Fallout 3 / Tropes N to Z

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Tropes N-P

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "Deathclaw", per series tradition. They're hulking reptilians larger than a man with claws that really justify the name.
• Negate Your Own Sacrifice:
  • Averted in the original game, to the anger of the fans — none of your radiation-immune teammates will enter the radiation-flooded problem area, not even the one who did a similar action just a few quests earlier, instead coming up with excuses about it being your destiny. That was fixed in Broken Steel, but the ending voice-over is the same as from the ending where you send a very much not radiation-immune teammate to their death instead, and so still implies you're a coward for not choosing to die. Pragmatism is dead in the wasteland.
  • If you ask Sarah, a Brotherhood of Steel paladin, to make the sacrifice, she snaps "What happened to chivalry?" (even if you are a woman as well). Err, chivalry, as in the idea that a Knight in Shining Armor is meant to protect others? Her snappy attitude probably comes from the dialogue option asking her to make the sacrifice instead of yourself being incredibly rude for no real reason, and to her credit she does ultimately do it.
• Nerfed:
  • Colonel Autumn's unique laser pistol was originally full-auto, allowing it to fire as fast as a Gatling Laser and making it almost as powerful.
  • Enclave soldiers in general, compared to their Fallout 2 counterparts, mostly as a result of how vastly different the combat engines in Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 are, primarily the changes to how armor works that significantly reduce its effect on combat.
  • Armor in general has much less of an effect on survivability compared to the earlier Fallout games. Armor also now degrades with usage and almost all NPCs have armor that's in middling to poor condition, which further reduces the protective effect it has for them.
  • The Sniper perk has been hugely downgraded from what it was in previous games. Instead of giving a Luck/10 chance of your hits with a gun being critical, now it merely increases your chances of hitting an enemy's head in VATS.
• Never Land: Little Lamplight has been populated entirely by children for nearly two hundred years. It's not clear how they replenish their population, but citizens are banished to Big Town on their sixteenth birthdays.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: At one point, Col. Autumn has captured (a) the missing component for Project Purity and (b) somebody who he thinks knows the secret password to access Purity's computer (you). He could just fly you to the Purity site and interrogate you there. However, President Eden orders him to take you (the Enclave's most dangerous adversary) directly into the heart of their incredibly-secret, you'd-never-have-gotten-in base for questioning. Eden has his reasons. If not for this detour, you'd have been entirely in Autumn's power, dooming your character and likely the Capital Wasteland as well.
• Nightmare of Normality: The game springs this on the players during the mission to Vault 112: upon discovering James imprisoned within one of the Tranquility Loungers, you take a seat in one yourself in an attempt to rescue him... only to end up in the virtual-reality neighborhood of Tranquility Lane, a suburban cul-de-sac modeled on 1950s-era sitcoms. Here, you're not only stripped of all your equipment but regressed to the age of ten - meaning that those hard-earned skills and powers earned out in the Capital Wastelands are now effectively useless. For good measure, it eventually becomes apparent that the Loungers are equipped with mechanisms that can erase your memory and alter your personality, ensuring that the illusion of normality is utterly unbreakable for most of the residents; fortunately, you're spared the extra mile of mental manipulation for as long as you remain amusing to Vault 112's overseer, Stanislaus Braun.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: You can't side with the Enclave in the main quest even if you have Evil karma, and are forced to side with the goody-two shoes Brotherhood of Steel. This is because you are a Wastelander and not a genetically pure human like the Enclave, so their genocidal plan will be harmful and potentially lethal for you. However, you can carry out President Eden's Modified FEV genocide plan for the Wasteland, and call an orbital strike on the Brotherhood of Steel's base after having them help you capture the Enclave base.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • If you've reached Good karma, the Talon Company Mercs will go after your head, calling you a "holier-than-thou white-knight". It matters little for some people though, since it also means more things to kill. That turns into more XP, ammo, armor, and weapons, as well as more things to shoot at. (And if you have Ranger armor as your main armor, the Talons represent an endless source of combat armor to repair.)
  • On top of the Talon Company Mercenaries coming after you, pissing off Tenpenny can result in him sending out a hit squad on you... even if you were completely compliant and reasonable with his requests and/or he's already been dead for a while now.
  • If you've reached Evil karma, you get the same but with a different set of people after you, namely the Regulators. But again, more people to blow away.
  • If you've managed to reach both Evil karma and Good karma at least once, you get both after you giving you even more people to kill. If both groups are near, you can also potentially set them to kill each other since they're hostile to the opposite group. Never leaving Neutral karma will avoid the hit squads.
• No Healthcare in the Apocalypse: While escaping from the Enclave's raid on the purifier, Garza (one of Dr. Li's assistants) is revealed to have a serious heart condition. If he is not given medication, the group is forced to leave him to die (unless the player does it personally).
• Non-Combatant Immunity: Vault 101's guards are only instructed to attack you on sight after you get your first gun, and there's no combat before that.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • Attacking Betty in the Tranquility Lane simulation results in death via a pulse blast.
    "You can't do that here. And now you have to pay." [zap]
  • If you tell Colonel Autumn the activation code for the water purifier, he thanks you, then shoots you.
  • If you fail to activate the purifier in time, it explodes, terminating your game regardless of whether Broken Steel is installed, since without the purifier, the events of the epilogue can't take place, and the main characters are probably killed in the explosion anyways.
• No One Could Survive That!: Colonel Autumn in one scene: Sentinel Lyons and yourself in a later one. Autumn clearly injects himself with some sort of Applied Phlebotinum before the radiation brings him down: Lyons was outside the control room and therefore took a less powerful blast. You, on the other hand, have no such explanation for your survival. However, you do ultimately survive even if you go into the room, which kills Lyons, so maybe the Lone Wanderer is just that much more durable to this situation.
• No Place for Me There: Should you accept and follow through with Eden's idea of purifying the entire Wasteland from mutated lifeforms. Remember, you're one of them.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The Cure in The Pitt expansion. Justified - the cure involves tissue samples from a baby.
• Notice This: Interactable items in Operation: Anchorage flash red and hum intermittently.
• NPC Amnesia: NPC characters have a hard time remembering if you've insulted them unless it drove them to attack you; however, when you're given a chance to make a Speech check, you only get the one chance—botch it and you can't convince them to let you try again. Not related to Speech checks, if you steal the Power Armor Mr. Crowley is hoping to retrieve, the NPC in question will never talk to you again, instead only saying, "You stole what was rightfully mine."
• Obviously Evil :
  • The Raiders. Psychopathic, Ax-Crazy, and chem-addicted bandits looking like they were taken straight from a Mad Max movie. Their constant taunting about how they're going to slaughter you and enjoy it, as well as their exquisite taste in crib decoration (hanging decaying corpses all over the place) are just icing on the cake.
  • The Talon Company, who will come for your head as soon as you reach "Good" karma. They are basically more organized Raiders with better gear, but an organization whose insignia is a skeletal vulture preying on a crying baby rarely turns out to be all about kisses and hugs.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In Broken Steel, you wake up from a coma two weeks since the end of the main mission. Apparently, while you were under, the Brotherhood was systematically tracking down the Enclave remnants with help from Liberty Prime.
• Off with His Head!: Getting a headshot on an enemy will frequently result in their heads popping off their shoulders. With enough damage, it will instead explode into a mass of brains and eyeballs.
• Once per Episode: Despite the numerous difference, numerous elements from previous Fallout games still return in the third entry:
  • The protagonist gets a mangy Canine Companion with pointed ears, a la Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, who they name Dogmeat.
  • Ron Perlman intones the series Arc Words: "War. War never changes."
  • A new Iconic Outfit (the armored Vault 101 jumpsuit ) and model of Power Armor (the T-45) make their first appearances.
  • A Super Mutant companion: Fawkes, a Defector from Decadence who managed to hold onto his sanity, and is incredibly friendly, surprisingly intelligent, contains a Zen outlook on life, and extraordinarily dangerous.
  • A Ghoul companion: Charon, a brainwashed Ghoul mercenary that is unswervingly loyal to whoever owns his current contract. Outside of that, however, he's quite the friendly fellow.
  • A robotic companion: Sergeant RL-3, a Pre-War Mr. Gutsy that the Lone Wanderer can purchase and have fight at their side - he just does it very loudly.
  • A Brotherhood of Steel companion: Star Paladin Cross, the highest-ranking member of the Brotherhood's Paladins and Elder Lyons' personal bodyguard. She was turned into a Cyborg after getting injured in battle years ago.
  • The presence of the Brotherhood of Steel, and a different interpretation of their organization: Here, there's actually two Brotherhood factions, both of which can occasionally be seen skirmishing with each other.
    • The main faction of the Brotherhood, led by Elder Lyons, who have discarded most of the Codex, directly recruit from the locals, and focus more on protecting the innocent citizens of the Capital Wasteland from the Super Mutants than gathering Pre-War technology - which often leads to them getting beaten up a lot. They're still racist towards Ghouls, though.
    • A smaller splinter faction, led by Protector Casdin, called the "Brotherhood Outcasts". They left Lyons' Brotherhood because of him abandoning most of the Brotherhood's Codex, and focus on gathering Pre-War tech while defending themselves from the local hostiles - which actually makes them the most like the original Fallout-era Brotherhood of Steel. Despite their Anti-Hero tendencies, they get several paralleling moments between them and Lyons' Brotherhood, and mostly just like to be left alone. They get more attention in the Operation: Anchorage! DLC.
• One-Time Dungeon:
  • Raven Rock, headquarters of the Enclave, is only visited once near the end of the main mission. Completionists would be advised to grab the collectible Energy Weapons bobblehead during that time, as you will not be able to re-enter to get it later.
  • Vault 101 where you begin the game. After escaping at the end of the tutorial, you can only return once during the mission "Trouble on the Homefront". Like Raven Rock, it is advised that you grab the Medicine bobblehead during one of these opportunities.
  • Several areas in Mothership Zeta can only be explored once, particularly frustrating since there's an achievement for finding alien captive logs in those areas, and they're quite easy to miss.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Most, but not all, of the kids in Little Lamplight are referred to by their nicknames, whether they be good or bad, like Bumble or Sticky Hands.
• Only One Female Mold: Even elderly, wrinkle-faced women have young shaped bodies.
• Optional Stealth: People specializing in Stealth can play in this way, sneaking about and using a silenced pistol, but breaking out a BFG and Power Armor whenever things get hairy.
• Organized Crime Sidequest:
  • If you can't get crooked bar owner Colin Moriarty to reveal where James went - or hack the answers out of his computer - one possible way to earn the answers is to do a little debt-collecting work for him. For good measure, Moriarty is a consummate bastard who will screw over everyone he's in business with, so playing the mission his way qualifies as Evil Karma.
  • Players with the "Contract Killer" perk have the option of collecting on bounties offered by the mysterious Daniel Littlehorn of Littlehorn and Associates, earning a small but regular fee for the severed ears of anyone who threatens the barbaric post-apocalyptic status quo of the Capital Wasteland.
  • Especially vile players can capture NPCs for the slavers of Paradise Falls at a price of two hundred and fifty caps per victim. As with contract killing, this has no relevance to the main plot of finding James or restarting Project Purity, nor can you ever join this particular gang: it's just a unique way of making money and gaining evil karma.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The Family, a formerly cannibal gang that harasses the small town of Arefu; They drink blood in place of eating flesh, avoid sunlight, and (despite their dislike of the term) will identify themselves as vampires if asked. However, they lack any of the traditional powers and other nuances. Their leader even lampshades this in certain dialog options. The player can also choose to be schooled in their ways (and thus get a better health boost from Blood Packs).
• Outcast Refuge:
  • Underworld is a museum with an exhibit of the Greek underworld at the time the bombs fell which has become a safe haven for Ghouls. Non-Ghouls are able to enter, like the Lone Wanderer, as they do still need to trade and have quests available. You can pick up the Ghoul follower Charon there.
  • The aptly named Brotherhood Outcasts are an Anti-Mutiny faction of the Brotherhood of Steel who split off from Elder Lyons' group to continue their mission closer to the ideals of the original West Coast Brotherhood. They've set up at Fort Independence where you can assist them in the Operation: Anchorage expansion. Between the events of this game and Fallout 4, the new East Coast Brotherhood Elder, Maxson, convinces them to return to the main contingent by veering closer to their ideals while keeping some of the practical changes (like being open to worthy outside recruits) from the old West Coast doctrine.
• Outlaw Town: Paradise Falls is a town of slavers. Likewise, Evergreen Mills is a town run by raiders. Good karma players tend to enjoy "scourging" these towns, in the parlance of the Brotherhood.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • It's implied that The Lone Wanderer is seen as this by many people, as someone who spent most of their life in a Vault without any knowledge of the outside world, yet somehow manages to flatten all opposition as they venture across the Capital Wasteland. It's implied that due to the Lone Wanderer's actions, the Enclave are particularly interested in finding and getting into Vault 101, if not to acquire the pure human stock inside, then to make sure that no-one else from that Vault could pose a threat to them.
  • No one thought the Enclave would still be active 35 years after the destruction of their primary HQ in Fallout 2, especially on the other side of the continent from where the problem started - in the early parts of the game, the only hints of their presence are the occasional eyebots playing their radio station. It makes it all the more shocking when their power-armored troops fly in on vertibirds and seize control of Project Purity.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay:
  • Sure, stealth and diplomacy are perfectly viable playstyles, but the game's economy makes Stimpak spamming a much easier tactic.
  • New DLC enemies such as Albino Radscorpions, Feral Ghoul Reavers, and Super Mutant Overlords have massive pools of hit points. At later levels they won't be individual threats, but they still take forever to kill. Just for you though, as most DLC foes can deal extra points of damage that isn't reduced by your Damage Resistance^note some guns have 15 extra points per shot while double-barrel shotguns have a whopping 35 per pellet and many travel in groups with others of their type (such as Point Lookout's Tribals and Swampfolk) or weaker variants (such as Super Mutant Overlords and Feral Ghoul Reavers). Part of the problem seems to be that they were balanced for players who put off the finale and take their endgame characters out to explore the new DLC areas, rather than ones who start a new character and check out the new content as they re-explore the wasteland. Hope you brought a lot of Stimpaks and Med-X.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Wearing the Ghoul Mask is all it takes for feral ghouls to ignore you. Somewhat justified since they're so far gone, their higher reasoning abilities are nonexistent. It really helps against Feral Ghoul Reavers due to their freakishly high amount of hit points and powerful attacks that make fighting against them a massive pain with very little reward.
• Parental Abandonment: Your father leaves around your 19th birthday, which leads to the Vault falling into mayhem from the Radroach infestation and the Overseer going nuts. He had a very good reason for it however, despite the severe consequences for his child. "Latchkey" Kenny in Point Lookout was also abandoned by his parents, the Swampfolk, because he "don't got the marks" of a Swampfolk and was left to fend for himself.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • You do not get karma penalties if you do 'evil' things to evil people (including stealing from them or killing them in broad daylight).
  • "The Power of the Atom" is a prime example, if you seduced Burke with a female character who has Black Widow perk. If a man is evil, it's completely okay to seduce him, then break his heart and drive him into depression and suicide by not responding to his adoring, borderline-obsessive love.
  • Averted when it comes to enslaving enemies. Even putting a slave collar on the most evil village burning raider or cruel Talon mercenary gets you a lot of bad karma point, while blowing up their heads leaves your karma meter unblemished. Apparently Even Evil Has Standards.
• Peek-a-Boo Corpse: Stepping on a skeleton causes the same rumble feedback as a bear trap or tripwire. It doesn't do any damage, it's just there to make you jump.
• Perky Goth: Bittercup, much to the annoyance of the other denizens of Big Town (mostly because she would rather look for makeup components than keep an eye out for Super Mutants and slavers).
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • You can only enter in Raven Rock in a late part of the main quest, and can't go back once you leave. The area contains the Energy Weapons Bobblehead, which actually lies in an area (Colonel Autumn's room) that can't be returned to once you leave its Raven Rock's sublevel.
  • The Medicine Bobblehead is found in Vault 101, that (beside the prologue) can only be revisited for a single, easily missable, quest, before and after which it's inaccessible. This one is a bit more lenient than the Energy Weapons Bobblehead mentioned above, as you have three opportunities to grab it (right before passing the G.O.A.T., during the run from the Vault, and eventually when you return to the Vault during the "Trouble on the Homefront" sidequest).
  • It goes without saying that choosing to nuke Megaton will cause you to lose nearly all associated quests, followers, and equipment you might have wanted (with the exception of Moira's Wasteland Survival quest) — but that just serves you right. This includes the Strength Bobblehead.
  • At the end of Broken Steel, you must choose between wiping out the Enclave Mobile Base Crawler or the Brotherhood Citadel, which renders any loot inside the place unavailable; of course, blowing up the Citadel royally pisses the Brotherhood off, and makes companion Star Paladin Cross impossible to recruit again. ^note Interestingly, the latter option is also the only way to access a unique weapon: the crater which replaces the Citadel contains Callahan's Magnum, a scoped .44 revolver and the most powerful "Small Guns" weapon of the game.
  • Points of No Return are all over the place in the alien ship of Mothership Zeta.
  • Not only is the whole simulation of Operation: Anchorage visitable once, but it consists in very linear levels with several Points of No Return, making its own collection sidequest and its unique reward (10 intel suitcases, getting all of them grants a free perk which increases Science, Small Guns, and Lockpick skills by 3) easy to fail.
  • If you complete the "Stealing Independance" sidequest by teaming up with Sydney, she'll then relocate to Underworld's bar and become a merchant if she survived the quest. Failing to do either results in the loss of a merchant whose stock contains tons of ammos, and who carries a high amount of caps. She also carries a unique SMG, which is lost forever if she dies and the gun isn't looted from her corpse.
  • Recruiting Charon causes him to murder Ahzrukhal, resulting in the disappearance of a merchant in Underworld's The Ninth Circle, though Ahzrukhal only sells alcohol and don't carry a very high amount of caps.
  • Sapling Yew from the Oasis settlement has a dialogue option during the "Oasis" siequest which results in a Speech check. Passing the check results in a permanent increase (+10) of the Speech skill. Failing the Speech check (unless you also have the Child at Heart perk) or not speaking with her at all while the quest is active makes this reward unobtainable.
  • In the Broken Steel sidequest "Protecting the Water Way", passing a Speech check allows to persuade Split Jack to give up their extortion plan of selling water seized from raided caravans. However, taking this specific option will result in the raiders blowing off steam by attacking Grandma Sparkle, a weak NPC owning the restaurant where the encounters happens, and most likely kill her, removing a food merchant from the game.
  • Point Lookout is full of these:
    • In the last part of the DLC, Calvert Mansion is blown up by Calvert, making all its content (truckloads of weapons, ammo, food, stimpaks, and various Shop Fodder) unavailable (though the building doesn't contain anything unique).
    • One of the objectives of Point Lookout sidequest "The Velvet Curtains" requires to trigger the self-destruction of a Chinese submarine abandoned not far to Point Lookout's shore. It doesn't contain much of interest beside a stealthboy, though.
    • Point Lookout's area contains three merchants, two of which will likely be killed over the DLC's main quest. Once you find Nadine, she goes back to the ferry and locks Tobar inside the ferry's engine room, where he'll remain until you visit him and turns hostile, which of course removes him from the game as a merchant (Nadine replaces him as the ferry's driver, but isn't a merchant). The other merchant, Panada, isn't supposed to die, but her shops lies in the middle of Pilgrim's Landing and the Tribals may attack her when turning hostile if the player sides with Desmont.
• Persona Non Grata: You, and by extension your father, in Vault 101 after you leave at the end of the tutorial. Amata only lets you back when she begs for help as the civil war between those who support and those who oppose the Overseer and his oppressive reign. Once the quest is over you're back to being banned because you staying there would lead to the collapse of the Vault. If you choose to do so, you can sabotage the water chip and force everyone else out as well.
• Phlebotinum Battery: You can get a perk called "Solar Powered" which gives you massive stat bonuses in the daylight. While this sounds great, the perk only works outdoors during the day (obviously) and you can gain the same bonuses (+2 Strength and 1 hit point every 10 seconds) using alcohol and the game's plentiful stimpaks.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: "Raiders" seem to do very little actual "raiding", in the sense of attacking inhabited settlements. Instead, they tend to act as highwaymen and territorial scavengers, staking out spots of the Wasteland and attacking anyone who crosses their path. However, several towns have checkpoints and security measures that suggest raiding is a constant threat, and occasionally raiders will spawn as a random encounter close enough to a settlement that they and the sentries will spontaneously start fighting.
• The Plot Reaper: Liberty Prime takes an orbital strike to the face in the first mission of the Broken Steel expansion to the main quest. Otherwise, you'd be wondering why he couldn't just curb-stomp the entire Wasteland for you.
• Point-and-Click Map: One in your Pip Boy, per series tradition. It includes both a "Local" map and a "World" Map, from which Fast Travel is available from the latter.
• Point of No Return: The final mission (without Broken Steel). Once you enter the inner confines of the Jefferson Memorial, the doors lock behind you, making it impossible to go back and do anything else but finish the game.
• Pokémon Speak:
  • The inhabitants of Vault 108: "Gary!"
  • Bingo in the Pitt.
• The Pollyanna: Moira Brown, who takes everything from her bleak surroundings to her catastrophically failed experiments to her own ghoulification with the same sunny enthusiasm. Breaking her spirit by persuading her to give up her Guide project is treated as a special kind of evil (that rewards you with a special perk.)
• Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: A section of highway in the Capital Wasteland features bumper to bumper cars, all of which still retain the working nuclear reactors that power each of them, and will explode if they take enough damage. There's also a horde of bandits that roam the highway and will attack you on sight. A fun way to deal with them is to shoot a car on one end and let the chain-reaction of explosions quickly blow up the entire highway with everyone standing on it.
• Powered Armor: Per series tradition. However, it requires specialized training that limits it to the Brotherhood (both factions) and the Enclave. Advancing far enough in the main questline will get you training from the Brotherhood, as will the Operation: Anchorage DLC which can be accessed from day one if you choose, and also unlocks a nigh indestructible variant of the T-51b.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The cure that Werhner wants? It's a transferrable genetic immunity to not only the Trog disease, but all mutations in general. Issue is, it's only held by a baby. Ashur and Sandra are slowly but safely extracting the gene, but Werhner doesn't give a shit about little Marie beyond the cure and intends on much more brute-force fueled means to extract the immunity gene.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Done by many Non Player Characters and followers.
  Talon Company Merc: I want this one's head on a fucking platter!
  Super Mutant: I'll wear your bones around my neck, human!
  Sergeant RL-3: Do that again and I'll put my boot so far up your ass you'll cough up boot polish!
• Press X to Die:
  • When you find the G.E.C.K., you can ignore Fawkes' warning and run to the (lethally-irradiated) storage room yourself. It's doable with a lot of Rad Resistance. When you get it, you can pick it up or activate it; choose the latter and it'll first warn you that everything in a several mile radius will be annihilated to use for materials. You can then do it anyway.
  • Attacking Betty, the psychotic and omnipotent little girl in charge of the Tranquility Lane simulation, will see you killed very quickly.
  • During Mothership Zeta, you enter a decompression chamber both before and after the Space Walk. There's nothing stopping you from pushing the button before putting on the suit, or from taking the suit off afterwards. In both cases, Your Head Asplode. Likewise, you can walk off the edge of the saucer. Doing so plays a short cutscene of your character drifting off into space.
  • During the Broken Steel main quest, the Brotherhood of Steel asks to go to Old Olney in order to bring them a Tesla coil. The game allows to interact with the coil before turning it off, which kills you by electrocution on the spot.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: You can perform an equivalent of this on President Eden with a high enough speech check or once you've gotten his override code. His tone as you perform this is a mixture of surprise and desperation as he has no choice but to comply
  Eden: I... Oh. Oh my...
• Psycho Knife Nut: The Pre-War serial killer "The Pint-Sized Slasher" used a large kitchen knife to brutally murder their victims and you get to be them yourself in Vault 112.
• Punch-Clock Villain:
  • Nearly all Vault-Tec Overseers. Braun is an exception, as there is no "Punch Clock" involved with him.
  • The Vault 101 Security guards you have to gun down during "Escape!" ^note you don't have to kill them; they can be outrun and avoided or you can let them be killed by the Radroaches, but it's quite difficult to pull off. Even the game considers them this during this quest, changing their karma level to Evil so you won't be penalized for killing them in self-defense.
• Puny Earthlings:
  • Subverted with Mothership Zeta, while the aliens possess powerful guns, without energy shields, they are just as frail (if not moreso) as any given human. A sextet of humans (The Player, a Samurai wearing vintage armor and a katana, a Cowboy wearing ordinary clothing and carrying a revolver, an Anchorage Combat Medic, another Wastelander, and a little girl) are capable of completely wrecking an entire shipful of spacemen.
  • Abominations play this somewhat straight, as they are definitely a threat if they close in, but their lack of shielding puts them at a disadvantage if you spot them beforehand and open fire.
  • Super Mutants will sometimes say things in this vein while attacking you.
• Put on a Bus: Doctor Li in Broken Steel. Characters state that she was tired of the conflict in the Capital Wasteland and decided to take a trip to the Commonwealth. Some of the pre-Broken Steel dialogue implies that she was in love with your dad, and his death and your near-death pretty much destroyed her emotionally. Ten years later, she's one of the villains in the Institute, which is actually foreshadowed in this game when we see them try to recruit her.
• Putting on the Reich: The Enclave Officers.

Tropes Q-S

• Quintessential British Gentleman: The Mr Handy robots. When confronted with an enemy, they will oftentimes shout "For Queen and Country!" before firing their flamethrower.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: Enclave Squad Sigma from the Broken Steel expansion, albeit heavily downplayed when compared to most examples. Although they are supposedly the most elite among the Enclave's soldiers, they don't really have much to offer as antagonists apart from their names.
• The Quisling: Anna Holt. And according to the game's karma system, it's still wrong to kill her. However, she likely dies if the base self destructs. She only goes with the Enclave because she foolishly believes that they want to help wastelanders and save the Wasteland with their advanced technology.
• Radiation-Immune Mutants: Ghouls and Super Mutants, per series tradition. Taking it a step further, they are even healed by radiation. Glowing Ones, a rare variant of ghoul, can even emit bursts of radiation that heal nearby ghouls and harm the player.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Formed to assist the Lone Wanderer during the Mothership Zeta DLC as they rally several of the alien's captives taken from different eras. There's a fellow Wasteland adventurer, a somewhat inexplicably Cheerful Child taken just after the bombs fell, a Combat Medic from the battle of Anchorage, a Cowboy and Samurai from the 17th Century.
• Railing Kill: Happens quite often if your target is on catwalk or the like. Most notably, this happens with Colonel Autumn if you shoot him where he stands during the final mission.
• Railroading:
  • Generally avoided, given the open world structure, but some of the quests — particularly in the main plot — are starkly this. For example, how choosing not to protect the code to Project Purity gets you insta-killed, or how your only options at the final "morality choice" are to be either extremely selfish or extremely generous.
  • Plenty of quest-related doors are impossible to break into, regardless of the player character's lockpicking skill.
• Rare Candy:
  • The Vault-Tec Bobbleheads. Each gives one point to their S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat or ten their skill. Some Bobbleheads can be Permanently Missable, such as the one in Vault 101 or Raven Rock.
  • Skillbooks. which give one point to each skill or two with the Comprehension perk.
  • Here and Now is a perk available at level 10 (or higher) which sends you to he next level automatically.
• Ray Gun: Energy weapons ranging from Plasma Cannons to Frickin' Laser Beams to a bigass Lightning Gun to Mothership Zeta's on-board Death Ray, all but the last of which can turn any poor sod hit by them to turn into a smoldering pile of ash or a steaming pile of green goo. The only non-lethal ray gun is the Mesmertron, a Hypno Ray, that confuses the target temporary, when it doesn't make them go nuts or their heads to pop. Even then it has a lethal variant called the Microwave Emitter that cooks anything the beam hits and pops them.
• Raygun Gothic: Mothership Zeta and a special encounter has the Alien weapons. The Alien blaster and variants look like a cheesy raygun, the Alien disintegrator and Destablizer variant look like a blunderbuss from a 50's sci-fi comic, and the alien atomizer and the Atomic pulverizer variant look like a Covenant plasma pistol that was designed by pulp fiction writers. That being said these weapons are very powerful, but very pricey and hard to keep energized.
• Real Fake Door: Sat Com Array NN-03d has a nearby door that opens into a concrete wall and a message: "FUCK YOU".
• Real Is Brown: Or gray, if you're in D.C. Justified since the region was nuked to within an inch of its life.
• Really 700 Years Old: Most of your allies in Mothership Zeta. Justified as they spent most of it frozen with the oldest of them being a Edo-period Samurai.
• Reluctant Mad Scientist: John Malleus, the head researcher of Vault 92. Logs found throughout the vault explain that white noise was used to plant subliminal messages in the minds of the residents with the intent of creating super-soldiers, turning many of them insane to the point they physically tore each other apart. However, Malleus' audio logs reveal he had no idea what was really going on, he thought only a percentage of the populace was being subjected in a controlled environment he was observing and the suggestions were for harmless things like making them fix their hair or scratch their ears, gradually working up to implanting complex commands. It was the Overseer who had the noise filtered through the vault loudspeakers to affect everyone and drove them to violence, and Malleus was trying to get things under control and was horrified when he found out the truth. It's implied that he either killed or was killed by the Overseer, but there's not enough evidence left to say which.
• The Remnant:
  • The East Coast Enclave is all that's left of the Enclave, which was destroyed by the Fallout 2 player character. Then in Broken Steel, you fight the remnant of that remnant.
  • The Chinese Remnants, ghoulified pre-War espionage agents hiding out in a factory in D.C.
• Respawning Enemies: Enemies that can respawn are programmed to do so at the location of their corpse after 3 days. By moving their corpse you can manipulate this system to Set a Mook to Kill a Mook, i.e. by dumping a couple of monster corpses in the middle of a Raider camp (though using monster corpses to do this is time consuming since they weigh an insane mass and take forever to move any appreciable distance). This system was reworked in later games to avoid this exploit.
• Restraining Bolt: Every robot has one of these on its back that doubles as a Morality Chip; it's the only thing stopping that jovial Mr. Handy (or any other robot) from going on a blood-soaked rampage.
• Resurrection/Death Loop: During the mission "Tranquility Lane," it's discovered that the inhabitants of Vault 112 have been imprisoned in a virtual reality simulation run by sadistic Overseer Stanislaus Braun. For the last two hundred years, Braun has been regularly torturing his playthings to death, then resetting the scenario to bring them back to life - and also erasing their memories for good measure. The one exception to this is one Mrs Dithers: thanks to a malfunctioning tranquility lounger, she can no longer be mind-wiped, effectively leaving her trapped in a hellish lucid dream with no hope of rescue. The only way to spare the residents from any further torment is to use an incompatible "Chinese Invasion" program to override the safeties and put them down permanently, leaving Braun trapped in his virtual dominion with no more playthings. On the other hand, if you're playing on bad karma, you can play along with Braun's sick games and put them through a round of torture that ends with them being killed and resurrected all over again.
• Retired Badass:
  • Herbert 'Daring' Dashwood, old adventurer and one of the nicest guys in the capital wasteland.
  • James, the Lone Wanderer's father. This is a man who 19 years previously, left the safety of Rivet City and set off across the Capital Wasteland to Vault 101, with his newborn child in tow.
• Reverse Escort Mission: In the quest "Following in His Footsteps", the Lyon's Pride faction of the Brotherhood of Steel may escort you through the DC Ruins. As it occurs early on, you aren't likely to survive numerous Super Mutants and a Behemoth. Should you Sequence Break, you'll have to fend for yourself when you decide to visit GNR later.
• Revolvers are Just Better: Averted with the .32 pistol, a revolver that is actually one of the weakest guns in the game. The Scoped .44 Magnum on the other hand is among the best of the available pistols offset by its terrible item health; every shot visibly degrades it. Then there's the PC cheat-only .44 Magnum, which will destroy anything in one shot. Raiders, mutants, robots, buses, vertibirds...
• Roar Before Beating: Feral ghouls and Zeta's alien abominations. This is not a free action—they tend to get shot up doing it.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: All of Mothership Zeta. Nobody abducts and anal-probes the Lone Wanderer and gets away with it.
• Robo Speak: Most robots. The smarter ones use Spock Speak instead.
• Robot Hair: There is a side-quest to retrieve the Declaration of Independence. In it, you will eventually encounter a Protectron who, due to a malfunction, believes himself to be the real Button Gwinnett and wears a powdered wig.
• Rube Goldberg Device: There's one hidden in the Gold Ribbon Grocer's. After stepping on a pressure plate. the chain reaction leads to useful tools and ammo falls from the ceiling. It will also set off a buttload of traps located very closely to the door you entered in from. You'll be safe at the pressure plate that activates it, but if you happen to wander around the shop while the contraption is going (perhaps unaware that you even set it off) it's possible to get killed.
• Rule of Cool: Per series tradition, where the Fallout universe works according to 1950s era SCIENCE! and theire vision of the future. For example, instead of simply causing a miserable death, radiation can create mutants while nearly everything runs on atomic energy.
• Rule of Drama: The original ending forces the player to make a heroic sacrifice. Even though logically speaking, several of your potential companions could easily perform the action for you and be unharmed. But all the companions will simply refuse to help — even Clover and Charon, who are both slaves forced to obey your every whim (the former via the threat of an explosive collar around her neck, the latter through brainwashing that renders him incapable of refusing an order) — with their reasoning being essentially "It's simply more dramatic if you do it."
• Scary Scorpions: Radscorpions, who have no weak point. The Giant and Albino versions even more so.
• Scavenger World: With a fair number of Survivalist Stashes.
• Scenery Gorn: Almost any high vantage point (most notably the top of the Washington Monument) gives you a panoramic view of the terrible devastation.
• Scenery Porn:
  • Oasis.
    Three Dog: Have any of you kiddies ever seen... a tree? [...] Somewhere out in the Wasteland is a place with lots of trees, a veritable oasis of green in a depressing sea of brown...
  • Various places such as downtown Washington, D.C. and Arlington Cemetery. Sometimes, the post-apocalyptic wasteland is very pretty. When you first emerge from Vault 101, you'll walk up to a cliff for your first view of the Wasteland spread out in front of you. There's a battered pre-war sign reading "Scenic Overlook". This really makes an impact if you happen to leave the Vault during the day. You've just fought your way out of the only place you've ever known, and when you emerge into the daylight for the first time, you're momentarily blinded by the sunlight (a recurring theme throughout the first part of the game). And then your eyes adjust and the desolate landscape comes into view...
• Scenic-Tour Level: The game tours various areas of Vault 101 during the Justified Tutorial, some of which are otherwise inaccessable.
• Schmuck Bait: In-Universe, there is an insane man in downtown DC with a megaphone who keeps spouting off completely crazy nonsensical ramblings from the safety of the second floor of his building. In the playground in the back alley of the building is a minefield. If he spots you, he will detonate the minefield and you WILL die. Over by the street is a wastelander who just wants the guy to shut up. You can convince the poor sap to walk up and try to talk to him... Just make sure you're standing well beyond the sidewalk so you don't get caught up in the explosion. ^note It's best to just pick the guy off from a distance with a gun. The minefield itself has at least 4 Mini Nukes scattered under the playground equipment. Yours for the taking if you kill the guy and don't set off any mines in the process.
• Second Hour Superpower: The Pip-Boy 3000 and the V.A.T.S targeting system is given to you during your 10th Birthday Party, just minutes into the tutorial.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Picking up on a mention from Tactics, both this game and New Vegas imply there's another faction of the Brotherhood of Steel operating in Chicago, and it's also hinted that super mutants have been sighted and the Enclave is suspected to have another base nearby.
  • A few characters in the game mention The Commonwealth and The Institute, which exist far to the north of the Capital Wasteland. Among other things, it's where the escaped android came from and where Dr. Li heads to between the end of the main quest and Broken Steel, and is said to be a place of scientific and technological research. In 2012, Bethesda employees were rumored to be visiting Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in preparation for a new Fallout game to be set nearby - and sure enough, this plot thread turned out to be Production Foreshadowing for the main plot of Fallout 4.
• Sequence Breaking: Many opportunities, particularly early in the main quest. Like its predecessor, you can cut out huge chunks of the game if you're strictly going for a Speed Run.
• Serious Business: The "Grady's Package" sidequest is all about this, starting with the player finding a dead body holding onto a holotape, documenting how the man (the titular Grady) is about to kill himself to protect a secret package, with instructions on how to reach it and who it's supposed to go to. Likely expecting something very important, the player can follow the instructions to a locked storeroom and a safe containing the package that Grady killed himself to protect: the Naughty Nightwear; either a pair of leopard-print pajamas or a leopard-print negligee depending on which gender is wearing it. Soon after picking it up, a raider will run up and actually try to mug the player for this package.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Doctor Lesko lapses into this when he talks about his ant research.
• Set the World on Fire: You don't want to, but it happens anyway.
• Sexual Euphemism:
  • The game has no issues with saying "Fuck", but there's a character in Megaton who's job is to "comfort" her customers." She doesn't call herself a hooker, callgirl, or any other term.. She doesn't say that her job is having sex with the bar's customers, but that's exactly what she does.
  • In Rivet City, if the player tells Father Clifford that Diego and Angela had sex, Angela says:
    Someone told Father Clifford that Diego and I were...you know.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Moira Brown + reverse-pickpocketed Raider Bombshell Armor = instant Fanservice. Inverted if she's been ghoulified by blowing up Megaton.
• Shooting Lessons From Your Parents: The Lone Wanderer is taught how to shoot by their dad, practicing on Radroaches in a deserted section of Vault 101.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: All the guns in the game have an Arbitrary Weapon Range, but it can be especially noticeable with the sniper rifle. Sniper-type players are known to fail to make long-distance shots that are quite possible in other games, never mind Real Life. The bullet simply disappears before it reaches its target. However, just because you see the bullet disappear doesn't mean it won't hit its target (assuming that it is indeed within the maximum range). It doesn't matter how far away you are from the target, the game WILL notify you if you score a critical hit.
• Shout-Out: See the series' page here.
• Sickening "Crunch!": When you take fall damage.
• Sidequest: Unlike Bethesda's previous title, Oblivion, which has story arcs out the yin-yang, the majority of the sidequests and characters you encounter have no bearing on either the central questline of the game or on each other. This is in contrast to Fallout: New Vegas, where most of the sidequests and characters have some ties to the central NCR-vs-Legion conflict or are otherwise interconnected with other events and characters elsewhere in the game. As a result, Fallout 3 is more of an episodic TV show, while New Vegas is more of a Myth Arc mini-series.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The desktop computers and holotapes. Laughably primitive by real world standards and yet capable of sustaining two hundred years fully powered and fully functional in the most inhospitable locations imaginable. Consider for a moment that you can destroy a modern computer with half a glass of water whereas these will happily survive centuries of living completely submerged and you can to see just how important these attributes would be in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
• Simulated Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Reality:
  • In the main plot, your quest to find your father eventually leads you to Vault 112: here, the residents have spent the last two hundred years plugged into virtual reality, the current simulation being Tranquility Lane, an idyllic 1950s suburbia. Compared to ruins of Washington outside, it's a paradise... except that the Vault's Overseer, Dr Stanislaus Braun, routinely uses his power over the simulation to torture the residents for his own amusement. Worse still, your dad's ventured inside and can't escape, forcing you to follow him in. The only way to escape is to play along with Braun's sick games... or make use of a Corrupted Contingency to break Braun's control of the simulator, put his victims out of their misery, and leave Braun trapped alone in virtual reality - forever.
  • In the Operation: Anchorage DLC, you find yourself in an abandoned VR facility hidden deep in the Capital Wastelands with priceless loot on the other side of a locked door. The only way to get inside is to take part in a pre-War military simulation sending you on a journey through a heavily biased depiction of the Liberation of Anchorage.
• Sinister Subway: Every wrecked metro system in the Capital Wasteland is crawling with either mutants or raiders. Given that they're dark and dank with at least a few systems flooded with radiation in either form as well as the occasional trap...
• Skippable Boss: General Jing-Wei and Colonel Augustus Autumn can both be talked out of fighting.
• Slain in Their Sleep: The "Mister Sandman" perk lets the Lone Wanderer murder Non Player Characters in their sleep for a flat gain of 50 Experience Points.
• Slave Market: Paradise Falls used to be a famous super market before the bombs fell. In the Capital Wasteland, it has been repurposed into the headquarters of a local band of slavers. While the player cannot buy slaves, they can choose to help free the ones inside and kill the slavers if they choose, or work as a slaver to earn some extra caps.
• Slave Mooks: Crimson and Clover to the slavers of Paradise Falls.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil:
  • The slavers of Paradise Falls are so evil that waltzing into their home and slaughtering the lot of them counts as good karma.
  • Enslaving people with the Mesmetron is always an evil act. Always. Even enslaving the Villain by Default raiders. Pay Evil unto Evil is not in effect here as you're only furthering the system.
• Slasher Smile:
  • Some of the raiders you fight will psychotically grin while attacking you, most noticeable with the ones that have melee weapons.
  • The Pint-Sized Slasher's mask is paper-mache mask of a grinning clown. The Slasher loved using a kitchen knife to stab and slash at their victims.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Dave, president of the tiny micronation of the Republic of Dave (with a population of about 10 or so, mostly children,) who believes that it's his destiny to conquer and repopulate the wasteland, and threatens to have the player shot for such heinous acts as not referring to him as Mister President. Though he stresses that the Republic of Dave is a republic, and thus still holds presidential elections, he's the only one who ever runs, and if the player manages to pull some trickery to get either his first wife or eldest son elected, Dave throws a fit and storms out to form a new Republic of Dave in Old Olney (which, seeing as Old Olney is infested with Deathclaws, he more than likely won't survive.)
• Sniper Pistol: The Scoped .44 Magnum, one of the most damaging standard pistols in the game. Even if you don't use pistols, you can use one as a telescope - very handy.
• Some of My Best Friends Are X: When telling Dukov that Crowley wants him dead for being a bigot, part of Dukov's argument against the claim is that he had a Ghoul whore once just to see what it was like.
• Songs in the Key of Lock: Tranquility Lane has a hidden computer interface that allows you to shut it down; accessing it requires a musical code based on the leitmotif you can hear on the soundtrack and which Betty occasionally whistles to herself.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Desmond from the Point Lookout add-on is quite eloquent. He's also a walking Cluster F-Bomb.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • The radio on your Pip-Boy is Soundtrack Dissonance on demand. With it, you have the choice of listening to either uplifting golden oldies music from the 50s, patriotic American army music, or even violin sonatas while going around and killing random mutants and animals.
  • Tranquility Lane is a more extreme case with its constant usage of an uplifting theme while you're busy committing murder. For bonus points, that happy little jingle is the musical key to triggering the simulation's failsafe.
• Space Compression: Naturally, DC and the surrounding area have been scaled down significantly. However, while many outlying locations have been moved closer to the DC metropolitan area, it has been done inconsistently, to the point where some of the placements venture into Artistic Licence – Geography territory. For example, while (Old) Olney isn't too far from its real location, Germantown (which should be about due west of Olney) is much further south, close to where Bethesda Softworks is located in Rockville. Perhaps the most egregious example is Raven Rock (presumably based on the Real Life Raven Rock Mountain Complex), which is approximately two in-game maps further south than it should be, in the wrong US state.
• Speech Impediment: Biwwy of Widdle Wampwi- er, Little Lamplight. If you feel like being a jerk to a little kid, you can tell him to stop talking like that, but he will say he doesn't know what you are talking about. He'll trade you his Wazer Wifle (the item is actually named this in the game interface) for caps, or give it to you for free if you have the Child At Heart perk.
• Spock Speak: Mr. Handy and Mr. Gutsy robots, which have English butler and Drill Sergeant Nasty voice respectively. The Prototype Medic Armor also uses this in the style of a Mr. Gutsy.
• Standard Snippet: The Enclave radio station uses plenty of theme songs pertaining to military marches or American patriotism.
• Stealth Pun:
  • James is shown to have an affinity for scotch throughout the game. Scotch is a type of whisky, which in turn gets its name from the Gaelic uisge beatha, which translates into modern English as...wait for it..."water of life".
  • The small-scale nuclear charges Liberty Prime throws? Nuclear Footballs!
• Stealth-Based Mission: In the first leg of the Operation: Anchorage DLC, you must sneak up the cliffs and take the Chinese guards out with a rather weak silenced pistol.
• Stealthy Mook: Operation: Anchorage has Chinese soldiers equipped with stealth suits that work like a permanent Stealth Boy while in use. Completing the simulation gets you one as a reward as well.
• Stepford Smiler: The Wilsons and the Smiths in Andale are way too cheerful to be real. They also talk as if they're in the middle of a picturesque suburban small town, not a cluster of scorched houses in a post-atomic wasteland.
• Stopped Clock: Every single clock you see is stopped at the exact time the Chinese attack occurred (9:48). None are the purely mechanical, wind-up types that might have continued.
• Stripperiffic: Several outfits (although generally more for females than males). The Sexy Sleepwear and its unique variants are obvious ones, but some of the Raider gear and slave outfits from the Pitt are even more suggestive/revealing. The Pitt's "Bombshell" armor is a full blown Chainmail Bikini on a female.
• Stronger with Age: The East Coast super mutants function this way, going all the way up to the Super Mutant Behemoth.
• Stupid Evil: You, if you poison the purifier with modified FEV at the end of the main quest. This results in dooming all the non-vault people in the Wasteland. Like, well, you. You get Evil karma for that, but you really should get some Stupid karma instead.
• Stupid Sacrifice
  • James sacrifices himself by flooding the Purifier's control room with radiation to keep the Enclave from controlling it. However, his act only keeps the Enclave from accessing the Purifier's control room afterward, it does nothing to keep them from occupying the Purifier and using it as a base of operations. The Enclave didn't have the means to activate the Purifier anyway, it isn't operational and they don't have the activation code if it was. But then, even if those problems were solved, they'd definitely figure out a way to access the control room safely sooner or later.
  • The player is presented with this option in the original ending, either sending Sarah Lyons in to activate the purifier or doing it yourself, even though the lethal radiation levels in the control room will kill whoever enters it. However, of the possible companions you have with you, three of them — Charon, Sergeant RL-3, and Fawkes — are immune to radiation, and Fawkes was even the one who retrieved the G.E.C.K. for you earlier by going into a room that was radiated to lethal levels. If the player tries to get any of them to activate the purifier for them, they refuse. With Broken Steel installed this trope is negated, any of the three will obey the direction to activate it, and if the player chooses to do it themselves they survive now.
• Stylistic Suck: Jingwei, a Chinese general, is depicted in General Chase's Anchorage simulation as committing sepuku when talked down and speaking Chinese in a fake and almost incomprehensible accent. It's unclear if it was Bethesda doing a poor job on his voicing, or if Chase didn't bother to make the simulation accurate at all (considering it's implied that the whole thing might be a fabricated retelling of Operation Anchorage).
• Subliminal Seduction: The true purpose of Vault 92 was to brainwash its residents — all musicians — through white noise seeded through the speaker system and recording equipment, with the purpose to make them ultra-loyal super-soldiers upon receiving a simple command phrase. Naturally, things went horribly wrong.
• Suicidal Overconfidence:
  • Wearing huge powered armor and toting a gun bigger than you won't stop leather-armored raiders from taunting you and firing their peashooters at you.
  • Sadly, Dogmeat. He's pretty much your only strictly melee-based companion, which means you'll often have to rescue him from his attempts to bite Deathclaws or Sentry Bots. Broken Steel gives him a massive health boost, turning him into your most durable companion, as well as offering the perk "Puppies!" which lets you replace him in the event that he still dies.
• Sunglasses at Night: There is no penalty in doing so: You get a Perception bonus, even at night.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • The Enclave's improved FEV targets anyone who was born outside of the Enclave or a Vault...including you. If you plug the FEV into Project Purity and try drinking Aqua Pura in Broken Steel, you will suffer debilitating status afflictions. If you drink three bottles, you will die instantly.
  • If you have Broken Steel installed and activated Project Purity, you find in the Playable Epilogue that bringing clean drinking water to the Wastes wasn't as simple as flicking on a switch. The Brotherhood of Steel have to set up a complex water distribution network practically overnight, and they are not too thrilled about you putting such a bureaucratic nightmare on them.
  • The Tenpenny Tower sidequest with Roy Phillips. Tenpenny Tower has an exclusionary "no ghouls" residence policy, but being around Roy (a ghoul) for five minutes will clearly show you that he is every bit as a racist Jerkass as the tower residents. Even if you work out a peaceful solution that will allow Roy and his ghouls in, Roy will eventually turn on the human residents and have them all killed. Sometimes you will meet people who cannot be swayed in their mindset or personal beliefs. But unfortunately, unlike every other evil character in the game, killing Roy will net you negative karma and the local DJ will admonish you over the radio for it because he is convinced that Roy is the real victim in this situation and you are guilty of a cold-blooded racist "murder". Journalists might be ethical and committed to reporting the truth, but they can still get the facts wrong.
  • In "The Superhuman Gambit" sidequest, the mayor of Canterbury Commons hires the Lone Wanderer to get rid of either The Mechanist (a superhero who claims to be Canterbury Commons' protector) or The AntAgonizer (a supervillain who was somewhat harassing them before The Machanist's arrival) who are regularly fighting in the town. Aside from a young boy living there, the inhabitants aren't exactly pleased by the situation and feel those fights (The Mechanist has robots armed with machine guns and missiles, while The AntAgonizer controls giant ants) are much more dangerous for them than The AntAgonizer was initially. In other words, that how the muggles would probably feel in any setting where superheroic vigilantes are active.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Since you meet a lot of brain-fried, deluded, misguided, and/or outright crazy people wandering the Wasteland, your dialogue options often have at least one which enables you to politely humor them in order to progress to the next part of the conversation. Naturally, you also have the option to bluntly and rudely tell them that they're nuts.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Pinkerton is a myth. He is certainly NOT in the broken bow of Rivet City. He left a long time ago, dammit!

Tropes T-W

• Tacky Tuxedo: Eulogy Jones' suit, a bright red zoot suit that comes with a matching hat with a feather in it. The problem is that it's so tacky that only merchants can repair it, meaning if it gets busted you can't get it back to 100%.
• Tactical Superweapon Unit: The Juggernaut known as LIBERTY PRIME was designed as the United States' ultimate weapon for destroying the communist army of China during the Alaskan invasion. It's capable of shooting Eye Beams, throws nuclear football bombs, and shrugs off conventional and energy weapons. The US ultimately couldn't solve its short power supply problem due to all of its weapons, so it didn't see use until the Lone Wanderer helps the Brotherhood of Steel reclaim the Jefferson Memorial from the Enclave. In the Broken Steel DLC, the Lone Wanderer learns that Liberty Prime was crucial for absolutely curb-stomping the remaining Enclave bases, and it was only finally taken down because of a Kill Sat.
• Taking a Third Option:
  • "Trouble on the Homefront" has you returning to Vault 101 to settle a conflict between the current Overseer and a group of rebels who want to see Vault 101's government changed, having been inspired by your previous escape. You can take either side, or you can (for a small karma hit) sabotage the vault's Water Chip, forcing everyone to evacuate into the wastelands. Regardless of your choice, you're not going to be allowed back in again, so why not make them see the world as you have?
  • In general, there's quite a few quests that let you do this and get both rewards by playing both sides against one another:
    • The Replicated Man: Normally, you either tell Harkness the truth and take the Plasma Rifle he gives you, or you tell Zimmer the truth and use the reset code on Harkness, getting the Wired Reflexes Perk. You can also tell Harkness the truth first for his Plasma Rifle and offer to kill Zimmer, then tell Zimmer about Harkness for the Wired Reflexes perk, then kill Zimmer and his bodyguard before they leave the room to tie up the loose ends.
    • You Gotta Shoot Em In The Head: You either have to kill Tenpenny by shooting him in the head with the Sniper Rifle Crowley gives you, or if you pass a speech check, he'll offer you 300 caps (100 up front) to kill Crowley^note doing so ends the quest, and since Tenpenny is the only one Crowley legitimately wants dead because he's a bigot, there isn't a way to continue the quest normally if he lives. However, there's nothing to stop you from accepting his offer, then turning around and headshotting Tenpenny with the Sniper Rifle and looting the 200 caps he had waiting for you from his body, and then collecting the 100 caps Crowley gives you.
  • After the release of Broken Steel, the final quest of the main storyline can also end like this if you have the right companion - normally, you could only either activate the purifier yourself or have Sarah activate it. However, if you have Charon, RL-3, or Fawkes as a follower, you can instead have them activate the purifier. As they are naturally immune to radiation, neither you or Sarah have to die.
• Tastes Like Feet: Moira's opinion of radroach meat.
• Teenage Wasteland: Big Town which is made up of people who grew too old to live in Little Lamplight. Little Lamplight itself is a child version of this and only allows children. Anyone who turns 16 is forced to trek over to Big Town, such as Sticky (the youngest person you can personally kill in the game).
• There Are No Adults: Little Lamplight. The eldest kids have to look after the younger ones and do certain jobs like teaching, taking care of injuries, and guarding the gate to Vault 87, the birthplace of the DC super mutants.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!:
  • Usually a bad sign; if their Names to Run Away from Really Fast didn't give you a clue, their lack of a first name should make you immediately suspicious of Mister Burke and Mister Crowley.
  • The hovering robots are called Mister Handy if they have service roles and Mister Gutsy if they're used for combat.
• This Is Gonna Suck: During The Wasteland Survival Guide, your dialogue option for the chapter on 'Crippling Injuries' is thus: "I'm going to hate myself for this, but what do you mean about handling injury?" Justified, given it involves either waiting around to get shot, throwing oneself off non-lethal heights or walking over a land mine or two. For Science!
• This Is No Time for Knitting: In The Adventures of Herbert 'Daring' Dashwood, the following exchange occurs:
  Penelope Chase: Why is your Ghoul friend picking their pockets? This is no time for sticky fingers, Daring!
  Herbert 'Daring' Dashwood: It's not what he's taking out, my dear, but rather what he's putting in! DUCK AND COVER!
• Throwaway Country: In Mothership Zeta, you can use the Death Ray to zap part of Canada.
• Time-Delayed Death: In Mothership Zeta, you can thaw out and revive a few soldiers who were abducted during the Anchorage invasion. The soldier accompanying you is their commanding officer, and the soldiers are informed that the revival process is only temporary. There is no telling when they will die, and sure enough, they eventually start dropping randomly.
• Toilet Humor: In the RobCo Facility, a broken Protectron is sitting on a restroom toilet. There is scrap metal in the same toilet bowl.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Weapons that have rare ammo and/or cannot be repaired except by merchants. In the case of weapons like the Alien Blaster, it has both a finite ammo limit AND it is unique and cannot be repaired by the player in the vanilla game. (Mothership Zeta gives you some options for dealing with both issues, but they are still finite.)
  • Nuka Grenades. Nuka-Cola Quantum is rare to come by, so unless you're being attacked by a Yao Guai or a Deathclaw, you'll want to save as many of them as you can. Subverted in Broken Steel with the new Quantum Chemist perk; whenever you have ten Nuka-Cola bottles in your inventory, they automatically disappear in order to convert to one Nuka-Cola Quantum. Suddenly, it becomes more viable to make Nuka Grenades as regular throwable weapons.
  • The T-51b armor in Fort Constantine. Best armor in the game, looks awesome, and has high radiation resistance. Too bad it's unique and the game's merchants can only repair it to around 50% or so, meaning that after it wears down enough it won't be any better than regular power armor.
  • Subverted by the Winterized T-51b (which has a bug-induced advantage) and by Broken Steel's Enclave Hellfire Armor, which is in the same league protection-wise and - as a non-unique - can be kept in shape by taking parts from the suits of defeated Enclave troopers.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The Vault 101 Overseer, who decides that after repeatedly attempting to murder the Lone Wanderer, something that has obviously failed, the best way to deal with them is to taunt and be sarcastic. Particularly egregious when the Lone Wanderer returns to Vault 101, now most likely clad in power armour and having taken several levels in badass, and the Overseer still doesn't understand that this may not bode well for his continued plans on having his head remain connected to his body.
  • Ditto for Officer Wilkins, the only security officer most supportive of the Overseer. Attempting to stop a power armor-clad, minigun-toting Lone Wanderer by brandishing a pea-shooting 10mm pistol and clad in mall-security body armor is going to make you a hero, eh?
  • The Ninth Circle's proprietor, Ahzrukhal. He knows that Charon really hates his guts and is only held in check by a contract. Ahzrukhal will still let the Lone Wanderer buy the contract off him.
  • To a lesser extent, feral ghouls, since they always announce they've detected the player with a distinctive screech that lasts about three seconds, giving an attentive marksman plenty of time to line up a shot.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Krivbeknih, a leather-bound book that is used by the Swampfolk, wanted by Obadiah Blackhall, and tied to an ancient evil called "Ug-Qualtoth". The only way to destroy it is pressing it against the Dunwich obelisk.
• Top Wife: Within the Republic of Dave, the player finds that President Dave has two wives—his original one, and another he picked up from wandering the wasteland. While Dave never indicates that he has a favorite, it's clear that the original wife isn't happy with the arrangement and that the second wife not only thinks she's the favorite, but that she should be Dave's only spouse.
• Tortured Monster: Harold. Bob the tree has grown over the years and now has rooted itself deep into the Capitol Wasteland's dry earth, spreading its children in an Oasis... but Harold is now completely stuck and worshiped along with Bob despite all of his organs being pushed down with Bob's roots.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Andale. Subverted in Meresti Station, where they're pretty open about their disturbing habits.
• Trap Is the Only Option: Vault 112 is blatantly a trap. But it's a part of the story so hop in the pod, kid!
• Trapped in Another World: Both Vault 112 and the Operation Anchorage DLC has the Lone Wanderer transported to a digital simulation.
• Trauma Inn: Any bed will heal you, but owned or rented ones give you a "Well Rested" XP-generation bonus for a short time afterwards.
• Try Not to Die: One of Moira Brown's cheerful ways of saying goodbye whenever you end a conversation with her. Also, Doc Church, and Everett in The Pitt.
• Undressing the Unconscious:
  • Happens to the Lone Wanderer when he/she is captured by the Enclave. They are knocked out and wake up in a stasis field wearing only their Pip-Boy and their unmentionables and about to be interrogated by Colonel Autumn.
  • The Mothership Zeta DLC also starts like this, and leaves you that way until you can find your gear and clothes in a conveniently close storage container.
• Unexplained Accent:
  • Moriarty and Tenpenny speak with Irish and British accents respectively. (There is no indication of transatlantic travel in this or any other Fallout.) According to the lead designer, Tenpenny is supposed to have come over from England.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • The Operation: Anchorage DLC ends with Defender Sibley mutinying against Protector McGraw because he doesn't want some filthy outsider walking off with any of the tech from the Outcast's armory (never mind that it's because of said outsider that they can even get into said armory in the first place.)
  • Roy Phillips, pre-War cop turned post-War ghoul, needs your help to get into Tenpenny Tower. Do it peacefully and he'll murder everyone inside with his pack of feral ghouls because he was going to anyway. Kill him afterwards and you'll get a karma hit (unless it's a sneak attack) because Three-Dog portrays him as a "victim" of a group cruel racists.
• Unique Items: The game has at least one unique variant of each weapon which have better stats and/or a unique ability over their generic counterparts.
• Universal Ammunition:
  • Downplayed. If a weapon is the same caliber as a given round, it can fire it, e.g. .32 rounds work in both the .32 revolver and the hunting rifle. This is not quite how it works in Real Life, but it's a trifle more realistic than 'one size fits all' bullets.
  • One serious screw-up is Lincoln's Repeater, a unique Henry lever-action rifle chambered for .44 Magnum ammunition (same as the aforementioned Sniper Pistol uses). One little problem: a Henry repeater of that era uses rimfire cartridges, meaning it wouldn't even fire due to the primer not being in the right spot. If you did somehow get around that, and assuming .44 Magnum would even fit in the gun given the cartiridges aren't the exact same size and shape, you'd likely ruin the gun firing ammo that's vastly more powerful than what it was designed for.
  • The Alien blaster along with the Firelance variant use "alien power cells". Come Mothership Zeta the Captain's Sidearm, a pristine Alien Blaster, uses "alien power modules" along with the other weapons found aboard. So both use universal ammo but not the same universal ammo...
• Unreliable Narrator: The Narrator says that Vault 101's door never opened, "This is where you were born. This is where you will die. For in Vault 101, no-one ever enters, and no-one ever leaves.". Obviously, you and Dad are about to make a lie of that. And not even for the first time.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In full force. Nobody comments that you're decked out in power armor, or when you bring Charon, a ghoul, into Tenpenny Tower, or on Star Paladin Cross walking into an Outcast base. Taken to the extreme with Fawkes, an eight-foot-tall super mutant. No one cares when you walk into a town or even the Brotherhood of Steel's Citadel with him behind you. Lampshaded and handwaved: Fawkes will often marvel at this while you're traveling.
  Fawkes: I'm amazed people trust you enough not to attack me!
• Unwanted False Faith: Harold from the Oasis is constantly being put on a pedestal that he refuses to acknowledge. An entire religion has quite literally been made around him to add insult to injury.
• Updated Re-release: The Game of the Year edition, which comes with all of the game's DLC.
• Upper-Class Twit: Tenpenny Tower is a haven full of these who look down on poor, scruffy wastelanders and mutants (with the exception of Herbert "Daring" Dashwood, who himself is a Retired Badass and the only one most tolerant of wastelanders and mutants). They become Asshole Victims during the takeover by Roy Phillips and his ghoul gang, whether or not you assist them.
• Useless Useful Spell: No spells in this genre, but plenty of examples among the 'perks' gained as you acquire levels.
  • Any perk that only boosts a skill. Skill books are found all the time (there's 25 of each in the whole game, for a total of 25 free skill points, 50 with Comprehension) and +5 to a skill isn't worth the waste of a perk when you can just wait for another level up.
  • Swift Learner: +10% experience for each level, but there's an infinite amount of experience available. Even worse is "Deep Sleep", which lets you get the "Well Rested" bonus for +10% exp from any bed you sleep in, meaning it's like Swift Learner, but you need to sleep in order to get the benefits, and those benefits only last a limited time. In addition to the fact that leveling up too quickly will cause more difficult enemies to appear sooner.
  • Any perk that affects how you handle radiation. Rad-Away to remove radiation and Rad-X to increase rad resistance are plentiful and nothing any anti-Rad perk does is worth the lost perk slot to save a few hundred caps.
  • Impartial Mediation: +30 to Speech skill at neutral karma, but due to the game's general Black-and-White Morality with little middle ground allowed, remaining at neutral is tedious. Speech challenges can be exploited for a 100% chance of success, either through save scumming or maxing out the speech stat.
  • Chem Resistant lowers the chance to become addicted to chems. Just go visit a doctor when you're done what you're doing and spring 50 caps for him to cure you. Additionally, due to the way the game handles addiction chance, it's not foolproof anyway.
  • Animal Friend at level 2: Normally-hostile mammals become non-hostile, At level 1 it is useful to avoid having to waste your weapons or bullets on animals, plus the Yao Guai leave you alone. At level 2, it's of no use, because attacking other non-animal enemies is something they already do anyway.
  • Mister Sandman and Cannibal. The former lets you stealth kill sleeping people and the latter lets you eat corpses for healing, but they can glitch and cause entire settlements to turn hostile.
  • Mysterious Stranger: He'll occasionally show up in VATS to provide a One-Hit Kill to any enemy, but he can glitch up, anything he kills doesn't provide you perk or quest-related benefits, and he has a low chance of appearing at all. Besides, his chances of appearing are totally random and don't take the threat level in consideration. Which means he's just as likely to appear and One-Hit Kill that full-health Super Mutant Behemoth you just engaged in VATS, as he is to casually waltz in and blow to shreds a half-dead Mole Rat you were too lazy to manually snipe yourself.
  • Night Person and Solar Power give you stat boosts depending on the time of day. The only worthwhile benefits of either perk can be replicated at any time by popping some chems.
  • Here and Now: Level up again instantly. Wasted perk slot due to the fact that infinite experience is available, the perk only functions at level up when you take it.
  • Master Trader: 25% discount buying anything, but most items aren't that expensive anyway and there's an infinite supply of Shop Fodder to loot from enemies.
  • Computer Whiz and Infiltrator: Can try to hack a terminal you get locked out of / pick a lock you broke. Save scumming fixes both problems, and specifically, Computer Whiz can be nullified by just logging out and back in to refresh your hack attempts, while locks never break unless you force the lock, which you never need to do.
  • Nerd Rage!: You gain a bonus to strength and damage resistance, but only when you're on death's door (Health < 20%), making it far too tedious and fragile for actual use.
  • Concentrated Fire: +5% accuracy for each action in V.A.T.S. targeting the same part of the same enemy. Only useful for guns with low AP costs because you usually only get two-four attacks, maybe five or six with AP increasing chems.
  • Puppies!: If Dogmeat dies, Dogmeat's Puppy appears outside Vault 101 after a few days; also applies to his puppies, making him impossible to permanently kill. Only available in Broken Steel, which causes Dogmeat('s Puppy) to have ridiculously high HP so he'll likely never die anyway. Useful only for the follower exploits.
  • Devil's Highway / Escalator to Heaven / Karmic Rebalance: Instantly sets your Karma to very evil, very good, or neutral. Karma is easily adjusted by theft, murdering respawning Non Player Characters, and donating to churches.
  • No Weaknesses: All SPECIAL stats below five increase to five: not bad in the unlikely case that you haven't used bobbleheads or Intensive Training to make it irrelevant, but made moot with the Almost Perfect perk (available just a few levels later) which raises all SPECIAL stats to at least nine.
  • Warmonger: Instantly get all weapon schematics to level three. Just find the schematics. Besides, only the Nuka Grenade and Bottlecap Mine really benefit from being level three by boosting the amount of items crafted, everything else just comes made with better condition, in which case just craft two and use one to repair the other.
  • Nerves of Steel: This is simply glitched. It's supposed to increase AP regeneration, but only by a rate of one per minute, while AP can usually regenerate from empty to full in half that. Even if it did work, useless since by the time you can get it, you probably have Grim Reaper's Sprint, which fully restores AP when you kill something in V.A.T.S.
  • Nuclear Anomaly: At twenty HP or less, you lose all your radiation, your health rises to twenty HP exactly, and you create a small nuclear blast where you're standing. Although it's an amusing gimmick, anything that could drive you to under twenty HP at level thirty is probably going to be dealing more than twenty damage per hit, the blast re-irradiates you, damages your clothing, often cripples your limbs, damages any friendly NPC in its radius, and occasionally it glitches up and fails to provide the healing, causing you to kill yourself. (Plus any enemy that can reduce your health to 20% at this point will probably be too strong for this Perk to kill.)
• Utopia Justifies the Means:
  • John Henry Eden wants to kill off every mutated human (read: 95% of the population) in the Capital Wasteland as he believes it is the only way to save it.
  • In The Pitt DLC, the leader of the slave-driving Raiders in the ruins of Pittsburgh is trying to resurrect Pittsburgh as a functioning, producing city, with the intention of ending the use of slaves... eventually.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Averted, as none of the obvious targets die plotline deaths. Not even the most blatant Vasquez, Brick from Reilly's Rangers. It's the new recruit that gets killed instead.
• Video Game Caring Potential: You can play tag and hide-and-seek with a lonely little kid who lives in a mine in Point Lookout.
• Videogame Cruelty Potential:
  • Stealth Armor. Flaming Sword. Bloody Mess perk. Town full of innocent people. You know what to do. And nuke the evidence.
  • From setting Harold on fire, to mezzing Wastelanders into slavery, to backstabbing the Brotherhood of Steel with a Kill Sat, almost every single quest has at least one "unspeakable bastard" option.
  • Dr. Braun gives us an in-universe example - his only source of amusement is cruelly tormenting the other inhabitants of Tranquility Lane.
  • In Rivet City, you can talk a suicidal old man into jumping off the flight deck. Feel proud.
  • The unmarked quest "The Kid-Kidnapper." You know Bumble? The littlest of the named Lamplighters? You can tell her you're taking her on an adventure and then SELL HER TO FREAKING PARADISE FALLS.
  • In Rivet City, you can screw over both Harkness and the Institute using Mind Rape and first-degree murder. Step one: Get permission from Harkness to execute Dr. Zimmer and his bodyguard. Step two: Convince Harkness to go back to the Institute. Step three: Wait until Zimmer says mind-wipe phrase to Harkness. Step four: Shoot Zimmer dead before he can give Harkness a single command. Congrats, you have left the Institute short of a well-respected genius and left his robot slave in a permanent vegetable state, doing nothing but standing there requesting a dead man to give him commands that will never come. And the rest of Rivet City will completely forgive you for this. Legally.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Played straight with the Flamer, subverted with the Burnmaster and the Slo-Burn Flamer, and utterly averted with the Heavy Incinerator.
• Video Game Vista: When the player first leaves Vault 101 near the beginning of the game, they will be standing on a cliff with a sign with the words Scenic Lookout printed on it. From here the player can see the ruins of the town of Springvale and its elementary school. The settlement of Megaton can also be spotted in the distance as well.
• Vigilante Man: The Regulators is a whole organization of these guys.
• Villain by Default: All raiders are homicidally insane, drug-crazed lunatics who live in shelters with human remains used as decoration. Text logs and messages suggest them to be capable of reasoning, but gameplay-wise all they ever do is attack anything and everything regardless of consequences.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Roy Philips. To put it simply, he has a homicidal hatred for unmutated humans. However, the Galaxy News Radio thinks he's an oppressed minority woobie, and bashes you if you put a bullet between the bastard's eyes. This is even reflected in the gameplay itself: even though Philips is villainous and the game knows it, killing him and his followers still nets you negative karma as they are set at "Good" karma.
• Villainous Incest: The Andale residents. You're pretty far gone when generations of inbreeding that's been going on for about 200 years straight isn't your dark secret.
• Visual Pun: How does Liberty Prime deploy nuclear weapons during "Take It Back"? He throws them like footballs. As in the Nuclear Football, the briefcase that the US President keeps the launch codes for America's nuclear arsenal in.
• Vitriolic Best Friends: Harold and Bob are a downplayed duo as Harold is a mutant and Bob is a tree. Harold likes to call Bob "Herbert", which apparently gets under Bob's bark but being a plant, Bob can only communicate to Harold in kind.
• Vow of Celibacy: Diego, an acolyte who intends to join the priesthood, has taken one. You can give Angela, a local woman with a crush on him, a powerful aphrodisiac to convice him into breaking it.
  Diego: Angela, I'm not sure you should spend so much time around me. I am to be married to God soon.
  Angela: Wouldn't you rather be with a real girl? Maybe you should try it, before you decide.
  Diego: Lord, give me strength.
• Warp Whistle: Fast-travelling. Time skips ahead each time you travel, and does so in proportion to the distance you've gone. While you get to avoid all the Random Encounters you might otherwise face, there's a fairly high chance that something will spawn right on top of you the second you arrive at your location.
• War Memorial: The Anchorage Memorial, a tribute to all the soldiers who pushed Communist Chinese forces out of Anchorage Alaska. One part of the Wasteland Survival Guide quest line requires you to visit the memorial to study the Mirelurk population living inside it.
• The War Sequence:
  • The march to The Purifier during the mission "Take It Back". You and the Lyon's Pride "escort" Liberty Prime while it makes mincemeat out of the defending Enclave forces.
  • The finale of Broken Steel pits the Lone Wanderer versus dozens upon dozens of Enclave soldiers. At one part of the mission, you get some appreciated help from a squad of Brotherhood Paladins, but they die quickly and for the most part you're on your own.
• Wasteland Elder: There are multiple examples. Such as Manya, the oldest person alive in Megaton, who can tell you the history of its foundation, as well as the elderly leaders of the Children of the Atom. There are also ghouls that have survived since the Great War bomb drops, one of which says that her interesting story is somewhat boring.
• Weapon Jr.: The tutorial has the player learn to shoot with a BB gun on their 10th birthday.
• Weapon Specialization: Quite a lot can be found, also one of the favorite melee weapons for super mutants. They go from hand-hammers that are classed as Shop Fodder, to wieldable sledgehammers, up to the high-tech Super-Sledge.
• We Can Rule Together: Affably Evil President Eden suggests that there may be a place in the Enclave for the Lone Wanderer, perhaps even replacing Colonel Autumn as his dragon, if they agree to help Eden implement his Final Solution. Nothing ever comes of it, though, for two important reasons; 1) even if you don't destroy Eden yourself, in Broken Steel Liberty Prime will level Raven Rock, either destroying Eden or burying him under a few thousand tons of rubble. 2) Despite being raised in a Vault, the Lone Wanderer is descended from Wastelanders, so Eden's FEV turns out to be fatal to him/her as well.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • The Vault 101 Overseer. He seems sour and unfriendly most of the time, but if you read his entry in his terminal, he really wished to have the vault residents lead a peaceful life and didn't proceed with Vault experiments.
  • Just about everyone in Canterbury Commons believes The Mechanist is doing more harm than good. While he's sincere about protecting the town, it's agreed that his heavily-armed robots are doing a lot more damage than the Antagonizer's mutated ants.
  • The Enclave. They're essentially Nazi's, though their goal to restore America and humanity is respectable. Their methods certainly are not.
  • The adults of Andale. They're just trying to make a stable food supply and home for themselves. Unfortunately, that involves relying on murdering people for food and mass incest.
• Wham Mission: The Waters of Life. Specifically, the point when its revealed that not only are the Enclave still active despite the events of 2, but they also intend to forcefully take control of Project Purity for their own sinister ends.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Depending on your actions, you can get quite a few of these.
  • Dad gives you one if he finds out you destroyed Megaton.
  • Three Dog will call you out almost any time you take the "evil option" in a given mission.
  • In The Pitt, you can also choose to deliver words along these lines to Wernher when you learn of his complete plan.
  • You get called on this if you kill the Overseer during your escape, or if you kill him in the sidequest "Trouble On The Homefront." If you kill the original Overseer and also the second one, Amata will accept the latter as self-defense, but you'll still get a lot of "what have you done?" from everyone else.
  • In the ending, Sarah Lyons will give you a lot of sass if you insist that she make a Heroic Sacrifice rather than doing so yourself. The narrator will also do so in the ending voice-over, even if you send in one of two possible radiation-immune followers (which is easily the most logical choice).
  • In Broken Steel, if you choose to target the Citadel after reaching the Satellite room in the Mobile Base Crawler, upon landing back at the [now destroyed] Citadel, the Brotherhood of Steel will immediately find out that it was your doing. They will then declare you a traitor in their eyes, and will shoot you on sight.
  • A more subtle one happens if you kill Three Dog, as his DJ segments on GNR are replaced by a very unenthusiastic and bitter technician who talks about how "some asshole killed our DJ."
• What Measure Is a Mook?: During the escape from Vault 101 in the final stretch of the tutorial, killing the Overseer is treated as a bad thing^note the player character's childhood friend Amata will chew you out over it, even though he had just had her tortured and even if you killed him in self-defense (granted, he is her father) and killing him will prevent you from reaching a peaceful resolution in the later "Trouble On The Homefront" mission., but nothing is made of all the security officers the player guns down and is more or less forced to kill (only one of them can be reasoned with). The difference is; the Overseer is a Jerkass Control Freak who always treated the player character with contempt, will try to kill the player in cold blood if they agree to surrender, and is ultimately resposible for the whole mess. The security officers, although some are established to be nasty individuals, are just regular people the player character has known their entire life (Officer Kendall, the first human enemy in the game, even attended their birthday party as a child).
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • A recurring theme. There are multiple quests that ask you to decide whether ghouls/androids/slaves/mutants/people trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine Are People Too (with the Karma Meter almost always falling on the side of "yes they are"); the two most powerful factions on either side of the coin are distinctly human-chauvinist, although the Enclave have an AI for a leader and the Brotherhood employ a high-ranking cyborg. The Enclave plan to use the modified FEV to kill all "meta-humans" with even the slightest degree of mutation.
  • Three Dog often says "Ghouls are people too", which can either be ignored by the player or not, but even he admits that Feral Ghouls are dangerous to everybody, going so far as to say "So kill as many as you damn well please".
  • The Replicated Man quest is about an android, and both his pursuer and "helper" give reasons on why or why not he's human.
  • Subverted at least once, though; Moira is convinced that Mirelurks must have a complex underwater society. They don't.
• What You Are in the Dark: The main character has a Karma meter to track this, and it doesn't care whether there were any witnesses. The trope is also applied to a lot of the evidence you find of peoples' last moments in the Great War - evidence of selfishness, or tragedy, or heroism.
• While Rome Burns: Dukov and his two party girls spend every day huddled inside a building doing nothing but drinking, partying, getting high, and having sex. The fact that they are almost completely defenseless and surrounded by super mutants and other monsters is something they choose to simply ignore. It helps that Dukov is a Retired Badass whose reputation as a mercenary was known to even Alistair Tenpenny.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The player is free to explore anywhere after leaving Vault 101.
• Wise Beyond Their Years:
  • Most, if not all, of the residents of Little Lamplight. Their doctor, their merchant, their defenders...all are children no older than 15.
  • The Lone Wanderer him/herself. The character is nineteen during the Vault 101 escape, and some of the technical things expected of the character (such as disarming a nuclear bomb) would ordinarily not be entrusted to a nineteen-year-old.
• Would Hit a Girl: Colonel Autumn makes his character clear when he murders an unarmed female scientist in cold blood the first time you see him.
• Worst News Judgement Ever: Three Dog of Galaxy News Radio talks about the player character and only about the player character. There are precisely two news stories in the entire game that aren't directly related to you or your father. This makes sense most of the time, as the player tends to do things that are noticeable enough to be considered newsworthy, but some of the things he reports on are less than noteworthy - he even does a story about you finishing a fetch quest involving collecting soda bottles for a strange woman out in the middle of nowhere. This is lampshaded with "Christ, talk about a slow news day..."
• Worst. Whatever. Ever!: An unmarked quest relating to the Citadel's malfunctioning medical robot is called "Worst. Doctor. Ever." Granted, when your Mr. Gutsy has all the know-how to do surgery but not the way to do surgery (along with some poor bedside manners) you'd have a bad doctor too.
• Wreaking Havok: The game's physics, when manipulated right, can be very amusing. Such as when you use a couple hundred mines to send a Behemoth Flying into the sky. The game tends to exaggerate the ragdoll physics more in VATS, so critting a Super Mutant with the Victory Rifle can cause them to go tumbling into the air because the weight of their own limbs pulled them into it while still in VATS.
• Wrench Wench:
  • Moira Brown, Megaton's resident tinkerer and merchant.
  • A female Lone Wanderer with a high Repair skill qualifies.
• Written by the Winners: A terminal in the Operation: Anchorage DLC mentions that General Chase was constantly changing the Anchorage simulation until it was largely divorced from the reality of what actually happened out there.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Both the AntAgonist and The Mechanist believe they are in a superhero comic... you can complete a quest by convincing them that they're not. In the AntAgonist's case, she's so far out of touch with reality that she believes she's living the Grognak the Barbarian comic of which she is based off of.

Tropes X-Z

• You Can't Go Home Again: Following the tutorial, you are forced to leave Vault 101 and go into the wasteland after your father escapes while the paranoid Overseer plans on killing you as a scapegoat. Later, the mission "Trouble On The Homefront" allows you to return to the Vault, which has fallen into chaos, and help sort things out. Of course right afterwards you are told to leave and this time you can't ever return (Although you can soften that blow, as you do have the option of forcing everyone out of the vault with you by sabotaging the environmental controls.)
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • If you tell Colonel Autumn the correct code for the purifier, he will thank you and kill you, resulting in a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • A pair from Point Lookout:
    • If you choose to side with Professor Calvert to kill Desmond, he will reward you with "The greatest thing any human could ever hope for", which is to say... DEATH! At least he tries to by activating hostile protectrons in his room, and not all of them are working.
    • The quest 'The Velvet Curtain' in which you follow the intended footsteps of a Chinese spy. After you accomplish the mission and look at the extraction information, it's revealed that Chinese intelligence felt silencing the spy would be far easier than recovering him, so they arranged a booby-trap involving an irradiated room.
• You Have Researched Breathing: You can get meat from anything from a dog to a giant bug, but you need the Cannibal perk if you want fresh human meat. Feral ghouls (and Swampfolk in Point Lookout) will occasionally carry around steak-shaped slabs of human, however. Justified in that taking a more active role in cannibalism is a major life choice.
• Your Head Asplode:
  • A frequent result of Boom, Headshot!, which even works on some robots.
  • Moira develops a molerat repellent made of Jet and Psycho that, as it turns out, repels their heads from their bodies.
    Moira: Oh no! Poor little mole ratties!
  • Under normal conditions, the Mesmetron that the Paradise Falls slavers give you temporarily confuses targets long enough to allow you to slip a slave collar onto them. However, if you score a critical hit to their head, it will explode a few moments later. They don't even see it coming. The instruction manual the slaver gives you even says that it hasn't been fully tested yet, and a random side effect was that occasionally pressure builds up in the subject's head and it explodes.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Tranquility Lane and the Anchorage Reclamation Simulation both use a biofeedback network that will lead to real death from virtual shock. The hallucinations encountered in Vault 106 are a less justified version of this.
• Zip Mode: Carried over from Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series, the game has a fast travel system to reduce player fatigue with having to travel long distances at a moderate jogging pace. Unlike The Elder Scrolls, there are no services allowing for the discovery of new locations without the aforementioned walking to them, unless you get the info of the vault locations from Vault-Tec systems while doing the "Agatha's Song" subquest or get the "Explorer" perk after reaching Level 20. And you need to be in the World Map or any location that allows you to fast travel, grounded, not overencumbered, and without enemies going for your blood.