Fallout New Vegas / Tropes C to D

Tropes A-B | Tropes C-D | Tropes E-H | Tropes I-M | Tropes N-R | Tropes S-Z

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Fallout: New Vegas provides examples of the following tropes:

C

• The Cake Is a Lie:
  • In Old World Blues, the Think Tank enlist your help in defeating their enemy, Dr. Mobius, on the promise that they'll let you go once you retrieve your brain and get it back in your skull. In truth, they plan on keeping your brain for themselves, because they need it for their own agenda.
  • Two of the Great Khans' endings are this. If you convince them to side with the NCR and go for that respective ending, the latter will end up completely going back on their promises, and the Khans moved onto a barren reservation far north of any trade routes.
  • Less surprising with Caesar's Legion. The ending for the Great Khans is determined by what you do during their main questline. Not breaking their alliance with The Legion means that, as they do with all tribes under their rule, they kill the elderly and infirm, declare the women chattel and the rest are slaves to Caesar. And, of course, their tribal identity is annihilated and the Great Khans are forgotten. Oh, and provided you didn't side against the latter.
  • Caesar's Legion does this in general to most tribes. If you honestly believe they'll make your Amazons into officers, then you're either living under a rock or just plain deserve it. Strangely, but believably, the ending says that some of the Khans still believe it was worth it to spite the NCR.
• Cane Fu: A favourite melee weapon for the White Glove Society that runs the Ultra-Luxe casino on the Strip. While that doesn't sound too dangerous, remember that you have to go in bare-fisted unless you have a high enough Sneak skill (50 or above if you want to really be prepared, as most of the really useful weapons are improved holdout items) or can rob the cashier's room without getting caught. If your Unarmed skill is crap, you'll have a hell of a time doing the quest for their casino (the right way, at least).
• Canines Gambling in a Card Game: In the cyberdog training area of Big MT, having the Wild Wasteland trait allows for the Courier to find a room where five cyberdogs are assembled around a poker table in the middle of a game.
• Cannibalism Superpower: The player character can literally gain cannibalism superpowers through a hidden perk. If the player takes the Cannibal perk and then kills and eats Caesar, The King, Mr. House and President Kimball, your character absorbs their greatest strengths. Afterward, you receive a boost to four primary stats for a full minute after committing any act of cannibalism. Given that you have to kill and eat the four most powerful people in the Mojave Wasteland (which will naturally alienate their factions) and Kimball only appears in the second-final plot mission of the game this perk is somewhere in between a Bragging Rights Reward, Awesome, but Impractical, and 11th-Hour Superpower.
• Cannibal Larder: The basement of the marked men guard outpost in Lonesome Road is full of butchered human corpses on tables and skeletons hanging on meat hooks.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': If you attack any member of a major faction, the rest will know and you will lose reputation with them for it (unless you do a stealth kill). They Hand Wave it with both sides having a "robust network of informants", but that's a shallow justification when you're killing Legion recruits in the middle of the desert.
• The Caper: What the Dead Money DLC is all about, aside from being a very blatant Homage to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
• Cash Gate: Entry to the Strip through the Freeside gate requires you to have 2000 caps minimum on your person, or pay 500 caps to purchase a forged passport (which can be negotiated down to 375 with a high enough Barter skill), though there are many ways around this like taking the monorail from the NCR's HQ at Camp McCarran, using a Science check to get pas the robotic guard, or gaining favor with The King and asking him for a passport.
• Casting Gag:
  • Mr. New Vegas is voiced by Wayne Newton, a.k.a. Mr. Las Vegas.
  • Kris Kristofferson was one of the Highwaymen, a country music Super Group composed of himself, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash. Their song "Highwayman" includes a verse sung by the ghost of a dam-builder who was killed while building the Hoover Dam. Kristofferson voices Chief Hanlon in this game, and the conflict over control of the Dam can be the death of him once again.
  • Big Sal is voiced by Alex Rocco, AKA Moe Greene from The Godfather, fitting his faux-Mafioso style.
  • Stand-up comedian Billy Knight is voiced by comedian Rob Corddry.
  • Dr. Mobius, who deliberately plays the role of a B-Movie villain and even admits to watching those films, is voiced by Cam Clarke, whose father Robert Clarke was best known for acting in that sort of film. Furthermore, Dr. 0 is voiced by James Urbaniak who voices Rusty Venture in The Venture Brothers, also a mad scientist in a series thats a send-up to pulp novels and B-Movies.
  • Mr. House, an eccentric billionaire played by René Auberjonois, being an Alternate Company Equivalent to Andrew Ryan from Bioshock, played by Armin Shimerman. Aside from both playing a role as an Expy of Howard Hughes, these two actors played against each other in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and their respective characters of Odo and Quark have certain traits that filter through to their billionaire characters: Andrew Ryan embodies Quark's avarice, while House fulfills Odo's obsessive need for order.
• Catchphrase: Yes Man thinks this trope page is absolutely great! And he's not just saying that because he has to!
• Cattle Baron: Even 200 years later, and now residing in the New California Republic, the power of a Brahmin Baron is unquestionable. In the game, there's Heck Gunderson who at first seems like a likeable enough character trying to find his missing son, but it's possible to meet a former rancher that he's stolen land from through underhanded tactics. Chief Hanlon, head of the Rangers, laments that the influence of the ranching and agriculture barons means that most of the NCR's best forces are still chasing small-time raiders from threatening their land, allowing the major threat of the Legion to grow largely unchecked in the Mojave.
• Cattle Punk: The closer you get to big cities, the more it becomes like a gangster flick, but the more rural areas have a definite Old-West feel to them. What do you expect, it's set in the former state of Nevada. Let us count the ways: Two cowboy robots (Victor and Primm Slim), prominent usage of revolvers, well-connected cattle barons, extra-big bighorn sheep, moody guitar riffs, "prospectors" as a euphemism for "scavengers," a Cowboy perk that makes you better at all things Gunslingers ought to be, a chain gang on the run... and these are all just in the first few hours of the game.
• Cavalry Betrayal: The goal of the Courier in the House/Independent ending is to pull one off against the NCR during the Second Battle of Hoover Dam with the Securitron army. Nobody wants the Legion to win, so making the NCR think that the Securitrons are on their side, only to use the chance to turn and force them out, ensures that things go well for the player's chosen side.
• Central Theme:
  • Per the developers themselves, the series' central theme is that you need to let go of the past. In base-game New Vegas in particular, there is a direct correlation between a faction's evilness on the Karma Meter and how tightly they cling to the values of the past. This even extends to all of your human/humanoid companions including those in the DLCs).
  • In the main game: Power is a gamble, and even a small thing can tip the scales in a big way. Even one individual can make a difference.
  • In Dead Money: Obsession is a cage. Begin again. Let go.
  • In Honest Hearts: We're all tribes in the end and family always forgives, so long as you admit you went the wrong way.
  • In Old World Blues: Don't cling to the past, look to the future - not for something better, but to make it better.
  • In Lonesome Road: Continuing the theme from the main game, one person with a careless action can leave unimaginable scars and not even know it.
  • War never changes, but men do, through the roads they walk.
  • The game also heavily tackles the topic of Hegelian dialectics. Caesar uses this to describe the relationship between his Legion and the NCR, but also describes the relationship between the factions based on pre-war history and the Courier. Too bad he doesn’t grasp Hegelian dialectics anywhere near correctly.
• Cerebus Retcon: The ending to the first Fallout says the Brotherhood of Steel began peaceful relations with the outside world, slowly reintroducing lost technology to the world; Fallout 2 shows this as happening and also implies that their territory became a state in the budding NCR. This game retcons that the Brotherhood and NCR have a history of war. Depending on the Courier's choices with both the Brotherhood and the NCR, the peaceful relations part has a chance to return, at least with the Mojave Brotherhood.
• Chain of Deals: The quest "Come Fly With Me" basically amounts to this. Upon arriving in Novac, the Courier is likely still pursuing Benny, and is told to talk to Manny Vargas, who may know where to find him. Instead, Manny asks you to first clear out the REPCONN test facility, which is infested with ghouls before they attack the town. The ghouls turn out to be a religious cult led by a ghoul prophet named Jason Bright, who is readying his followers for a pilgrimage, but they can't leave until someone clears out the "demons" (a group of nightkin) also inhabiting the building. To get them to leave, the Courier has to creep around the basement and deal with both the nightkin's leader and a trigger-happy ghoul survivalist, and then help the ghouls with their "Great Journey". At every point along the way, the player has the option to say "screw this" and resolve things violently, while still being able to deal with the other parties involved peacefully. Cutting the chain short is especially likely to happen since the nightkin leader can be dealt with non-violently, but only if you talk to him before getting into combat with any of the other Nightkin.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • As well as the Ripper, a full-sized chainsaw can be found in Vault 3, wielded by Motor-Runner, or on high-level Legionaries. Thanks to its incredibly high-damage VATS attack (high enough to completely ignore a Ranger's DT and kill him in one hit), it is one of the best weapons for Sneak Attacks in the game. Despite whatever common sense may tell you about using a bulky, awkward and loud weapon for stealth work.^* Doubles back into hilariousness because despite its revving sound being liable to wake up an entire house, the game actually considers the chainsaw's idle state to be silent and just as useful as any melee weapon for stealth kills.
  • The Gun Runners' Arsenal adds new mod parts for the chainsaw, including carbide teeth (raising its base damage) and a carbon-fibre body to reduce its weight. From Chainsaw Good to Chainsaw Great.
• Challenge Run:
  • The in-game challenges. They range from normal things (heal 10,000 damage with Stimpaks 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.
  • Hardcore Mode, which makes you have to eat, drink, and sleep regularly, and stimpacks and Rad-aways heal you over time rather than instantaneously.
• Chaos Architecture: Invoked if not displayed. In Old World Blues, Dr. 0 says that they can't give you specific directions to the labs in Big MT because "sometimes they move around. Or disappear. Or blow up."
• The Chain of Command: The Bo S elder can be demoted from his position in the Brotherhood of Steel for violating the "Chain That Binds" because he skipped rank when giving orders concerning the security of the bunker.
• Character Development: The Enclave remnants really humanize the faction of Card-Carrying Villains they were in Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, as does ED-E's creator Whitely from what we hear from the eyebot's logs and those of his duplicate in the Divide.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • As you're poking around your would-be gravesite in Goodsprings, you'll likely come across a bunch of Distinctive Cigarette Butts. Then you find information about your attacker's movements with Great Khan mercenaries at Novac. Later, you're given an engraved lighter from a Khan betrayed by the same man you're tracking at Boulder City. Keep these items, they become useful when convincing Swank to turn on Benny.
  • In the Old World Blues expansion, the injury you sustained at the very beginning of the game ends up as one of these. It creates a bit of a "wrinkle" in your brain that caused the Auto Doc responsible for the brain-extraction process to alter its programming, and keep you sane and lucid after it was done.
  • The rocket toys you can buy in the Dinky Dino shop in Novac. They end up being extremely relevant to the local quest.
  • New Vegas itself is this. Clearly visible from the first area you start in. Trying to go there immediately leads to a squishy death, and most folks won't get there for weeks, unless on a speed-run.
• Cherry Tapping: One of the challenges added by Gun Runner's Arsenal is to kill Deathclaws with the weakest weapons in the game. Of course, it only says kill. Nothing says you can't horribly maim them with your top shelf guns, first.
• Chew the Scenery: Doctor Klein, Doctor Borous, and Doctor Mobius in Old World Blues. Klein claims that people keep tampering with his voice volume knob. You can ask Borous why he always talks dramatically. He responds that there is no drama. ONLY SCIENCE! Mobius is a stereotypical Mad Scientist, so it's to be expected.
  Dr. Borous: WHAT TERRORS AWAIT THE LOBOTOMITE IN BIG MOUNTAIN!? ... Really, anyone know? I'm at a loss here.
• Child Soldiers: Two young boys can be seen receiving military traning inside the Legion's Fort, although they will not attack The Courier if the Legion becomes hostile (and can't be attacked as well). Also, according to Ranger Andy in Novac, he suffered his leg injury by being caught off guard by a child (a Legion slave) who was ordered to drop a grenade at his feet.
• Christianity is Catholic:
  • In the vanilla game, the only references to Christianity are the use of Christian symbols by The Followers and a line where Cachino references the Pope.
  • Averted in Honest Hearts, which prominently features a post-apocalyptic Mormon sect founded in "New Canaan" (the town that sprung up in the ruins of Ogden, Utah), with the Joshua Graham and Daniel serving as missionaries to the Dead Horses and Sorrow tribes. The .45 Auto Pistol (based on the Colt M1911) is referred to as an ancestral weapon of the Canaanites that all are trained in, as it was designed by "one of their tribe" almost 400 years ago.^note Specifically, John Browning, firearms designer and Ogden-born Mormon.
  • Burt Gunnerson is a Ghoul minister from Utah who helps the poor and destitute and is implied to be a Mormon minister. In cut dialogue, he reveals that Driver Nephi was his old friend from Utah before he ran into a bad crowd, i.e. the Fiends, and got hooked to drugs and left the church, or as he refers to it "[Burt's] little cult".
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
  • Benny has betrayed three people before the game even started, can betray you if you are gullible enough to believe him about talking to you in private at the Tops penthouse, and has the audacity to betray you yet again if you free him from the Fort by running away for good instead of helping you.
  • In the main questline, the Courier has the capability to betray not one, not two, but all three factions, murder all three leaders (and possibly even devour them after killing them), and then taking over New Vegas in the resulting power vacuum. And those are just the major factions. You can also get in good with every minor faction in the game, provided you're clever enough not to alienate them by accident, and then, before the final battle, go in and wipe out all of them. I Can Rule Alone, indeed...
  • There are also plenty of quests that end with the option to slaughter the people you're helping. Help a group of ghouls get to the rockets, then set them to crash into each other. Help restore power to HELIOS One, then set the defense system to kill everyone unlucky enough to be standing outside. Promise to cut off access to the sulfur mines under the Vault, then set enough explosives to take down the mines and the Vault. And then there's that self-destruct button in the Brotherhood of Steel bunker...
  • Every deal that Caesar's Legion makes with other tribes and groups is in bad faith. There are no allies for Caesar, there are only prospective slaves and enemies. Nipton falls victim to this, Ulysses's tribe fell victim to this, the White Legs fall victim to this, the Great Khans can fall victim to this. Interestingly, the Legion's tendency towards backstabbing pokes a huge hole (pun not intended) in Caesar's reasoning for founding the group, as a large part of why the original Roman Empire was so successful was because they made a policy of not doing that, and in general trying to respect conquered nations.
• Church Militant: Downplayed with the New Canaanites, a Mormon sect founded in Ogden, Utah and the last surviving remnant of the LDS church. According to Joshua Graham, learning how to handle a .45 auto is a Canaanite rite of passage, and their missionaries tend to carry some heavy firepower. However, they're more survivalist than aggressively militant, focusing mainly on self-defense - a natural consequence of living in a setting where Apocalypse Anarchy is in full effect.
• Classy Cat-Burglar: The sneak skill magazine '¡La Fantoma!' depicts one of these on its cover.
• Clingy Suit: while the Stealth Armor MK II in the Old World Blues DLC isn't permanently attached, it sometimes begs you to continue wearing it and expresses sadness at being removed.
• Clip Its Wings: Crippling a Cazador's wings is an excellent way to soften them up for the killshot. Of course, that assumes you can actually hit them in the first place, and not get stung to death by five or six of his buddies.
• Cloud Cuckoolander:
  • Played with; No-Bark Noonan is actually pretty perceptive about strange events that are happening around Novac, and good at looking through people with less-than honest intentions. Too bad he blames them on the Chupacabra and the mole people. Of course, the mole people are actually real, and he sometimes lays blame on exactly what the problem is but obfuscates it behind his choice of words. As for the communist ghosts, well...
  • The Think Tank and Doctor Mobius.
  • Many of the relatively sane nightkin, such as Lily and Tabitha, qualify as this. Mentioned explicitly by the rough-voiced, slightly Mister Rogers-like radio personality Mr. New Vegas. He notes that ever since Tabitha took over the broadcast, Black Mountain's radio channel has become "less for outcasts, more for weirdos."
• Cluster F-Bomb: Cass has a delightfully foul mouth, and can't help swearing repeatedly. The game plays with this during her side-quest, while taking revenge for her ruined caravan, she states that they'll settle accounts with one group, and then go to the leader of the other group and "make that bitch eat her own hair." When you look in the quest menu, that statement is recorded word for word as your goal for this quest. Some characters have a wonderful way of personalizing their own quests, you know?
  Cass: The NCR wants their hands on everything they see. Nobody's dick is that long, not even Long Dick Johnson, and he had a fucking long dick, thus the name.
  The Courier Yeah, I kinda guessed that.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: One path available when interrogating Silus is to kill him for your personal pleasure. Of course doing so before he's said anything of importance just gets Lieutenant Boyd angry. Still, you can simply beat him around until he relents.
• Cold Opening: While the first three DLCs start with a narrated slideshow, Lonesome Road skips this in favor of dropping you right into The Divide.
• Cold Sniper: Boone. He actually tries to keep you away, believing he's too cold to have a spotter and that it'll end in disaster. If he gets killed (or rendered unconscious), he'll creepily chuckle and say the he knew that you'd be the death of him.
  • Corporal Betsy in Camp McCarran deconstructs the trope by expressing regret over the job requiring such a cold personality.
    • She also subverts it with her vulnerability and mental trauma after being raped by Cook-Cook.
  • Ranger Ghost is somewhat of a subversion - she's cold and doesn't regret it, but the other NCR personnel think she's a prick and/or trying too hard.
  • Sergeant Bitter Root as well. The other First Recon members, Lieutenant Gorobets, Corporal Sterling and 10 of Spades are quite friendly however.
• Collection Sidequest:
  • The longest mission in the game, by logical extension, involves collecting special "star" bottle caps from bottles of Sunset Sarsaparilla and handing them in to an animatronic cowboy named Festus.
  • There is a snow globe collection game which nets you caps.
• Colonel Badass: Colonel Cassandra Moore. She commands the garrison at Hoover Dam, within spitting distance of the massive Legion buildup at Fortification Hill. She's built up reputation as a hardass and a General Ripper (though justifiable due to the proximity to the Fort). She's had four tours against the Brotherhood of Steel during the NCR's war with them.
• Color Wash: The game's world is overlaid with an orange-brown filter, in keeping with its desert and Western themes. Not as obvious as Fallout 3's green tint though, since the Mojave is, like most deserts, pretty brown to begin with.
  • The recently nuked Camp Searchlight is very green.
  • Camp Forlorn Hope is a drab sepia colour, in keeping with its occupants' low morale. The filter is seen in a few other places around the Colorado River too, like the Deathclaw promontory.
• Commonplace Rare:
  • Lonesome Road introduces an amazingly rare and valuable item: a portable bedroll. There are only three of them in the entire DLC, and the value of one in caps is slightly higher than that of a minigun.
  • To lesser extent, campfires could also be considered this. In the core game they are the only place where you can craft foodstuffs and some other low-tech items, and you cannot substitute what should be a fully functional stove for one. You can't build a new campfire yourself either, no matter what your character's survival skill is. This leads to absurd situations where just to cook some food you have to hoof out of a lively town and halfway to the next one to find a roadside campfire.
• Companion-Specific Sidequest: Every companion has a sidequest specific to them often providing more then just further backstory for the companion concerned.
• Company Town: The Villa and the Sierra Madre. The Sierra Madre chips you find laying around the villa are given as payment to the employees who live and work there. One computer log mentions that they barely get enough chips to make it to the next paycheck- provided they ration supplies carefully. Another computer log tells of how Sinclair set up the whole economy so that all the profits of his casino go directly to him, without him having to give anything back in return. He even spun up some excuse to claim that it benefits all the workers by not having to worry about money directly.
  • Also to note is that in the casino itself, chips and Pre-War cash have a 1:1 exchange. Presumably so anyone with cash could trade it in for chips. Or any kleptomaniac who picked up a shit-ton of chips could make off with a bunch of green and wreck a certain desert's economy...
• Competitive Balance: Every character build has a chance to survive and thrive in the Mojave Wasteland, whether he be a power armor-wearing sledgehammer-wielding maniac, a sneaky thief with a sniper rifle, or a smooth talker, Obsidian has made it possible for you to solve everything the game throws at you.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • NPC characters can reload some slow reload weapons such as Cowboy Repeaters and .357 revolvers as though they are reloaded with magazines or speedloaders. Thankfully, this also applies to followers. A Good Bad Bug with the hot-swapping ammo system allows the player to do this as well.
  • Nowhere is this more apparent than the game's gambling. NPC card dealers will regularly deal themselves 20s and Blackjack several times in a row when your luck stat is below par. Maxing out your Luck stat allows for the game to cheat in your favor as well, elevating Luck (already a boon to many builds) to Game-Breaker status (allowing a character to break the bank of every casino in Vegas in half an hour's playing time).
  • The Boomers. The artillery barrage you must run through upon approaching their base is a scripted event, and cannot be avoided in any way or gives any third options besides 'duck and cover'. Stealth won't work, even with Stealth Boys. You can't snipe the spotters, because there aren't any. You can't make them run out of ammo. You can't return fire with the Fat Man. All you can do is run and take cover and wait for the reloading breaks—which, given the number of shells they're shooting per barrage, implies they've got a 20-gun battery firing at you. (You can, however, use Turbo to run past them.)
    • Or with good enough armor and perks, survive getting explosion-launched repeatedly toward the Nellis AFB gate...
  • The Legionary Assassins that come after you if your reputation with the Legion is poor always come straight for you. Even if you're sneaking with a Sneak skill of 100, have all of the stealth-related perks, and are invisible using a Stealth Boy, they will find and attack you. This makes playing a sneaking sniper character against them incredibly difficult unless you are able to see them coming from a good ways off, which isn't always possible.
    • One unusual bug that often comes from this is that many assassin squads will not be instantly aggro to you. If your perception is enhanced enough that you spot them before they spot you, they will appear as blue blips on the compass radar. They have a tendency to approach you first, announce that you have been marked for death, and THEN attack you. This works in the player's advantage because the messenger will run a long distance away from the rest of the squad to approach you. You can easily kill the scout while it takes a few moments for the others to catch up and join in. However, if your Legion rep reaches "Vilified," they'll skip the "marked for death" dialogue and just attack you. It is possible to become Vilified to the Legion during your (likely) first encounter with them in the Nipton if you kill Vulpes Inculta.
  • There are quest triggers that are scripted for when you walk through a zone and trigger whether you're sneaking or not resulting in an NPC spotting you and walking up to you to either talk or attack no matter how good your stealth is.
  • Just like with Fallout 3, NPCs can effectively shoot at you even when they're not actually facing you. Normally this isn't noticeable, but in a melee or unarmed only run this can become very apparent as NPCs nail you with a plasma pistol while facing away from you.
• Confirmed Bachelor: The "Armored Closet Gay" variety is the name of the game for this perk, which allows you extra Speech options for any gay men in the game such as Major Knight of the NCR or your companion Arcade Gannon. That being said this perk is not mutually exclusive with the "Lady Killer" perk, allowing the player to roleplay as a bisexual.
• Continuity Nod:
  • This game takes place in the same area as the canceled but Broad Strokes canon Van Buren, so plenty of characters and elements in New Vegas are references to events from that game.
  • Fans of Fallout will soon notice the large number of references to towns from Fallout and 2, such as Modoc or the Hub; understandable, since those took place in northern California, not far from Nevada, which is where this game takes place. Some of the original music even creeps in here and there.
  • The reason the NCR can't torture POWs can be traced back to the administration of President Tandi.
  • Who is one of the faces on the NCR currency, along with Seth and Aradesh. The Chosen One themselves is repeatedly referenced.
  • Remember the crashed vertibird outside Klamath? So does its pilot. So does the Nightkin who fashioned one of its rotor blades into a BFS.
  • Bruce Isaac in the Dino Dee-lite Motel makes mention of the mildly terrifying Mr. Bishop of New Reno, who seems more at home in the wasteland than the city. This, presumably, is the son a male Chosen One can have by either the wife or daughter (canonically the latter) of the head of the Bishop family at the time.
  • There are also a surprising amount of references to Fallout 3, both explicitly and thematically:
  • Veronica wishes the Brotherhood could help the ordinary people and look at changing the philosophy to fit the changing world they live in. This is basically what the Capital Wasteland BoS did. She even vaguely refers to this, mentioning that the BoS has had schisms and breakaway groups in the past (although that could refer to the Tactics BoS as well).
    • If you're of low intelligence, when Veronica asks you what you think about the Brotherhood of Steel, you can reply "I've heard they shoot lasers from their eyes"... which is pretty much Liberty Prime in a nutshell.
    • The schism and breakaway part likely references both the Midwestern and Capital Wasteland Brotherhoods, but she continues by mentioning that one chapter even had a small civil war over it, which either references the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood/Outcast conflict or some other conflict we haven't heard about before or since.
  • When the Courier questions Wayne in Freeside about his attackers in the quest G.I. Blues, he says that one of them called another "Lou Tenant" which his friend Roy corrects to "Lieutenant," and says Wayne can be "dumb as a mutant." This is a reference to the Master's Lieutenant in the first game, whose mutant subordinates called him "Lou Tenant".
  • ED-E is an Enclave eyebot from the airbase in the "Broken Steel" DLC. And was headed to Navarro. He was also the only prototype finished because funds were being pulled to create Hellfire Armor, also from Broken Steel. Colonel Augustus Autumn is explicitly mentioned in his backstory, specifically in Lonesome Road.
  • The aliens from the Mothership Zeta DLC show up if you have the Wild Wasteland trait.
  • Copies of Moira's "Wasteland Survival Guide" are skill books that increase your survival skill.
  • Doctor Henry in Jacobstown really knows his cyberdogs. He also happens to know a thing or two about mutations.
  • Remember Marcus, the friendly Super Mutant who helped Chosen One and wound up as mayor of Broken Hills in Fallout 2? He's back, mayor yet again, this time for a town full of Super Mutants.
  • The Classic Pack gives you the equipment of both the Vault Dweller and the Chosen One.
  • Emily Ortal, a Follower and a native of Arroyo, may reward you with medical supplies for completing a small side quest she gives you. She hopes that they are of no use to you... just like Hakunin, the shaman from when it was still a tribal village, from Fallout 2. Except a little less cryptically.
  • Dog from Dead Money seems to always need orders because he had a master as long as he remembers. Starting with The Master (the Big Bad from Fallout).
    • The Master is also mentioned by other Super mutants and Nightkin.
  • You can get the recipe for the delicious Deathclaw omelet from the great niece of its creator, who somehow got a female Deathclaw to provide a steady supply of eggs in Modoc. Until some stranger came along and "shot it in the eye," anyway.
  • The Forecaster, a psychic kid who lives under the overpass at the 188 Trading Post, wears a peculiar headband as "headache medicine." It's a psychic nullifier, like the one the Vault Dweller could use when going to confront the Master.
  • The NCR Ranger armor was designed based on the short physical description of Tycho in the first game: "a man in dusty leather armor with a trench coat and gas mask".
• Cool Plane: The Boomers' B-29 bomber.
  • The vertibirds used by President Kimball and the Enclave Remnants.
• Cool Shades: You and several NPCs can wear shades.
• Cool Versus Awesome: The central conflict of the game is basically the frontier United States and the Roman Empire fighting over Viva Las Vegas!, which is controlled by Howard Hughes and his army of robots and gangsters (including the Rat Pack), with a gang of Elvis Impersonators watching over the common people.
• Cops Need the Vigilante: The quest "Silus Treatment" has Lt. Boyd recruit the Courier to help her interrogate Silus, a captured Centurion, because NCR law prevents the torture of prisoners. One option you have is to just beat Silas into revealing information.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: You, if you ever decide to cook up a "Bloatfly Slider" or "Fire Ant Fricassee."
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Alice McLafferty of the Crimson Caravan Company not only recruits the player to steal the Gun Runners' manufacturing specifications, she also made a secret deal with the Van Graffs to eliminate the other trade caravans through any means necessary. Buy them out, kill the owners, it's all good.
  • Similarly, Heck Gunderson earned his power through forcing competitors off their land at gunpoint.
  • It's implied that Festus, Sunset Sarsaparilla Company's robot mascot, was programmed by, or on the orders of, someone very much like this. The company was legally required to include in his interface a "silly ol' advisory" about the health risks of drinking their product too much, but his hearing always suddenly gets suspiciously spotty anytime you start asking him questions about it. Assuming the player doesn't just give up in frustration first, the conveniently tin-eared Festus has to be queried for the advisory three times in a row before he finally spills the beans. Yeesh.
• Cosmetic Award: If you get the Omertas to buy guns from Mick again or free Troike from his contract with them, Mick shows his gratitude by "pimping out" your Pip-Boy 3000 to the Pimp-Boy 3 Billion, which has gold and silver plating and encrusted diamonds.
• Courier: YOU! As well as the various other couriers that work for the Mojave Express, (formerly) including Ulysses.
• Cowboy: One of the perks, which makes you better with revolvers, lever-action weapons, knives, axes, and dynamite.
• Corrupt Quartermaster: Sgt. Daniel Contreras is the New California Republic's quartermaster at their Camp McCarran outpost who exploits his position for personal gain smuggling guns and chems to clients in the Mojave Wasteland. If you complete his unmarked quest for him, he'll give you full access to his inventory and also gives you the This Machine rifle, one of the best weapons in the game.
• Cowboy Cop: Meyers, one of the (better) options for Primm's new sheriff, was sent to the NCRCF for "taking the law into his own hands one too many times." If he becomes sheriff, the epilogue reveals he does his job well and Primm prospers under him, but occasionally a body of a suspected criminal is found lying in the gutter.
  "Howdy-do folks, I'm Sheriff Meyers. Be good, or I'll shoot you dead."
• Cozy Catastrophe: Compared to Fallout 3 at least. Despite a war going on, life in the Mojave is comparatively more civilized and on the road to rebuilding itself, complete with running electricity, clean water, unmutated wildlife, and some degree of order, things that the Capital Wasteland's denizens wished they had. It's also implied that the NCR homeland is reaching pre-War levels of civilization.
• Cozy Voice for Catastrophes: Mr. New Vegas' voice is relaxing to listen to, even if you're hearing it as you get poisoned to death by mutant insects and flesh abominations.
• Crapsack World: A given for a game in a series set After the End, but the Mojave Wasteland is in several ways less of a crapsack than the Capital Wasteland was. Though there is a war going on, most areas are relatively more civilized with access to electricity and clean water. And though you may not agree with their methods, the NCR, Legion, and Mr. House have all brought some sense of order in the regions they control.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Mr. House. He not only calculated the exact time and day of the nuclear apocalypse (and was less than a day off), but he also managed to prepare himself that he survived for two hundred years afterwards, as well as being able to remotely disable or shoot down all but eleven of the missiles headed for Vegas. And if he'd had the Platinum Chip, none of them would have hit.
  • The Courier. Hey, the weapons and supplies in the Courier's Stash DLC had to come from somewhere.
  • Dean Domino, who has stashes with weapons, food and ammo all over Sierra Madre.
• Crazy Survivalist: Randall Dean Clark, a pre-War soldier who left the service in disgust after participating in the annexation of Canada, and the former owner of the Desert Ranger Armor in Honest Hearts.
  • He survived alone for decades in the park where he used to go hiking, constantly plagued by Survivor Guilt over not dying with his wife and young son. He frequently attempted suicide, but could never muster the will to go through with it, which he attributes to cowardice until his final moments.
  • One day a group of Spanish-speaking refugees arrive in the valley, and he decides to watch over them after saving one of their members and sneaking medicine into their camp. One day, the refugees get into a conflict with a group of vault dwellers from Vault 22 (who or what started the conflict is unclear), and they are all wiped out, with the women and children being killed and eaten by the dwellers. Afterwards, Randall goes on a one-man guerrilla campaign against the dwellers, wiping out over 100 of them (more than two thirds of the group) in just ten months. The vault dwellers never once saw him, and left the valley believing that a demon inhabited it.
• Credits Gag: If you've got the Wild Wasteland trait, the credits are full of humorous notes, in-jokes, and nicknames as an homage to the first two games, where similar gag credits were seen if you held shift while the credits loaded.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • The silenced .22 pistol is silent, so you can attack enemies without alerting them, can use hollow point ammo so it has a damage buff against lightly armored targets, is a basic holdout weapon so it can be snuck into places where you aren't allowed weapons, and has bonuses to critical hit chance and critical hit damage. Essentially, it exists so you can bring it into places where weapons are confiscated, and use a sneak attack critical to assassinate someone without being noticed. Outside of that circumstance, it has awful ammo variety and one of the lowest damages of any gun in the game, so if that One-Hit KO doesn't take with your first shot, you're only marginally better off than fighting the now-alert enemy with your bare hands.
  • On the crafting side, various liquid containers end up behaving like this. If a recipe calls for "an empty soda bottle", it means precisely what the game identifies as such, which is a completely different item from an empty Nuka-Cola bottle or empty Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle. If you want to cook up a Wasteland Tequila, you had better have an empty whiskey bottle to keep it in, no other container will do!
• Critical Existence Failure: Zig-zagged, as with Fallout 3. Damage to your HP also damages your limbs, and taking enough damage to any limb cripples it, giving you a relevant handicap until you mend yourself. Crippled legs make you limp along at a snail's pace, crippled arms make it impossible for you to hold a weapon steady, and a crippled head causes your ears to ring and eyesight to blur periodically, mimicking the effects of a concussion. However, you can restore your HP with food and water without healing your limbs, and it doesn't matter if all of your limbs are broken and beaten; you can crawl along indefinitely and never die until your all-important HP is depleted - and inversely, even if all your limbs are fine, as soon as your HP is gone you still keel over and die.
• Critical Hit Class: It's one of the possible ways to build your character, as critical rates are determined by the player's Luck stat, weapons, and a good number of the game's perks. A character with high luck will also be ridiculously good at cards, making him become both this trope and The Gambler.
• Crooked Contractor: Terminal entries in Dead Money reveal that the surrounding villa was built by a different construction crew than the Sierra Madre Casino proper to save money. The villa crew's manager, Mr. Yesterday, intentionally built everything slipshod to squeeze every penny he could out of Sinclair. He embezzled money from shipments, covered up construction accidents, and smuggled in hard liquor and chems for the workers. It's also implied he murdered a subordinate who tried to blackmail him into getting a higher cut and Made It Look Like an Accident.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The death animation of some weapons, or if you have Bloody Mess perk.
• Cruel Coyotes: One of the enemies in the game is called the Nightstalker, which is a coyote/rattlesnake hybrid, combining it with Snakes Are Sinister. The Nightstalker is commonly seen throughout the Mojave wasteland, but can also be found at the Big Mountain research facility were they were created before the Great War by Doctor Borous, one of the scientists performing research at Big Mountain. When a Nightstalker sees the Courier, they will attack as a group, either with their fangs or with the rattlesnake head which also serves as a tail unless the Courier has the Animal Friend perk, in which case the Nightstalkers will become non-aggressive.
• Cruel Mercy:
  • One option in Cass's quest. If you spare the Van Graffs and Alice McLafferty , and give evidence of their crimes to the NCR, Cass decides that the NCR's bureaucracy and legal procedures will do them more harm than her bullets ever could.
  • You can also do the same to Mr. House, by disconnecting his body from the mainframe and putting him back in his capsule. His life support will keep him alive for at least one year before he dies from the contaminants you exposed him to.
  • In Honest Hearts, with high enough speech skill, you can convince Joshua Graham to do this to Salt-upon Wounds, letting him live and leave as a broken man.
• Crushing the Populace: Caesar's Legion if Legate Lanius comes to rule; he will murder anyone and everyone who he sees as an insult to the Legion, including the Followers of the Apocalypse as he claims they have "dishonored" Caesar's reputation. While Caesar treats profligates somewhat gently and enters the Strip as a conquering hero, Lanius is horrifically cruel.
• Crutch Character:
  • ED-E is the first companion one can easily obtain. He has a great companion perk in Enhanced Sensors and a decent little zapper, but he can't switch up to newer weapons and armor like your other companions, causing him to fall behind. Doing his companion quest upgrades his weapon or his armor, but not both, and removes him from the party for a bit. Fortunately, he doesn't take up a "human" companion slot, so leaving him around isn't too harmful unless you play Hardcore. Pairing him up with Boone turns the duo into a Disc-One Nuke, as ED-E's Enhanced Sensors allow you to "notice" faraway enemies, who Boone will then blow away with his maxed-out Guns skill. With Lonesome Road, though, ED-E averts this in the main game, as going through the whole DLC results in him becoming by far the most useful companion, but in Lonesome Road proper, he gets taken over by the antagonist before the climax starts kicking in.
  • InnDead Money, Dean Domino, despite not being the strongest of the three companions, is easily the most useful. His companion perk allows you to explore the denser concentrations of poisonous clouds without taking damage (temporarily), which is essential if you want to find everything, and he's the only one with a gun. Since there are only three types of enemies in the DLC, only one of which can shoot back (and even then only five times), he's basically a killing machine if you're not boxed in. The only reason he isn't a total game breaker is because he (along with the rest of your companions) disappears about halfway into the main quest.
• Cultured Badass: Arcade Gannon and possibly a high-intelligence Courier.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The final battle at Hoover Dam can turn into this, especially if you got all factions to ally with the NCR including the remnants, have a powerful companion with you (like Boone with Power Armor and an Anti-Materiel Rifle), have maxed out energy weapons and have saved all your alien blaster ammo. You can just go around disintegrating squad after squad of the Legion's Elite Mooks with no difficulty at all, while your allies just keep coming in and curb stomping the shit out of them in one Big Damn Heroes moment after another, finally culminating in defeating the Final Boss Legate Lanius in a few seconds.
  • Bonus slides and radio broadcasts throughout the final battle indicate that the Legion attacked not only the Dam, but made a general offensive along with their allies across the region. Assuming you did the above, the result is... one-sided. The Fiends attack the NCR base of Camp McCarran and are quickly routed; the Omertas storm out onto the streets of New Vegas and are promptly butchered to the last by House's Securitron army; the Legion raids Novac but a small militia of former NCR Troopers and the Bright Brotherhood drive them back; the Legion attacks Camp Golf but the efforts of the Rangers and the Misfits see them driven off with heavy casualties; and finally a Legion assault on Camp Forlorn Hope sees the Legion repelled "in what will surely be the most decisive victory in this entire battle." Total. Abject. Failure. On every front.
  • Also, you can make an off-screen Curb-Stomp Battle happen if you upgrade the Securitron army under the Legion fort, for the Mr. House and Wild Card endings. Imagine an army of 7-foot-tall heavily-armoured killbots with gatling-lasers, grenade launchers and missile launchers, fighting against an army of squishy hockey-gear-wearing tribals with throwing spears, improvised machetes and a few rusty guns. And the robots have the element of surprise. You don't even actually see the stomp happen, but the sight of the Legion camp practically exploding in a firestorm and an unscathed Securitron army arriving at the Legate's camp says enough.
  • In the backstory, the first Battle of Hoover Dam it's said that this was a curb stomp on the Legion's side. Going against a small fraction of the NCR still weakened by the Brotherhood of Steel War, the Legion pushed the NCR completely off the Dam. If the Legion stopped their pursuit they would have won, but Joshua Graham pushing for a decisive victory caused a majority of the Legion's forces to be caught in an NCR Ranger trap that destroyed the majority of Boulder City. This was the turning point that allowed the NCR to route the Legion back across the Colorado, and got Joshua Graham thrown into the Grand Canyon as punishment.
  • In Honest Hearts, you don't actually have to help Joshua Graham destroy the White Legs. He will slaughter the entire tribe singlehandedly if the player does not interfere.
• Curse Cut Short: If you work with Cachino to take out the Omerta bosses, you'll get this exchange when you give the signal to Cachino:
  Courier: We're here for a change in management. Cachino, NOW!
  Nero: What the fu-- [Cachino blows his head off with a shotgun]
• Cute Bruiser: Veronica; her weapon is the Power Fist. Give her a Ballistic Fist, and she will murder the crap out of just about anything.
• Cute Machines: ED-E. That he communicates via little beeps and scratches helps.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • In the Old World Blues stealth lab, you get put through increasingly difficult tests to grab a "secret document". The first involves getting past Robobrains, the second adds laser tripwires, the third adds proximity sensors, and the final one requires you to shut down the Robobrains instead (you don't need any skill to do it, you just have to sneak up to them). The first three can be circumvented in numerous ways:
    • You can kill the Robobrains before the first test, and they will not respawn except for the last test, where they are necessary. You can always kill them again. Thus, the robots are not a problem. It also completely eliminates the need to sneak, except for the last test, because nothing can actually see you.
    • With 55 Science/Repair, you can either hack the tripwire IFF circuit or disable them outright. This is permanent.
    • You can scout out the location of the proximity sensors if you fail the third test at least once (they don't spawn until that point), making them easy to disarm before they activate. You don't need to sneak to approach them, since they can detect you either way. Unfortunately, they rearm for every test.
    • If you can get past the locked door and have the forcefield disabling mod for the Sonic Emitter, you can leave the test area, go to the forcefield ceiling of the final room, disable it, then jump down and grab the document, bypassing the test entirely.
  • Also in Old World Blues, you can obtain the hazard suit by finding the password to lower the force field surrounding it, or simply disable the force field with the Sonic Emitter.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: The Think Tank. A group of once-human scientists who had their brains extracted and placed in robotic...."bodies", for lack of a better term. By the time you come along, they've completely abandoned the very concept of humanity, regarding you as some kind of animal. Klein even thinks your fingers are penises! This is especially jarring considering each of them is fixated around a very human flaw: Klein is self-obsessed and prideful, Borous is obsessed with getting petty revenge on Richie Marcus for stealing his prom date, Dala is struggling with her sexuality, and Dr.0 is grappling with his confidence issues. What Dr. 8's flaw is, however, we can only speculate on.
• Cycle of Hurting:
  • Your character can spaz out in VATS and be unable to fire back while the enemy hacks away at you. Also, certain enemies can knock the player down; if they are attacking in a group, this can result in fatal stunlock. Third, as with many other games, the game can autosave right before or when the player receives a killing blow, leading to a looping death reload.
  • The golf clubs in New Vegas can turn a fight into a Cycle of Hurting for whoever's against them because of the "Fore!" special ability. Its damage is only average, but always knocks the target down, probably to represent the inherently debilitating effects of taking a 9-iron shot between the legs. Anyone hit by it stays down for longer than it takes to wind up another swing, so by the time the victim finally gets up, you are ready to use "Fore!" again. This can turn one-on-one melee fights against human enemies into a post-apocalyptic rendition of "Ow! My Balls!" Unfortunately, this can go both ways, with the player getting knocked down by constant "Fore!" hits regardless of armor. This is best exemplified by the terrifyingly fast and tough King Mook Driver Nephi, who employs a custom driver club and can tank waves of rifle rounds and buckshot to get up close enough to start the cycle and if you want the full bounty on him, you can't shoot him in the head. Then again, you can still blow his legs off.
  • Characters caught in an explosion's blast radius but not killed are usually knocked down for a few seconds and are helpless until they're completely standing up again, leaving some time to keep on receiving damages while they're unable to fight back. Jackals and Vipers are especially annoying due to them spawning in large parties and often including grenade launchers, which they are able to use accurately at long range. Grenade launchers are single-shot but they reload fast, which means once hit by one, you probably won't be able to get back on your feet quick enough before being hit by another grenade... Then, there's the grenade machinegun, basically the same thing but even worse (an automatic grenade launcher with the fire rate of a machinegun), and once an enemy using one starts firing at you, you're already dead.
  • A player character exclusive-one. The Super Slam! and And Stay Back perks add a knock down effect to every attack of a specific kind (respectively melee/unarmed for the former and shotgun for the latter), making enemies helpless against them since attacking again through them again on the ground. Rinse and repeat.

D

• Damage-Sponge Boss: Legate Lanius, the Legendary Deathclaw, the Legendary Bloatfly, the Giant Roboscorpion, Ulysses, and Colonel Royez (who has HP-regenerating armor in addition to radiation healing).
• Dangerous Deserter: You encounter a few in Primm, attempting to start a protection racket and attacking you if try to turn them in. They're survivors from an outpost that was overrun by Caesar's Legion, and think the NCR will lose soon.
• Darker and Edgier: While at first, the atmosphere in general is Lighter and Softer, especially compared to Fallout 3, the game is definitely Darker and Edgier, as the factions exhibit Gray-and-Gray Morality and lack Card-Carrying Villians.
  • Caesar's Legion, born out of pragmatism and fanaticism, conduct Rape, Pillage, and Burn and are pretty clearly willing to decimate their own men for a single failure. They also accept trafficking and enslavement of pregnant women and even a whole family, as discovered not halfway through the game. While ultimately Caesar's intentions to bring order to the wastes are noble, it is undeniable that Caesar's Legion is far from good.
  • The NCR, which is outwardly the most "heroic" side of the struggle, embodies both sides of modern American stereotypes. While most NCR members are sociable and nice, they heavily tax their controlled territories and engage in corruption with NCR-based companies operating in New Vegas.
  • The Fiends, a group of evil psychopaths perpetually going on one long drug-fueled rampage against the rest of New Vegas. It's implied that many of them openly rape and cannibalize their victims, including the innocent people that once inhabited the Vault they commandeered as their hang-out.
  • The DLC are each Darker and Edgier than the main game content in their own way:
    • Dead Money: You are put into a Deadly Game in a very hostile and very inhospitable place.
    • Honest Hearts: While it seems Lighter and Softer, the action starts as the members of the caravan were all killed, leaving you as the Sole Survivor. The endings aren't any better; either the Sorrows and the Dead Horses leave Zion in regret and sadness, or they fight back against the White Legs, but Daniel, the missionary that helps the Sorrows, falls into depression over how the Sorrows and the Dead Horses have become increasingly militant.
    • Old World Blues: Big MT looks Lighter and Softer and Denser and Wackier, but it conducts inhuman experiments and has a Chinese-American internment camp full of human test subjects.
    • Lonesome Road: Set in one of the worst places of post-War America, a nuclear hellhole inhabited by pain-maddened NCR and Legion soldiers who have been skinned to the muscle by the constant radioactive sandstorm in the region that refuses to let them die because the radiation keeps healing them, Morlock-like monsters that tunnel up from the ground and would be an existential threat to the Mojave if they ever left the area, and a mysterious wanderer with a vendetta against you specifically. And it's (probably) all your fault that it got like this, since you unwittingly delivered the launch codes that activated the underground nuke silos and blew this once thriving hub of civilization back to the Stone Age.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Most nightkin aren't really evil, just crazy and many you talk to shows Hidden Depths that disproves any real malice on their part (God, Tabitha, etc.)
• Days of Future Past: In addition to the "retro 50s" feel of all surviving pre-war culture typical to the Fallout franchise, Caesar's Legion is obviously inspired by the Roman Empire, in-universe and out.
• Deadly Gas: The Cloud contaminating the Sierra Madre in Dead Money, which is absorbed through the skin.
• Dead Man's Hand: In the expansion Dead Money, the player can get an achievement for getting the dead man's hand from the deadly, abandoned casino Sierra Madre. Humorously, because the game doesn't track which specific cards have been picked up, it can be completed by obtaining any single one of them, and repeatedly picking it up and dropping it.
• Death of a Child:
  • In Honest Hearts a wrecked bus is full of the skeletons of very small people... The amount of toys and lunchboxes laying around gives clues as to whose these small people were.
  • Vault 22 has a Spore Carrier that attacks you when you investigate a crib, as well.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Most notable are the player character and companions
    Veronica: [on the Boomers] A bunch of shut-ins who show disdain for outsiders and hold technology above them. Huh. Haven't heard that one before.
    Raul: [if told to wait] Sure, boss. I'll just wait here. Whilst my heavily armed companion wanders out of earshot. What could possibly go wrong.
    Arcade: [crouching down to sneak] Just so you know, my covert bandaging skills are a little rusty.
  • Rene Auberjonois brings a delightful snideness to Mr. House. Especially if the Courier tries to get uppity with him.
    Mr. House: Why is it so hard to find good help these days? [unleashes a dozen murder-bots on the Courier]
• Death by Irony:
  • The Legion camp at Cottonwood Cove is built right underneath a truck loaded with barrels of radioactive waste, perched perilously halfway over a cliff. It's possible to dump the barrels into the Legion camp, killing all the Legion forces there, resulting in an ironic payback for their dirty bomb attack on Camp Searchlight (the NCR survivors of Camp Searchlight will appreciate the irony if you tell them about it).
  • If you opt for traditional Townicide while playing a female character, Sergeant Astor will also comment on the delicious irony of the camp being wiped by a woman, who in the Legion are basically just used as baby factories.
  • Step one, buy a powerful shotgun. Step two, go meet Caesar. Step three, load the shotgun with Coin Shot (rounds made with coins that are used by Caesar's Legions, and bonus points if these are coins that Caesar himself paid you). Step Four, Render Unto Caesar That Which Is Caesar's. Step Five, fight your way out of the now angry horde of Legion soldiers. ^note The headshot is also a deliciously ironic way to remove Caesar's brain tumor — extra points if you also have the "Shotgun Surgeon" perk.
    • Alternatively, reenact the Ides of March by stabbing Caesar to death with a knife or spear him in the head. There's a challenge for it in the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC, and if you have Arcade Gannon (history buff and Legion hater) with you, he'll commend you on your "historical propriety".
  • After finally catching up to Benny in The Tops casino, the man responsible for ambushing you for the chip and foolishly leaving you for dead after shooting you not once, but twice in the head, you can kill him via a headshot with your holdout gun of choice. Or even better, pickpocket or disarm him in combat of his trademark gun, Maria (the same gun he used to shoot you in the intro), and use it on him to get a special achievement.
• Death by Materialism: One of the major traps designed by Sinclair for his personal bank vault was to have the elevator only be able to be called from one side (if you're inside the vault but the elevator is at the hotel room, you're stuck). Sinclair, after finding out about the betrayal and heist, became upset and redesigned his vault with a number of major safety violations, and the computer in the vault with a message to Dean triggers the trap. Although obviously intended to catch Dean for his greed, it ultimately gets used against Father Elijah if you sneak around him and reach the entrance. You trap him inside, and now he's stuck with the gold of the old world with nothing to use it for.
• Death City: The Sierra Madre Villa is an isolated town choked by a toxic gas, inhabited only by Ghost People and full of traps. It only gets worse when you find out that not only the Casino itself was intended as a death trap but that the town was a test lab for some Think Tank experiments. Ulysses even refers to it as a "special sort of hell".
  • The Divide in the addon Lonesome Road after suffering a regional Class 3 apocalypse in the last decade has become a death city all of its own. It is an almost completely inhospitable place to anything that hasn't mutated and adapted to live there, like the Marked Men, the deathclaws, and other... things that live underground that are making their way to the surface, which even in small groups can rip a deathclaw to pieces. In fact, the conditions of the Divide are possibly a good representation of how most cities like the Capital Wasteland looked in the first few decades after the bombs fell.
• Death World: Don't let the Scenery Porn in Zion Valley fool you. It's filled with inhabitants that make their Mojave counterparts look like pansies. Dear Golden Gecko, meet the Green Gecko. Dear Cazador, meet the Giant Cazador. Dear Fiends, meet the White Legs.
• Decapitated Army: Double Subverted by Caesar's Legion. It's entirely possible to off Caesar rather early in the proceedings, which subverts this trope when the Legion continues on more or less as normal with Legate Lanius in charge. However, many characters are of the opinion that Lanius doesn't have the charisma or head for logistics to hold the Legion together in the long term, so it will crumble... just too slowly for it to do much good for the Mojave if they're not defeated in the short term.
• Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: The Legion version of the quest "I Put a Spell on You" has you pulling this on Pvt. Crenshaw.
• Deconstruction:
  • Previous Fallout titles not only allow, but encourage, players to play all angles of questlines in order to maximize their rewards and experience. This game makes the player realize that trying to play all sides like that will have a person torn between them, because questlines in this game conflict and completing one may fail another. There's also the problem that when you try to play all sides like this, they find out, and they may not be happy, or may suffer for you helping their enemies. Additionally, unlike previous titles, diplomacy is not always an option. Stealth and guile will help you avoid direct conflict, but there's no path to the ending that doesn't get blood on your hands on way or the other. If you go the Wild Card route, deciding the fate of Vegas's factions by your own whim, you can make a lot of people happy, but there's still going to be factions dead or facing a bittersweet future, and the Legion, NCR, and FEZ leaders all mock the idea that you thought you could make everyone happy on your own.
  • The Fallout tradition of doing this to the value system of the 50s also continues; there's a great example in the REPCONN Headquarters and its rather strict security.
  • The Boomers sidequest "Young Hearts" does this to the time-honored Fallout tradition of "Speech checks make everything better". Partway through the quest, when you're speaking to Janet, a Speech 50 check pops up. If you choose it, however, the Courier lies and tells her it's safe to go back to Nellis - which leads to her being reduced to her component atoms by the Boomer artillery because they didn't know she was coming, failing the quest on the spot.
  • Honest Hearts has some of Mighty Whitey; Both Daniel and Joshua are aware that them leading their respective tribes isn't healthy for anyone involved, but they don't know how else to handle it. Daniel's uncertainty is actually hinted as one reason for him listening to a complete stranger.
  • Dead Money deconstructs the companion system. None of the three companions in the add-on want anything to do with you and only work for you because they have to, and the story and gameplay, not to mention the Big Bad, encourage you to use their specific skills as needed to get to your objectives, then invoke You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on them. Further, the way you treat them will bite you in the ass once they find out they don't need you alive anymore either; if you treated them poorly before, they will respond in kind now that they have the chance. On the other end, if you manage to play it perfectly, you can be kind and gradually help your companions work out their issues despite lacking a reason to do so. You are not rewarded for it until the finale of the DLC, where they can all survive and help you defeat Father Elijah, ultimately securing the best possible ending. Even if that happens, that doesn't mean that the companions like each other, since in the best ending, they go their separate ways without saying goodbye lest they end up killing each other.
  • Lonesome Road is one huge kick in the nuts to people who like to roleplay super virtuous characters, and to the broader concept of the Player Character in general. It turns out even your most minor and innocuous of actions have consequences.
• Decoy Convoy: Mr. House has his high-tech platinum chip delivered to him through the use of six couriers, five of whom are carrying decoys like a chess piece and a pair of fuzzy dice. The sixth courier — the Player Character — carries the chip. However, Benny discovers the route that the Courier will take, ambushes them, and steals the chip, setting up the main plot of the game.
• Deface of the Moon: No-Bark believes the "commie ghosts" are trying to "paint the moon pink and draw a Lenin face on it"
• Deliberately Monochrome: Camp Forlorn Hope is washed-out and has a heavy brown pallor over everything.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Caesar's Legion, being The Theme Park Version of Roman/Spartan ideals, gets tons of this. They're absolutely sexist, able-ist, fantastically racist, xenophobic and anti-intellectual, and glorify war, masculinity and Social Darwinism. As their belief system clashes with modern morality so much, this makes them the bad guys.
• Demanding Their Head: An NCR Major named Dhatri offers a bounty on three leaders of the Fiends, a gang of drugged up raiders. He asks for the heads as proof. If you damage the heads too much in your attempts at collecting them, such as going for Boom, Headshot!, you'll get a smaller reward.
• Democracy Is Bad: Vault 11. The computer stated that unless people were sacrificed at regular intervals, everyone would be killed. The citizens decided to choose those sacrifices with elections.
  Gus Olson, Ombudsman: ...Choose a sacrifice democratically, in the way that we citizens are accustomed to washing our hands of terrible deeds...
  • Resulting in the rather darkly funny 1950s style campaign posters which say stuff like "Haley is a known adulterer & Communist sympathizer, vote for Haley!" in bold red, white, and blue.
  • In particular, the Justice Bloc embodies a tyranny of the majority: as a like-minded group that barely constitutes a majority of the population, they can decide the entire election, letting them threaten their way into whatever they want. Like blackmailing a woman to perform sexual favors for them so they won't have her husband killed for beating them at cards (then doing it anyway). She got them back, though. With her power as an elected official (gained by murdering members of the Justice Bloc in response and getting a guaranteed "win" in the election), she stole their majority out from under them. After that election, the Overseer instated a random number generator to choose the new Overseer. The Justice Bloc started a coup to "bring order" and lead to the death off all but 5 vault dwellers. They started a Suicide Pact and 4 of them killed themselves.
  • Mr. House tells you to look outside if you want to know the fate of democracies when he's discussing how he plans to be the sole autocrat of New Vegas.
  • Caesar believes the New California Republic to have been at its strongest when it was akin to a hereditary monarchy under Presidents Aradesh and Tandi. In his opinion, the democratic NCR has deteriorated into a corrupt, overly bureaucratic plutocracy since then.
• Democracy Is Flawed: The New California Republic is a democracy styled after pre-War America. Most characters in the game say it's flawed, but prefer it to the alternative of eking out a precarious living in small isolated settlements or subjugated under the rule of Caesar's Legion. The problem's with the NCR is that regressed, in a sense, over the years as it become more hawkish (they had two major wars in succession; once with the Brotherhood of Steel and once with Caesar's Legion), more against women, open homosexuals, and Ghouls and Super Mutants in the military (see Colonel Cassandra Moore's abrasive attitude after having to claw her way to her position and Major Knight not wanting to be "friends" openly), letting corrupt trading houses and cattle barons have too much say and free reign in politics (the Van Graff family helping the Crimson Carravan Co. in their plan to become a monopoly), their currency is very poor (NCR money is fiat money and, due to lack of faith, converts to fewer caps than what's on the paper), stretching far more then they can provide in order to secure a goal (the NCR is regularly talked about being stretched thin with their troops not having standardized equipment), and using their large population as a cheap way to gain a strategic advantage (see the NCR-Brotherhood War and HELIOS One).
• Denser and Wackier: Old World Blues is not at all serious, even with Wild Wasteland off. The Think Tank doctors are hyped up on Mentats and yelling at the top of their vocal synthesizers, and the appliances' personality modules are all lovably insane.
• Department of Redundancy Department: All of the Think Tank doctors get into this, with Dr. Mobius's dome-shaped... dome in the FORBIDDEN ZONE (that is... YES!... FORBIDDEN! to you), and THE COILS...THE TESLA COILS... THE COILS OF NIKOLA TESLA.
• Designated Bullet: You can kill Benny with the same gun he shot you with in the opening cutscene. There's even an achievement and XP bonus for doing so if you have the Gun Runner's Arsenal installed.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Raul, if you follow his side-quest. He either settles down to be a repair man, or becomes a Vaquero again, avenging and protecting innocents where ever he goes.
• Determinator: The Courier, and Caesar calls attention to it. You survived being shot in the head. Twice. At point blank range. By a guy holding one of the most powerful unique handguns in the game. The doc didn't pull the bullets out of his/her skull, the Courier forced them out THROUGH SHEER WILLPOWER. If you have high Luck, the doc will even suggest that this should have happened.
  • Raul makes mention, during one of the conversations you unlock by talking to certain elderly people, about how he went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge when a girl who resembled his deceased sister was kidnapped by raiders. He tracked them for three straight days (they slept, he didn't), and she was dead by the time he got there. In response, he killed all seven of them by himself, soaking up bullets and staying alive on nothing but pure rage. After several days of lying near-dead on the ground, he pulled himself back up and went back home.
    • Also helps that, being a ghoul, he has a healing factor while near radiation, and this was taking place not long after the bombs fell.
  • Joshua Graham, the Burned Man. After a failed attack on the Hoover Dam against the NCR, the Malpais Legate was covered in pitch, lit aflame, and sent falling down the canyon. The fire that burned in him, hotter than the flames that burned him, was the love of the New Canaanites and of God and that gave the strength to survive and thrive.
• Developer's Foresight: See here.
• Developing Doomed Characters: In Honest Hearts, you meet Stella, who used to be the Sheriff of a town in Reno, and Ricky, a compulsive liar with a psycho addiction. Both of them, and the rest of the expedition, are killed off as soon as you make it to Zion National Park, unless you blackmail Ricky into leaving.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: You can meet a bodyguard for hire who hires people to pose as thugs so he can pretend to shoot them and scam his customers out of money. The problem? He wears decent armor, is carrying a powerful Hunting Revolver, and most thugs he has to fight to protect his clients carry knives or lead pipes. It's much, much cheaper and less complicated for him to just do his job rather than hire four other people and split his earnings with them. Not played straight, though, as this is still a good way to increase the apparent need for his services and thus drum up business.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?:
  • Mortimer, upon realizing that he's just admitted to still being a cannibal in front of a banquet of other (former) cannibals if they haven't fallen back to the old ways. Of course, if you pipe up too early, then it'll backfire on you.
  • Also Karl if the Courier taunts him into shouting that the Great Khans are nothing compared to the Legion. While the Khan leaders are most likely sitting right next to him.
  • When you first meet the Think Tank, after convincing them of being sapient and capable, Dr. Dala suggests to her fellow scientists that you'd probably be amenable to helping them with their problem, as long as they do not mention that they're responsible for your lobotomization. Yes, she says this while you're standing in front of them. Rather than being embarrassed about this, however, she will delightedly explain the whole deal if you bring it up.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Ulysses refers to the Think Tank as "the gods of the Big Empty," and remarks that not even he, or even "a hundred Elijahs" could defeat them. The Courier can.
• Diegetic Character Creation: The Courier begins the game waking up after surviving being shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave. Character customisation is presented as the doctor giving you a mirror to check that your face wasn't too badly damaged, and selection of stats, traits, and skills takes the form of an improvised psychiatric evaluation to make sure their mental faculties are all working.
• Dirty Coward: Frank Weathers, an NPC encountered in the Aerotech Office Park, fled from a Legion attack, abandoning his wife and children to be enslaved. A Courier who passes an Intelligence check can note how suspicious it is that he was the only one who got away, and his wife is rather bitter about being abandoned, among other things.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Benny serves this role, being the main object of the player's pursuit for the 1st half of the main quest line.
• Disc-One Nuke: A thorough player can find some incredible equipment for any class within the first few hours of gameplay. Notable examples can be found on the Series' Disc One Nuke page.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Jeannie May Crawford really likes the hometown spin of her home of Novac, so much so that she took an immediate dislike to Carla Boone when the woman constantly turned her nose up at their frontier way of life. How did Crawford handle this? No, she didn't bite back with some acerbic wit or simply ignore Carla. She flat-out struck a deal with Caesar's Legion to have the pregnant Carla kidnapped and sold into slavery for a thousand caps. Even worse, she was due to receive a further 500 if and when Carla's unborn child was born, and likely would have if Boone hadn't decided to end Carla's misery himself. She never even showed remorse for the act, instead deciding to cook up a story that Carla eventually got fed up with Boone's decision to live in Novac and abandoned him. Wow. Many a player no doubt felt the satisfaction of cold, hard justice done if they helped Boone bring down the same fate she ultimately brought on Carla.
• Disproportionate Reward: Potentially, being inducted into the Brotherhood of Steel. You're required to install a doohickey on a Black Mountain transmitter. However, you could have already completed the Black Mountain quest, which means you can casually stroll there without firing a shot at the Super Mutants, plant the bug in plain sight, and stroll back down to receive a shiny set of Power Armor, Power Armor training, and a new safehouse. Especially compared to the previous mission, one of the longest and most dangerous Fetch Quests of the game, this mission is a breeze.
• Distaff Counterpart: Miss Fortune to the Mysterious Stranger. She's a Vegas Showgirl who, instead of doing a crapton of damage with her revolver like the Stranger, inflicts her victims with a host of maladies ranging from cooking off explosives, to flinging them backwards, to paralyzing them, to crippling limbs.
• Distracted by the Sexy: The Sexy Sleepwear apparel gives a bonus to Charisma, which relates your Speech and Barter skills. You can also buy the unique leopard-print "Naughty Nightwear" from Mick & Ralph's, which provides a speech bonus and improves your character's luck.
• The Ditz: Any main character with less than 4 in intelligence will often find themselves completely missing the point, and can ask for the Layman's Terms if a conversation is causing them trouble.
  Courier: You sell plants here?
  Dr. Usanagi: Uh, no. Implants, not plants. They're little machines I can put inside you to make you faster, quicker, or smarter. I recommend the smarter implant. (She'll offer a discount on it out of pity.)
• The Dog Bites Back: in the history of Vault 11, the election of the last Overseer contains this. The Justice Bloc, a textbook case of Tyranny of The Majority, orchestrates the election for the yearly Overseer/Sacrifice in their favor (a position that no one wants but the vault laws dictate has to happen). To get back at one person who beat them at cards (petty, no?), they coerce his wife into performing sexual favors for them in exchange for not putting her husband on the ballot. They put him on the ballot anyway. So in response, the wife murders one of them, ensuring that she'll be elected Overseer as "punishment". She then abolishes the election in favor of a random number generator in the vault computer. The Justice Bloc didn't take kindly to their power base being yanked out from under them, and incited a revolt, which led to the eventual demise of the Vault.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: An invoked realization from General Lee Oliver in the Wild Card ending. He's quite surprised to learn that some random "road jockie" not only completely fell an entire nation and sent the remains scattering into the wind, but completely undermined everything the NCR had spent years slowly building up to obtain. Both within moments of each other! Never saw it coming. Never thought such a possibility could even exist.
• Domestic Abuser: Frank Weathers became abusive toward his wife after his attempt at striking it rich in New Vegas didn't work out.
• Door to Before: A rather blatant example appears in Honest Hearts. The tunnel where the DLC starts (and ends) serves as both the entrance and exit to Zion National Park, with doors at either end. This is in spite of it supposedly taking days and days of hazardous travel to make the trip from said cave, which is in the Mojave.
• Doppleganger Attack: One of the side-quests in Honest Hearts pits you against a Yao Guai while under the influence of drugs. The result is having to fight a flaming Yao Guai that can produce two copies of itself.
• Double Entendre: As a male with the Confirmed Bachelor perk, you can ask Major Knight in the Mojave Outpost if he wants to be "friends." He'll get really awkward and explain that he would like to have you as a "friend," and the NCR technically doesn't have rules against guys having "friends," but the outpost has a somewhat conservative climate and he can't afford to have a "friend" while having to get up and work with these people every day, but maybe you can be "friends" when he's transferred somewhere else.
• Downer Ending:
  • If you side with the Legion. Especially if you leave Legate Lanius in power. Because Caesar is now dead, the Legion devolves from a evil empire into a band of raping and pillaging marauders, and every single settlement gets either enslaved or destroyed. Or enslaved then destroyed.
  • The "Yes-man" ending becomes this, if you didn't deal with the hostile factions like Fiends and Powder Gangers, nor did you update the securitron army, allowing chaos and death to rule the Mojave.
  • Even the Legion ending is absolutely nothing compared to siding with Elijah in Dead Money. The ending explains that Elijah proceeded to release the Cloud upon the Mojave, which brought horrible painful death to everything in its wake, before releasing his army of invincible laser shooting holograms to mop up. No living thing set foot in the Mojave for years after due to rumors of ghosts immune to gunfire and a red cloud that brought death in its wake. All that remained was Elijah and the Courier, waiting in the Sierra Madre for the world to begin again.
  • No matter what you do, not everyone will be able to have a happy ending at the end. For example, the only way to get a good ending for the Followers of the Apocalypse is by making them cooperate with the NCR and leave the Republic in control of New Vegas.
  • If Arcade Gannon fights with the Enclave Remnants at Hoover Dam and the NCR wins, he is forced out of the Followers and becomes a fugitive. If you instead tell him to return to the Old Mormon Fort, he gets a much better ending, only being mildly disappointed that Freeside is no longer independent.
    • Of course, Arcade has the worst individual ending in the entire game. At one point, you get the option to sell Arcade to Caesar. If you choose to do this, the ending reveals that Caesar liked having someone of equal intelligence around who didn't just agree with everything he said. Arcade hated it so much that the second he had the chance after years of servitude, he disemboweled himself. Did you think of that when you sold him?
  • Lily has nothing but downer endings. Either she dies, stops taking her medicine and goes insane, takes her medicine regularly and forgets her family, or takes it semi-regularly and tries to find her family, who are long-dead. Of course, one could take the "Forgetting Family" ending as a pretty mixed Bittersweet Ending, as while she lets go of her dead family, her entire personality gets erased, as that was all that she focused on.
• The Dragon:
  • You to Mr. House, if you choose to do so.
  • Legate Lanius and Vulpes Inculta are Co-Dragons to Caesar.
  • Jean-Baptiste Cutting to Gloria Van Graff.
  • Yes Man to Benny and possibly to the Courier, if you so choose.
• Dragon Their Feet: Although it's possible to keep them alive, both Caesar and President Kimball can possibly be dead by the time the final battle rolls around. Regardless, Legate Lanius and General Oliver are still around to lead Caesar's Legion and NCR against each other for the endgame fight. Lanius even becomes the new Caesar if you side with the Legion, kill Caesar during his surgery, and help them win.
• Dressing as the Enemy:
  • Can be done with some factions. Take note that the faction's oppositions will also mistake you for one of their goons and will open fire without warning. So don't go around wearing Powder Ganger armor without good reason since both the NCR and the Legion will try to gun you down. Also, security guards and Elite Mooks will recognize you as a fake, so the only people that won't shoot at you are the mooks of that faction. Every other faction will open fire on an apparent enemy, and the guards will open fire on a disguised enemy. Granted, Legion/NCR armor is good enough, and Khan armor is pleasantly tribal.
  • If given the chance, Benny tries to dress as a member of the Legion in an attempt to sneak in the bunker under their stronghold, however, because his well-groomed hair makes him stand out quite a bit amongst the shaggy and dusty legionaries, he is quickly detected and captured.
• The Drifter: Just like the previous games, you can be this with Good Karma, coming in to save a town from its problems and then hitting the road again. One of the first missions in the game you can get, in fact, is you building up a small town militia to fight off a group of thugs, and this is right after you woke up from being double tapped in the head. Bonus points in that Goodsprings is the very picture of an old western town.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In the quest "Return to Sender", if you choose to turn in Chief Hanlon for trying to sabotage the NCR's defences at Hoover Dam. You leave the room to report him to a ranger, and he locks the door behind you. Hanlon then gives a rather poignant speech over the radio confessing what he did and how he messed up, followed by a gunshot. Going back in the room reveals he had killed himself out of shame.
  • Possibly Elijah, if you choose to lock him the casino vault in Dead Money. Vera did this when the vault's security systems trapped her during the nuclear war.
  • The final five inhabitants of Vault 11 decided that they had enough with the sacrifices and announced that they would stop sending any more people to die. The Vault's automated response which cheerfully informed them that the whole thing was a test and no one needed to die was enough to send four of the five into killing themselves.
  • The absolute worst possible ending for Arcade. If you sell him into Legion slavery as Caesar's personal doctor, he spends a long time as Caesar's intellectual conversation partner. Caesar himself is absolutely giddy to finally have someone in the Legion who understands science and technology (and a Follower of the Apocalypse, no less), but Arcade is absolutely miserable. Eventually, he disembowels himself with a scalpel.
  • If General Oliver survives the House/Wild Card ending, then House estimates that there is a 30% chance that he will kill himself in shame over his defeat.
• Drugs Are Bad: Played straight without heavily dropping the anvils, as is par for the course with the Fallout series. Most of the drugs in the game give you some sort of temporary boost, but with the possible risk of addiction, meaning you will be weaker if you go without the drug. Some more specific examples:
  • The Fiends are a group of drug-addled raiders, and one of the most outright evil groups in the game. The only time you won't be kill on sight to them is when you enter Vault 3 and mention that you're delivering more drugs.
  • On the other hand is Caesar's Legion, a ruthless group of fascist slavers, but are very anti-drug.
  • A number of quests that help addicts kick their drug habits net good karma for the player. Quests where you deliver or administer drugs generally net you bad karma.
  • Med-X, a drug that increases damage resistance, appears once again in the series. It was originally slated to be called "Morphine" until Moral Guardians found out and got it changed.
    • This is the only real downside to wearing the Stealth Armor Mk. II. It will regularly inject Stimpaks and Med-X when you get below 50%, and you will become addicted before you even realize it. You have to actively go out of your way to avoid carrying any Med-X in your inventory to avoid it.
  • One quest has the player helping a Gomorrah prostitute escape her situation, but she reveals that her boss has gotten her hooked on drugs which he supplies in order to keep her around, adding additional difficulty to the situation. With a sufficient Medicine skill, you can point out the symptoms of her addiction. She wasn't aware that her condition had gotten that bad. Doing this removes any drug requirements out of the escape plan.
• Drugs Causing Slow-Motion: The chem Turbo slows down time to 1/3rd normal speed while keeping the player at full speed, allowing them to dodge attacks easily and attack much faster.
• Drunken Master: Cass, by extension, you with her companion perk. Normally alcohol boosts your Str at the cost of Int, but with Cass the reduction is removed and addiction is no longer an issue. She also causes whiskey to boost your armor.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Duct Tape is a component for the Weapon Repair kit, which can repair any weapon, from a lead pipe to an Alien Blaster.
  • Also: Wonderglue!
  • This is somewhat lampshaded with the Jury Rigging Perk. With it, you can repair any weapon with something of its class (Bolt action, Automatic, Melee etc...), rather then an actual copy, so repairing Anti-Tank Rifles with your humble Varmint-rifle is possible. The Perk picture has the Vaultboy duct-tape two guns together. "How does it work? Nobody knows... except you."
  • One of the conversation options with Doctor 8 in Old World Blues about masturbation of all things has the (male) Courier explaining the wonders of combining Cram (processed meat) and a roll of Duct Tape.
• Dull Surprise: Matthew Perry's surprisingly bad voice acting for Benny means that we don't just get Dull Surprise, but a whole range of lukewarm emotions from a rather hilarious G-rated sex scene to a variety of bland reactions to his impending death.
• Dump Stat:
  • When picking S.P.E.C.I.A.L. scores, Perception is commonly regarded as worthless. It doesn't affect your aim, only your ability to detect threats, and ED-E's companion perk eliminates that weakness. There are about four or so high Perception checks in the main game, and a few more in the DLC. From a minimum of 1 you can buff yourself to 9 with various drugs and alcohol (7 in Dead Money, since some of the drugs don't exist in that add-on), more than enough to pass any check in the game. Most hats will boost it by 1 anyway and the Riot Gear and Advanced Riot Gear helmets from Lonesome Road can boost it further by 1 and 2, respectively, with both bonuses stacking with hat bonuses, as they count as eyewear. Its one, true use is meeting the requirement for Better Criticals (+50% critical damage), which you don't really need to kill effectively.
  • Charisma. Its main effects are boosting your Speech and Barter skills and making your companions tougher and stronger. But Intelligence and/or a couple of key Perks (Comprehension, Educated) will do much more for your skill levels in the long run, and companions are still quite powerful even at Charisma 1.
  • As far as skills go, if you're not playing on Hardcore, Survival definitely qualifies. Survival's main benefit is that it makes food far more effective. Food isn't very useful outside of Hardcore, since Stimpaks are abundant and heal you instantly. It's not checked against very often, and it's usually low when it is. In Hardcore, however, it's a lifesaver.
  • Of the five combat skills (Energy Weapons, Explosives, Guns, Melee, and Unarmed), it's advisable to choose one to focus on and treat the others as Dump Stats, at least until the late-game when the player likely has skill points to spare. For this reason, the Good-Natured trait, which grants +5 each to five different "social" skills at the cost of -5 each to the five combat skills, is considered a Min Maxers Delight. You're basically getting +25 points that you actually care about and only losing five, a bargain.
• Dysfunction Junction: All of the Courier's companions have some sort of deep personal problem to be sorted out.
  • Arcade is trying desperately to live up to his father's name and to help the wasteland as best as he can.
  • Boone is trying to reconcile with his memories of the Bitter Springs Massacre and loss of his wife.
  • Raul is trying to find meaning in a life ravaged by tragedy and old age.
  • Cass is trying to deal with the loss of her caravan and the state of her home nation.
  • Lily wants to hold onto her memories of her past despite how it might lead to her mental illness worsening.
  • Veronica wants to save her family in the Brotherhood since she's the only person willing to look beyond the bunker's walls and look for change.
  • Rex has a brain that's over 200 years old and needs replacement or he'll die. Two of the three brains are fine for Rex, but the third will invoke more of this on him as he will struggle to find an equilibrium between the old and new memories when they're so incompatible.
  • Dog/God is trying to find peace with his dueling selves.
  • Christine wants to end her lifelong hunt no matter the cost.
  • Dean wants to finally bring a satisfying conclusion to his centuries-long revenge against the man he hates.
  • Joshua Graham wants to destroy the White Legs to avenge his tribe's destruction and redeem himself from his actions while serving the Legion.
  • As revealed in Lonesome Road, ED-E wants to reach Navarro, fulfilling his creator's last wish.
  • The Courier has shades of this as well. They explicitly say in Lonesome Road that the reason they left the NCR was because not even home felt like "home." Make of the that what you will. Add in the fact that a gay Courier might presumably have to deal with the NCR's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. A companion romance with Cass was even planned, but ultimately cut, with an ending where she goes to make love with a male Courier but doesn't find him being added instead. You get the feeling the Courier still manages to get the short end of the stick despite being the Hero of the Mojave.
  • As revealed in Old World Blues, 200 years as brains in jars with access to a lot of drugs has not been good for the Think Tank's collective mental health, and by all accounts they were completely devoid of morals or ethics to begin with; becoming robots just dialed up all their issues to 12.
• Dynamic Entry: General Lee Oliver of the NCR, complete with big-ass explosion out of nowhere and a squad of Veteran Rangers marching in ahead of him.

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