange (Film)|with his droogs!]]

*** In Japan, [[Yosuke Akimoto|Master Asia]] has uploaded his brain into a super computer and instead of using Devil Gundam cells, he is using the FEV to wipe out humanity.

* [[Human Resources]]: The Little Lamplight caverns produce a kind of edible fungus which scrubs rads ''and'' cures health, and is thus enthusiastically gobbled up by the kiddies. Sounds too good to be true? {{spoiler|It's best fertilized by human flesh.}}

* [[Humongous Mecha]]: Liberty Prime. It is also a bit of a Deconstruction, in that it takes a lot of power to operate. {{spoiler|Reconstructed at the end, in a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]]}}

** Go to either extreme, and you'll have either ultra-evil mercenaries (if you are good) or vigilante "lawmen" (if you are evil) attack you as random encounters. Also, one perk gives you a substantial bonus to your Speech skill, provided that you maintain a Neutral karma level. To put this in perspective, you can earn enough Karma points to be "Good" or "Evil" before you leave the tutorial level.

* [[Hurricane of Puns]]: Some weapon names, such as Man Opener, Jack (a unique Ripper), Rock-it Launcher, Board of Education, etc.

* [[Meaningful Name]]:

** Mr. Burke doesn't just sound like "berk", he's also named after a famous Victorian grave robber. Even that doesn't hint at quite how evil he is.

** President John Henry Eden. Named after both the folk hero John Henry and his ultimate goal in recreating paradise.

* [[Mecha Mooks]]: Protectrons, sentry bots.

* [[The Plot Reaper]]: {{spoiler|Liberty Prime}} takes a nuke to the face in the first mission of the ''Broken Steel'' expansion to the main quest. Otherwise, you'd be wondering why he couldn't just curb-stomp the entire Wasteland for you.

* [[Point and Click Map]]

** Bingo in ''the Pitt''.

* [[The Pollyanna]]: Moira Brown, who takes everything from her bleak surroundings to her catastrophically failed experiments to her own ghoulification with the same sunny enthusiasm. [[Break the Cutie|Breaking her spirit]] by persuading her to give up her Guide project is treated as a [[Moral Event Horizon|special kind of evil]].

* [[Rule of Cool]]: The entire game basically ''runs'' on [[Rule of Cool]].

* [[Rule of Drama]]: The original ending forces the player {{spoiler|to make a heroic sacrifice. Even though logically speaking, several of your potential companions could ''easily'' perform the action for you and be unharmed.}} But the companions will refuse to help, with their reasoning being essentially "It's simply more dramatic if ''you'' do it."

* [[Scavenger World]]: With a fair amount of [[Survivalist Stash|SurvivalistStashes]].

* [[Scenery Gorn]]: The view of downtown DC from the top of the Washington Monument is equal parts breathtaking and horrifying.

* [[Scenery Porn]]: {{spoiler|Oasis}} Also, various places such as downtown Washington, D.C., Arlington Cemetery, the northwestern area of the map ... pretty much anything that isn't in the central, southwestern, or northeastern portions of the world map.

{{quote| '''Three Dog:''' Have any of you kiddies ever seen... a ''tree''? [...] Somewhere out in the Wasteland is a place with ''lots'' of trees, a veritable oasis of green in a [[Real Is Brown|depressing sea of brown]]...}}

* [[Sequel Hook]]: Picking up on a mention from ''Tactics'', both this game and ''New Vegas'' imply there's another faction of the Brotherhood of Steel operating in Chicago, and it's also hinted that super mutants have been sighted and the Enclave is suspected to have another base nearby.

* [[Short-Range Long-Range Weapon]]: All the guns in the game have an [[Arbitrary Maximum Range]], but it can be especially noticeable with the sniper rifle. Sniper-type players are known to fail to make long-distance shots that would have been possible in some other games, never mind [[Real Life]]. The bullet simply disappears before it reaches its target.

** In the Georgetown townhouse there is a robot that says a very familiar poem for those who have read Ray Bradbury (actually that whole house is a reference to that short story)

** The Mysterious Stranger carries a .44 Magnum. The Mark Twain story ''[[The Mysterious Stranger]]'' has an alt title: ''No. 44''.

* [[Try Not to Die]]: One of Moira Brown's cheerful ways of saying goodbye whenever you end a conversation with her. Also, Everett in The Pitt.

* [[Universal Ammunition]]: Semi-realistically averted. If a weapon is the same caliber as a given round, it can fire it, (e.g. .32 rounds work in both the .32 revolver and the hunting rifle). This is not ''quite'' how it works in [[Real Life]], but it's better than many games do at it.

* [[Unreliable Narrator]]: The Narrator says that Vault 101's door never opened, and that you were born there. [[First Episode Spoiler|The game's plot proves both false.]]

* [[Unusually Uninteresting Sight]]: In full force. Nobody comments that you're decked out in power armor or that you have an eight-foot-tall, bright yellow walking tank with you. But for once, the tank (Fawkes) has the decency to [[Lampshade]] it:

* [[Warp Whistle]]: Fast-travelling. No explanation is given of how you can effectively teleport, so it's best seen as a "skip to the end of the journey" option -- time skips ahead each time you travel, and does so in proportion to the distance you've gone. While you get to avoid all the [[Random Encounters]] you might otherwise face, there's a fairly high chance that something will spawn right on top of you the second you arrive at your location.

* [[Wasteland Elder]]: There are multiple examples. Such as Manya, the oldest person alive in Megaton, who can tell you the history of its foundation, as well as the elderly leaders of the children of the atom. There are also ghouls that still survived since the original bomb drops, one of which says that her interesting story is somewhat boring.

* [[We Can Rule Together]]: [[Affably Evil]] President Eden suggests that there may be a place in the Enclave for the Lone Wanderer, perhaps even replacing Colonel Autumn as his [[The Dragon|dragon]], if they agree to help Eden implement his Final Solution. Nothing ever comes of it, though, for two important reasons; 1) even if you don't destroy Eden yourself, in ''Broken Steel'' Liberty Prime will level Raven Rock, either destroying Eden or burying him under a few thousand tons of rubble. 2) Despite being raised in a Vault, the Lone Wanderer is descended from Wastelanders, so Eden's FEV turns out to be fatal to him / her as well.

* [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]]: The Vault 101 Overseer. He seems sour and unfriendly most of the time, but if you read his entry in his terminal, he really wished to have the vault residents lead a peaceful life and didn't proceed with Vault experiments.

** Just about everyone in Canterbury Commons believes The Mechanist is doing more harm than good. While he's sincere about protecting the town, it's agreed that his heavilly-armed robots are doing a lot more damage than the mutated ants.

* [[What the Hell, Hero?]]: Depending on your actions, you can get quite a few of these.

** Dad gives you one when he finds out you destroyed Megaton, while Three Dog calls you a "scumbag" if you kill the mutants wanting to get into Tenpenny Tower -- and calls out the mutants when they ''kill'' every human in Tenpenny Tower.

* [[Worst News Judgement Ever]]: Three Dog of Galaxy News Radio talks about the player character and ''only'' about the player character. There are precisely two news stories in the entire game that aren't directly related to you or your father. This makes sense most of the time, as the player tends to do things that are noticeable enough to be considered newsworthy, but some of the things he reports on are less than noteworthy - he even does a story about you finishing a fetch quest involving collecting soda bottles for a strange woman out in the middle of nowhere. This is lampshaded with "Christ, talk about a slow news day..."

* [[Wrench Wench]]: Moira Brown. You, if you play as the female version of the Lone Wanderer and spend up enough on Repair skill points.

* [[Wrong Genre Savvy]]: Both the AntAgonist and The Mechanist believe they are in a superhero comic...you can complete a quest by convincing them that they're not.

* [[You Have Researched Breathing]]: You can get meat from anything from a dog to a giant bug, but you need the Cannibal perk if you want fresh human meat. However, feral ghouls will occasionally carry around steak-shaped slabs of human.

* [[Your Head Asplode]]:

** Moira develops a molerat repellent that repels their heads from their bodies.

* [[Your Mind Makes It Real]]: Tranquility Lane and the Anchorage Reclamation Simulation.