Fallout New Vegas / Tropes S to Z

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

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Fallout: New Vegas provides examples of the following tropes:

S

• Sadistic Choice:
  • The player get to make one at the end of Lonesome Road either allow a barrage of nuclear ICBM'S to be launched, destroying either/both the only usable path into the Mojave from the West, or/and obliterating most of Arizona, or asking the copied ED-E to sacrifice himself to stop the missiles. However, the sacrifice of the copied ED-E doesn't affect the ED-E that exists in the Mojave Wasteland, and it manages to transfer its memory to its other self just before exploding.
  • At the end of the sidequest "Hard Luck Blues," you have choice between plugging the radiation leaking from Vault 34-which saves the NCR Sharecropper Farms but dooms a group of trapped Vault dwellers-or allowing the trapped Vault dwellers to escape, which releases a massive burst of radiation that destroys the farms, ruining the sharecroppers livelihood.
  • The main quest can be this to good-aligned players. You will likely have to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel. Maybe you already have joined them and gained their sympathy? You might have to throw your principles out of the window. Fortunately, if the player has good enough standing with the Brotherhood, they can create a peace treaty between them and the NCR, at the expense of some NCR infamy.
• Safely Secluded Science Center: Big MT from Old World Blues. Originally a colossal Scienceville referred to as the Big Mountain Research and Development Center, it's only become more isolated with the fall of civilization, to the point most who hear about Big MT call it "Big Empty"; even when one of the Think Tanks' experiments ended up transforming the mountain into a crater and exposing the facility to the open air, the high walls and sophisticated defenses kept anyone from investigating too deeply - and those who do manage to break in usually end up having their brains sucked out. As a result, the Big Empty remained largely unexplored to the present day... up until the Courier shows up.
• Samus Is a Girl: Nightkin, like other Super Mutants, have no secondary sexual characteristics, so the ladies sound just like the men chewing gravel. This is used as a point of humor a few times with some plot-relevant Nightkin such as Lily, a former member of the Master's army... who has the mind of an elderly grandmother and joins the Courier, seemingly believing them to be her grandchild, and Tabitha, who co-opted the Black Mountain comm array, creating her own territory called the State of Utobitha and uses it to broadcast her insane conversations with her best friend Rhonda.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Anthony House, elder half-brother to Robert E. House, founder of RobCo and martial lord of New Vegas, during his reign at H&H Tools, largely out of an extreme paranoia that the rising star Robert might eventually come to reclaim his stolen inheritance.
  • Due to the effects of near-constant Stealth Boy use, all Nightkin begin suffering this at some point. If you see one (and by doing so, likely trigger a common Berserk Button of many of them), it's generally not a question of if they are crazy, but how much.
• Sarcastic Confession: If you ask Arcade Gannon about his past, he will originally be evasive. If you ask him why he is dodging the question, he will jokingly reply "Only to obfuscate my previous association with a fascist paramilitary organization." You can later find out that he descends from members of the Enclave.
• Save Scumming: Quicksave/quickload plus a Slots Machine equals easy but boring money-making... until the casino kicks you out. When doing this, trying to use the slot machines (or the Black Jack or Roulette tables) within 60 seconds of reloading produces a message stating that it seems to be resetting itself as an anti-cheating measure. This also applies to most merchants. Talk to the Gun Runner's Protectron within 60 seconds of reloading your game, and he'll inform you that a transaction is already in place, and to wait for it to end.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: Both a bog-standard 12 gauge double-barrel, and 20 gauge lever-action with a cut-down barrel and stock. In addition, there is also the laser version, the Tri-Beam Laser Rifle, a shorted laser rifle with a beam splitter attached.
• Scarpia Ultimatum: The residents of Vault 11 were told that they had to sacrifice one of their own every year, or else they would all die. The residents decided to send their overseer as revenge for springing this on them, and thus began a tradition of their overseer being in charge of the vault for one year before being sent to die. To help stay safe, the residents all formed voting blocs. Prior to the events of the game, the members of the Justice Bloc threatened to nominate Nathan Stone, husband of Katherine Stone, to become the overseer if she did not agree to have sex with them. She agreed. They nominated him anyway.
• Scary Black Man: Jean-Baptiste Cutting, the muscle of the Freeside branch of the Van Graff company. The first thing you see is him blasting a man into ash. The Van Graff family as a whole appear to be a scary Black Family as all but one of the random Mooks are Black.
• Scavenger World: Per series tradition. In the Mojave, actual scavengers tend to go by "prospectors" since it has fewer of the negative connotations. However, this is played brutally straight in the Dead Money DLC. You're left off in a Death World, filled with traps and extremely dangerous enemies. All you have is rags and a clunky holorifle, so you'll have to scrape together everything you find; weapons, food, tools and medicine if you want to survive for another five minutes.
• Scenery Gorn:
  • The Villa, a decayed husk of a city built near what was supposed to be the greatest casino in the West. Infested by maybe-undead Ghost People who only kill, creepy holograms, polluted by a toxic atmosphere that won't let you sleep exposed to it, populated by a schizophrenic Super Mutant, a mute surgical experiment, a ghoulified Old World star, and an insane former BoS Elder, where Everything Trying to Kill You is taken to 12. Even yourself.
  • The Divide, a collection of nuclear wreckage, earthquake damage, and twisted, torn-apart, half-buried buildings constantly covered in a storm and whirlwind of radioactive rubble, filled with ghoulified, insane NCR and Caesar's Legion soldiers, deathclaws, and mutated, subterranean creatures called tunnelers all after you.
• Scenery Porn:
  • Lake Mead Cave, covered in glowing, beautiful, bioluminescent fungi.
  • Jacobstown. You've been traipsing around the Real Is Brown wasteland, and then you go up that long road. The trees are green and lively, the mountaintops are white with snow, and it's gorgeous.
  • New Vegas itself. Being hit with all that color after going through Freeside and outer Vegas is pretty amazing.
  • Zion Valley from Honest Hearts, a lush, forested series of canyons and valleys.
• Scars Are Forever: The Marked Men get their skin ripped straight off of their flesh by the searing winds of The Divide, but because The Divide is so full of radiation, the Ghoulified soldiers are kept alive through it all, and are unable to die as their skinless bodies are put through mind-breaking agony year after year after year.
• School Grade Hacking: A sidequest involves helping a squad dubbed "The Misfits" improve, with one possible solution being to simply hack the camp's computer to make it seem like they're doing better than they are. However this results in them being ill-prepared for actual combat, with their ending stating that the ones who aren't killed in battle end up getting caught and executed for desertion.
• Science Is Bad: Discussed and ultimately defied in the Good Old World Blues ending. Unless, of course, you finished it with a negative karma rating.
• Schizo Tech: All over the place, given that the game combines the franchise's traditional Atom Punk aesthetic with a Space Western vibe and a storyline about the clash between three major factions that all operate at wildly different technology levels.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Vault 11 is deliberately designed like this. Really, when there's an option to open the sacrificial chamber on a terminal, you just know the end result will be bad. But you'll do it, because you've come this far and you need to know (and have to in order to complete the unmarked quest). Curiosity demands it!
  • The radio which starts the Dead Money DLC. "Oh look, a radio, let's go touch—*choke*"
  • Oh look, there's a Barter skill check you can use for Dean Domino in Dead Money, pointing out the fact that he's forced to work with you since your explosive collars are linked! Choose that and it'll bruise his ego enough to betray you, thinking that you'll pull a fast one on him, and it'll be impossible to resolve the situation peacefully.
  • At the end of the Dead Money DLC, when you access the vault, you get a message from Sinclair warning you not to open his personal files, which will seal the vault if you read them. Normally, you would use this to trap Father Elijah in, but you can activate it yourself. The game ends and tells you how you slowly starved to death.
  • You can find the Thump-Thump, a variant of the regular Grenade Rifle during the quest Ant Misbehavin'. Said Ants have been eating gunpowder, and you were told in advance of fighting them that they'll pretty much explode if you look at them the wrong way. The chances that this is a coincidence are extremely small.
• Schrödinger's Gun: The quest "Debt Collector" has an instance where you can almost see the game world change to conform to your choices before your eyes. One of the people you collect from, Lady Jane, will tell you she lost the money in a caravan that was attacked. She actually does have the money on her, which you can get either by a speech check, pickpocketing or just killing her and looting her corpse. However, the instant you agree to go check the remains of the caravan, the money poofs out of existence from her inventory and is now at the caravan remains.
• Scienceville: In Old World Blues, Big Mountain Research and Development Center is essentially a city-sized laboratory complex where some of the most advanced technologies of the pre-War era were developed. Effectively a world in its own right, the "Big Empty" is equipped with numerous ancillary research bases, a prison camp for test subjects, and even a private village for the scientists in residence — plus an advanced HQ building just for you. It's currently home to the Think Tank, the preserved brains of the executive scientists who ran the complex, all of whom are still continuing with their increasingly demented research; if you go out your way to look, it can also become home to numerous artificial intelligences with many useful scientific skills.
• Scientific and Technological Theme Naming: The expansion pack "Old World Blues" includes a collective of Mad Scientists called the "Think Tank". All are disembodied brains floating around in robotic life support units. Their names are Dr. Klein, Dr. Dala, Dr. 8, Dr. 0, Dr. Borous, and Dr. Mobius, who is estranged. All of their names refer to the same thing: endless, recursive loops. This turns out to be a big clue to the nature of their characters.
• Scratch Damage: Damage Threshold, your most used defensive stat, subtracts damage, but can never make attacks do less than 1/5 the damage they would against a completely unarmored target. Sufficient BBs will take down a Paladin. If you manage to stack the maximum damage reduction from both the defensive stats (threshold and resistance, which requires forcing your DR value to 85 with chems or, in mods, damage resistance), the minimum damage you take drops to 3%.
• Screens Are Cameras: The members of the Think Tank in Old World Blues each have three mounted screens displaying their eyes and mouth separately, and are capable of seeing through their "eye screens".
• Screw Yourself: It's possible to flirt with your own brain in Old World Blues. Your brain does not take it very well.
  Your Brain: Are you... are you coming on to me?! Sweet Lord, I don't even have the words for how repugnantly wrong that is.
• Secret Test of Character:
  • Vault 11 is programmed to kill all of the inhabitants if they don't send one of their own per year into a special sacrificial chamber where they are killed. At first this is decided by election— the "winner" rules as Overseer for one year before being sacrificed— and then after the electoral system becomes massively corrupt, one Vault dweller pulls a Batman Gambit / Heroic Sacrifice to get herself elected and change the system to a random Lottery of Doom as a marginally more humane alternative. Knowing how sadistic and amoral Vault-Tec is, it wouldn't have been out of character for the vault's robots to actually exterminate everyone in the event that no sacrifice was chosen. Surprisingly, when the remaining five(!) survivors finally defiantly inform the vault's master computer that they'd rather all die than continue the practice, it congratulates them for their morality and opens the vault doors, allowing them to come and go as they please. Four out of the five commit suicide in despair, knowing that everyone before them had died for nothing.
  • Vulpes claims the lottery in Nipton was this. He relates how no one fought back when their loved ones were killed or crucified with each drawing, and he mentions that he was amazed that the twenty or so townsfolk were so cowardly as to not fight back against the half-dozen Frumentarii under his command. It seems that the people of Nipton had several opportunities to impress Vulpes, at least one of which would have saved them, and they failed every time. However, it is shown that at least a few fought back, with some success at that. Unless Vulpes dismissed a large portion of his invading army then held the lottery, it's unlikely they ever really stood a chance.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: The Hidden Valley bunker has one, which can be triggered either by pickpocketing three Brotherhood leaders or hacking a Very Hard terminal. Doing so is either an optional or mandatory part of the storyline, depending on which faction you back.
• Sense Loss Sadness: Dr. Dala seems to suffer from this at first.
• Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: Female members of the Fiends gang dress like pole dancers. Your companions Veronica and Cass dress like they might have to work outdoors in a harsh climate.
• Sequel Escalation: All in all, Fallout: New Vegas is a bit more complex than its predecessor.
  • Item crafting is a huge thing in this game, whereas it was only sparingly used in Fallout 3. All your skills do more than just their base function, as they impact what stuff you can craft or have additional effects.
  • Most of the perks in this game tend to be game-changers rather than Fallout 3's "this perk increases your skills a bit" perks.
  • There's a whole faction system in place for numerous different groups throughout the wasteland.
• Sequel Hook: ED-E logs, both in the main game and in Lonesome Road, mentions an Enclave outpost in Chicago, which indicates that they may have not been completely wiped out.
  • Chief Hanlon mentions that the NCR rangers have been "fighting ghosts" in Baja California, Mexico. What those "ghosts" are is never specified.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • There's a Beef Gate north of Goodsprings, namely cazadors and deathclaws, that keep you from heading to Vegas the direct way, so you need to go south and around to the east and back up the highway there. Or, if you know what you're doing, you can charge through the cazadors and/or deathclaws at a comparatively low level and get to the Strip a much faster way.
  • Scorpion Gulch southeast of Hidden Valley presents another Beef Gate that also hampers your path to Vegas in the form of radscorpions, including the Giant versions. However, if you have ED-E as your companion and carry a decent enough weapon to deal with the radscorpions, you'll eventually make it towards HELIOS One and Novac as well as heading towards Vegas while earning a good amount of experience points along the way. The Gulch is relatively easier to go trekking there even for low level players because unlike the Beef Gate north of Goodsprings, the radscorpions are less dangerous opponents compared to the cazadors and deathclaws.
  • If Benny escapes you with the Chip, Mr. House will send you after him to get it. When you track Benny to the Fort, Caesar gives you the chip and sends you into the vault underneath the base. There House awaits you on a monitor, and tells you he didn't expect you to get there yet. But, you're here now, so let's take care of things ahead of schedule. You then receive his second main story quest while the first is still active.
  • The questlines for the three major factions all involve interacting with a lesser faction, which usually will involve a questline for them, like what's happening with the Omertas being so quiet, or destroying the Brotherhood of Steel. If the player completes these questions before the main questline gets to them, when it does the quest-giver will acknowledge the matter has already been settled and moves on to the next quest.^note This can cause problems because some of the main quest chains lock out the others, so be careful about talking to House while doing an NCR playthrough and similar, or you'll end up having to reload. This is only averted in the Wild Card path because you can take on the objectives in most any order, so there's no sequence to break, but you can still meet all the relevant lesser factions before you meet Yes Man and thus decide immediately what to do about them.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness:
  • You can talk to Canyon Runner at Cottonwood Cove into releasing the three captures in exchange for some caps. With a high enough speech skill, you can lie to him and say that the young girl — the only one of the three worth any value — has "Pustular Hypomyalgia". He hopes it isn't contagious. You just convinced him to drop the price down to 150 caps by saying that the poor girl has chronic pain caused by zits.
  • Poindexter of The Misfits speaks this way to distance himself from his comrades.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Everytime you get some it fades to black before any clothing comes off.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • Doctor Mobius of Old World Blues breathes this.
    Doctor Mobius: It is I, Doctor Mobius, transmitting from my dome-shaped... dome in the forbidden zone. A zone that is... yes... FORBIDDEN to you!
  • And the Tesla coils! The coils of Nikola Tesla!
• Shared Fate Ultimatum: During the "Dead Money" DLC, Father Elijah fits the Courier and the other participants in his planned heist with a set of explosive collars. One of the condidtions that triggers the collars is if a collar ever detects a lack of life signs from its wearer, it sends a detonation signal to all others in the same set, forcing the heist participants to work together if they dont want their heads to be blown up.
• Shop Fodder:
  • Much of the Misc Item category is this. None are immediately useful like ammo, weapons, apparel, or aid items. Many can be used as crafting items. You can even make your own vendor trash in the form of tanned hides, which makes them much more valuable (especially the tanned golden gecko hide).
  • The Old World Blues DLC does its level best to subvert this. The personality constructs in the Sink can break down completely worthless items and turn them into incredibly useful crafting material. The Book Chute can turn pencils and clipboards into scrap metal and duct tape weighing twice as much as the materials you recycled, Muggy turns worthless dishes into valuable gun materials, and the Biological Research Station turns plants you don't use into a generic slop which can be converted into the kinds of plants you do. The whole place is a hoarder's wet dream.
• Short-Range Shotgun:
  • The Sawed-off Shotgun returns to affirm this trope, but every other shotgun in the game has a tighter spread, making them actually useful for medium range combat. Ballsy players may choose to use a modified Hunting Shotgun to snipe. In addition, there are also Slug shells, which makes the shotgun otherwise behave like rifles. Higher tier shotguns are also superior weapons to submachine guns and most handguns in medium range combat even with just buckshot shells.
  • As of patch 1.3.0/1.5, all shotguns are now decent weapons at medium range due to vastly reduced spread, including the sawed-off. With slugs the range is increased while reducing close-range crowd control.
  • For Energy Weapon users there are the Tri Beam Laser and Multiplas Rifle. The base game version of the Tri Beam good for crowd control but degrades fast and burns ammo faster along with being pretty hefty at 9 weight units, so the Laser RCW is better at the job. The Gun Runners Arsenal version however can accept mods to increase durability from 245 shots to 745 shots before it becomes unusable along with increasing damage and ammo capacity. The Mutliplas Rifle is similar to the base game Tri Beam in that it drains the microfusion cell quickly but it is lighter and cheaper to repair at the cost of having no GRA version.
• Shotguns Are Just Better:
  • The Shotgun Surgeon perk, along with other things (see Short-Range Shotgun), allow shotguns to become viable all-situation weapons. As well, a perk can be taken that give shotguns a chance of knocking down enemies. Due to the way the perk is implemented, you can effectively stun lock enemies if you keep shooting them. Combine this perk with the Riot Shotgun, with its ridiculous firing rate and its 12-shot drum magazine, and most enemies will be gibs within seconds.
  • The Multiplas Rifle is topped only by the Gauss Rifle, Big Boomer (the unique sawed-off shotgun) and Anti-Materiel Rifle in damage per shot. Granted, the damage is split up between three sub-projectiles, but it's still a lot of damage for a mid-tier weapon. Its main disadvantage is its ammo consumption.
  • The GRA version of the Tri Beam Laser has mods that lets it last much longer, shoots harder, and drains the microfusion cell much slower (from 24 to 48 shots) than the base version. While the Laser RCW shoots faster the GRA Tri Beam will last the player longer as spare laser rifles are easier to come by to repair with the "Jury Rigging" Perk.
• Shout-Out: Being Reference Overdosed is standard for the Fallout series. There are so many Shout Outs in this game that it demanded its own page.
• Shown Their Work:
  • "Caesar" (at least by those within the Legion) is pronounced "kye-zar" and "ave" is pronounced "a-weh", reflecting prevailing academic opinion of ancient Roman pronunciation as opposed to the medieval "Church Latin" pronunciations used today.
  • The fluff about the Legion fits both in-universe and in the meta. The Legion features far too many accurate reflections of the Roman Empire's nature to be coincidental. Most notably the Frumentarii, who play an important role in the plot. They were rather obscure group, virtually nonexistent in any popular media (and even many historical textbooks). Arcade and even Caesar himself would even comment in-game on how certain aspects of the Legion aren't accurate or instead selective interpretations of Roman culture.
  • As mentioned above, the vast number of towns and landmarks that appear in this game (even the starting town) that are closely based off those in real life, if a bit space-compressed. For instance, the Goodsprings General Store and the Prospector Saloon do exist and look exactly as they do in-game (except that it's the Pioneer Saloon). The Goodsprings Schoolhouse, cemetery, and the sign leading out of town also exist, and look almost identical to their in-game counterparts. Not exactly general tourist knowledge. Several people have toured southern Nevada explicitly visiting sites featured in the game and chronicled it online, with plenty of pictures and videos showing how close the game got things.
  • On the AER14 Prototype Laser Rifle (a unique variant of the basic laser rifle), there is a sticky note on the back: "Focus: 1064nm, 532 nm (SHG), 8.18 pm!!!". It means that it has a primary wavelength of 1064nm (infra-red range), a "second harmonic generation" (SHG) that doubles the frequency to a green-wavelength 532 nm., and the 8.18 pm is beam divergence, or how wide the beam gets as it leaves the laser (usually measured in picometers per meter).
  • When asked about the .45 Auto pistol (based on the Colt M1911), Joshua Graham claims that "This type of .45 Automatic pistol was designed by one of my tribe almost four hundred years ago". John Browning, the inventor of the M1911, was a Mormon from Ogden, Utah. Graham is from New Canaan, a Mormon community built on the ruins of Ogden.
  • The game's crafting system allows you to craft gun cartridges by combining lead (for the bullets) along with the proper types of primer, powder, and cases. The only cartridge type you can't craft this way is .22LR, and for this reason it's also the only type that doesn't leave shell casings. This is because .22LR is a rimfire cartridge while the rest are all centerfire: in real life, reloading rimfire cartridges is almost impossible because the primer is a ring inside the rim of the case, which gets deformed when the round is fired.
  • Whoever was in charge of ammo specs clearly knew what they were doing. One small but important detail they got right (that fiction almost never does) was that hollow-point bullets are more damaging to soft, fleshy targets, but also have the real-life drawback of being much less effective against solid targets like armored foes, robots, and creatures with hard carapaces. You can have armor-piercing or you can have expanding bullets, but you can't do both; one trait comes at the direct expense of the other.
  • There really is a crashed B-29 Superfortress bomber at the bottom of Lake Mead.
  • Randall Dean Clark's journal entries in Honest Hearts contains a lot of accurate information about wilderness survival, and what an all-out nuclear war would probably be like. One thing he mentions is that he found a hurriedly abandoned USGS (United States Geological Survey) camp. As monitoring seismic activity is a routine thing for the USGS and nuclear bombs would produce tremors that can be measured thousands of miles away and are clearly identifiable as being non-natural, those people likely would learn about it very quickly and abandon the camp to do any one of a hundred things that seem more urgent when the end of the world comes.
• Show Within a Show: Lonesome Road shows that ED-E was a fan of a series known as Ralphie, chronicling the adventures of An Eyebot and a boy escaping from a General Winters (similar to ED-E's escape from Colonel Autumn).
• Side Effects Include...: Sunset Sarsaparilla apparently has a long list of "side effects". You have to ask Festus three times before he'll tell you about them.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer:
  • The minigame "Caravan", which you can play with other travelers and some merchants. Sure, it may not look like much at first, but in no time you'll be buying every card you see (it's dirt cheap to do so) and swindling people out of absurd amounts of money before you even get to the meat of the main quest. It may look difficult at first, but it's actually fairly easy to win every single game on almost any hand, provided you have a decent-sized deck or a lot of high-number cards.
  • And, of course, you can go to any of the casinos of New Vegas and blow all your money trying to "get lucky" at the slots, the roulette wheel, or the blackjack table — just like in Real Life. Or you could jack up your Luck stat and clean them out, and get thrown out of all four casinos in twenty minutes, whatever works.
• Sighted Guns Are Low-Tech:
  • All of the laser weapons lack gunsights, save for the Laser RCW, which is modeled on the Thompson SMG, and (perhaps unintentionally) the recharger pistol. Gun Runner's Arsenal allows the player to attach sights to the laser pistol and a scope to the laser rifle. Oddly, when aiming laser weapons in third-person, the Courier will still assume the aim-down-sights stance.
  • The Laser RCW works better by not aiming down the sight. The rapid laser fire causes the Courier and player to be slightly blinded from the strobe effect and seeing how it's more of a close to mid range weapon, there is little point in aiming in the first place.
• Signs of Disrepair: The town of Novac seems to take its name from the "NO VACANCY" sign on the motel which is missing the last several letters.
• Silliness Switch: The Wild Wasteland trait, available when you're making up your character, changes some dialogue and adds in some extra bits to the game to make it... weirder.
• Simulated Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Reality:
  • Nellis Air Force Base is still equipped with a full set of virtual reality loungers, though you're not allowed to use them. These were originally used as flight simulators by the air force prior to the nuclear war; two hundred years later, the Boomers continue using them as flight sims - even though they have no aircraft and the only possible use for the loungers is escapism. Unless you can get them access to an antique bomber, which will eventually be put to use on the behalf of your chosen faction during the endgame.
  • In the "Old World Blues" DLC, you can find a VR chamber in the depths of the Big Empty. It's not known what it could have been used for, but during the last two hundred years, someone has sabotaged the VR equipment; a note found on the body of the saboteur implies that they and a group of test subjects were forced to take part in a simulation against their will and that it "killed us."
• Sinister Southwest: New Vegas adds some Western flavor to the series' normal post-apocalyptic wasteland. But the Dead Money DLC steers firmly into this trope: you get roped into a heist of the legendary Sierra Madre casino that's been bottled-up since pre-War times. Along the way you have to deal with a poisonous fog, creepy Ghost People, backstabbing companions, and ghostly (but still quite deadly) holograms that populate the casino and surrounding villa. And then you find out the whole thing was built as a trap for a rival of the owner, who just so happens to be one of those backstabbing companions. As the narrator says, getting to the casino is not the hard part.
• Sinister Surveillance: Vault 19 is full of surveillance cameras with bright red lights that track the Courier as they walk around. Since Vault 19 was designed around paranoia experiments it's possible the cameras don't even work and are just there to up the tension.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot:
  • Boxcars is among the most foul-mouthed people in the wasteland, but he's been through a lot.
  • Cass as well.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Depending on how you play the game, Benny could be one.
• Slain in Their Sleep:
  • The Powder Gangers killed Sheriff McBain of Primm and his wife in their sleep.
  • The "Mister Sandman" perk lets the Courier murder NPCs in their sleep for a flat gain of 50 Experience Points, like the Lone Wanderer could in Fallout 3.
  • A female Courier with the "Black Widow" perk can seduce Benny and kill him in bed after having sex.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:
  • Idealistic, but less so than previous Fallout games. On the grand scale, civilization is mostly rebuilt. However, the two largest nations are the corrupt, inefficient, but progressive New California Republic and the brutal, repressive, but efficient Caesar's Legion. Within the city, the Kings and Followers of the Apocalypse are working to help Freeside, while all those with real power are ignoring or exploiting the horrific conditions. The Brotherhood of Steel, present in every Fallout game thus far, are finally dying out as a result of their xenophobia, a stark contrast to the stretched-but-altruistic Brotherhood of Fallout 3. Or not, as indicated by a Non-Standard Game Over in Dead Money.
  • Most of the DLC takes a hard right-wheel into cynicism. Dead Money is about how people's sins corrupt them and lead the world to ruin, and has the most omnicidal potential ending in the game. Honest Hearts makes the point that paradise can't last forever without being ruined by war, one way or another. And Lonesome Road is a fight against a small-minded man with a personal grudge against the Courier, a grudge that might wreck the fragile civilization of the West, and even a complete victory merely reverts everything to the status quo, though your Courier is stronger for the experience. Old World Blues, by contrast, is perhaps the most idealistic portion of New Vegas, and it's the one DLC where you really can make the world a better place through the power of Science!
• Smart People Know Latin: Your character can use Latin phrases in certain trees provided their Intelligence is 8 (out of 10) or higher. The lower ranks of Caesar's Legion only seem to know a few words, like "vale" and "ave", while a centurion POW you meet appears to be fluent. Arcade Gannon also speaks it fluently and bemoans the fact that most people only associate the language with the Legion.
• Sniper Pistol: The Hunting Revolver comes with a scope attached and is accurate to boot. The .44 magnum and 9mm can also be modded to have a scope.
• Snuff Film: Clanden, one of the members of the Omerta faction does these, though they're audio tapes rather than video.
• The Social Darwinist: The Great Khans as per their tribal history. Upon reaching the age of adulthood all Khan children are severely beaten in a rite of passage in which they choose their own new name. Sargent Bitter-Root claims that the kid has to endure it without crying out while Jerry the Punk claims they have to survive (but he also did it 5 times before so he's most likely exaggerating).
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear:
  • A companion exiting the party takes the gear with them. In case of the ED-E retrofit, the gear is lost forever (except if you've installed any of the DLC, apparently). The only exception is if you complete Arcade Gannon's quest, where he gives you all the gear he was carrying... plus, depending on the way you played the quest, up to two sets of very bulky armor. So, Be Careful What You Wish For.
  • All of the companions in Honest Hearts give you everything they were carrying on them when they leave you. Like above, this can potentially include the extremely bulky .45 Auto SMG.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Dean Domino. He's a suave talker but he can be a real dickhead at a drop of a hat.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: This is complicated by RPG elements as well as weapon modifications and unique variants, but played fairly straight by conventional guns in particular. Keep in mind they don't necessarily have to be found in order:
  • Semi Automatic Pistols: Silenced .22 —> 9mm pistol —> 10mm pistol —> .45 Auto Pistol —> 12.7mm pistol
  • Revolvers: .357 magnum revolver —> Police pistol —> 5.56mm pistol —> .44 Magnum revolver —> Hunting revolver —> Ranger Sequoia
  • Lever action rifles: BB Gun —> Cowboy repeater —> Trail carbine —> Brush gun
  • Bolt action rifles: Varmint rifle —> Hunting rifle —> Anti-materiel rifle
  • Semi-automatic rifles: Service rifle —> Battle rifle —> Marksman Carbine —> Survivalist's rifle
  • Automatic guns: .22 SMG —> 9mm SMG —> 10mm SMG —> Assault carbine —> .45 Auto SMG/Automatic Rifle —> Light Machine Gun/12.7mm SMG/Minigun
  • Shotguns: Single shotgun —> Caravan shotgun —> Lever action shotgun —> Sawed-Off Shotgun —> Hunting shotgun —> Riot shotgun
  • Explosive launchers: Grenade Rifle —> Grenade Launcher —> Missile Launcher —> Grenade Machine Gun —> Fat Man
  • Hand-thrown Explosives: Dynamite —> Frag Grenade —> Plasma Grenade —> Nuka Grenade —> Holy Frag Grenade
  • Proximity/Remote Explosives: Powder Charge —> Frag Mine —> Plasma Mine —> Bottlecap Mine —> Satchel Charge —> Fat Mine
  • Flame weaponry: Flare Gun —> Incinerator —> Flamer —> Heavy Incinerator
  • Laser rifles: Recharger rifle —> Laser Rifle —> Tri-beam Laser Rifle —> LAER
  • Laser pistols: Laser pistol —> Recharger pistol —> Pew Pew —> Alien blaster
  • Plasma Weapons: Plasma Pistol —> Plasma Rifle —> Plasma Defender —> Multiplas Rifle —> Plasma Caster
• Space Compression: The Real Life area covered by the Mojave Wasteland is about 10,000 square miles. The in-game version is much smaller (1/25th scale, specifically). This is most noticeable around Hoover Dam and the Colorado, which look alright in-game, but grow by several orders of magnitude when overlaid over the real area.
• Spare a Messenger: The player character wanders into the scene of a particularly brutal massacre in the town of Nipton. The perpetrators, the Caesar's Legion, decide to let the Courier go for this purpose, to tell everyone (especially their enemies the New Californian Republic) what happened there.
• The Speechless: Christine from the Dead Money DLC, due an Auto-Doc malfunctioning and cutting her vocal chords out. She gets better near the end, though. Not so much voiceless and not so much a malfunction. Which only makes it worse.
• Spin Attack:
  • Can be done with some melee weapons, though they require sufficient melee weapons skill to do it in VATS.
  • The Ranger Takedown. When used in third-person view, it's a leg sweep.
• Squee: Veronica has this reaction when you give her a formal dress.
• Spiritual Successor: So many story elements were taken from the cancelled Fallout: Van Buren that it's often considered to be the be successor to it.
• The Starscream: It seems this happens a lot in the Mojave Wasteland. Cachino wants your help to take over the Omertas, Head Paladin Hardin wants you to help him overthrow Elder McNamara, and while Pacer doesn't particularly want to lead The Kings, he does try to overthrow The King if you succeed in negotiating a peace treaty between The King and NCR. And of course, there's Benny and his plot to overthrow Mr. House and take over New Vegas. Heck, YOU can be The Starscream if you work for Mr. House and then starting following the Yes Man questline.
• STD Immunity: Averted. Benny remarks at one point that he "doesn't need another 'social disease'." In a cut ending for Old World Blues, a plant-based STD spreads throughout Gomorrah, which "grew like a fungus within victim's genitalia until their bodies burst open like pods".
• State Visit: One quest has the NCR president Aaron Kimbal make an official visit to Hoover Dam in order to improve morale among his troops. Depending on which faction you decide to support, you either need to save him from an assassination attempt or assassinate him yourself.
• Stealth-Based Mission:
  • Completing the quest "Come Fly With Me" peacefully requires you to avoid being seen by the barely visible Nightkin in the REPCONN test site basement, who are cloaked with Stealth Boys.
  • Stealing the Gun Runners' manufacturing specifications from their factory for the Crimson Caravan Company, which Alice McLafferty explicitly states she wants done without killing anyone.
  • In Dead Money, you must avoid detection by the Sierra Madre Casino's invincible security holograms, which can only be gotten rid of by disabling or destroying their emitter. If Dog/God betrays you, you must stealthily disable his traps or he will subject you to a gruesome Non-Standard Game Over.
• Stealth Insult: One of Dean Domino's interactions has him saying, "Just because I work in entertainment, doesn't mean I'm a moron." It remains the same on paper regardless of intelligence stat, but low-intelligence Couriers will hear him emphasizing "I'm", insulting the Courier's intelligence as he tries to push himself up.
• Stealthy Mook: Apart from the Nightkin in general, who are unable to be targeted in VATS unless you have ED-E's companion perk, part of Lily Bowen's personal quest in involves investigating night stalkers that have gained cloaking abilities. Turns out to be an unexpected result of them chewing on a dead Nightkin's Stealth Boy. More invisible night stalkers show up in Old World Blues in the X-13 labs, one of several experiments involving stealth.
• Stepford Smiler: Jeannie May Crawford, the mayor and kind old lady of Novac sold Boone's pregnant wife into slavery because she had an unpleasant attitude that was ruining her perfect town.
• Still Wearing the Old Colors: Ranger Andy in Novac still wears his NCR Ranger gear despite being in retirement, while Boone and Vargas still have their 1st Recon berets and rifles. Father Elijah in Dead Money meanwhile still looks like a Brotherhood of Steel Elder in attire and weaponry, even though he's too long ago succumbed to his own hubris and madness for him to ever be welcomed back.
• Stock Desert Interstate: It's almost like this game was made for this trope! Most of the game world is deserts intercut by interstates and the 50s era rest stops you find with this trope? Fits the retro 50s theme of the game like a glove to a hand!
• The Stoic: Boone.
• Story Branch Favoritism: The NCR offers literally dozens of side-quests. The Legion, by contrast, offers only a handful, and most of those that exists only become available comparatively late in the story. Furthermore, two of the Courier's companions will either leave the party or not become recruitable at all if they side with the Legion or have a negative reputation with the NCR, whereas none of the party members are especially opposed to siding with the NCR or Mr. House. In theory, you can play a Courier aligned for or against any faction. In practice, siding with the Legion (or just being militantly anti-NCR) will prevent you from accessing large amounts of content. This extends into the endings as well: The NCR's is borderline Golden Ending while others has their various flaws exposed: Legion's Brutality; House's Apathy; Independent's chaos while NCR's shortcomings like corruption, imperialism and lack of personnel to provide for all region are conspicuously removed, with certain third-party factions helping to compensate for the Republic's weaknesses.
• Straight for the Commander: Vulpes Inculta's backstory has him winning a victory for Caesar's Legion against a hostile tribe by charging through a hole in their defenses and capturing their chieftain. Caesar is so impressed by Vulpes' cunning and tactical knowledge that he spares him from execution (the standard punishment for legion soldiers who disobey orders) and instead has him transferred to the Frumentarii, Caesar's network of spies.
• Straight Gay: Arcade Gannon, Veronica and Christine, and the Courier if the player so desires.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The Powder Gangers' weapons are sticks of Dynamite and power charges. The Boomers venerate anything that goes... well, boom.
• Stupid Crooks: The Freeside Thugs, they seemingly do not understand the stupidity of luring someone in Power Armor and carrying a Machine Gun into a 'trap' they set, when all they have is just pool cues and meat cleavers.
• Sudden Downer Ending: The Amazon Prime series turns out to be this, as it makes nothing The Courier did matter, as it shows a derelict and destroyed New Vegas as of 2296 in The Stinger of the season 1 finale.
• Suicide Dare: You can do this to Frank Weathers in the Aerotech Office Park after you save his family from slavery at Cottonwood Cove. Not that he didn’t deserve it.
• Suicidal Overconfidence:
  • Tying in with the above, some people are just too self-confident for their own good. Special mention goes to Caleb McCaffery, with whom you have to deal for the "Debt Collector" quest. He is easily the most unjustifiably arrogant man in the entire Mojave Wasteland. Yeah buddy, you're definitely enough of a badass to take the Power Armor-wearing, Plasma Caster-packing war hero while armed with only a low-level shotgun. Even pacifistic players will have a hard time fighting the urge to paint the sidewalk with this guy's brains.
  • The Fiends, Powder Gangers, Vipers, and Jackals, just like the raiders of Fallout 3, seemingly do not understand that the One-Man Army with the Power Armor and Minigun is not the best person to mug. Justified with the Fiends, who are all insane drug addicts, and NCR military police (provided you massacred one of the casinos) due to, er, having some pull with the NCR, but the Powder Gangers, who continue attacking you even after they label you their personal "grim fucking reaper", have no excuse.
  • This is actually built into New Vegas and Fallout 3's game engine; every enemy has a "confidence" attribute as part of their programming — the highest level means an enemy will never avoid a fight, with the ones right below that not offering them much better chances. At higher levels, you will notice that certain low level animals like coyotes and Bark Scorpions (only Bark Scorpions) will be extremely hesitant at attacking you.. at least until more of them show up.
• Suicide Pact: How the last surviving inhabitants of Vault 11 decided to go out after discovering the very uncomfortable truth about their vault. However, the security recording of the suicide has five voices speaking, only four skeletons are found near the entrance and the closed caption specifically notes four gunshots, making it clear the shooter couldn't go through killing himself.
• Superboss:
  • The four Legendary monsters. The toughest of them, the Legendary Deathclaw, is by far the most powerful thing in the entire game, with more health than the final boss. Like all deathclaws, it is also very, very fast. He also one hit kills pretty much all but the toughest and most heavily armored of characters. Nice knowing you.
  • A tough foe could be found in an unused file for the game (which was eventually included in a mod, "New Vegas Uncut - A Wilder Wasteland") — after defeating the four aforementioned monsters, a message will display indicating that something bigger and badder has woken up and will pursue you across the Mojave. This manifests itself in "Gojira", a massive Fire Gecko that is far larger than any other creature in the game. Gojira was allegedly a joke enemy created by developers at Obsidian to "terrorize Camp McCarran".
  • Old World Blues has the Legendary Bloatfly. It's harder to kill than the Legendary Deathclaw and fires insanely powerful plasma bolts at you. When it dies it drops over 50 bloatfly meat and 20+ buffout.
  • Colonel Royez and Gaius Magnus from post-Lonesome Road appear when you nuke NCR or Legion territory respectively. They are two ghouls with utterly insane amounts of health (Capable of withstanding about five Holorifle shots to the face on Normal difficulty without dying), and constantly regenerate health as well. To make it worse, they both have high-end unique armor, one of which adds even more health regeneration.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: The Terrifying Presence perk allows the Courier to pick dialogue options that intimdate foes enough that many will run instead of fight you.
• Super Prototype: The Q-35 Matter Modulator has several superior qualities in comparison to its more production-rate plasma rifle brethren: a higher crit chance, higher crit damage, faster rate of fire, less ammo used per shot, and faster projectiles.
• Supreme Chef:
  • The White Gloves chef, who has recipes for some of the best food in the game, such as Brahmin Wellington. He even has the recipe for a substitute for human meat.
  • A high-survival Courier counts as well, being able to take the everything from rat remains to insect insides and make them not just edible, but tasty. The fact that at 75 Survival he can JURY-RIG a recipe SUBSTITUTING FOR HUMAN MEAT only cements this.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Wearing the gear of a particular faction will make members of opposing factions hostile to the player — you're wearing the other guy's armor, after all. And similarly, a faction's armor is not a get-out-of-jail-free card — if you repeatedly commit crimes against a faction while wearing their gear, they'll still turn hostile to you.
  • Think the casinos are an infinite, if naturally risky, source of caps? You're wrong there; if you're winning too much at one casino, the staff will ban you so you don't run them dry.
• Survival Horror: The Dead Money DLC. You go around traveling with companions solving puzzles and fighting abominations in hazmat suits and gas masks that wield knives, spears and bombs. Ammo is limited, you have to search hard to find the best weapons, and medical supplies are very scarce, so you have to not lose a lot of health. The "climax" of the first portion of the DLC is this — you must fight your way, badly wounded, through hordes of Ghost People, to the Casino. That being said, take the 'Them's Good Eatin' perk from the DLC pack and magically watch your medical shortage disappear as you harvest blood sausages and thin red paste from everything you kill. Which just happen to be some of the best healing items in the game.
• Survival Through Self-Sacrifice: The experiment in Vault 11 is an inversion of this. The dwellers are told that they would have to sacrifice one person every year or else the vault's automated systems would kill everyone. Of course nobody would willingly sacrifice themselves, so an election system was put in place where the one with the most votes would be the one to bite the bullet. As it turns out, however, when the residents refused to sacrifice anyone they were treated to a recorded message that pretty much praised them as paragons of humanity for not sacrificing their fellow man, and unlocked the vault door so they could come and go as they please. When this was discovered, there were five dwellers left. Out of presumably hundreds. All but one of them committed suicide.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • After Arcade gives you his opinion on where to direct the power from Helios One, you can agree with him straight off. He evidently doesn't expect it.
  Arcade: Great. Glad we're on the same page. I mean, I didn't expect that you'd want to... activate the super weapon or anything. Heh.
  • If you ask Marjorie about the whereabouts of Ted Gunderson, she will promptly insist that the members of the White Glove Society are not cannibals. Subverted in that Marjorie has no idea that Mortimer wants to return the White Gloves to their cannibalistic traditions. She's just heard the accusations so much that she assumes that must be what the Courier is trying to say.
• Swap Fighter: In the "Dead Money" DLC, The Courier is given a companion called Dog and God, a nightkin mutant with split personality disorder, and the ability to decide which personality is in control of their body by playing recordings through their Pip-Boy. The Dog personality is Dumb Muscle and the more brutal fighter of the two, able to kill Ghost People in a way that prevents them from respawning, while God is a well-spoken Control Freak, granting a companion perk that makes The Courier stealthier and less likely to set off traps when in control.
• Swiper, No Swiping!: With a high enough speech, or barter, skill, you can actually talk Legate Lanius into calling off the attack on the NCR and going home without a fight.

T

• Take That!:
  • When you are researching weird NCR broadcasts, you can ask one ranger station about reports of domesticated Deathclaws and they reject it out of hand as impossible.
  • A response to a markedly unpleasant question-asker in J.E. Sawyer's talk page:
    Q: Who's the homo that insisted on being so heavy handed with the gay dialogue and references in the game?
    A: Alarm at the presence of homosexual dialogue topics is pretty interesting considering the majority of them only appear if you voluntarily take a perk that identifies your character as homosexual.
  • As a in-game example in Old World Blues. Dr. 0 made Muggy, a tiny, neurotic Securitron obsessed with coffee mugs as a cheap joke at the expense of Mr. House, who he hates.
• Take That, Audience! Elijah's comments in Dead Money about the Pip-Boy is a jab at players following quest markers.
  "That thing on your wrist — it's a convenience. It tells you where to go, what to do, dulls the brain."
  • Note that he himself has a Pip-Boy.
• Take a Third Option:
  • Don't like NCR or the Legion? Go to work for Mr. House! Think he's a snide prick? Take over the Mojave yourself!
  • In Honest Hearts, you are faced with the choice of either evacuating Zion or brutally eradicating the White Legs. Both options lead to Bittersweet Endings. However, if you choose to eradicate the White Legs and convince Joshua to spare Salt-Upon-Wounds, you get a slightly happier (albeit still quite bittersweet) ending. You can also decide to not help neither Joshua or Daniel and escape Zion while killing anyone that gets in your way. Although it will cut the DLC short ahd give you a Downer Ending.
  • In the quest "My Kind of Town", you're tasked with finding a new sheriff for the town of Primm. The two options that immediately present themselves are letting the NCR annex the town, or having the NCR pardon Ex-sheriff Meyers, who takes over. Ask around the Vikki and Vance Casino, and you'll be presented with a third option: if you have a Science skill of 30 or 3 fission batteries and 4 conductors, you can reprogram Primm Slimm to take over the job.
• Take Your Time:
  • No matter how urgent the quest giver's language, you can leave and circle the map a few times and pick up where you left off. The only exception is the President's visit, which will run according to scripted schedule.
  • The Dead Money addon practically requires you to do this in order to survive it. It doesn't help that the whole atmosphere of the Sierra Madre makes you want to run through it and get the hell out as quickly as possible.
  • This trope is especially noticeable in relation to Honest Hearts. No matter how imminent the Second Battle of Hoover Dam is, no one takes any notice if the Courier leaves the Mojave for almost a month.
• Talking Is a Free Action:
  • Not talking per se, but you can spend any amount of time on hacking and lockpicking minigames even if you're dying of any kind of damage-over-time or, even more egregiously, triggered a tripwire but managed to click the locked item/terminal a split second before the trap explodes.
  • Time usually stops when you're in a conversation, so if you used a drug, alcohol, or book to pass a skill check, you shouldn't worry about it running out while talking to the npc.
• Talking the Monster to Death:
  • Diplomacy (and judicious use of seductive perks like Black Widow or Confirmed Bachelor) can open as many doors for you as a lock pick or a hacked computer terminal. The speech stat still reigns king, however — if you're lucky, you can pass a speech check that doesn't require speech or barter, such as using your intelligence, explosives, et cetera rating instead. Passing speech checks is no longer percentile, either.
  • New Vegas continues the Fallout tradition of giving a high Speech character the opportunity to win the inevitable endgame confrontation with diplomacy rather than firepower. It then turns this option into the ultimate Infinity +1 Sword in story terms. Killing Caesar and Lanius simply sends Caesar's Legion into mayhem, fracturing the group and pretty much ensuring that their methods get adopted by dozens of Caesar-wannabes. If Caesar dies or is allowed to die, and Lanius is defeated but talked into leaving, a much different ending occurs. Lanius has been foreshadowed to be a brutal warrior and capable general, but no politician, and without Caesar's charisma backing him, his plan to retake Hoover leaves him oblivious to the fact he lacks Caesar's leadership ability. The Legion still causes problems in the short term, but gradually dissolves as individual outposts realize it never could have lasted without Caesar or someone like him at its head.
  • There are two examples in the Old World Blues DLC. The mad scientists can be peacefully talked down by some high-level speech and skill checks, and the Giant Robo-Scorpion can be turned off by hacking a Very Hard terminal.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: In one quest, you can flood a Legion camp with toxic waste, in retaliation for the Legion's attack on Searchlight (which left the town a radioactive wasteland). The quest-giver compliments you on your sense of irony.
• Technical Pacifist:
  • O'Hanrahan, one of the misfits. His squadmates think he is a coward, though if you did follow his advice on squad improvements, he has no problem kicking legionaries' asses in the final battle. According to him, the behavior is because of his upbringing: he was always very physically strong, and his mother told him something to the nature of "with great power comes great responsibility," which he readily took to heart.
  • Daniel in 'Honest Hearts', though he is close to being an Actual Pacifist. He has no desire to attack the White Legs (nor does he), but is fully capable and willing to kill any that try and sneak into the Sorrows encampment.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: Used in some areas, most notably Vault 34. All of the DLC use this a lot — reaching an objective site or picking up supplies will often spawn a formidable ambush behind you.
• Tempting Fate
  • One too-proud-for-his-own-good NPC just doesn't know how to take the hint.
  General Oliver: If our situations were reversed, I'd see you hang.
  Courier: I see. Yes Man, would you please throw the General off of the Hoover Dam?
  • A dead Brotherhood of Steel Paladin patrol is found near the Boomer's territory, presumably shelled to death by the Boomer's artillery. The holotape with their mission instructions states '...but it's highly unlikely they have any weapons that can seriously threaten someone in full Power Armor. The threat level is considered minimal.'
• Terror Hero: A Good Karma Courier with the Terrifying Presence perk.
• Terse Talker: At first, this seems to be a particular trait of Boone's, and quite fitting for both his personality and the setting^note If he ends up dying, he also drops a note for his late wife written in the same style. About halfway through the game (many, many Hemingway-esque NPCs later), one gets the impression that some of the writers really don't like personal pronouns.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Female Nightkin lack standard sexual characteristics and rely on props. Lily wears a gardening hat and shawl, while Tabitha sports a pair of heart-shaped pink eyeglasses and an adorable blonde wig to look feminine. The result is... interesting.
• Test of Pain: The Great Khan tribe's initiation ritual, used for outsiders that wish to join the Khans or children born into the Khans who believe they're ready for adulthood, has the initiate enduring a beatdown from several other Khans for a full minute without fighting back or calling for mercy. Despite rumors of the ritual being potentially fatal, the Khans see no shame in someone calling for mercy and attempting the ritual again when they feel more prepared, so cases of the initiate dying are mercifully rare.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The logo is set up like a billboard in order to represent the New Vegas casino strip.
• Theme Naming: Many, many quests are named after songs popular in the 1950s.
• The Theme Park Version: In-universe, and a major recurring theme. Thanks to Future Imperfect, many of the factions are trying in some manner to revive a pre-war ideal or society, without the context or a lot of the complexities. The Legion to the Roman Empire, the Strip to Las Vegas, and even the Kings to Elvis all come to mind.
  • The idea of adopting symbols and themes of other cultures without understanding the proper meaning behind them is essentially Ulysses' raison d'etre, as he is desperately trying to find meaning in the meaningless chaos that has surrounded him and is willing to imprint his beliefs on symbols even if they only tangentially line up (such as the idea of the Old World, whose flag he wears on his duster). Hypocritically enough, he absolutely detests this when others do it, such as when the White Legs adopted the dreadlocked braids of Ulysses' former tribe without understanding the deep cultural and linguistic meanings behind them. You can eventually shine the light on his hypocrisy and convince him to fight for the new world you two can create together, rather than digging through the bones of the past for scraps of understanding from a society that killed itself. Just be prepared to scrape through every inch of the Divide looking for his tapes and to pass some crazy difficult Speech checks.
• There Are No Therapists:
  • Thoroughly averted. Standard medical training seems to include psychiatry in the Mojave — Doc Mitchell gives you a mental health examination, the Followers of the Apocalypse help with the mental health of the people they care for (one of their biggest jobs in Freeside is helping addicts), Lt. Markland at Bitter Springs asks you to find psychology textbooks to help him help the refugees, and your character's own medical skill allows some dialogue options in which you diagnose mental trauma or disease. The Auto-Doc in Old World Blues can also give you a one time psych exam (read: A second chance to pick your traits).
  • During "Beyond the Beef", you can psychoanalyse Philippe, the Ultraluxe's master chef in order to get access to the kitchen. It only takes a few suggestions to make him recall a ludicrous amount of over-the-top childhood abuse (from his entire family, too) he's been repressing, causing him to flee the kitchen and hide in his room.
  • In fact, given the very high amount of whacked-out lunatics in the Fallout universe, the intro at the start of the game where Doc Mitchell specifically wants to find out out if you're all there make perfect in universe sense, especially given the paranoia that led to the post-apocalyptic war and all the crazy people who tried to make the lives of the post-apocalypse population suck in the previous games. That said, it makes good sense for him to want to make sure you're not batshit insane. Doc Mitchell comes from Vault 21, but Vault 19 isn't too far away from Goodsprings. If Mitchell knew what happened in that vault (which is to say, the final outcome isn't explained, but it certainly didn't end with people dying horrific deaths, if at all) then his psych test is damn well justified.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: One of the GRA challenges takes this to its logical conclusion. You are tasked with killing twenty non-mutated animals (dogs, coyotes, ravens) with mini-nukes. This is the only challenge where killing yourself by mistake is more of a concern than the threat your enemy poses (which is to say, none whatsoever).
• Theseus' Ship Paradox: Invoked after the Courier's brain (and heart and spine) is removed and replaced at the beginning of Old World Blues. You otherwise have your original body, and all your memories and emotions are intact, as far as you can tell, and in some ways you're actually better off (Heartless, Brainless, and Spineless are all perks with positive effects), but are you still yourself, or just a very a close copy? And if you could even ever know, would it matter? You end up discussing this at some length... with your own disembodied brain near the end of the plotline for the DLC. The Courier's Brain had its own experiences in the Big MT, and isn't entirely sure it wants to be reunited with its body, given that its body thinks romping around the Mojave getting shot at is a good idea.
• This Is Wrong on So Many Levels!: Benny, who tried to have you murdered, has this as a response if you seduce him with Black Widow option, as a female character:
  All right, honey baby, this is all kinds of wrong, but to my suite it is. Thirteenth floor. Don't keep me waiting.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Some perks are only situational, but when that situation arises, you'll be glad you have them.
  • "Animal Friend" is by no means a necessary perk but it makes cave exploration easier and comes in handy during Old World Blues because it makes nightstalkers non-hostile (and boy are there a lot of nightstalkers in Old World Blues!)
  • "Light Step" makes you immune to setting off traps. Most traps are avoidable, but if you don't have a good eye for them (or just slow reflexes when trying to disarm a frag mine) it'll save you from blowing your legs off and having to waste a bunch of stimpaks. It also comes in handy in Lonesome Road, which features the much more damaging and much more faster-triggered Satchel Charges. It is almost necessary to survive Dead Money, which has traps laid out everywhere in an environment that is already hazardous to your health just by being there. At least you get this perk as long as you're with one of your companions.
  • "Strong Back" lets you carry an extra 50 pounds. Alternatively, recruit two companions and carry an extra 400 pounds of loot and use that perk slot for something else. However, you can't take your regular companions to the DLC missions and local companions are not always available, so that extra 50 pounds suddenly becomes useful.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: A side-quest in Honest Hearts forces you to drink drugged tea before going off to fight a Yao Guai. How much of the ensuing battle can be considered real rests firmly in this trope.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works:
  • Downplayed. There are throwing knives, hatchets, and spears to give Melee-specced players some ranged attacks. However, they're all Painfully Slow Projectiles, the worst offender being the throwing spear, which takes nearly two whole seconds between clicking the button and leaving the Courier's hand. Add to that the fact that they're prohibitively expensive, have noticeable weight (even on Casual Mode) and can't be retrieved once used, and they become rather frustrating when fired 'from the hip'. However, they do work relatively well with the Bullet Time effects of VATS, where throws are more certain to make contact. And, as with all thrown weapons in video games, The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In.
  • And then to play this trope straight, thrown weapons are amazingly useful in Dead Money. Plenty of enemies have them, and a sneak attack with a throwing spear (easy with VATS) can instantly rip a limb off a Ghost Person. While other melee weapons are also plentiful, throwing spears are a great choice for Sneak based Couriers, since Ghost People have very good Perception and range is about the only way to get the jump on one. Plus, they're silent!
• Time Skip: Occurs in one of Old World Blues' endings, and, like everything in the Big MT, it's taken into comedic absurdity; with time jump to over 700 YEARS into the future.
• Title Drop: Three out of four DLCs have them.
  • The Dead Money Jumpsuit and Dead Money Collar from Dead Money.
  • Old World Blues has a quest of that name, and the jukebox in your room is willing to explain the expression (focusing on the glory lost during the apocalypse, rather than hope for the future).
  • The Lonesome Road Perk granted at the end of Lonesome Road.
• Token Good Teammate: A good karma Courier can be this if working for the Legion.
• To Create a Playground for Evil: In contrast to the Dystopia Justifies the Means of a Legion ending, an evil karma Courier pursuing the Wild Card ending can seem like this. Notably, the only way to get a 'happy' ending for such bandit groups as the Fiends and the Powder Gangers is to get rid of both the NCR and the Legion while leaving the bandits unharmed, resulting in much of the Mojave being left at the mercy of psychopaths.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • The Fat Man, which has less than 20 mini nukes to use in the entire game, at least until GRA came out and added more to purchase and new variants. The three Holy Frag Grenades which are even more powerful than the Fat Man can only be obtained in a Wild Wasteland encounter, replacing two mini nukes. And the Alien Blaster, a ridiculously powerful Wild Wasteland-exclusive energy pistol with zero spread guaranteed to Critical Hit which will disintegrate nearly any target with a headshot that comes with a limited supply of ammo that you only get once.
  • Early on, any weapon that uses the devastating yet rare .44 Magnum rounds. With the addition of ammo crafting at sufficiently high levels, however, you can make your own .44 rounds by breaking down your less useful but much more common 10mm or .45 bullets, and after talking to the right NPC or taking the Hand Loader perk, you can even upgrade them to more powerful SWC rounds. Not so with the alien energy ammo or the mini nukes, though.
  • Turbo. It puts everything around you into Bullet Time, causing enemies to move and attack ridiculously slowly while you continue to fight at normal speed, rendering even the Legendary Deathclaw a sitting duck for its duration. Unfortunately, there's only a handful that can be found or bought right off the bat, and to get any more than that you have to learn an extremely rare crafting recipe that requires you to hunt Cazadores (one of the hardest enemies in the game) for ingredients. The only other option is the Implant GRX perk in Old World Blues.
  • Nuka-Cola Quartz and Nuka-Cola Victory; they're about as close to Infinity Plus One Food as you can get (The former gives you night vision and a DT boost, the latter gives you extra action points, and neither have a chance of addiction), but there are only a handful of each scattered about. However, the Nuka Chemist perk lets you craft them both using regular Nuka-Cola, which is plentiful. Drinking the Quartz would also be extremely foolish, since you can instead use it to craft Nuka grenades, which are only second in destructive potential to the Holy Frag Grenade. If you save all the Nuka-Colas you find and brew your own homemade recipe, you can wind up with hundreds of Nuka grenades.
  • The Proton Inversal Throwing Axes in Old World Blues. There are, at best, around thirty total with random spawning on corpses. You're lucky if you find ten. They are the single most-damaging thrown melee weapon in the game, but there's no way to get more.
  • Throwing knives also qualify, due to how scarce they are compared to the throwing spears and hatchets.
• Too Dumb to Live: There are many people in this game who would earn a Darwin Award.
  • Mister RADical, who found himself a radiation suit and assumed it made him totally immune to radiation because he couldn't "feel" any radiation in a highly radioactive area. Just in case you don't know how radiation works, you typically don't feel it, only its after-effects, and by the time radiation levels get high enough that you can feel them, you're as good as dead several times over. Radiation poisoning takes time to develop fully, which incidentally it did for Mister RADical, who passed it off as food poisoning. You find the idiot dead near a radioactive dump site, probably either been killed by his radiation poisoning or by the Golden Geckos inhabiting the place, and according to a log he had on him, he was preparing to drench himself in a fluid that was so horribly radioactive that, had he done so, it would have killed him and turned everything within a hundred feet of him nightmarishly radioactive in seconds.
  • General Oliver in the Independent/House endings. He ambushes you, with only five Elite Mooks for backup... and then he turns around to find about fifty Securitrons as your backup. He then says that if the situations of himself and the Courier were reversed, he'd see you hang. One dialogue option involves attacking him and his backup with your Securitrons; a second, in the Independent ending, involves Yes Man throwing the General off Hoover Dam. Judging by the subsequent reaction of his subordinates, they probably thought that he deserved it.
  • Then there's Trash, a girl who decided that life as a human sucks, so she'd become a ghoul. How? By exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation, naturally. She lives in a shack on the southern edge of the map, in an old nuclear test site. How she even got there is a mystery considering it's surrounded by tough-as-nails feral ghouls. Of course, the odds of ghoulification are roughly one in one million, but she assumes it's a sure thing, and when you reach the shack where she's staying, she's usually dead (she may spawn alive as a bug). Basically, mixing radiation and idiots are a fatal combination, at least for the idiot.
  • Freeside Thugs. They're armed with knives and lead pipes, maybe a sledgehammer at best. They aren't even a threat to you when you enter the city, much less later when you're walking along in Powered Armor with a sniper rifle that can punch a hole in a tank. To wit, they will attack you and your companions even though said selection can include a robot attack dog and a Nightkin with a BFS, among other friends who may not look as threatening but are every bit as dangerous. Not to mention the fact that the entire freaking city is hostile to them on sight.
  • Any of a number of female characters in the game who openly support Caesar's Legion. It's not as if it's a secret what they do to women. Though at least one of said characters was lied to.
  • On the flip side of the above, Caesar himself can fall into this if the Courier is a woman and/or has been dismantling the Legion's war effort at every turn across the Mojave prior to going to Vegas. He'll still grant you a pardon and invite you to meet him, then (barring an open betrayal or refusal) trust that you're working for him implicitly. He never even bothers to check whether you really blew up the facility beneath the Fort.
  • At Goodsprings Source you can find a man named Barton Thorn who claims that his girlfriend is nearby just beyond a nest of Geckos. After you get done massacring them for him it turns out that there is no girlfriend, just corpses and a cache of food and supplies. Thorn then approaches, apologizes for tricking you into clearing the way to the cache, and then tries to kill you because you're of no use anymore. It is a severe case of Darwinitis on his part since you have not only just survived being shot — point blank — in the head, you have also just killed the bunch of Geckos that he couldn't kill himself. Vicious mutated lizards that swarm prey in large numbers. Granted, he might have thought that you would have died thinning out some of the Geckos, or at least be in such a rough shape that he could finish the job either way. Becomes more hilarious if you manage to have the Animal Friend perk. After watching you saunter to the cache unmolested, he'll try to do the same, and promptly get eaten by geckos.
  • Sometimes entire factions qualify as this based upon irrational reactions to you (given your in-game actions). It's entirely possible to enter Cottonwood Cove and only get a mild "don't mess with anything or else!" response from a non-hostile Legion — after coming out of the Divide, where you fired a NUCLEAR WARHEAD at a Legion camp. And this was after already being vilified by the Legion.
  • Jeannie May full stop, but it turns out to be justified in her case. You might wonder why in the world would you keep a receipt that states that you were responsible for selling the wife of a highly skilled and very, very vengeful sniper into slavery instead of destroying said evidence of your actions the first chance you got? Then you realize that the sale includes both Carla Boone AND her unborn child, which has its own value in caps if it is born healthy. The receipt is Jeannie's proof that the Legion owes more caps than the original sale.
  • During the final assault on Legate Lanius' camp, two NCR Rangers arrive before the player and head up the climb toward the Legion's military leader. NCR Rangers are famed sharpshooters, while Lanius is the greatest hand-to-hand combatant in an army that specializes in hand-to-hand combat. Naturally, the NCR rangers decide to run at Lanius with knives and are taken out in short order.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • The Courier takes several levels of badass over the course of the game, both game levels and in-story levels.
  • Do you remember those poor Deathclaws in Fallout 3 and how easily you could slaughter them after a few levels? Try it with a Deathclaw in this game and see how that works out for you. Lampshaded in a player dialog response to someone warning you of the problem. "I'm not afraid of Deathclaws."
  • Raiders to a lesser degree. In Fallout 3 Raiders used low-grade melee weapons and small fire rifles like hunting rifles, sawed-off shotguns, very rarely you'd find one with an assault rifle or a flamer, and their armor was constructed of random scrap. In the Mojave, Raiders are packing SMGs, energy weapons, chainsaws, and it is not uncommon to find them wearing leather armor or metal armor. They're still not a threat, but their equipment is much more impressive.
  • Numerous weapons are far more useful from Fallout 3 with the addition of weapon mods. Remember the humble laser rifle? It gets two mods that greatly boost its damage output, and a zoom-in scope. Enjoy your laser sniper rifle. A fully modified Laser Rifle is incredibly efficient as they have really good aim, can zoom like hell and have a lot of firepower. You can even singlehandedly take down a Deathclaw with less than one magazine if you're good enough. Ammo is relatively easy to access.
  • The Luck stat. In Fallout 3 Luck just gave you a minor boost to all skills of maybe a few points and affected critical chance. Now it still does those things, but at higher levels it noticeably tips the odds of the casinos in your favor, even letting you know when Luck has influenced the cards in Blackjack. With an implant, Intense Training and two equipment pieces you can get 10 Luck from a base stat of only 6 (and can get 10 from 5 with Lonesome Road). Eventually the casinos will ban you from gaming because you win too much, but by the time they do you'll be walking out the door with several thousand caps, and can just head next door into the next casino. Breaking the bank like this can take as little as an hour.
• Torture Always Works: An interrogator constrained by NCR regulations asks the player to rough up a captive for her. The man allowed himself to be captured rather than dying because he was confident that he could withstand any torture, a pride he could only take if he believed Torture Always Works in the first place. Of course, he cracks under sufficient brutality. Averted, however, if you opt for psychology rather than punching.
• To the Pain:
  • The Terrifying Presence perk is pretty much based around this. It causes NPCs to flee for a little while after you make scary threats like "I'll carve myself a knife out of your bones."
  • What Caesar did to Joshua Graham. Execution attempt aside, the destruction of New Canaan and its people shows how far Caesar is willing to go to hurt him.
  • In a sense, what you can do to Elijah if you trick him into trapping himself forever inside the Sierra Madre vault.
• Training the Peaceful Villagers: One of the options at the end of the Honest Hearts DLC. It's Deconstructed; having learned to fight, they're not peaceful anymore, so they spend the next couple decades warring with former allies. However, sparing Salt-Upon-Wounds leads to them being more merciful.
• Trauma Inn:
  • There are always certain places you can bunk for the night, especially if you're running with hardcore mode on.
  • Averted with the Dead Money expansion, where there is no place any sane person could feel safe sleeping in. Sure enough, you can't sleep in at least half the beds you find at all, because the buildings they're in are sufficiently damaged enough that they're exposed to the Cloud. In an anti-frustration feature, your sleep meter in hardcore mode doesn't advance unless you actually sleep.
• Trespassing to Talk: Certain NPCs will seek out the Courier, like Malcolm Holmes after you pick up a star bottle cap or the NCR Ranger if you achieve "Accepted" reputation with the NCR, and they will find you just about anywhere. This leads to hilarity when the Courier wakes up to find one of these people standing in their hotel room waiting to talk to you, or they make an interlude during battle for a chat.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Dead Money includes a number of sequences having the player advance through an area before nearby radio signals set off the explosive collar that they are forced to wear for the duration of the expansion. These segments can be made easier by destroying the signal emitters (radios, PA systems), but the emitters are often hard to see in the dark and hazy environments of Dead Money, and at times simply cannot be destroyed at all, often making the player resort to a disorienting charge, often resulting in repeated deaths and frustration.
• Trial Balloon Question: Veronica would like to know your opinion about the Brotherhood before she will confess that she is a member herself.
• Tribal Face Paint: In the Honest Hearts DLC, one of the two tribes of Zion Canyon, known as the Dead Horses, has a custom where members earn a facial or body tattoo for every major achievement they accomplish. The vicious White Legs wear war paint on their faces as they attack Zion under Caesar's orders.
• Tropers Do It Without Notability: One of the graffito on the loading screen says, "Powder Gangers do it with a BANG!" They ain't lying.
• Tsundere: Dean Domino of all people. When you tell him to take a hike but change your mind he says this line.
  Dean Domino:{Relieved} That's a relief. {Beat, changes tone to false confidence} I-I mean, not like I care. I'm fine on my own.
• Two-Headed Coin: Referenced with the Vit-o-matic Vigor Tester, a luck score of 10 is two-headed coin flip.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: The Myth Arc of the DLC has very little to do with the buildup to the battle at Hoover Dam. Even firing nukes at either or both sides will not even significantly alter the force balance. Justified to some extent by the fact that the game's opening slideshow points out that both armies are already there, staring at each other, so blowing up their distant supply lines wouldn't make much of an immediate difference, and the DLCs take place in other places than south Nevada. Honest Hearts takes place in Utah, Dead Money takes place in an unspecified corner of north Nevada, Old World Blues takes place in Big Mountain, and Lonesome Road takes place in California's southern valleys.

U

• Uncoffee: "Black Coffee", a substance brewed from coyote tobacco and honey mesquite beans. It's certainly stimulating, but one can only imagine the taste...
• The Unintelligible:
  • Mean Sonofabitch, on account of having his tongue cut out. Even his voice actor doesn't know what he's saying. One line has him mention "Wesibe" (Westside), and he pronounces it "wes-see-bay".
  • Dr. 8 from Old World Blues can only speak in static and scrambled audio, though if you ask him his name, you may notice an "8" buried in the center of his garbled symbols. With the right stats and skills, the Courier can even realise that Dr. 8's "static" is a type of in-universe computer code, and gain some basic understanding of him.
• Undefeatable Little Village:
  • Goodsprings is one of these, if you decide to help them drive away the Powder Gangers. If Caesar's Legion wins, and provided you didn't help the Powder Gangers destroy the town, the Legion passes up on conquering the Goodsprings, despite going Rape, Pillage, and Burn everywhere else in the Mojave.
  • Nobody except Legate Lanius dares to mess with the Boomers, considering they're inhabiting Nellis Air Force Base and thus have howitzers, assault rifles, missile launchers, mini nuke launchers, and potentially a WWII bomber, and blow anyone who tries to approach them to bits.
• Unexplained Accent: Melissa Lewis of the Great Kahns is literally the only one with a New Zealand accent; even her father speaks with an American accent. Her voice actress is a New Zealander but uses American accents for every other role.
• Unexplained Recovery:
  • The Courier, of course. When you confront Benny again in the Tops, this can even be your response to him. With appropriate perk, you can also scare him into running by saying that you came back from the grave to put him in his.
  • Also when you confront Jessup. He'll be surprised, scared even maybe, and say "You're supposed to be dead." One of your responses can be exactly, word for word, the line, "I got better."
• Unguided Lab Tour: As long as you're not too badly regarded by the NCR, you can easily sneak into Hoover Dam's facilities, including the turbine chambers, the armory, the offices, and the barracks without anyone even asking who you are or making you relinquish your weapons. If you so wanted, you could probably plant a few bombs and cripple the region (although there's no quest to do so).
• Unique Items: The game has at least one unique variant of each weapon which have better stats or a unique ability.
• Universal Ammunition: Downplayed, but still trope-relevant: Energy Weapons run off of only four types of ammo (as opposed to the zillions of types that Guns do) and three of those can be easily converted into any other of those three types at a workbench.
• Universal Poison:
  • Played straight in the main game, as the generic item "antivenom" will cure you instantly, whether it be a simple radscorpion sting or a nasty Cazador attack. Averted in the Honest Hearts DLC, where the local poisonous plants and the White Legs' poisoned weapons have their own type of antivenom.
  • On the other hand, the poison effects themselves differ wildly by toxin source.
• Unreliable Expositor: Major Knight of the Mojave Outpost and Jimmy from Westside are both this in terms of the Legion's policies concerning homosexuality. Jimmy says that Caesar punishes homosexuality by death, (experience from being a former slave) but Knight says the Legion is more tolerant of same-sex relationships than some parts of the NCR. (Though the player has to activate a Confirmed Bachelor check with Knight to even hear that.) Companion Cass's dialogue implies it (in a rather disparaging way) to be a common practice, directly contradicting Jimmy's story.
• Unreliable Illustrator: The game has characters which are tagged in the G.E.C.K. editor as being Asian, probably with a name to match...but their actual faces will likely not indicate this as clearly. An obvious example is the NCR Colonel James Hsu, whose playing card plainly portrays him as an Asian man, yet his in-game model mostly has facial features that are similar to other caucasian characters, such as Craig Boone.
• Unscrupulous Hero: The Courier, if you wish him/her to be.
• Unstoppable Mailman: Again, The Courier, the fandom even jokes that the game can be summed up with the phrase "local mailman becomes too angry to die".
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Ulysses, the antagonist of Lonesome Road, calls you this for destroying the Divide because you unknowingly delivered the package that activated all of the nukes that created the hellhole that remained. Maddeningly, he's responsible for nearly all the problems that ''you'' had to fix in the previous DLCs. Due to the nature of the game, you can do the DLC in any order and thus no speech options calling HIM out on this are prepared.
• Upgrade Artifact:
  • The stat-boosting implants from Fallout 2 make a return, along with other implants that give the Courier armor plating or (as of the Old World Blues DLC) do things like increasing Sneak speed.
  • Skill books are a less dramatic but straighter example, instantly boosting a skill by 3 points (4 with a related perk).
• Useless Useful Spell: A number of perks qualify. A few notable examples:
  • Lead Belly: This one is a holdover from Fallout 3 where even there, with significantly fewer sources of clean water than in the Mojave, it was pretty useless.
  • Anything that gives you additional attempts at something, such as Computer Whiz, where Save Scumming is a better alternative.
  • Swift Learner/Here And Now: There is infinite experience and most things have some form of Level Scaling, so wasting a perk on faster XP gain or a free level-up is fairly pointless.
  • Survival in non-Hardcore mode. You Have Researched Eating, but stimpaks are readily available and do a better job of healing you without adding weight to your inventory.
  • Elijah's Last Words from Dead Money. It increases Veronica's melee attack speed by 150% and adds 25% chance for melee attacks to knock down enemies for Veronica. Useful. Veronica's tagged skill is in Unarmed and her Melee skill never rises past 18. Useless.

V

• Vagina Dentata: Played with. At Cottonwood Cove, there are three people, the Weathers family, imprisoned by the Legion to be sold as slaves. The Courier can buy the Weathers off of Canyon Runner for 300 caps, or they can try to negotiate the price down by claiming they're *clearly* showing signs of a deadly disease. If, however, your speech isn't high enough...

Courier: But the girl is sick. With classic symptoms of, uh... Vagina Dentata?

Canyon Runner: I think my Latin is better than yours.

• Vapor Wear: Great Khan Simple Armor when worn by a woman has the torso covered by a wide open leather vest with nothing on underneath. Fortunately, it's a Godiva Vest. Maybe there's duct tape under there holding it in place?
• Variable Mix: Implemented in a much more complex way than in Fallout 3. The non-radio background music changes and evolves based on things like the location, time of day, and your karma and faction status. A piece of music will often gain more layers and instruments as you proceed further along a given quest line, or boost your reputation or notoriety with the faction controlling that area. Also, like in the previous game, there's sudden Background Music Overrides whenever the Battle Theme Music starts or stops playing.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Randall Clark waged a one-man guerrilla war against a force of over a hundred organized and well armed people after they killed and ate a group of youths who were barely a threat. They finally left after Clark killed two thirds of them. Afterwards, this is in Clark's journal entry:
  Victory. 10 months of killing. All I feel is cold.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Divide acts as this for the DLC. It's an uninhabitable (even by wasteland standards) stretch of ruin, filled with radiation, windstorms, and scattered nuclear warheads. It's populated by Deathclaws, Tunnelers (innumerable subterranean creatures that can kill Deathclaws), and crazed skinless Marked Men armed with the various military weapons scattered all over the place (often in ruined high-end fortifications). And worst of all, it is a long road to a temple filled with ICBMs that are still live and about to be launched.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Benny, the man that shot you in the head and left you for dead in Goodsprings is captured by Caesar's Legion. You can order his brutal death, or you can help him escape his predicament, even after everything he's done to you...
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • ...But if you want to kill him, there's always a nice cross you can strap him to. You can also smuggle a pistol into Caesar's tent and shoot him in the head for Poetic Justice, but it takes around 15 shots and he keeps yelling "Damn!" while all the guards become antsy at your having produced a gun.
  • Those Deathclaws mentioned earlier, and how terrible they are? They can't figure out how to jump and climb. The quarry you find them in has cranes and conveyer inclines you can climb on, and the deathclaws will literally run around like headless chickens. You will feel terrible killing the babies... maybe.
  • If you'd like to blast at your comrades' kneecaps so they have to limp on broken legs across the Wasteland, sell them to cannibals, sell them to slavers, or bring them along and make them watch as you usher those they hate to new heights of power and influence over the helpless people of the wastes, New Vegas has you covered. There is plenty of opportunity for depravity, if that's your thing...
  • A slave girl in the imperial prison camps asks you to get her teddy bear back for her. Once you have it you can either give it to her or gleefully tear it up right in front of her face.
  • There is a similar quest where a Boomer kid asks you for help finding her lost teddy bear, Mr. Cuddles. You can instead choose to sell the bear to a trader for a small handful of caps and then go back and tell her Mr. Cuddles is dead. You really are a piece of work.
  • A mod allows you to create all manner of havoc in an underground area. In Red Lucy's bedroom in The Thorn, the mod can be used to restore an option to release all her caged monsters including powerful nasties like Cazadors and Deathclaws. When you exit, you're treated to a massive battle between the beasts and their former captors. Then you get to the surface and see the beasts have made it top side . . . and are wreaking havoc in the poorest part of Vegas, Westside. Oops.
  • If you take the Animal Friend perk (and/or a similar Ghoul themed perk) various beasties will no longer attack you on sight. It's useful enough for avoiding random encounters but you can abuse it for easy kills turning animals into walking meals just waiting to be harvested.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: The people of the wasteland will not treat you lightly if they decide you're too cruel.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Courier can be one if you decide to work for Caesar's Legion while simultaneously keeping the NCR (and most of the other neutral and good factions) happy and unaware of your plans to stab them in the back when the time comes. In fact, it's probably for the best to play the game this way if you decide to work for Caesar since a good chunk of the quests in this game come from the NCR.
• Violation of Common Sense: The couple who stole Vance's 9mm submachine gun from the display in Primm tell you about their plans to go on a robbing spree similar to Vikki & Vance (who themselves are expies of Bonnie and Clyde). To talk them out of it you first have to pass a speech check telling them it sounds like a great idea. This will cause them to voice their doubts about it, and have second thoughts and drop it.
• Viva Las Vegas!: Most of the game takes place in and around Las Vegas (now called New Vegas), which still offers many of the same attractions to tourists and thrill-seekers as it always has.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: A few NCR soldiers on leave in the Strip can display these.

W

• Walking Techbane:
  • Dr. 0 of the Think Tank takes pride in his ability to nullify, deconstruct or otherwise neutralise any machine. Extra ironic, considering that he himself is a cyborg. Unsurprisingly, he despises Mr. House.
  • Veronica also makes a comment along these lines about the Pulse Gun, though it is specifically meant to screw up tech-based stuff.
• War Memorial: West of Goodsprings is the Yangtze Memorial, which commemorates US soldiers who gave their lives during the Yangtze Campaign against the Communist Chinese during the run-up to the Great War, and Boulder City has a stone monument listing the NCR soldiers who died during the First Battle of Hoover Dam. If you shoot at it, a nearby soldier will call you out for disrespecting the dead.
• Warrior Therapist: The Courier's companions all have baggage that they can help unload, healthily or not.
• Wasteland Elder: Several; Raul's quest involves you introducing him to three of them so he can decide whether he should settle down as one of these, or become a badass. Since the game also lets you make your character young or old (with a selection of gray hair and beards to boot), you can be a Wasteland Elder too!
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • Abominations (including deathclaws and tunnelers) are scared for ten seconds and run away from you if you shoot them with a Flare Gun.
  • Holograms in Dead Money are invincible, powerful, and reasonably perceptive. However, even one hit to their sensitive emitters turns them off completely.
• We Have Reserves:
  • A tactic heavily favored by both the NCR and Caesar's Legion. Both forces use poorly trained and cheaply supplied troopers to throw themselves against anyone in their way like a tsunami of bodies, best seen in the NCR-Brotherhood war and the Battle of Helios One. General Lee "Wait-and-See" Oliver wants to do this to put his name in the history books as the man who won the Hoover Dam and he's willing to let the Legion build up their forces on the other side of the Colorado River until he gets as many troopers as possible to fight.
  • Father Elijah, former Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, also favoured the We Have Reserves approach to warfare. It's deconstructed in that the Brotherhood didn't have reserves and isn't open-minded about recruiting outsiders (and was, in fact, severely outnumbered and being slaughtered by the NCR), and yet the very fact never bothered him very much.
• Weirdness Magnet: The effect of the "Wild Wasteland" trait. Chris Avellone outright used the title of this trope to describe it.
• Welcome to Corneria:
  "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a Nuclear Winter."
  "When I got this assignment, I thought there'd be more gambling..."
  "If you were enlisted, you'd be halfway to General by now."
  "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a Nuclear Winter."
  "Ave, true to Caesar."
  "RETRIBUTION!"
  "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a Nuclear Winter."
  • "I heard the NCR took back Nelson..." which is a little ridiculous when it is being said by the aforementioned Powder Gangers who were locked up by the NCR in the first place.
  • If counting the number of times the Fiends ask "do you like the sight of your own blood?!" were a drinking game, you would drop dead of alcohol poisoning inside of ten minutes.
  • The fact that NCR NPC's keep on saying "Our boys got the Monorail back up and running!" after the Monorail has been blown up is particularly confusing. Especially if they follow it up with "No Monorail access on the Strip? Where'm I gonna take my leave, Freeside?"
  • After you help Primm get a new sheriff, the decision you made is added to the list of NPC dialogue options. However, due to a glitch, the dialogue for the two main options (annexation into the NCR, or independent protection under Cowboy Cop Meyers) is switched around. Plus, the people of Primm are more likely to talk about their town than other settlements, but the lines are written in a way that makes Primm sound like a distant settlement. The result is that after helping Meyers become sheriff, half of Primm ends up saying "Primm wimped out and accepted NCR rule. Some people will do anything to feel safe." Including Sheriff Meyers.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: All three of the main factions qualify to varying levels of degree. Even a Good Karma Courier going for the Wild Card ending counts as it requires you to murder your employer to take control for yourself and forcibly drive out both the Legion and NCR with an army of robots just like House planned on doing.
• We Win, Because You Didn't: Arcade Gannon does not like House, nor the NCR, and does not care for their political ideals, but his priority is for the Legion to lose, so he will be willing to support any of the two factions (or three, if the Courier decides to compete) as long as the Legion is defeated.
• Wham Episode: Vault 11. The Vaults were never meant to save anyone and this is one of the many Vaults that proves it. The experience inside was that, every year, one of the residents had to be sacrificed or else the whole Vault population would perish. The inhabitants decided that the Overseer should be the sacrifice at the end of a one-year term. Thus, every year, they elect someone they don't like as Overseer, forming political blocs in the process. One day, a man riled the biggest bloc up, who left him a choice between being elected Overseer or having his wife "perform services" for them. When they vote him in despite choosing the latter, said wife murders several members of the bloc and gets willignly caught in order to be elected. Her sole act as Overseer is to replace the election by a random selection. The bloc, losing its advantage, takes it poorly and starts a civil war... The Wham Episode part comes after only five dwellers are left alive due to the infighting and chose to refuse to keep the sacrifices going, only to be cheerfully informed by the Vault computer that this was what was expected of them all along. They end up forming a Suicide Pact and go through with it, save for one of them.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Lonesome Road features the Tunnelers, mutated humanoids that can tear apart Deathclaws. Ulysses mentions that they're slowly tunneling their way towards the Mojave, which would be utterly screwed when packs of super-strong abominations pop out of the ground without warning. And yet you can do absolutely nothing about this, and it's never mentioned again.
  • There were five survivors who emerged from Vault 11. The audio recording you find at the entrance to the vault has four gunshots, and there are four skeletons there. You never learn what happened to the final survivor. The game files do contain a few references to a character simply labeled "Vault 11 survivor".
• What Measure Is a Mook?: The final ending to Joshua Graham's path in Honest Hearts depends solely on how you treat the White Legs captured leader, Salt-Upon-Wounds. If Joshua spares him, then Joshua will become much more merciful and pleasant. Apparently the dozens of White Legs he slaughtered to get to that point don't matter. Or for that matter, the countless people who were killed, maimed, enslaved and crushed by the Legion, of which he was one of the core architects and the right hand to Caesar. Or the many people, including the population of New Canaan, destroyed by Salt-Upon-Wounds. Both are merely Backstory to redeeming one ruthless warlord by sparing another.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Aside from the ghoul and mutant companions in game, you also have Victor, a robot who think he's a cowboy. Note that while Doc Mitchell calls him "the metal fella" and Trudy refers to him as "the robot", no-one in Goodsprings acts like he's not a person.
  • Divide!ED-E's backstory. His inventor acted much more like his father than anything else, and reacted with outrage that his colleagues treated ED-E as a mindless machine.
  • In the REPCONN Launch Site, Jason Bright leads a groups of ghouls, not all of whom retain their humanity. He acknowledges that the ferals are essentially ravening zombies who must be detained from attacking others, but they are still part of his flock and he asks you to avoid harming them if possible.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • You will get a small one from the narrator if you get the Legion ending with good karma, or the NCR ending with evil karma.
  • The Great Khans will not shy away to tell the player that you're travelling with a murderer if Boone is your companion.
  • Mr. House certainly tries this on you when you kill him, and the obituary he leaves in your notes just rubs it in further. Whether or not you agree or not depends on your personal beliefs, of course — and whether or not you finish reading the obituary to the very end.
  • If you go through the pains and labors of convincing Boone to reconcile with his past only to bail on him at the last second, he will give you one of these.
  • As part of the "Come Fly With Me" quest, you descend into a basement filled with Nightkin and have the option of negotiating with the only sane one of them to leave peacefully. Kill too many of the insane ones, however, and he will attack you.
  • If you take the job to help guard the Silver Rush for the Van Graffs, one of the NPCs that approaches the store will have bombs strapped to his body. If you let him in, he'll detonate the bombs and kill everybody inside. The door guard instructing you, Simon, berates you for putting him out of a job and opens fire.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: As per the tradition of the original Fallout games, you get an epilogue informing you what happened to all the settlements you visited and the companions that you had depending on your actions. Some are nice, some are bittersweet, and some are just nasty.
  • The epilogue will show the fates of people that you might not have met on your playthrough and their default fate is the downer kind. This is deliberate so that the player might seek them out on subsequent playthroughs.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?:
  • Dead Money never states the location of its setting, the Sierra Madre, beyond specifying that it's not near any major cities. The fact that Dog/God can drag you there from New Vegas (possibly on a raft given that he kidnaps you near the Colorado River), plus the architecture having a Spanish Mission Revival style, obviously places it in the American Southwest, and the bad ending implies that it's east of California, but beyond that no details are given. This contributes to the quasi-mythical feel of the expansion; notably, you can't return to the Sierra Madre after leaving, unlike other DLC locations.
  • In a game that's actually pretty accurate as regards the Southwestern US (other than obvious issues of space compression), the location of the Lonesome Road DLC seems to be invented from whole cloth. The Pre-War town of Hopeville and the Ashton military base sit to the west of Vegas, in what Joshua Graham states is Death Valley- so the name of the location itself is given, but the equivalent settlements aren't, since there are few cities and no military installations in that area. (The nearest modern-day military outpost anywhere near there is Fort Irwin, outside Barstow— in Fallout canon, this city is now known as "The Hub", and is a major NCR settlement, further complicating things.)
• White Mask of Doom: The White Gloves Society. Of course this is obviously also their weakness.
• Whole-Plot Reference: To The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Dead Money.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Dangerous Abominations like Deathclaws and Nightstalkers are absolutely terrified of the Flare Gun from Lonesome Road and will panic and flee if it's fired on them.
• Wicked Cultured: Caesar, the Legion's intelligent and charismatic leader. He is a talented anthropologist, linguist, and historian that speaks fluent Latin and knows all about both pre-war and post-war history. In his free time he likes to read and debate about political science and philosophy with other educated people. He is also the founder and leader of a faction of imperialistic slavers that kills the weak, enslaves women and children, and engages in war crimes.
• Wicked Wasps: Cazadores, they hurt a lot, are fast, poison you and attack in swarms of 2-5! Their origins are explained in Old World Blues where it's revealed that they were tarantula hawk spider wasps mutated into extremely aggressive giants by Dr. Borous's experimentation. The strongest of them is Specimen 73, who's tougher than the Legendary Cazador and a lot meaner too. The best you can do against them is stay out of tight areas (impossible in Old World Blues) and shoot at their wings to slow them down because they don't gain extra damage from headshots.
• Wild Card: You. Potentially you could side with the Legion, NCR, Mr. House or with nobody but yourself. Appropriately enough, this series of quests is called "Wild Card."
• With Cat Like Tread:
  • Divide!ED-E makes "Sneaky beeping". As opposed to being absolutely quiet when sneaking.
  • In fact, everyone says something amusing when you sneak with a companion. Except for Veronica and, appropriately, Boone. Lily, the stealthiest of the companions (due to her Stealth Boy) always tell you in her booming voice that grandma knows how to be quiet when sneaking.
  • All melee weapons are treated as totally silent. This includes a chainsaw, the Ripper, and the arm-mounted, punch-triggered, incredibly loud shotgun that is the Ballistic Fist. All of which are ignored by anyone around your target — so long as they don't detect you specifically as you punch someone to death, they won't even care that their friend's body is falling down next to them, maybe sans a limb or two depending on where you hit them.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: In Hardcore Mode, you need to eat, drink, and sleep regularly, or suffer the consequences!
• Wolverine Publicity: The Ranger Combat Armor, which is featured on promotional art, trailers, the cover, title screen, and intro, and can otherwise hardly be found anywhere in-game until near the end. Recent patches, however, have alleviated this somewhat and made it available earlier and more easily.
• The Worf Effect:
  • The Powder Gangers are a major enemy in the area of the Mojave where you start. At Nipton, you learn that they are no match for the Legion.
  • In Lonesome Road, the Tunnelers are introduced to you by having one instantly tear apart a Deathclaw.
• A World Half Full:
  • Unlike the Capital Wasteland, the Mojave Wasteland has very few abandoned or destroyed buildings in it, with most of them being just outside the New Vegas strip. Even then, most of them are boarded up and inaccessible. Civilization is firmly in control at this point and most peoples' lives don't revolve around struggling to survive. The Mojave feels more like it has returned to The Wild West and less like a hopeless irrecoverable hellhole. It helps that Mr. House prevented most of the nukes from hitting the Mojave. Played even straighter if you manage the entire game with good karma and helping everybody.
  • Though the further away you get from Legion or NCR areas the more violence and despair there really is. Most of Utah is considered a horrible place to live, and Raul even says how before the Legion took over Arizona that the whole state was overrun by raiders and warring towns.
• World of Ham: Old World Blues. By Oppenheimer, Old World Blues. The whole DLC involves crazy scientists yelling at each other, and you can join in!
• Worst Aid: Naturally!
  • Sleeping to cure crippled limbs. Possibly for convenience, since Hardcore Mode disables it.
  • Old World Blues gives us the Y-17 Trauma Override Harness. Laying aside the fact that they were made with the best of intentions — though they never worked and essentially gave us gun-toting zombies — the overall design is a textbook example of Worst Aid. Should the operator be critically injured, the TOH walks him or her back to an aid station for treatment. It does this, however, with no consideration for what has happened to the wearer, meaning that it'll happily force-march someone with critical internal injuries, spinal fractures, and any of a wide variety of injuries where moving the victim is right up there on the medical treatment advisability scale with "beat patient with brick." Given the batshit crazy plans cooked up at Big MT, though, this really should come as no surprise.
• Worthless Treasure Twist: Fairly early on near Nipton (and possibly even before that) you'll come across a Sunset Star Bottle Cap or someone bringing them up. Turns out the bottle caps are part of a legend about a grand treasure with the Sunset Sarsaparilla company and a man named Allen Marks who will kill anyone to get ahold of it. If you go to the SS headquarters, you can meet a robot named Festus who tells you you'll gain a reward if you find 50 (which is quite a painstaking task given how hard they are to find). Once you get them, you return to Festus and he rewards you... with a story about where Sunset Sarsaparilla comes from. At first it seems like the quest is over, but then Festus says that, due to legal reasons, the company does have an actual prize as a result of complaints against the company. When you find the prize room, you find hundreds of completely worthless plastic deputy badges, the body of Allen Marks who got locked in and suffocated (with the horrifying realization that what he did was pointless), and the only worthwhile treasure which is on Marks' person and he likely brought with him: a laser pistol called Pew Pew.
  Allen Marks (on recording): "Prolly shoulda stayed at home... and taken care of my ma. She... always used to say people who... murder and steal... die bad in the end."
• Worthless Yellow Rocks:
  • Inverted: Bottle caps, once worthless, are now the currency of the wasteland, so when you find a cache full of them, it's an unexpected good reward.
  • The gold bars from the Dead Money DLC are the single-most valuable type of item in the game at 10,000 caps. However, each bar weights 35 pounds and most vendors don't have over 10,000 caps on them at a time, so their value is balanced by portability and practically, in that you'll have to buy enough each time to offset the loss. Furthermore, there are several items in the game (ammunition, high-end weaponry in good repair, and certain medical supplies) which are worth significantly more per weight than the gold from the Sierra Madre and thus worth more than their weight in gold. The gold certainly isn't worthless, especially if you can steal all of it, but the value-to-weight ratio is far lower than expected.
  • This is the reason NCR used to back their money with gold (rather than water, as they did back in Fallout and during New Vegas). It has very little use post-apocalypse, unlike water, which everybody always needs.
  • Played with in Dead Money. The gold bars and stacks of pre-War currency in the Sierra Madre's vault still have a monetary value even in the post-War economy, and a quite significant value at that, but it pales in comparison to that of the true treasure: the schematics on the vault computer, which would enable their possessor to duplicate the casino's Matter Replicator vending machines, Hard Light security holograms, and Universal Poison Cloud. Even in terms of what the player can take out of the Sierra Madre, several heavy bars of gold that only exist to be sold are far from the most valuable things that can be gained from the Sierra Madre, which includes powerful unique gear and long-term access to the some of technogical treasures of the Sierra Madre.
• Wretched Hive: Nipton. Its population ends up massacred by Vulpes Inculta.

Y

• You and What Army?: Two of the four endings (Mr. House and Wild Card) play out in this manner. One of the quests even has it in the title.
• You Are Already Dead: It's possible to trigger a tripwire and click on a locked item or terminal in the split second before it triggers. You can spend all the time in the world on the hacking/lockpicking minigame, but as soon as you leave the minigame screen, you die in an explosion.
• You Are Number 6: The Courier is the sixth courier hired to deliver seemingly meaningless crap to New Vegas. Except your package ain’t meaningless crap, and a lot of people want it for themselves.
• You Bastard!: Cass is one of the few who calls the Courier out for consistent enough bastardry to earn bad karma. Arcade Gannon calls the courier out on some events in opposition to the Follower's ideals, but it is sometimes possible to avoid distrust in these actions.
• You Have Failed Me: The story behind the Burned Man.
• You Have Researched Breathing:
  • Old World Blues requires you to find two holotapes in order to fill a bottle of water from a sink.
  • Some of the campfire recipes seem like this. You need a whopping 50 survival skill to learn how to make a Coyote Steak (recipe: one piece of Coyote Meat + fire); apparently they're much harder to cook than Gecko Steaks (25 survival skill, same recipe but with Gecko Meat).
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Barton Thorn tries to pull this in Goodsprings Source. He should have known better.
  • Caesar's Legion is really fond of this trope, to the point that with a high enough Speech skill you can convince some of the Legion's allies to abandon them by pointing out the faulty logic of working for someone who's obviously going to kill or enslave you as soon as they win.
  • The leadership of the Omertas comes down to those who drug and enslave prostitutes, or those who "only" physically abuse them. Or you can wait until they turn their backs after they trust you.
  • Logan and his group of prospectors. They enlist you to help them acquire some radiation suits and scavenge Camp Searchlight. Once everything of value has been found, they try to kill you.
  • Elijah in Dead Money. Though he leaves the decision of whether your former comrades live or not up to you, he encourages you to kill them once they become of no further use (ironic given that he also encourages you to actually work with them or else you'll all die). And then he tries to lock you in the underground vault forever.
• Your Head Asplode:
  • 'Splosions happen quite often if you always aim for the head. Subverted in one quest where you are instructed to score no headshots on the bounties since their heads are required as a proof. The First Recon squad that are sent to help you kill Driver Nephi is apparently unaware of this and occasionally headshot him.
  • In Dead Money, if you hear a beeping coming from your collar, leave the area immediately.
  • Old World Blues reverses this at the Little Yangtze camp, where its inhabitants were given similar collars to keep them within the camp — when you find them as Ghouls, they immediately try to run to attack you with their fists, which will almost always result in their heads popping when they reach the gate.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Well done! You've finally tracked down Benny and recovered the Platinum Chip! Now all that's left is to deliver it to House and...wait, is that an NCR Trooper? Huh? The NCR Ambassador wants to talk to you? Well, ok, but...Oh, Crap!, Vulpes Inculta?! Wait, he's not hostile, but he says Caesar wants to talk to you. And what's with the Securitron with the goofy face in Benny's suite who seems to want to talk to you...?

Z

• Zeerust: Obviously. Due to limitations to the number of variations to wall textures and such, pretty much every location look like a dilapidated wreck with mildewed walls and moth-eaten mattresses (even in supposedly swanky locations like the casinos that are rolling in money). It seems that humanity somehow managed to lose the secret to making paint and carpets during the apocalypse.
• Zombie Apocalypse:
  • Vault 22: turns out, they were using a fungus that infected vermin and pests and forced it to kill its own before dying, as pest control. Unfortunately, it spread to the human population.
  • And Vault 34, a vault that, only a short time ago, experienced a critical reactor leak, turning more than half the residents into feral ghouls and promptly killed anyone who wasn't killed by the radiation or haven't already left to the Nellis Air Force Base.
  • Camp Searchlight and the areas around after the Legion detonates a dirty bomb in the middle of town, turning the NCR garrison into ferals. Save for one soldier.
  • The Ghost People were all residents or guests in the area of the Sierra Madre Casino. It turns out those Hazmat suits worked too well...
  • The Marked Men are what's left of the Legionaries and Troopers who were stationed in the Divide. They changed.
  • The Trauma Harnesses in Old World Blues basically take dead people and have them run around trying to kill you.

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