Red Dead Redemption 2 / Tropes D to L

Main Page | A-C | D-L | M-Z | Online

---

D

• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • While the controls are similar enough to the first game that this is averted within the series itself, chances are you'll be trying to talk back to NPC in other games.
  • For a different but similar Rockstar title, the default button to enter a car in Grand Theft Auto V is instead the default auto-melee button in this game. You might punch your horse quite a few times. Also, aiming down the sights while in first-person mode is done by pressing Down on the D-pad instead of clicking in the right thumbstick (since clicking on the right thumbstick in this game activates Dead Eye).
• Dark Reprise: There are a few different remixes of "Unshaken" that can play during the ending.
  • If Arthur decides to go back for the money and get revenge on Dutch and Micah instead of leave with John, a threatening, bass-y, hip hop-esque beat, called "Mountain Finale", plays as he makes his way back in High Honor mode. The start of the song contains a snippet of Nas vocals. Rather than the humble, questioning tone of the original version of "Unshaken", they're far more aggressive and confident:
  I rise to the top
  I cannot be stopped
  I stand
  Unshaken
  • Regardless of ending choice, depending on Arthur's honor at the end of the story, a version of "Unshaken", called "Crash of Worlds" by Rocco DeLuca, either with an angelic, harmonic choir (high honor) or an ethereal, spooky instrumentation and a deep, bass-y choir (low honor) plays at the very end of the mission.
• Dated History: Invoked deliberately in one camp interaction, where Hosea recounts his very brief stage career and describes himself performing in The Revenger's Tragedy, by Tourneur. At the time this would've been completely accurate and common knowledge, but more modern assessments beginning in 1923 have called Cyril Tourneur's authorship into question and offered Thomas Middleton as an alternate source.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Mary's father despised Arthur and he's a big part of why they broke up. As seen during Mary's mission in Saint Denis, her father is a broke, drunken lout who doesn't have room to talk. You can find his body with no explanation in New Austin laying in the middle of the road just past the church outside Armadillo in the epilogue.
• A Day in the Limelight: Companion missions allow you to interact one-on-one with your fellow gang mates. You get to learn about their pasts, their motivations, and get a better look at their personalities.
• Death by Irony: Arthur draws beautiful sketches of places and wildlife in his journal, to the point where his fellow gang member remark upon his artistic ability. What kills him in the end isn’t his violent lifestyle, but tuberculosis. How is that ironic? TB was also historically known as ‘The Artist’s Disease’ due to a widespread belief was that tuberculosis assisted artistic talent, as witness the number of great artists who were affected. Wikipedia has an article about it here.
• Death by Racism:
  • Each of the KKK random encounters end in this fashion, even if you don't involve yourself. In one, several members accidentally set themselves on fire trying to light a cross. In another, the cross falls, killing two of them.
  • The racist eugenicist in Saint Denis is so hated by the rest of the town that you can kill him in broad daylight without repercussions.
  • In the mission The Iniquities of Histories, after recovering the items from the foreclosed home of Jeremiah Compson who turns out to have been a former slave catcher, you can kill him on the spot and actually gain honor.
  • The Braithwaite stablehand and riverboat pit boss in Horse Flesh for Dinner and A Fine Night of Debauchery both refer to Javier as a "greaser" and are subsequently killed by Arthur. Though if you wish, you can subdue the stablehand with a lasso and steal the horses.
• Death by Woman Scorned: When you visit Robard Farm, you can examine the bloodied corpses of a husband-wife couple inside the house, and if you follow the Trail of Blood outside, it will lead to the corpse of another woman holding a machete and a revolver, with a letter she had on her. When you read it, it explains that the husband, Claude, was telling the girlfriend, Annette, to leave because his wife Harriet wanted to give him a second chance at life due to his being caught in a Love Triangle adultery with Annette. It seemed that the latter wouldn't take his advances sitting down and slaughtered them both with the machete in retaliation before heading back outside and turning the gun on herself.
• Death of a Child: The Old West is a brutal place, and the young are not spared. Jack is the only kid in the whole story who doesn't have even a remote chance of being killed.
  • Two different abandoned cabins can be found with children's bodies inside. Clawson's Rest, northwest of Valentine, tells the story of a mother who set out to recover the family's stolen money and never returned, while her sons, instructed not to leave or let anyone inside, starved to death; Osman's Grove, near Emerald Ranch, has an entire family dead of smoke inhalation from a broken stovepipe, who became trapped inside and suffocated.
  • A random encounter in Saint Denis will have Arthur teased by street urchins, then swarmed, mugged, and knocked to the ground if he runs after them. When they approach him, there is an option to whip out your gun and blow them away just like any other robbery, but chances are that Arthur won't catch them all, and now he's trapped in a narrow back alley with the police investigating the multiple child murders just reported.
  • Arthur had a young son, Isaac, that was killed in a petty robbery with his mother while he was away riding with the gang. It haunts him, to the point that he never speaks of the two, and only confesses his story to Rains Fall after a long and painful journey of self-reflection.
• Death Equals Redemption: Arthur at the end of the main story in High Honor and you help John in Low Honor. Terminally ill from tuberculosis already, he decides to spend his last days making amends and helping the truly deserving, eventually giving his life to help John Marston escape from their vengeful former comrades.
• Death Mountain: The final quarter of the "Red Dead Redemption" mission if you go with John involves Ross and the Pinkertons attacking you on the mountain while you're trying to escort John out to safety. Once the Pinkertons are defeated, Micah launches an attack on you, and you have to fistfight your way to a draw. And in the ending, if he doesn't kill you already as long as you're in High Honor mode, the tuberculosis definitely will while you're watching the sunrise.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Crossing over with Cherry Tapping, this can be performed using the Varmint Rifle. It holds 14 rounds and can be fired quickly thanks to its pump action. Unless you're scoring head shots, it will take about half that magazine in order to bring down human opponents.
• Death Seeker: As revealed in the Epilogue, Sadie. She admits that she no longer cares whether she lives or dies, and keeps throwing herself into dangerous situations as a bounty hunter as a result.
• Decade Dissonance: Larger cities like Saint Denis and Blackwater are much more advanced than more rural towns like Valentine and Rhodes, which seem to be stuck about 20-30 years in the past.
• Decapitation Presentation: Done in Chapter 4 by the O'Driscolls with Kieran immediately before launching an assault on Shady Bell.
• Deceptive Disciple: Micah for Dutch. In the later chapters, his kissing up to Dutch makes him Dutch's new #2. In reality, he's planning to sell the gang out to the Pinkertons.
• Deconstruction: The outlaw life is not as fun and romantic as it seems.
  • Dutch's Idiot Hero mentality of laying low, making a big score and then leaving only gets the gang deeper and deeper into shit, and due to their destructive nature they chronically draw attention to themselves. All their efforts to lie low fail, pushing them further and further from their destination. In the end, they fail to get anywhere even remotely close to their goal.
    • As mentioned before, Dutch is a terrible leader: he may be charming and charismatic, but his poor decision-making skills combined with his Sanity Slippage eventually lead to all gang members either dying or abandoning him.
  • Also mentioned above, Dutch's whole "one big score" mentality is revealed to be woefully unworkable. The gang simply cannot make make enough money in just one job to provide for twenty-plus people, not to mention seeing their passage out of the country and set up properly in a new one. Dutch seems somewhat aware of this, but his thinking never advances beyond "just keep pulling off heists", none of which make even close to what they need, so they're trapped in the same futile cycle.
  • The West doesn't give a damn if you're a main character or not. One of the gang members, Sean, is unceremoniously sniped in an ambush. By the end Kieran, Lenny, Hosea, and even Arthur have bitten the dust. Of course, it's keeping to the themes of the first game, where John and Dutch bite it.
  • Many of the gang's members have various amounts of Hidden Depths they could use to live normally or even gain wealth, but are buried by their criminal lifestyle. For a few examples, Javier knows a surprising amount about fishing and can handle a guitar really well, while Arthur and Mary-Beth can do wonders if given a pen and paper.
    • In an extension of that, the game continues its deconstruction of the first one's themes of change and moving on. John doesn't have any extra skills or hobbies and has no passion for menial work - what's really valuable about him is his gunslinging, which also repeatedly endangers Abigail and Jack. It's made abundantly clear that he abandons his old ways mostly out of love for his family and a sense of debt towards Arthur.
  • The concept of open-world games is played with in the epilogue and it even ties into the original Redemption. The gameplay and activities remain mostly unchanged but with one big difference; John has a kid he should be raising. It's established in 1 that John hasn't spent that much time with his family and has had a habit of just disappearing for long periods of time. The activities Beecher's Hope offers are menial chores, encouraging the player to explore the world and participate in some of the dozens of available activities. As a result, every time you leave the ranch to do something more interesting than milking cows and shovelling manure, you're accidentally screwing up Jack's psyche by being a Disappeared Dad, unless of course you return to them after completing missions.
  • Chapter 3 is a deconstruction of the Playing Both Sides plot. Hosea and Dutch both write off the Grays and the Braithwaites as dumb hicks who won't catch on to their attempt to play them off against each other to let them get at a rumored fortune of Civil War gold. Unfortunately for them, neither family is that stupid or blinded by their mutual hate for one another, and take notice when the same group of strangers show up to cause trouble for both families.
  • In the first game, Herbert Moon's bigotry was mostly Played for Laughs. However, in this game, it's shown as causing harm to himself and other around him. When John meets with him in the epilogue, he can find a letter showing that Moon ruined his relationship with daughter after she decides to marry a Jewish man. Of course, he doesn't care that he ruined the relationship one single bit.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype:
  • Sadie becomes one of the typical Action Girl. Her violent nature is a consequence of some serious emotional trauma (it's heavily implied that the O'Driscolls raped her after killing her husband), with the terminally-ill Arthur outright stating that she and him are "more ghosts than people." It eventually reaches the point that she tells John in the epilogue that she seeks out dangerous situations because she wants to die. She gets a bit better by the final mission and end credits, where she decides to leave for South America and find some measure of peace.
  • Arthur Morgan of the Villain Protagonist from your typical Wide-Open Sandbox. Once again, Rockstar Games shows us, as in Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V, how depressing the life of our Villain Protagonist could be from their respective context. Sure, he may not have had a choice in the beginning, but his acceptance of being the "bad guy" leaves him feeling pretty shitty about himself. Reading his journals reveals that he is also under a lot of stress and that he feels that he can't help prevent everything from spiraling out of control. After he finds out he's dying, then he's wracked with guilt; desperate to make what amends he can, having realized that all he's done has not been worth it. The final nail in the coffin is if the player chooses to help John and has good karma, his last words will be "I tried. In the end... I did." Arthur may be a killing machine with over dozens, perhaps hundreds of kills to his name, but the game goes to great lengths to detail how toxic and harmful living a life of constant conflict is for anybody. Even if you're a particularly nasty player, not in any way is Arthur's lifestyle treated as something awesome. As a result, he dies as he lived: fighting petty, pathetic criminals who are worse than him.
• Deep South:
  • Scarlett Meadows, a county of mixed hills and bayous that is run by two inbred clans who hate each other's guts. Still marked by the Civil War, it is a place where lingering traces of the slave trade can be found.
  • The state of Lemoyne in general, which takes heavy cues from Louisiana, complete with its own version of New Orleans, the city of Saint Denis.
• Delayed Diagnosis: Arthur contracts tuberculosis during the mission "Money Lending and Other Sins", but isn't officially diagnosed until near the end of the game and ultimately passes away from his illness.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Just like the first game, the setting of II shows how different people's attitudes in the past were.
  • Racism is still prevalent during this time; anyone who is non-white is treated with hatred or seen as a savage that needs to be controlled or put down.
  • The Women's Suffrage movement is mocked by most men, who think that giving women the right to vote is absurd.
  • An optional series of missions has Arthur assisting an inventor of a prototype electric chair, which he claims is a "humane" method of execution. When it finally comes time to demonstrate the device, it turns out to be anything but.
  • As related to the above, the death penalty is very liberally used throughout the game which is in stark contrast to today, especially outside the US. Today, it's legal in 28 states and still practiced in 17 of those. The U.S. is one of the few developed countries that still has it. Executions haven’t been done regularly by the federal government since the Johnson administration, although the Trump administration has brought it back.
  • Arthur is out of the norm for the time period by unequivocally treating every woman he comes across as an equal and with respect. He can tell the girls at camp that he thinks that men and women are equally awful. He even says in his journal that he doesn't like when men treat the women in their lives as objects without seeing them as their own people (specifically in the context about Mary's dad). He's also disgusted when Micah says in Chapter 4 that the girls owe the guys sex because all they do is sit around at camp all day. Arthur says they help and that they don't owe anyone anything.
  • There are obstacles to various romantic relationships in the game that wouldn't really exist today. One of them is Arthur and Mary's Inter-Class Romance. Since Mary comes from money and would have no way to provide for herself should something happen to him, she doesn't have the luxury of marrying for love and marries someone that's more "suitable". Nowadays a rich woman like Mary would have a college degree and the legal protection to not to have to listen to her dad. Another type of romantic obstacle that wouldn't exist today is the stigma against interracial relationships. No one in the gang really has a problem with Lenny (who's black) having a crush on Jenny (who judging by Arthur's drawing of her was white) but it's implied that Hosea doesn't really mean that it wouldn't have worked out between them because of their similar names. It's more the fact that society wouldn't accept them. They wouldn't have been able to get legally married in a good chunk of the country (or even have sex in some places) as Loving vs Virginia , which repealed all anti-miscegenation laws, wasn't decided until 1967. In Manzanita Post, you can come across a Norwegian settlement group who fled to the U.S. because they brutally killed an interracial couple (Morrocan husband, Norwegian wife) and their child. The picture of said couple has "unclean" scribbled on the back of it. There's also what's implied to be Bill's closeted homosexuality. Arthur says in his journal that he doesn't care what secret Bill is hiding but there was no way for him to be who he was until the 1990s at the very earliest as the Clinton Administration was the first explicitly pro-gay administration. The Supreme Court didn't overrule the state and federal laws prohibiting same-sex sexual relationships until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.
  • This game also pulls no punches in showing how hard women had it in a time in which they were still considered property/second-class citizens. They’re dependent on men and have very few opportunities to earn money (and one of them is prostitution). Abigail, in particular, is an absolutely desperate situation at the beginning of the game. She’s a young single mom who can’t read or write, John doesn’t want to take responsibility for her and Jack, and she was a prostitute in the past. This is also a time before reliable birth control and legal, safe abortion so if she were to get pregnant again, she’d be even further up the creek without a paddle. Luckily she’s got the rest of the gang to look out for her and Arthur goes out of his way to help her and Jack but if something had happened to them before John got his act together, she’d be in an even worse situation. She’d likely have to go back to being a prostitute or live on the streets. Mrs. Downes is also forced to be a prostitute after Thomas dies and she’s got a son that’s old enough to work and help out. Mary had to marry a man she didn’t love because she couldn’t risk marrying Arthur (of whom her dad doesn’t approve) because if something happened to him, she couldn’t support herself. Women still can’t vote and men regularly mock them for wanting to.
• Denser and Wackier: While the story is just as serious as the first game's (if not even more so), the stranger quests are less so. In 1, most of the strangers were relatively normal, with a few exceptions. ^note Such as the man who is in love with his horse and the old man who believed his wife's corpse was still alive Here, the bunch you'll meet consists of, for example, a traveling freak show (which is a tweaked version of one cut from I), a Mad Scientist, a very camp plant collector, and two brothers who willingly subject themselves to violence and life-threatening acts to win over a girl they both like. The most insane of the missions may just be a male animal tamer who disguises himself as a woman because, he (she?) believes that no-one wants to see a man tame animals. Note that he didn't even bother to shave his large mustache. The animals in question are just normal animals painted to resemble exotic animals. Well, except for the lion.
• Developer's Foresight: See the series' page.
• Developing Doomed Characters: Foregone Conclusion tells us the gang will fall apart, but the game takes its time before it starts to happen — out of the 8 chapters the game has, the Point of No Return happens at the end of chapter 4.
• Dialogue Tree: Arthur can chat with any NPC by aiming at them (with or without a gun on his hand). When locked on to an NPC, the game displays a list of possible interactions, such as "Defuse", which allows you to stop potential fights before they even start, "Antagonize" which can be used to start fights, and a few others others. The available options and the dialogue itself are affected by various factors, such as the current situation, location, NPC alignment, whether Arthur's gun is holstered or not, and even his appearance. Unlike in most examples, the system is omnipresent and doesn't stop the gameplay. The system is practically identical to the one Rockstar used in their previous game Bully.
• Died Standing Up:
  • A particular glitch can cause this in both NPCs and animals. There are a number of ways to trigger it, but the most common seems to happen when making a kill shot from an extreme distance. When you get close to your target, they'll be dead but still standing. In the case of a few animals, such as mountain sheep, they may have a stream of blood pouring out of them continuously until you interact with the carcass.
  • In the spirit of the trope, given the game's physics engine, NPCs can be killed while sitting in chairs or leaning up against objects.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • You can get the game's best saddle (speed-wise, at least. also includes stirrup bonuses) as soon as you unlock free roam in chapter 2... and you only need to find a perfect panther from one of their few spawn points, make a clean kill, take the skin to a trapper before it starts to rot, and pay a small fee.
  • The Legend of the East satchel takes about six hours to get all of the skins you need but it's sure worth the work. Getting a perfect panther pelt in particular can be extremely frustrating, they only spawn in two locations in the original map (one southeast of the Braithwaite estate, another east of Lagras) and one spawns only at night. You could be setting up camp to sleep until the evening for a month in the real world before you get a perfect one to spawn but once you get it, you'll be able to carry 99 of everything which is extremely helpful.
• Dime Novel: Several can be found in camp and throughout the world, featuring an expy of Sherlock Holmes (Aldous Filson) and a heavily fictionalized Otis Miller, among others. They are, to put it bluntly, not even close to great literature, but Jack and Hosea both seem to like them, and it's not like the trashy romance hardcovers or pretentious philosophy tomes that Mary-Beth and Dutch read are any better.
• Dire Beast: The Legendary animals are all larger and more powerful versions of their standard brethren. The one that stands out the most in this regard is the Legendary Bull Gator, an alligator that's close to 40 feet long, over three times the size of the game's other, more realistic gators.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • You can find an "Arabian", an elite horse with the game's highest stats from a spawn point on the northwestern point of Lake Isabella. It may take a few visits to spawn, but you can obtain one as early as Chapter 2 once the stables unlock in one of the first story missions. It can be recognized from its snow white coat and for being pretty much the only horse that spawns on the freezing climate. Its skittishness is its biggest downside, but you won't find a comparible horse to replace it with for several chapters.
  • Several powerful guns can be acquired early in Chapter 2 by performing the right side quests:
    • The Schofield Revolver can be obtained early by robbing the back room of the Valentine Doctor. It has a higher damage than the default Cattleman which, if coupled with a few upgrades at the gunsmith and Express ammo, can turn it into a Hand Cannon. This mini-mission can completed multiple times, meaning you can dual wield them. There aren't many encounters in the first couple of chapters that will be serious threats with a pair of these.
    • There are three unique handguns acquired during "The Noblest of Men, and a Woman" side-quest available at the Valentine saloon in Chapter 2. While the revolvers are decent upgrades on the default Cattleman, Billy Midnight's pistol in particular is a unique Mauser (normally not available for purchase until Chapter 4) which trades power for a superior rate of fire. Since headshots with any gun will kill human enemies in a single hit, it makes for a devastating gun to use coupled with Deadeye.
    • In camp during Chapter 2, Javier may offer the optional mission "The First Shall Be Last". Completing it allows you to pick up the Pump Shotgun which is a major upgrade to the basic Double-Barreled Shotgun you start with in terms of ammo capacity and rate of fire. Give it a barrel upgrade to increase its range, load it up with slugs, and few enemies will stand a chance for several chapters. (If the mission doesn't show up, you can simply head north to Chez Porter and kill the small gang living there. Once they're gone, the gun will be in a case in the house's attic.)
    • The Semi-Auto Shotgun, normally only available in Chapter 4, can be acquired as early as Chapter 2 by heading to Watson's Cabin in West Elizabeth and looting it from the basement. It alone makes many enemy encounters ridiculously easy, particularly O'Driscoll ambushes which combined with Dead Eye tend to end in seconds.
    • In similar manner to the Schofield that can be acquired by robbing the Valentine doctor's office, the gunsmith in Rhodes can be robbed for a Lancaster repeater. Unlike Valentine however, there are no criminals hiding out in his basement, so just hogtieing the gunsmith or killing him quietly (which you may want to, given the kidnapped teenager in a sailor suit he keeps there as well) will let you walk out of the gunsmith without a single fear of the law coming after you.
    • By taking advantage of some scripted events, you can acquire firearm upgrades from certain enemies. If you acquire a bounty and then wait in that state, bounty hunters may come after you who carry Rolling Block Rifles, a gun locked at the gunsmith until the end of Chapter 2. If you complete a bounty mission and then attend the subsequent hanging, the police guards present may spawn with Bolt-Action Rifles. If you don't mind the bounty, you can kill one and take the gun, which you otherwise can't acquire until later in Chapter 3.
  • The Stage Coach Fence at Emerald Ranch becomes available early in Chapter 2. Once unlocked, it can become an easy source of nuke-level money. Simply steal stage coaches and bring them to the fence for an easy $15-$40 a pop. Emerald Ranch itself is within sight of several crossroads that are traversed frequently by stage coaches. Once you learn the most valuable/least risky wagons to look for (2+ horses, nice looking wagons, single occupant), you can easily haul in $400+ per real life hour. It's more than enough to upgrade every weapon you have available, max out your ammo, spoil your horse(s), and upgrade your camp with ease.
  • Hunting is also a very easy source of good money/updating right off the bat if you know how to do it right. In one of the first missions available in Chapter 2, the legendary animals become available. If you hunt the legendary buck just north of Strawberry, you can craft a trinket at the fence (which becomes available a bit later) that turns some two-star animal pelts into three-star upon skinning. The medium and large sized animals can be lassoed and stabbed which guarantees a perfect pelt/carcass. Deer in particular are all over the map and are very easy to find, kill, and sell . A perfect deer carcass will fetch you $10 at the butcher/trapper and you can easily do three or four of them in the span of ten real life minutes. You can also skin them to give to Pearson who can use them to upgrade your satchel. You can get the Legend of the East satchel (which by most accounts takes about six hours of outside work to get) that holds 99 of every item not even halfway through Chapter 2 if you want. Though it costs $225 to get the leatherworking tools to update your satchel which can be hard that early on in the game.
  • There's a gold bar, worth a whopping $500, literally just down the hill from the first camp in Horseshoe Overlook. You can get it as soon as the map opens up and while you won't be able to sell it until the fence opens up a bit later, it's still a very healthy sum that early in the story. If you don't feel like waiting to fence it, it can be donated to the camp right away and will cover quite a few camp upgrades including ammo, medicine, and food that is free to take.
  • As mentioned above under Difficult, but Awesome, you can get the game's most stamina/speed/acceleration efficient saddle very early on if you can pull it off.
  • There are three treasure map "chains" in the game, and the third and last one of each gives you a few gold bars. Once you find them all, you have a total of 11 gold bars, each worth 500$. If you know where every map and treasure is, you can complete all three chains as soon as free roam opens up. With the pre-order DLC map chain^note Just one map and a riddle after that you can find 4 more, rising the total to 15 Gold bars, giving you a free 7500 dollars. In addition, finding all 9 treasures in the main game also completes the explorer challenges, allowing you to buy a set of equipment that boosts your max health from any trapper. Memorizing each location makes repeat playthroughs a breeze as far as money is concerned, and even the camp upgrades can be covered with around 4-5 bars.
• Disguised in Drag: The provocative French artist Charles Châtenay goes undercover in incredibly unconvincing drag — the chest hair and beard are a bit of a giveaway — to flee town after making enemies of practically the entire population of Saint Denis.
• Disposing of a Body: You can cover up murders by hiding the body where passers-by will be less likely to see it. Dumping them in the wilderness or into bodies of water are good options. See also: Fed to Pigs.
• Disproportionate Restitution: Arthur may come across an enraged widow in Valentine who curses at him for killing her husband before bursting into tears. He can choose to give her $2, which she will either reject or begrudgingly accept.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Strangers are very quick to resort to violence over mild slights and accidents, such as lingering too long in their wilderness camp or bumping into them.
• Distressed Dude: At different points, you'll rescue Sean, Bill, and John from situations like this. You'll need to escape from such a situation as Arthur after he's captured by the O'Driscolls and again in Guarma.
  • Arthur isn't exactly above getting rescued himself as Charles, Eagle Flies, and Abigail can attest.
• Does Not Like Men: Saint Denis's Suffragette, Dorothea Wicklow. As she says:
  Once women get the vote, the whole country will stop making such a pig's ear of everything! There'll be no more wars, no hunger, no stupidity! We'll elect a woman president, within the first ten years, of course, men are such judgmental prigs, you need us women to help straighten you out! Okay? With us helping, I'm not saying there won't be trouble, I just think we'll do a better job of things.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: If Arthur is played honorably through and maintains his maximum honor by the final part of Chapter 6 (aptly titled "Red Dead Redemption"), then his final ride, with "That's the Way It Is" playing beautifully in the background, may come across as some kind of college graduation ceremony, with people complimenting on his best behavior as if he were graduating from morality school summa cum laude ("with highest praise"), even though he has only a short time before he dies from TB anyway.
• The Don: Angelo Bronte is the mafia-esque crime lord of Saint Denis, right up to having the Saint Denis police in his pocket. He doesn't take too kindly to another crime boss, Dutch, setting up shop so close to his town and tries to have him killed in a set-up train station robbery. Dutch repays in kind later, having Bronte kidnapped before drowning him and feeding him to gators.
• Doomed by Canon:
  • What's left of the Van der Linde gang is destined to fall apart after a failed robbery. A former member, John Marston, will be forced to hunt down other former members afterward.
  • Tumbleweed, the sole bright spot in the chaos that is New Austin, is destined to lie in ruins by 1911. By contrast however, plague ridden Armadillo will have recovered and become a relatively stable place to live at.
• Don't Go in the Woods: Tall Trees, the aptly-named coniferous forest west of Blackwater, is an absolute death trap. It's used as a home base by the Skinner Brothers, a sadistic gang of ruthless psychopaths that loves to abduct travelers, strip them naked, torture them horribly and flay them alive before leaving their carcasses in massive, bloody piles by the side of the road. Especially in the early stages of the epilogue, it's nigh-impossible to ride through these woods without stumbling upon such grotesque horrors, or being attacked by the Skinners yourself. By 1911 the Skinners seem to have disbanded or moved away, as in the original game there's nothing particularly dangerous in Tall Trees but the occasional bear or wolf.
• Downer Beginning: The story starts with the gang on the run in the mountains during a blizzard after a botched job in Blackwater. They can't get to their stash of money, several gang members are dead with one captured, they're low on food, and they have the law hot on their tails.
• Dramatic Gun Cock:
  • When a gun is aimed for the first time after drawing or reloading it, it is almost always accompanied by the action being cycled to chamber the first round, or the hammer being cocked in the case of revolvers and non-repeating long guns. Some guns may not exhibit this trope in one manner or the other, or rarely, in neither manner.^Exceptions All the self-loading pistols don't exhibit this, as does the Browning Auto-5 (which doesn't have chambering animations, period). The Rolling Block and Trapdoor Springfield rifles don't exhibit this after reloading as their both weapons' reload animations begin with the hammer being cocked as to allow the breechblock or trapdoor (respectively) to be opened in order to replace the spent case with a fresh round.
  • In addition, you're able to invoke this at will during standard gameplay with said weaponry that allows for it. For example, you can shoot someone through the head, pause for a moment, then cock your gun. Certain weapons, like pump-action guns and repeater rifles, even let you pause halfway through the motion by holding the trigger button, then releasing it to finish the animation.
  • Susan Grimshaw does this after shooting Molly O-Shea through the stomach with a shotgun for betraying the gang. Even if it turns out she hadn't betrayed them, and was instead just desperate for Dutch's attention.
• Dramatic Irony: Saint Denis Mayor Lemieux thinks learning will make man "put down his guns, and start living a life of relentless purity" in 50 years. Well, no, the world just used that learning to make bigger and better guns.
• Dramatis Personae: Not present in the game itself, but the game's credits page on its website lists the cast this way, with a classical theatre-style title for every character.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Sean is unceremoniously killed with a head shot not a minute into a main story mission.
  • Kieran is captured off screen and only a single gang member mentions his absence before his beheaded body rides into camp immediately prior to an O'Driscoll attack.
  • Lenny is simply shot dead during a botched heist. No build up, no sad last words, not even a cutscene, just...shot dead.
• Drugs Are Bad: Averted on two levels. In terms of the narrative, Deliberate Values Dissonance is at play. During the time period of the game, drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco were extremely common. Harder drugs, like cocaine, were often prescribed medicinally. In-game, all of the drugs are quite useful. Alcohol can refill your bars and cores, with the exact effects depending on the type of alcohol. Moonshine in particular temporarily maxes out and fortifies your health bar, making it a great item to take right before a big fight. Smoked tobacco refills your Deadeye core at the cost of some slight stamina, while chewing tobacco temporarily maxes out and fortifies your Deadeye bar making it extremely useful. Cocaine gum is another consumable which temporarily maxes out and fortifies your stamina bar.
• Dual Wielding:
  • Once you get the off-hand pistol holder, you can do this with handguns. It potentially doubles the amount of shots you can fire before reloading, but reloading is then slower as a result.
  • Dutch and Micah are both notable dual-wielders. Dutch uses a custom pair of Schofield Revolvers while Micah uses a custom pair of Double-Action Revolvers.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Arthur is the self-described "workhorse" of the Van der Linde gang, and it comes with the lack of respect one would expect. He is apparently the only gang member contributing to the camp food supply, and missing even a single day draws negative comments from Pearson and Ms. Grimshaw. Want to upgrade the camp? Arthur will be providing 90% of the necessary funds. Someone owes the gang money? Arthur collects. Another gang member needs some extra muscle on a mission? Yep, Arthur. Something goes wrong on that mission? Must be Arthur's fault.
• Duel to the Death:
  • A possible encounter, most often in saloons, involves bumping into an ornery, drunken patron who will then challenge you to a duel. If you accept, you can meet them outside for the duel.
  • With one exception, all of the legendary gunslingers in the related side mission meet their fate with you in this fashion.
• Dump Stat: Stamina. It really only drains when sprinting or swimming, and given the amount of time you'll spend on horseback, you won't be draining it often. Most players don't think twice when using consumables such as alcohol or tobacco products which lower your stamina while increasing your health or Dead Eye. Additionally, many players will fatten up the player character which increases health at the cost of stamina, since being able to take a couple more bullets is significantly more valuable than being able to sprint or swim for a longer distance.
• Dwindling Party:
  • The Van der Linde gang. Four are mentioned as dead or dying as a result of the Blackwater fiasco and subsequent escape before the game even starts. By the end of the game, Sean, Kieran, Hosea, Lenny, Molly, Susan, Micah, and even Arthur himself lie dead. Additionally, the epilogue confirms that Strauss was captured by the Pinkertons shortly after Arthur kicked him out of camp and died in custody offscreen while Karen disappeared from the public eye and her status is officially unknown, with Tilly speculating that she probably drank herself to death.
  • In a mission specific example, the gang members who set out to rob the Saint Denis bank experience this during that mission and those immediately after. Hosea and Lenny are killed, Abigail flees, John is captured, and Charles leaves the group in order to draw off some Pinkertons. Of the five who escape on the ship to Guarma, Javier is wounded and captured there, leaving the foursome of Dutch, Bill, Micah, and Arthur.
• Dying Town: Tumbleweed was crippled when the railroad was rerouted through nearby Armadillo instead, then suffered bandit raids and a cholera outbreak. As seen in I, it would become completely abandoned a few years later.
• Dysfunction Junction: Pretty much the entire Van der Linde gang. There isn't a single member who hasn't been subjected to some sort of terrible loss or abuse before falling in with the gang.

E

• Eager Rookie: Lenny has elements of this. He's only 19 and one of the most junior members of the gang, but seeks to prove himself. He initiates dangerous missions including the assault on the Lemoyne Raiders HQ to steal a weapons shipment and a stagecoach robbery which is actually a trap set by federal marshals. Arthur seems to take Lenny under his wing and he is really coming along, having greatly assisted during the botched trolley station robbery before he is gunned down without warning during the failed Saint Denis bank robbery.
• Early Game Hell: If you're looking to do things outside of the main mission, Chapter 2 becomes this. Unless you play at least some of the main mission to unlock things, you're stuck with a very limited selection of weapons (not ideal for forays into areas with predators or possible rival gang ambushes), certain items are locked (like the Fishing Rod), and certain vendors (like the wagon and horse fences) are not available. It is also before the game's Money for Nothing comes into play, so you're often perpetually broke unless you really go out of your way. Many guides recommend playing up to the end of Chapter 2 or even into Chapter 3 before venturing deeply into the game's side content as it will be much easier once you've unlocked a greater variety of weapons and items.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Due to the Prequel nature of the game, it is a Foregone Conclusion that the Van der Linde gang will break up through both internal strife and the constant pursuit of the authorities. However the epilogue reveals that Charles, Mary-Beth, Tilly, Pearson, Swanson, and Sadie were able to settle down and have satisfying lives afterwards. Charles moved to Canada and raised a family, Mary-Beth became a prolific author, Tilly married a successful lawyer in Saint Denis, Pearson got married to a woman named Edith and took over the General Store in Rhodes, Swanson moved to New York and became a preacher, and Sadie became a Bounty Hunter and eventually decided to move to South America to pursue a more peaceful life. Also, Edith and Archie Downes if Arthur chooses to help them in the final chapters; they take his money and invest it to become the owners of a successful golf course.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • At several points during the main story, you'll shoot up entire towns and gun down dozens of lawmen. You will be wanted "Dead or Alive" afterward, but you can simply pay off your bounty at any post office with no consequences once you do. Stroll right back into any of those towns and it's as if nothing happened at all.
  • The "Honor" system. Naturally, robbing and murdering outside of where it is required for main missions causes your Honor to drop. However, you can regain Honor, right up to maxing it out, with simple activities such as greeting townsfolk or doing some catch-and-release fishing.
  • In-Universe: Bill at one point complains how any time he screws up, he gets chewed out while Arthur's fuckups are "One of them things" and he faces very little criticism. Being Dutch's first protégé clearly has some benefits.
• Easter Egg: One of the random gamblers in Valentine is named Claude.
• Edible Collectible: There are two main categories of consumables - tonics and provisions. The former consists of a variety of items that restore health, stamina, or Dead Eye and are either store-bought or brewed by the player at a campfire. The latter consists mostly of actual food and drink, falling squarely into this trope, and consuming them increases one or two Cores, which govern the regeneration of the meter they're tied to. Fruits, vegetables and snacks restore the Health Core, coffee, chocolate and other stimulants restore the Stamina Core, and cigarettes, cigars and various types of alcohol restore the Dead Eye Core. Lastly, campfire-cooked meat restores all three Cores at once - the bigger the game, the bigger the recovery. Cores are always constantly draining, and while the player can't starve to death, having completely empty Cores often puts the player at a disadvantage.
• Emergency Weapon: Even if you expend every round of ammo and toss every throwable weapon, you will still have your trusty knife and lasso. The knife is the default melee weapon, and several unique knives can be acquired as well. It is quite useful for making stealth kills, and is used in cut scenes to skin animals and cut free hostages. Throwing knives are another option, and can be used in melee or, as the name implies, thrown to give you an option for ranged stealth kills if you don't want to take up a long gun slot with the bow.
• Encounter Bait: Somewhat literally with Predator and Herbivore Bait. Spread them on the ground, retreat to a a spot with a good view of the bait site, and wait as they attract animals.
• End of an Age: As with the first game, a major theme running through this prequel is how the outlaws of the "Old West" come to terms with the encroachment of law and order from the East making their way of life increasingly impossible. This theme is even more emphasized here than in the first game as it takes place during the Van Der Linde Gang's final months, being forced further and further eastward towards civilization.
• Enemy Chatter: If you remain undetected near groups of enemies, you can listen in on their conversations, which are fully scripted.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: Detected hostiles show up as red dots on your radar.
• The Enemy Weapons Are Better: Averted in most cases, as enemies will use lesser "worn" versions of guns you already have. However, in a select few cases, it is possible to acquire better weapons before they would normally unlock by getting them off of certain dead enemies. For example, one can acquire the Rolling Block Rifle from some bounty hunters who will come after you if you have a bounty. Another is that it is possible to acquire a Bolt Action Rifle early by completing bounty missions, attending the subsequent hanging of the outlaw, and then gunning down one of the police guards at the gallows who may be carrying one.
• Epic Fail: Several Stranger encounters end in this fashion. To note:
  • One such encounter involves two thieves attempting to open a stolen safe with dynamite. It goes off before they can get back, blowing them both up. (The door to the safe does come off, so you can help yourself to its contents.)
  • Another encounter is a group of KKK members attempting to set up a burning cross. However, the cross falls onto them, crushing and burning them to death.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: The Van der Linde gang is easily the most diverse in the game, including several minorities and women. This is in a setting with plenty of period appropriate racism and sexism portrayed.
• Escort Mission: A number of Stranger missions involve rescuing someone from hostiles (a rival gang, wild animals, etc.) during which they must survive in order to succeed. In a few cases, you may also need to give the rescuee a ride back to town.
• Eternally Pearly-White Teeth: Averted. While it varies from character to character, most have realistically yellow or brown teeth.
• Ethereal Choir: A reprise of "Unshaken" called "Crash of Worlds" plays in the background during Arthur's final moments leading up to his death; depending on his honor level, it can be either angelic or sinister.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Arthur keeps a picture of his deceased mother next to his bed. A low-honor Arthur plays this completely straight, while a high-honor Arthur downplays it (he is still an outlaw bandit after all).
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • The Van der Linde gang will gladly rob anything they can make a dollar on and isn't above killing anyone who gets in their way. But they take great offense to the Braithewaites kidnapping Jack. Cue the Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • As mentioned, the gang will kill if needed as part of their robberies, but Dutch frowns upon outright murder and claims (when confronted by Angelo Bronte) that they aren't murderers for hire. Arthur too gets several moments of this during some side missions, such as the one where the Saint Denis mayor asks Arthur to kill his former assistant.
  • Arthur writes in his journal after he and Hosea rob Seamus's cousin-in-law that robbing family is low even for him.
• Everybody Smokes: Standard for an "Old West" work. Countless characters throughout the game can be seen smoking. This even includes Arthur in some cutscenes.
• Every Scar Has a Story: John Marston gets his scars from being mauled by a pack of wolves during a scouting mission gone awry.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Bronte is accustomed to using his wealth to get what he wants. When he is captured by Dutch's gang, he tries to get out by offering money to anyone who kills Dutch and sets him free, He's stunned when none of them take up his offer, as he can't understand why anyone would pass up a chance to earn some dollars. Sadly, the events in the following two chapters show that they might have been better off taking the money.
• Evil Debt Collector: One of Arthur's roles in the gang. No matter how honorable you play Arthur as, the loan shark missions tend to be Kick the Dog moments for him. The biggest and most tragic example is when Arthur accidentally kills a sick debtor, forcing the victim's widow to pay off the debt in his stead. Eventually Arthur cannot stand the misery such predatory usury is causing, and forcibly ejects the gang's loan shark from the camp, threatening to kill him if he returns. Said debtor ends up giving Arthur fatal tuberculosis as a result of the incident, and Arthur is so disgusted with what he did that he views it as a Karmic Death.
• Evil Pays Better: If not better, then faster. Looting items from corpses often results in valuable junk, and robbing stores can give you more than many of the bounty hunting missions do. Stealing wagons, looting and robbing random civilians and/or robbing stores and trains for an entire day can get you a lot of cash for little work. However, you only get discounts if your honor is high enough, and getting caught means you'll be constantly harassed by bounty hunters until you A) spend some of your ill-gotten gains to pay off the bounty or B) surrender to the law and lose some of your money anyway.
• Exact Words:
  • Downplayed. Before release, Rockstar mentioned that the game world is open from the start. This is technically true; you can go to West Elizabeth before the game allows it, but you'll be faced by unlimited waves of Pinkertons that will hunt and gun you down. However, if you try to go to New Austin, you'll be killed by an invisible sniper. Every new area can be visited as soon as the prologue is over, though.
  • Several challenges can be completed much more easily if you take the wording literally. For example, some challenges require you to kill an enemy in a specific way, meaning you can't just kill some random NPC to fulfill it. However, it does not say that the enemy has to be a threat. You can tie up a rival gang member, drop them somewhere that makes it easy to complete the challenge, and then kill them while they are totally helpless. Bandit 10, which requires robbing five trains without getting caught, is a lot easier when you realize that "robbing" includes stealing a single item from the baggage car.
• Experienced Protagonist: Arthur is a veteran outlaw of the Wild West, third most senior in the gang behind only Dutch and Hosea, and is seen as a big brother/mentor figure by the more junior members, particularly Lenny and John.
• Exploding Barrels: Boxes of dynamite and barrels of moonshine will explode if shot.
• Exposed to the Elements: A new gameplay mechanic involves your cores draining if you aren't dressed appropriately for the various environments and weather conditions. Going into the snowy peaks of the West Grizzlies without heavy winter clothing is a bad idea, as is wearing said heavy clothes in the humid bayous of Lemoyne. It's advised to always keep an outfit each for cold and hot conditions on your horse.
• Extended Gameplay: Aside from the requisites of the Open World Sandbox genre like sidequests and other activities, the game features a rather extensive Epilogue sequence focusing on John Marston, who gets Promoted to Playable. Said Epilogue is a series of missions focusing around John and his family trying to go straight, and it ends with them building Beecher's Hope and paying it off with the money lifted from the Blackwater job. Of note is the sheer length of this part, as it technically accounts for 1/4th of the entire game. After the main storyline has been completed, the player is allowed to wander the world as John, or help take care of Beecher's Hope by doing chores.
• Extremely Short Timespan:
  • The main story of the game takes place over a few months in 1899. You can, of course, take quite a bit more time than that to actually complete the story in-game, with potentially hundreds of days passing.
  • Arthur contracts tuberculosis and dies of it in a matter of weeks. Although there was no effective treatment for TB in 1899 other than rest in a dry climate, "consumption" nonetheless was a disease which typically, in its latency period, took years slowly to consume its victims. Although it's possible that Arthur unwittingly chose to hasten the TB progression with his smoking, drinking beer, and getting beaten by physical trauma and malnutrition, all of which are risk factors for TB.

F

• Face Death with Dignity: Arthur in a high Honor ending, whether he stays with John or goes back for the money, is completely at peace as he passes away watching the rising sun.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • The ambient challenges, as many of them also fall under Luck-Based Mission. While the gambler challenges are the most infamous as some are entirely luck-based, there are some in the other challenge branches as well. Hunting perfect pelts also relies on this way too much, as you not only have to find the animal, there's a chance they are already damaged once you do, and then you have to hope you hit the hitbox of the animal's weak spot and get a one hit kill. All of these are affected by luck to at least some degree.
  • Several missions impose limits on the players that aren't readily apparent. Missions in which you must catch up to someone on a horse are particularly blatant, especially if you've gone out of your way to acquire a particularly fast horse. "The New South", the first mission of Chapter 3, requires Arthur to chase down some escaped convicts on a train. It is very apparent that your horse is not moving at maximum speed throughout most of the mission, allowing the convicts' scripted actions to take place. When chasing someone on a horse, theirs will be much faster during the mission than in free roam gameplay. It's groan-inducing when you can't catch someone on a basic Tennessee Walker while riding your fully upgraded, fully bonded Arabian with an enhanced saddle.
• Family of Choice:
  • The Van der Linde Gang is this for Arthur, John and rest of the members, under the charismatic Dutch and Cool Old Guy Hosea. The gang has varied members from all areas and even from various backgrounds, Native American, African-American, Irish, homosexual, even Ax-Crazy members, you name it, as Dutch didn't tolerate any form of discrimination or racism against his 'family'. It was also why many people willingly followed Dutch in the game.
  • That said, the Van der Linde gang also is a massive Deconstruction. As civilization begins to spread through America, Dutch undergoes a slow Despair Event Horizon as well as his upcoming Face–Heel Turn realizing all the good they did won't matter in the long run. This led him to control all aspects of the gang, and as the gang had Undying Loyalty, they foolishly obeyed his every words, including Arthur. But, as he begins to notice Dutch slip, he tries to warn his friends and allies, but to no avail, as Dutch's schemes get some of them killed. It ends in a massive betrayal as the gang leaves John for dead on Dutch's orders.
• Fanservice: You have to take a bath at a hotel. You can choose to have a "Deluxe Bath" to up the cost, and a revealing, attractive woman will help you bathe. You can give inputs on body parts to wash and make small talk, as long as you keep her happy.
• Fan Disservice: While a heavily intoxicated Arthur is looking for Lenny in Smithfield's Saloon in "A Quiet Time", he can barge in on a man and woman having sex. The woman is nude, but Arthur is so drunk he hallucinates Lenny's head on her body as she screams bloody murder at him.
• Fantasy Landmark Equivalent: The state of New Austin, which covers the southwest from Texas to Arizona, includes the massive canyon Pike's Basin, clearly based on the Grand Canyon (located in Arizona in real life).
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Both games in the series suggest many more sinister, mysterious narratives brewing just beneath the surface of what is primarily a tale on Old Western bandits, and some of these oddities even have far-reaching implications for the world of the story far beyond the scope of what the main characters are able to perceive. Encounters with certain strangers, side quests, and Easter eggs directly allude to the existence of many fantastical things: a captured European princess; a town said to be cursed with a demonic presence, where a pentagram burns red beneath a dilapidated farmhouse at 4 in the morning, and a mentally ill woman locked away by her own family rambles numbers that lead to the town's coordinates; a vampire directly based off the bat-like Count Orlok from the 1922 German silent film "Nosferatu", who terrorizes the city of Saint Denis; witches (and their familiars); ghosts; a time traveler; a forest of whispering voices; a Gypsy seller of antique goods with the gift of clairvoyance, whose cryptic fortunes always come true; a marionette doll in the abandoned caravan of a traveling freak show who gives ominous warnings; an inventor similar to Nicola Tesla who dies creating a sentient robot; unnaturally pale, silent murderers known as the Night Folk who ritualistically kill unfortunate travelers (one of which cries in a white dress until she is approached and grows hostile, who bares a striking resemblance to the Mexican folktale of La Larona); the skeletal remains of giants; ancient Greek and Nordic gods; unidentified flying objects said to belong to enigmatic alien beings by cults who sacrifice themselves in worship of them; the strung-up animal hybrid creation of a Dr. Frankenstein-like mad scientist who sought to bring his monster to life, and a Strange Man who is very likely God, the Devil, or the Grim Reaper himself. The DLC "Undead Nightmare" further adds to this, including a zombie curse from an ancient temple mask, the steeds of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Bigfoot.
• Fast-Forward Mechanic: You can skip ahead to Morning, Noon, or Night by sleeping in a bed, at the gang campsite, or by setting up your personal campsite from your main horse.
• A Father to His Men: Subverted by Dutch. He certainly seems to play it straight through the first half of the game, and will play it up when it suits him (such as leading the rescue of Jack). He calls his fellow gang members things like "brother" and "son", and preaches the virtues of the gang being like a family. However, the moment it no longer suits him, he drops this charade in a hurry, such as being willing to let a captured John hang if not for Arthur and Sadie rescuing him, then berating Arthur for doing it.
• Fauxshadow:
  • Kieran is a captured O'Driscoll who sticks with the Van der Linde gang because leaving the protection they offer is basically a death sentence. In short order, he takes the gang to wipe out an O'Driscoll hideout, saves Arthur's life, offers a fun fishing companion mission, and seems to be earning the respect most of the gang. He really seems like a character who will become important down the line and who you will be rewarded for fostering a positive relationship with. Instead, he is captured by the O'Driscolls offscreen in Chapter 4, killed, beheaded, and sent into camp as an example/distraction immediately prior to an O'Driscoll attack.
  • When Arthur visits the Downes ranch again in Chapter 3, Archie is not even trying to cover up his hatred of Arthur for causing his father's death, and the concept of revenge even comes up in their discussion. Those familiar with westerns might assume that he'll pop up later as an antagonist, but instead Arthur ends up helping the family when they need it, burying any potential revenge scheme Archie may have had. If anything, Archie is more easily able to forgive Arthur (or at least acknowledge his atonement) than his mother is, as Archie even thanks him in their final encounter when Arthur provides money to help start a new life.
• Fed to Pigs: Pigs will chew through any corpse in their vicinity. This is a handy way for you to dispose of bodies, and there is a scenario where you can help a prostitute by disposing of a dead customer in this manner, though you will lose your Honor if you decide to help her.
• Felony Misdemeanor:
  • Mark Johnson is one of the bounty mission targets. He is wanted for stage coach and train robberies from years in the past and carries a bounty of $25. No mention is made of him having killed or even seriously harmed anyone beyond robbing them. However, should you apprehend him, you can witness him being hanged in Rhodes. For a $25 bounty. The same happens with Joshua Brown, who did actually kill someone, but has also been a career bounty hunter and worked extensively with the very sherriff you get his bounty from. And it's somewhat implied to have been an accident. Notably Arthur never hangs no matter how bad his crimes.
  • Law enforcement is very quick to deliver an armed response, even for non-violent or accidental offenses, such as vandalism or clipping someone with your horse. Unlike most games, however, you do usually get a chance to settle it peacefully, either talking them down or letting them arrest you.
• Feuding Families: The Grays and the Braithwaites. Dutch and the gang hope to exploit the feud by Playing Both Sides in Chapter 3, but the feud doesn't make the families that blind and they catch on, leading to one gang member's death and forcing the gang to move once again.
• Fictional Counterpart: The Wheeler, Rawson, & Co. Consumer Guide catalogues found in every shop is one to the Sears, Roebuck, & Co. mail order catalogues from the era, complete with the "Cheapest Supply House on Earth" and "Our Trade Reaches Around the World" taglines.
• Fictional Document: The game contains hundreds of notes, letters, and even some full blown short stories in book form. You can collect them and they are neatly organized in your inventory by category.
• Fictional Province: The game takes place in the fictional U.S. states of New Austin, West Elizabeth, New Hanover, Ambarino, and Lemoyne. Guarma is a fictional Caribbean island visited as well.
• Fighting for a Homeland: The Wapiti have already been moved to a new reservation once with great difficulty, and now the government wants to move them again because they believe there is oil beneath their reservation. Their leaders are fighting it, both literally and metaphorically, with the local army colonel goading them into attack with actions like stealing their horses and burning their sacred sites in hopes of wiping them out for glory.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Notable in its complete aversion. Members of the Van der Linde gang fight side by side and save each other's lives on quite a few occasions throughout the story, but this by itself never leads to deep bonds of brotherhood and camaraderie. Arthur and the other gang members often finish a fight together only to immediately begin angrily bickering and accusing each other, especially when Micah is around, and even when friends save each other's life, there's rarely any fanfare or sentimentality beyond a quick "Thanks."
• Fire Purifies: The third trailer has a heavy emphasis on fire and its destructive nature. In the final game, it's one of the things that Reverend Swanson talks about at night around the gang's campfire.
• Firing One-Handed: Just like John in the first game and epilogue, Arthur fires all sidearms one-handed, even the Sawed-Off Shotgun.
• First-Person Ghost: The first-person mode averts this: you can see Arthur's body when you look down, and there are first-person animations for various contextual actions.
• First-Person Shooter: Just like the eighth-generation port of GTA V, there's an option to play the game from a first-person perspective.
• First Town: Valentine, a fairly unremarkable livestock town, is not far from the gang's first hideout at Horseshoe Overlook. Unless you really go out of your way, it will have the first gun store, general store, stables, and more that you visit. It also almost perfectly resembles Armadillo, the first game's First Town, in layout.
• Fishing Minigame: You can fish in most bodies of water, with different types of fish appearing in different areas of the map as well as depending on the body of water (lake or river). Different baits and lures also influence the type and quality of the fish you catch. You can also toss in a stick of dynamite, though this causes you to lose honor. On the flip side, catch and release fishing causes you to gain honor. Finally, just like the "legendary" animals to hunt, there are legendary fish to catch.
• A Fistful of Rehashes: Two rival families with ties to crime, one of whom includes the town sheriff. A third party looking to benefit by playing them off of each other. The protagonist helps a couple of Star-Crossed Lovers escape the situation. A (supposedly) hidden stash of gold. Are we referring to Chapter 3 or A Fistful of Dollars?
• Fisticuffs Boss: Several missions in the game involve Arthur defeating enemies while unarmed in order to continue the mission. Notable ones are the fight in Valentine's saloon shown in trailers, and the final confrontation against Micah Bell.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • At the start of the "security" mission in Rhodes, the town is near completely deserted, all the shops are closed and the townsmen glare menacingly at the gang as they walk down the street, which hints towards a nasty surprise on the Grays' part.
  • If the player hasn't already realized where Arthur's disease came from or that it's a contagious one, they might be clued in by Dr. Barnes immediately and nervously washing his hands after inspecting Arthur.
  • In the final mission of the game, as John confronts Micah, the latter makes an offhand remark about how it’s a good day for renewing old acquaintances. A few minutes later, Dutch himself marches out of the cabin and joins the fray.
• Foregone Conclusion: As would be expected from a prequel:
  • At the very least, Dutch Van der Linde and part of his gang (John Marston, Bill, Javier) will survive the events of the prequel, as they appear in the events of the first game set years later.
  • Arthur obviously wasn't seen in the original Red Dead Redemption or even mentioned as one of the men John needed to hunt down. So, regardless of whatever became of him, it can already be pieced together that he didn't exactly have a big presence in New Austin by 1911.
• Foreshadowing: Has its own page.
• Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: Prior to the events of the game, John left the gang for a year and then returns, welcomed with open arms by most. Arthur is not one of them, disgusted that John had left the entire gang as well as Jack (whom at first John doesn't believe to be his son). Eventually, Arthur starts warming up to John again after the latter is determined to get Jack back from Angelo Bronte.
• Free Rotating Camera: Present in 3rd person, like most Rockstar games. Pressing the left trigger will cause it to lock on. If you have a gun drawn, this will also point the gun using auto-aim, which also locks it onto the target.
• Friendly Fireproof: Zig-zagged in that you cannot fire your weapon while pointing at companions during missions, and you cannot even draw your weapons under normal circumstances while in camp. However, any Splash Damage you cause, for example using fire bottles, dynamite, or by shooting explosive containers, can still harm and kill your companions.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Micah. The rest of the Van der Linde gang are a group of outlaws who nonetheless view each other as a sort of family unit. All with the exception of Micah, a violent psychopath who often goes out of his way to antagonize other members of the gang and otherwise act like a massive asshole. The only reason he's able to stick around is because he's a competent gunman and he's really good at sucking up to Dutch, who goes through a steady decline as the game goes on. Eventually, by the end, he sells the gang out to the Pinkertons to save his own skin.
• Friends with Benefits: Sean and Karen have a bit of a relationship like this.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • The beginning of the game sees the gang in a bad spot - lost in a blizzard, two people are dead, one was captured, and the rest are hunted by the Pinkertons and other bounty hunters after a botched ferry job forces them to run off east (the opposite direction of where they wanted) without money and low on supplies.
  • The end of Chapter 4 through the beginning of Chapter 6 is basically a Trauma Conga Line of things getting worse for the gang. A bank heist in Saint Denis goes awry, resulting in the death of two gang members and the capture of a third. In order to escape, the survivors from the heist group stow aboard a ship bound for Cuba which wrecks along the way. They end up on the island of Guarma, a nightmare of a corporate police state run by a corrupt sugar baron. They are captured, one is wounded, and then the survivors must aid the local resistance in order to secure passage back to America. Finally, when they arrive and regroup with the rest of the gang, they are almost immediately beset by Pinkertons who bring a veritable army to take the gang down.
• Full-Boar Action: Wild boars can be hunted in the southern areas of the map. They are quite hardy and can take several rifle shots to the body before going down.
• Futureshadowing: Edgar Ross meets Jack Marston for the first time at a river bank while Jack is fishing. Jack Marston meets Edgar Ross for the last time at a river bank, although Ross is duck hunting instead of fishing.
  Ross: Enjoy your fishing, kid... while you still can.

G

• The Gadfly: This is the raison d'être of the avant-garde French artist Charles Châtenay, who strives "to provoke, to challenge" his audience — primarily through nude paintings of people they'd prefer not to see nude. Even while fleeing town, he claims that there's no difference between being loved and being hated, as long as he makes an impact.
• Gainax Ending: Played With. The player probably understands the ending of the "Geography for Beginners" stranger mission, but it's clear that poor Arthur is very, very confused about the whole thing. To recap:Francis, the guy who gives you the mission, is gone by the time you return to his cabin. Instead, inside you find a mural depicting skyscrapers and him walking through a circle. Seconds later, a woman walks in and reveals that the only Francis in their household is the 1-year old she's holding in her hands. Arthur notices that the baby really appears to be the man they interacted with earlier, and leaves the cabin confused about the whole thing. Francis also spoke in mid 20th century slang that Arthur just doesn’t get but someone today would be able to spot as being out of place. Most players have enough knowledge about Time Travel to understand the implications, while Arthur doesn't.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Multiple:
  • There are reports of a few items (camera, lantern, fishing rod, throwing knives) disappearing from the player's inventory once you enter the epilogue. While throwing knives can be forced back into your inventory by crafting a special variant (you still have them, but just can't equip them), the lantern, camera, and fishing rod cannot. Unfortunately, the camera is required on the legendary duelists side mission, while the fishing rod is required to catch all of the legendary fish (some of which can only be caught in the epilogue without exploits) so these become outright impossible to complete. What triggers this is a total unknown as it doesn't affect everybody, but one possible trigger may be dying and restarting a checkpoint after Arthur gives his satchel to John.
  • Ammo will sometimes disappear from your inventory. Sometimes its just for one gun (most commonly the Varmint Rifle) and other times it is for an entire "class" of weapons (those which share the same ammo type, so repeaters, rifles, and shotguns). Exactly what causes it is unknown, but players have seemingly traced it to the upgraded bandolier which doubles your "long gun" ammo capacity. Even then, what triggers it is unknown as some players with the upgraded bandolier never experience while others experience it several times in a single play through.
  • Sometimes in rare cases, when your honor meter starts getting higher than usual before players get to "A Fork in the Road", it will quickly take a nosedive down to negative honor and bad flashbacks happen. In fact, when players try to complete a mission, their honor meter goes higher then quickly takes a nosedive back down to negative honor. If that happens, then they are better off starting the whole game over from scratch and hope they don't get the (very rare) honor meter glitch again with backup copies of their save files at hand to avoid getting a bad ending.
  • Sometimes Giaguaro, the Legendary Panther you need to kill for Master Hunter Challenge 10, will never spawn. Unfortunately, this means it would be impossible to have 100% completion, since all the challenges are a prerequisite to it.
• Game Hunting Mechanic: Hunting has been made even more realistic here, with the values of the catches being dependent on the freshness of the meat and the cleanliness of the kill.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: Averted. Your allies can be killed when involved with missions which results in mission failure. The game prevents you from shooting them directly, but they can still be killed by explosions you instigate.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Once you switch to John, your ability to swim is gone. You can still save yourself if you're close to the shore, but John will go into a complete panic and his stamina, core included, will be depleted instantly.
  • It's known that Arthur has a way with words and art, as shown in his journal, while John is... Just compare his sketching and Arthur's in the epilogue.
  • Once you reach chapter 6 (or you're in the middle of Chapter 5) and Arthur is diagnosed with TB, he starts thinking about making amends, even at low honor. In turn, the game begins to nudge the player to redeem him by allowing them to reach max honor. In addition, the side quests and debt collection missions in the chapters allow forgoing rewards and absolve the debts. So to say, you unlock Arthur's conscience.
  • Also once you get to Chapter 6, Arthur's journal gets increasingly illegible due to his handwriting deteriorating as his disease progresses. The entry about the "Dear John" Letter he gets from Mary in particular is pretty much impossible to read unless you use the text function.
  • During "Favored Sons" in Chapter 6, Dutch and Arthur are running away from the US army and end up jumping off of a cliff into water. Undoubtedly, you'll think that everywhere else in the game a fall like that would kill you, or at least deal a lot of damage, but if you go back to that particular spot and jump off of it outside of the mission, you'll be just as unharmed as in the mission.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • John starts off with whichever level of Dead Eye Arthur had, while in 1 he had to learn abilities already available here.
  • Several of the collection missions can be started as Arthur but can only be completed as John, since a few of the items needed to be collected (fossil locations, legendary fish, etc.) are only available once the rest of the map opens up in the epilogue. Despite the 8-year gap, all of the quest items are still available, with none having been found by the quest-giver themselves or any other agents the quest-giver may have. Furthermore, the quest-givers seem to have patiently waited all those years for the protagonist to get them what they want, without trying to get the items some other way.
  • It's kind of a given, but it counts; you can put in 2,000... 5,000... 10,000... hell, 50,000+ dollars into the contribution box if you're willing and able. Doesn't matter. The story will truck on with Dutch and the gang insisting that they just don't have enough money to escape the outlaw life.
    • Similarly, the epilogue treats John as completely broke, even if you collected many thousands of dollars of valuables as Arthur and never sold them, thus having them carry over to John via Arthur's satchel. With the amount of money you can make from selling things at the beginning of the epilogue, John could have outright bought Beecher's Hope and not had to go on all the bounty hunt story missions with Sadie just to make the mortgage payments.
  • Wearing a kerchief or some other kind of mask before going after Thomas Downes removes it in the cutscene; taking a bath after you visit does absolutely nothing. This is the mission that triggers Arthur contracting tuberculosis, and it is mandatory.
  • Between 1899 and 1907, the Marston family is constantly relocating thanks to John's inability to keep his revolver in his holster. Once you start playing as him, nothing stops you from committing crimes in public, as canon dictates that John and Abigail live the rest of their lives in Beecher's Hope. John could massacre the entirety of Blackwater without getting his family in trouble.
  • Health Tonics can be used to bring you back from brutal injuries, however no one seems to think of them when it comes to the story. For example, John spends weeks recovering from his injuries in Chapter 1 and no one thinks to give one to Dutch after his traumatic head injury in Chapter 4. Making this one more flagrant than most health item/story injury examples is that you can offer them injured Strangers during numerous random encounters.
  • The whole of Chapter 3 involves the gang working the Braithwaites and the Grays in order to find and steal a stash of gold each family claims the other has. But as early as Chapter 2 Arthur can find a letter from 1806 in the swamp near Saint Denis from Lucille Braithwaite to Douglas Gray, the two had fallen in love and ran away to elope, stealing the gold in the process. Finding this letter has no effect on the story or Dutch and Hosea's quest for the 'hillbilly gold'.
  • Sometime after Arthur collects the debt from Thomas Downes, Edith may visit the camp as a random encounter and tell Strauss Thomas is dead. Arthur even expresses regret about how things turned out. However, Arthur is also told this little fact in a story mission cutscene later in the game, and the game treats like it's the first time he hears about it.
  • You can start certain sidequests as Arthur and finish them as John. Picking up some of these sidequest lines such as "Oh, Brother" as John will resulting in them starting with dialogue that implies that John has been involved with their quest before, even if you started the questlines as Arthur.
  • Certain collectibles don't spawn until you start their related stranger quest, so you can't have found them all by the time you first meet whoever needs them. Cigarette Cards, however, have no such limitation and the player can have all 144 in their inventory before starting their sidequest. No matter how many you have, Phineas will always be disappointed that you have nothing he hasn't got and asks you to send any full sets you may find to him through mail.
  • Every bounty target you bring in can later be seen being hanged, even at bounties as low as $25 or entirely non-violent crimes. Arthur never will, no matter how high his bounty, how many lawmen he kills, or how much chaos he causes, the only punishment is a bit of jail time and bounty payment, or just jail time if he doesn't have the money to cover the bounty. This gets to absurdity when John gets captured during a bank heist, put in a maximum security prison, and almost hanged himself. On top of the fact that Arthur will still get the usual jail and bail treatment if you surrender to Saint Denis lawmen immediately after getting back from Guarma or after the jailbreak mission, during which you are permanently considered Wanted Dead or Alive across the eastern edge of the map, you later play as John, who from then on gets those same privileges.
  • A few conversations have Arthur mention that he isn't particularly good at fishing, such as two side missions that become available near the start of chapter 3 when he gets invited on 2 fishing trips by Javier and Kieran. If the player is diligent enough, it's entirely possible for these dialogues to occur after completing the Survivalist 10 challenge (catch 1 of every species of fish that can be found in the game) and caught more than half of the legendary fish.
  • An example that combines this with Gameplay and Story Integration, interestingly: During the course of Chapter 5 and especially by the beginning of Chapter 6, Arthur will automatically lose a large amount of weight and gain a diseased, sickly apppearance to signal the increasing aggresiveness of his tuberculosis, becoming very thin and weak-looking. The Integration part comes from the treatment of his cores; for the rest of the game, Arthur's cores will drain faster and it becomes impossible to fatten him up again by overeating. However, mercifully, his stats and general performance will remain mostly the same, so you can still sprint halfway across the map and beat up a whole bar's worth of outlaws in an afternoon despite looking like you're one foot and half in the grave.
  • In the Epilogue, John will be surprised to see the Mauser Pistol being used by the Italian Mobsters as a sign of advancing technology despite said pistol being available in shops since 1899 and John could have one in his inventory. Hilariously, Angelo Bronte owns a Mauser Pistol and threw it at John in "Revenge is a Dish Best Eaten".
• Gang of Hats: Much like the previous installment, most of the gangs are identifiable by some physical aspects and all by unique behavior.
  • The Van der Linde gang revolves around Equal-Opportunity Evil (they are the most diverse of all gangs, be it in ethnicity, background or gender) and Dutch's idiosyncratic anarchist ideology.
  • The O'Driscolls are all Irish immigrants and Irish Americans, who all wear green accessories (possibly as a tribute to their heritage). Men in Colm's employ also overwhelmingly favor black overcoats; Kieran's stays on even when he's semi-accepted into the Van Der Linde Gang, marking him as an outsider, and stays with him until Rhodes.
  • The Lemoyne Raiders are a neo-Confederate militia that relies on robbery, moonshining, and gunrunning to finance their ongoing war; the senior members wear their old uniforms, while the ones too young to have served wear yellow bandanas and clothing that mimics Confederate grays. Some favor red shirts, in reference to the "bloody shirt" myth that many Reconstruction-era hate groups mocked and took as a badge of pride.
  • Angelo Bronte's mob are all Italians, almost certainly an early Mafia family (though never named) or possibly Camora. They carry top-of-the-line weapons and custom gear, and are decked out in very expensive, very dark clothing unsuited for the climate of Saint Denis, suggesting a desire to look intimidating over being practical.
  • The Murfree Brood are severely inbred yokels who torture and cannibalize their victims; they rarely wear shirts.
  • The Night Folk wear primitive clothes and only use bows and melee weapons, they never talk and many wonder if they are fully human.
  • The Del Lobos are stereotypical Mexican banditos.
  • The Laramie Gang serves as hired thugs for wealthy ranchers to bully poor homesteaders, they all wear fine clothes and red neckerchiefs.
  • The Skinner Brothers are a multiethnic gang of sadists who torture their victims much like the Murfree Brood.
• Gang Up on the Human: Outside of scripted events, bandits completely ignore wandering civilians and are only interested in harassing the player. Likewise, if someone attacks the player without provocation, law enforcement will not step in to stop them and may even attempt to arrest the player for defending themselves.
• Gargle Blaster:
  • Moonshine, much like in the real world. It is extremely flammable, meaning it is a very high proof. You can still drink it for a temporary health boost.
  • Aged Pirate Rum. Though the game takes place in the past, it is still some 200 years after the golden age of piracy. Booze that old would not be pleasant to drink.
• Gatling Good: Mounted M1908 Maxim machine guns are used in this role. They'll be used against you in several missions, and you can sometimes take control of them. Oddly, the first game, set 12 years later, is more technologically backwards, featuring things like Gatling guns and wood-burning locomotives more appropriate to the 1870s. Of course, this was a function of RDR 1's troperific homages to Hollywood westerns, anachronisms be damned. The appearance of 1908 Maxims in 1899 is equally anachronistic, in the other direction (the U.S. Army's MG at the time was the Colt M1895 "potato digger.")
• Generic Ethnic Crime Gang:
  • The O'Driscolls are the primary rival of the Van der Linde gang and are almost entirely Irish in terms of ethnicity.
  • The Lemoyne Raiders are made up of ex-Confederate soldiers and other southerners they've drawn to their cause.
  • Angelo Bronte is The Don of an Italian proto-mafia gang in Saint Denis.
• Gentle Giant: Large game including Elk, Moose, Buffalo, and even Black Bears are entirely non-hostile. It is possible for them to trample you if you get in their way, but they won't intentionally attack you.
• Genre Shift: The first half of Chapter 5 turns the game from a western sandbox to a Uncharted-esque jungle adventure.
• Get It Over With: After turning in a bounty alive, you may witness them being publicly executed next time you're in town. Most are hardened career criminals who have an attitude like this.
• Ghibli Hills: West Elizabeth to the north and west of Strawberry. It's a hilly forested area with mountain streams, peaceful lakes, plentiful wildlife, and is relatively untouched by man.
• Ghost Town:
  • Colter is an abandoned mining town that briefly serves as the gang's hideout during Chapter 1. Once the gang leaves the place, nobody else is seen there.
  • Limpany is a small town devastated by a fire and then abandoned.
  • Pleasance is a small community that was hit with the double whammy of a mass murder followed by a plague outbreak. Its few buildings are boarded up as a result.
  • Unlike in the first game, Armadillo is almost completely deserted when the player visits it in the epilogue, with only a few sickly men and women, a local town crier, the Saloon owner and Herbert Moon occupying the place. The Del Lobos occasionally come in to terrorize the place, which prompted the town's single sheriff to get the hell out of dodge.
• Ghost Train: A spectral train can appear on railroad tracks at the border of Lemoyne and New Hanover. It only appears at around 3 AM or so, and it can never be encountered again once seen.
• Give Me Your Inventory Item: Several Stranger encounters involve giving items like Health Tonics to NPCs who are sick after eating poisonous plants or who have been bitten by a snake. While you can simply ignore them or choose not to give them the item, you'll generally take a hit to your honor.
• Golden Ending: While still rather bittersweet, the ending you get with high Honor, a fully bonded horse, making The Atoner-style choices in Chapter 6, and choosing to hold the line to allow the Marston family to escape is generally considered the best possible ending.
• Good Guns, Bad Guns:
  • While the guns Arthur uses throughout the game are up to what the player acquires and chooses to use, he starts off with a Cattleman Revolver (based on the Colt Single Action Army revolver) and the Carbine Repeater (based on the Spencer repeating rifle), which lean "good" as classic Old West weapons. These hint at Arthur's good heart beneath his rough exterior and his possible "redemption" at the end of the game.
  • Foreshadowing his status as The Mole, Micah dual-wields (a typical "bad" trait) a pair of double-action revolvers (advanced for the age, another typically "bad" gun trait).
  • Saint Denis Mafia boss Angelo Bronte uses a Mauser pistol, obvious to modern players as a "bad" gun due to its associate with Germany in the World Wars. For the time period, it counts as an "advanced" gun, typically a "bad" trait as well.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: A combat option. You'll get into quite a few brawls over the course of the game where you'll fight in this fashion.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: It is a game set in the Old West, so characters of all moralities can be seen throughout the game smoking like chimneys. This even includes Arthur, who will be smoking in a number of cut scenes even if you try to actively avoid doing so in gameplay (smoking recharges your Dead Eye core at the cost of some Stamina). A high Honor Arthur gets several of the "Good Smoking" exemptions, including being a badass and (depending on who you ask) being sexy.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Rockstar seems to be actively trying to invert this.
  • Some kills activate a kill cam, which shows off the gun's moving parts and the bullet hitting the target in all its gory detail.
  • The majority of animals are skinned onscreen. For larger animals, this means plunging a knife into its stomach and peeling the skin off. For birds and small game, you pick them up and rip their skin/feathers off with your bare hands.
  • Also Played Straight in one instance; one mission requires you to help give birth to a foal, and Rockstar thankfully realized that showing it on-screen would be a bit much. It happens just off-screen as the camera focuses on you instead.
• Gotta Catch Them All:
  • Several Stranger missions involve locating/collecting large numbers of items like dinosaur bones, rock carvings, specific perfect condition animal specimens, legendary fish, etc.
  • Several Challenges have requirements in this vein, such as taming one of every kind of horse or picking one of every type of plant.
• Go Wait Outside: Numerous side missions only advance to the next stage 24 in-game hours after completing the previous mission in the chain. However, nothing is stopping you from simply setting up camp and sleeping for that time to quickly advance them. Conversely, you'll be chastised at the start of some main missions with characters making statements along the lines of "what took you so long" even if you immediately begin that mission at the conclusion of the previous.
• Gratuitous German: A mild example with the disappeared Luxembourgian princess Isabeau Katharina Zinsmeister's surname. As an occupational surname (freely translating to taxmaster), it would a perfectly acceptable German name... for commoners and lower nobility (and even in the latter case, The Von Trope Family is in full effect). Like in the rest of mainland Europe, higher nobility in the Germanosphere traditionally style themselves after places over which they reign or once reigned, such as von Wittelsbach (a castle in Swabia) or von Hessen (a former landgraviate). The Real Life princely family of Luxembourg does, appropriately enough, style itself as the House of Luxembourg.
• Grave-Marking Scene: In the end credits, Mary visits Arthur's grave (which has a Celtic cross headstone signifying his Welsh heritage), and demonstrates that despite everything that happened between them, she still cares for him. If he was played honorably through to the very end, then his grave is also adorned with a bunch of flowers to add a bit of cheerfulness to this otherwise bittersweet scene. John Marston can also visit the graves of his fallen comrades, including Arthur, for the "Paying Respects" achievement. If the player reaches 100% Completion, John also visits said grave and writes on Arthur's journal as "Crash of Worlds" plays in the background, and says, "Guess we're just about done, my friend."
• Gravity Barrier: Used in several areas on the edges of the map. Slopes less steep than what you've climbed to get to them suddenly send you sliding back down when you try to climb them.
• Great Escape: An early Chapter 2 mission has you breaking Micah out of the Strawberry jail. Naturally, it gets...noisy...and attracts the attention of the law.
• Great White Feline: One of Strauss's debt collection missions has you aid the debtor in hunting a white cougar, whose valuable pelt will cover the debt. The debtor...doesn't make it, leaving you one-on-one with an animal capable of killing you with a single pounce in a dark cave. Happy hunting!
• Green Aesop: Killing too many animals in quick succession results in honor loss. Most easily seen by shooting down a flock of birds in a single deadeye use and/or by dynamite fishing.
• Green Hill Zone: The gang's first two camps at Horseshoe Overlook and Clemens' Point qualify. Both are in green wilderness areas surrounded by plentiful non-hostile wildlife and have relatively peaceful (until the actions of the gang itself disrupt the peace) nearby towns.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: When he's prone on the floor and at the mercy of depraved serial killer Edmund Lowry Jr., Arthur improvises by picking up a severed head from Lowry's collection and throwing it at him; once Lowry is disoriented, Arthur takes the opportunity to move in and clobber the weaker man with a single punch.
• Grim Up North: The northern areas of the map are covered in deep snow bounded by tall mountain ranges. They're home to dangerous creatures including Grizzly Bears and packs of Wolves. Naturally, the Downer Beginning Chapter 1 and the Bittersweet Ending final epilogue mission take place up here, book-ending the story.
• Groin Attack: One sidequest features a pair of brothers trying to prove their manliness to a woman by having Arthur punch them to see who has the higher pain tolerance. You start with their faces, go down to their stomachs, and end the section by kicking them in the crotch, which causes both of them to collapse.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The only advice the game gives you in regards to disguising yourself to avoid gaining a bounty while committing crimes is to wear a mask, neglecting to mention that depending on the situation there are several other steps involved. This can bite players in the ass hard during the story and land you with at least one pretty hefty bounty. This Reddit post covers some of the finer details that even the official guide doesn't mention, but the general gist is this: disguises and masks help keep witnesses from giving a good positive ID, as lawmen that witness you will ID you no matter what, and the time it takes a witness to report to the law giving you the time to either run, hide, or change your appearance in any way before they show up to investigate. Changing your appearance can equate to getting a haircut and shave or just changing clothes to an outfit you have stored on your horse, be it a custom outfit or one of the many presets. Hanging around an investigation site makes the lawmen suspicious of you, with a good chance of them IDing you as the culprit and likely either firing on you or trying to arrest you.
  • The game doesn't tell you all of the bonuses of crafted saddles, particularly that they also include the bonuses of stirrups (which can't be changed while using a crafted saddle). For example, the best purchasable saddle has the bonuses of 16/14/16 and the best stirrups have the bonuses of +2 to top speed and acceleration and a 50% slower stamina drain rate. In comparison, the stable menu tells you that the craftable alligator saddle has the stats of 20/24/22 and a 50% slower stamina drain, with no mention of the +2 bonuses that would come with the stirrups. However, the +2 bonus is actually still present, but it can only be seen on the horse section of the pause menu.
  • Finding specific animals for hunting and fishing. The game thankfully hands you a map early on of Legendary animal spawns and reinforces these with a pop up letting you know that you've entered their territory. However, for rare standard animals, finding them can be a real challenge. Need that Perfect Panther pelt to upgrade your satchel? They only spawn in two locations, and there are numerous circumstances which may cause them to not spawn. Some of the smaller animals can be an even greater challenge due to a combination of their size and infrequent spawns, such as the badger.
  • When it comes to collecting perfect pelts, the only advice that the game gives to players is to use the correct ammo, aim carefully, and try to take the animal down with just one shot. It glosses over the fact that not all animals can yield a perfect pelt, even if you kill them perfectly: when you get close enough to an animal to study it, a star rating (which many players miss) will appear beside their name. Only animals with three stars can yield perfect pelts (two-star animals can only yield a good pelt at best, and one-star animals can only yield poor pelts).
  • There's a 100% effective method of getting perfect pelts from certain three-star animals, but the game never tells you about it: you can use your lasso to capture almost all mid-sized animals (e.g. deer, pronghorns, rams, etc.), which will bring up a prompt to kill the animal with your knife once you're close enough. Since this allows you to cleanly kill the animal without firing a single shot, it yields perfect pelts every time. (Even taking down an animal with a single headshot isn't effective 100% of the time, since you can still inadvertently damage the pelt if your angle is off)
  • Contrary to what its item description implies, the Varmint Rifle isn't a foolproof method of cleanly killing small game, as it can still damage the pelts of particularly small animals (like squirrels and chipmunks). To cleanly kill those animals, you need to use a bow loaded with Small Game Arrows.
  • If you carry animal pelts or carcasses to Pearson at camp, there's no way to just hand them to him manually. Meat and pelts (if they're small enough) have to be selected from your satchel to be donated—and the only way to donate an entire carcass (or a larger pelt) is to leave it stowed on the back of your horse, allowing you to select it at the "donate" screen—since items stowed on the player's horse are treated as a separate inventory from the player's satchel. Considering how much detail is otherwise put into realistic interaction with NPCs, most players find this very counterintuitive.
  • Want to keep John's white gambler hat? You need to have someone punch it off and have John pick it up during the first half of the epilogue.
  • Want to keep Arthur's money into the epilogue? There's actually a way to do it, but it's incredibly obscure. You have to go to the Aberdeen farm and drink until you pass out, which results in the Aberdeens taking all of Arthur's money and putting it in their secret stash. Then you just leave and complete the rest of the main game, reach the epilogue, and then complete enough missions to unlock the free-roam portion of the epilogue. Then you can go back to the Aberdeen farm, kill everyone there, and take the money out of the safe.
  • Want to obtain the unique outfits from stores not accessible until the epilogue? Log in to the Rockstar Social Club, and open the "Wheeler, Rawson & co." page, which includes every purchaseable item in the general store catalogue and uses Arthur's money as currency. Unlike weapons, the outfits are not tied to story progression and the only reason they are normally unaccessible is that the player cannot physically enter these stores as Arthur. If bought through the webpage, the game adds them to your inventory the next time the game loads up.
  • The game prevents you from obtaining certain collectibles until you activate the mission related to them, so you won't have them all the first time you meet the person who wants them. While this makes sense with the main collectible such as rock carvings or bones^note Certain rewards for these sidequests are tied to the post office system, this also extends to plants. This can lead to a situation where the player seeks a certain orchid (say, the ghost orchid) for the 9th herbalist challenge, but has already collected 4 before starting the challenge — the game stops spawning any more ghost orchids until you complete the first 2 stages of "Duchesses and other animals", because Algernon wants 5 of them.
  • You can restore your horse's stamina by clicking the left analog stick, although with a ~20 second cooldown. It's an entire mechanic that levels up with your horse, but it's never mentioned anywhere. Not helped by the fact that it actually wasn't there on release.
  • During one mission, the protagonist has to fight a wildcat in a pitch-black cave. The only apparent options are for the player to either have Arthur hold a lantern in one hand (which prevents him from using a rifle on the cougar, since those guns require two hands, and restricts him to weaker, one-handed guns), or standing in one specific spot where there's a lantern on the ground (and thus being a sitting target). Unless, of course, the player already went to the one location in the game where a Miner's Hat can be found lying around. The hat produces light by itself and allows the player to move around and wield a rifle while still being able to see what's going on. It makes the fight much easier, but absolutely nothing indicates where the hat is (or that it even exists), meaning the only ways to find it are by using a guide or just stumbling across it.
• Guns Akimbo: Borrowing from Rockstar's earlier work on Max Payne 3, you can dual-wield pistols for extra firepower.
• Guns in Church: You can carry firearms with you almost everywhere. When entering camp, your long guns will typically be left on your horse, but you still keep your sidearms and knife on your person. A few story missions will require you to turn in your guns as well, averting the trope.

H

• Hair-Trigger Temper:
  • NPCs can be rather irascible and don't appreciate it if the player (almost) bumps into them or, if they're even grouchier, stands too close to them for more than a moment. Those of a generally violent disposition are definitely this trope, being more than willing to start an (armed) fight over the smallest things.
  • Arthur, also, with a dedicated conversation option. Even if you never antagonize a single person, he still has moments throughout the game (especially with Kieran) where he comes off disprapportionately angry.
• Hammerspace: Averted in some respects, unlike in I.
  • You can carry up to two sidearms and two longarms on your person, period. Switching which weapons you're carrying requires either going into a town with a gunsmith and switching them out there if you're somehow without your main horse, or switching them out from your main horse's saddlebags.
  • You're limited with the number of animal carcasses you can strap to your horse: two moderate animals and one medium/large animal. Small animals are put in Arthur's satchel, while massive animals can only be carved on the spot. Pelts and feathers work differently: feathers and small/moderate pelts go into your satchel, medium/large pelts are draped over your horse's back and can be stacked, while massive pelts take up the medium/large carcass spot.
  • Zig-zagged with Arthur's satchel, gun belt, bandoleer, and saddlebag, which each act more like a Bag of Holding.
    • Satchel: You can carry a limited number of each item, but there appears to be no limit as to the sheer variety of stuff you can carry in each of the six categories. The carry capacity can be increased by upgrading your satchel, with the Legend of the East satchel boosting your capacity for everything to 99.
    • Saddlebags: You can initially carry only three outfits/hats/masks in them, but buying upgraded saddlebags from any of the stables will boost that limit to five. All while looking like they'd be lucky enough to store one outfit. They can also carry all of your weapons, with guns just appearing and disappearing when you take them out and put them back.
    • Ammunition: Each weapon type has a certain limit for how much ammo you can carry for each type (for example: revolvers and repeaters have caps of 200 for regular/express/high velocity ammo, 100 for split point, and 10 for explosive). Buying the upgraded gun belt (revolvers and pistols) and bandoleer (repeaters, rifles, shotguns) will upgrade your max ammo by 50%, while buying any of the reinforced gun belts and bandoleers from the Saint Denis trapper will upgrade your ammo max by 100%. Note that once you buy an upgrade to your satchnel, gun belt or bandolier, their effects are permanent, even if you don't actually wear them.
• Hammerspace Police Force:
  • On certain missions, the lawmen sent after you will continue to spawn infinitely. Kill as many as you want, the game will keep sending more after you. In cases like this, the objective becomes escape.
  • In free roam, killing enough of the lawmen sent after you following a crime will stop them from coming after you. However, this typically results in a high bounty, after which bounty hunters will continue to spawn if you stay in the state in which you have the bounty. Played straight in and around Blackwater until the Epilogue, where federal agents will spawn infinitely if you're spotted.
• Handicapped Badass: Despite being terminally-ill with tuberculosis, Arthur still manages to hold off a large number of Pinkerton agents and later fights the healthy Micah to a draw. Things may have turned out very differently indeed if Arthur had been in fit condition during the ending.
• Hands-Free Handlamp: The Miner's Hat can be found in an abandoned mine and lights up a small area when worn. It will burn indefinitely and, unlike the handheld lantern Arthur comes with by default, still allows two-handed weapons to be used. The only downside is that it isn't quite as bright as the lantern.
• Happily Adopted: Arthur, along with a dash of Family of Choice and Platonic Co-Parenting, when it comes to Dutch and Hosea. After the deaths of his biological parents, Arthur was a street urchin scooped up by Dutch and Hosea who raised him together before they started their gang. Even twenty years on, Arthur still sees them as his family, and writes in his journal that he loves both of them dearly. They are explicitly referred to as his parents a couple times in the game.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: Rival gangs will be immediately hostile if you enter their camps or hideouts. A possible random encounter in their territories are ambushes set to take you out. Downplayed in towns and in some random events where they might just insult or try to rob you instead.
• Hard-Work Montage: An interactive montage, complete with music, features in the Epilogue as John builds his ranch house at Beecher's Hope.
• Hat Damage: It is possible to remove people's hats with a well placed shot. They can also be knocked off in a melee fight. This can also happen to you as well.
• Hate Sink:
  • The kids in Saint Denis involved in robbing Arthur's satchel. Further cementing this is the fact that it's something that can happen to anyone in real life if they're a little too trusting. The experience is probably more personal than getting shot.
  • All of the rival gangs have their negative attributes played up to instill player hatred and make the Van der Linde gang look much more reasonable by comparison. Colm O'Driscoll is a Smug Snake who believes in quantity over quality when it comes to his gang members. The Lemoyne Raiders are The Remnant of the Confederacy, complete with anti-Federalist ideals and loads of racism. The Night Folk are barely human cannibalistic monsters. The Murfree Brood are inbred Hillbilly Horrors who torture their victims and launch sneak attacks. The Skinner Brothers are a loose collection of criminals who engage in Cold-Blooded Torture for its own sake.
• Healing Potion: Health Tonics and some alcoholic beverages work in this fashion.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Horses can be named and renamed at stables. For some reason, in a game where it's possible to decapitate someone with a shotgun, profane names are not permitted in spite of the game's dialogue being profanity ridden.
• Henpecked Husband: After finding Pearson running the General Store in Rhodes, his wife can be heard from upstairs barking orders at him.
• Herding Mission: In the mission "The Sheep and The Goats", John and Arthur rustle a flock of sheep from Emerald Ranch and must herd them to the animal market in Valentine without letting the sheep injure themselves or wander away from the flock.
• The Hero Dies: Arthur, already terminally ill with tuberculosis, performs a Heroic Sacrifice at the end.
• Heroic RRoD: Arthur is told that he can slow the progression of his illness by going someplace warm and dry, but he chooses to stay with the gang. If the player finishes the final mission with high Honor, he dies from overexerting his disease-weakened body.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Two examples from Arthur.
  • The first example is when Arthur gets diagnosed with tuberculosis - he is told that he may survive longer if he retires somewhere warm and dry, but he chooses to stick with the gang anyway. He continues to help others in this condition despite knowing that it will lead to his inevitable death.
  • The second example is when Arthur decides to stay and hold back the Pinkertons while John escapes with his family. Unlike John in the original RDR, Arthur manages to successfully hold off the attackers without losing his life in the process, only dying when Micah intervenes.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Arthur is very hard on himself in this regard, whether he's played at high or low Honor. He never misses a chance to voice his self-loathing. He constantly brushes off people whenever they compliment him or tell him how he's a good person and that they like him, and he even calls himself an "ugly bastard" when he looks at himself in a mirror.
• He's Back!: The Epilogue opens with John, now going by the name Jim Milton, working at Pronghorn Ranch for David Geddes, who's being hassled by the Laramie Gang. One night, the gang attacks the ranch and John, having had enough of them, suits up for a shootout in the mission "Jim Milton Rides Again" to show that John Marston is back!
• He Was Right There All Along: Cougars and Panthers are ambush predators who can pull this on you. Perhaps you're sneaking through a wooded area hunting when, suddenly, you hear a growl and see a red dot appear on your mini-map. From that point, you have about one second to active Dead Eye, lock onto the creature, and fire a kill shot before it pounces, killing you.
• Hidden Depths: Arthur engages in some surprisingly deep and interesting philosophical discussions with various characters over the course of the story, quite an accomplishment for a gunslinging outlaw with no formal education. His journal entries also provide insight into his thoughts, and are more eloquently written than how he speaks. He will get called out on this by a couple of people, most notably Dutch.
• Hide Your Children:
  • Downplayed, as there are children present throughout the game, but not in the "open world" portions. They can only be interacted with in cut scenes, preventing you from harming them.
  • Played straight with animals, as you will only encounter adult animals.
• High-Pressure Blood: Shooting a person in the neck causes that person to start bleeding to death as well leaving puddles of blood.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Each rival gang wears something that makes them identifiable, ranging from Downplayed with the O'Driscolls wearing bits of green to the Lemoyne Raiders playing it straight with old Confederate uniforms. Each of these groups are outlaws who shouldn't logically want to call attention to this fact.
• Hillbilly Horrors: There are a lot of creepy folks hanging around the woods and swamps in various areas of the map. More than one gang also have this as a theme, most notably the inbred Cannibal Clan known as the Murfree Brood.
• Hillbilly Incest
  • The Murfree Brood are a Cannibal Clan living in the caves of Roanoke Ridge (an area inspired by the Ozark Mountains) who terrorize travelers in the area. They're alleged to practice extensive inbreeding—many of them have visible deformities, and in-game dialogue shows family members referring to being incestuous with one another.
  • Bray and Tammy Aberdeen are rural pig farmers. They invite Arthur into their house for a meal with the intent of poisoning and looting him. Midway through the dinner, Arthur realizes they're brother and sister and becomes increasingly disturbed by them flirting with one another. It's also implied that they may have been sexually abused by their parents as children, inspiring them to murder them and take over the farm.
• History Repeats:
  • A subtle one, but noteworthy nonetheless. John gives his life so Jack can have a normal life in the first game, only for the boy to throw it all away years later in pursuit of vengeance. In this game, Arthur does the same so that John can leave his outlaw days behind, only for the latter to ruin it by attacking Micah's gang to avenge the former and putting himself back on the law's radar.
  • In the final mission before the Epilogue of the first and second game, Edgar Ross leads an army of government men to kill members of the Van der Linde gang at their respective home/hideout. In the first game, its the U.S. Army attacking Beecher's Hope to kill John with Uncle being an added collateral casualty. In the second game, its the Pinkerton Detective Agency attacking Beaver Hollow to kill any gang members that haven't already fled or haven't been executed already.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Thomas Downes coughs on Arthur while the latter is beating him to recover a debt. There's even a particular moment where he coughs right in Arthur's face and Arthur wipes it in disgust. Downes' wife comes out and reveals that Downes is sick as he lies there coughing and struggling for breath. This is how Arthur caught TB. The music that plays in the ride back to camp clues the player into something major having just happened.
  • There is a professor in "The Mercies of Knowledge" mission series who wants to use a criminal as a guinea pig for the test of the electric chair that he has invented. By the end of the mission series, however, the professor gets killed by his own electric chair he was trying to use on the criminal, who is already in pain from getting tortured by it.
• Hollywood Darkness: Night is always brightly lit by the full moon, so it's never more than a little dim, and shadows are still strongly apparent.
• Hollywood Density: The gold bars found throughout the game are easily handled with one hand.
• Hollywood History: Rockstar took great paints to Avert, Subvert, or at least Downplay, many classic-but-inaccurate "Wild West" tropes. For example, the game is realistically diverse in terms of races. Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans, and many European nationalities (Irish, Scots, Poles, Germans, Italians, and even an instance of Scandinavians) are represented. The law, while still corrupt in places, is portrayed as more well-meaning and competent than in most media centered around outlaw main characters.
• Holy Ground: The Native American Burial Ground is considered such a site. Shooting animals on or near it causes you to lose honor.
• Home Base:
  • The camp. While in the gang's camp, Arthur can sleep, play minigames, change clothes, shave his beard and socialize with the other members. This base's location changes several times throughout the story. In the epilogue, as the gang has disbanded and John replaces Arthur, the camp is replaced by first the Pronghorn ranch and later Beecher's Hope.
  • Camping is still a game mechanic, but while you can sleep, cook food and craft at them, they lack the character customization aspects of the main camp. They're more akin to temporary bases.
  • As many of the enterable houses in the wilderness have beds on them yet their owners never appear, it's possible to take over any of them and treat them as one. However, as the game doesn't treat them as camps, they don't offer anything else than the ability to sleep inside them.
• Honorary Uncle:
  • Uncle isn't a blood relative of anyone in the gang, yet everyone still refers to him as such.
  • Jack refers to the adult male gang members as "Uncle" including Arthur, Bill and Hosea.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Several of the female members of the Van der Linde gang contribute in this fashion. Abigail is retired from this life since having Jack, but a few others still actively engage and, based on the conversations you can have with them, are quite lovely people. Part of an early Chapter 2 mission has you rescue Karen when one of her Johns reacts angrily to her attempting to rob him.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: One of the vaudeville shows in Saint Denis features a strongwomen named Hortensia, who claims that no man can beat her in a fist fight and challenges anyone from the audience to do so. Climbing on stage and taking the challenge will inevitably result in you getting your ass beaten unconscious and thrown out the back door of the show. Even if you are skilled enough to knock her down it makes no difference; once you've done that, her next attack on you is guaranteed to be a One-Hit KO. The game will also not let you shoot her either.
• Horse Archer: You've got a bow and you'll be spending a lot of time on horseback. While this can be an effective way to hunt, going after human enemies armed with actual firearms requires some real skill.
• Hospitality for Heroes: Having a high Honor gets you discounts of up to 50% at stores. It also makes it easier to Defuse situations which may escalate to violence.
• Hot Coffee Minigame: Downplayed but present when bathing in most hotels. You have the option for a deluxe bath in which an attractive woman helps you bathe. You can give inputs on body parts to wash and make small talk.
• House Squatting:
  • The Lemoyne Raiders have taken over Shady Belle, an abandoned plantation mansion in the bayou, to use as a headquarters for their arms dealing. Arthur and Lenny attack it during Chapter 3 to steal a shipment to sell, then Arthur and John return to clear it out so the gang can take it over and use it as their base during Chapter 4, making them the squatters.
  • Van Horn is a failing trading post full of dilapidated buildings and irritable citizenry. Several of the buildings are home to squatters. To the south is the "Van Horn Mansion", which a gang is using as a trap to rob anyone who comes in to loot the place.
• Hub City: Saint Denis is the largest and most populous city in the game. It has one of every kind of merchant, including a Trapper, and has a high volume of missions available. Its only downside is that it isn't centrally located, being at the far southern end of the map which can make trekking there tedious.
• Human Pincushion: Arrows will stick in targets and show until you collect them. If you intentionally aim for non-vital shots with standard or small-game arrows on a human opponent, they can limp around still alive with numerous arrows stuck in them.
• Human Trafficking: Brother Dorkins' first sidequest, "Help a Brother Out", has him enlist Arthur to investigate claims that human traffickers are operating out of the Saint Denis pawnbrokers. He turns out to be right, as the pawnbroker has a couple of victims chained up down in the basement waiting to be sold.
• Hunk: Arthur is a very handsome and charming cowboy with rugged features. Other characters even compliment him on his good looks, depending on how well-groomed his appearance is. He starts the game off as a "bad man" and continues to believe that of himself, but other people tell him otherwise. He gets some "attractiveness points" for being polite and courteous towards women, compared to others who are dismissive and speaks to them in a condescending or derogatory way.
  • Dutch is also this. He is a manly, badass A Father to His Men leader who is very handsome, in contrast to his later shabby and pathetic appearance in l.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Hunting any predatory animal can become this if they detect you first. However, the Legendary Panther takes the cake. Every other legendary animal has you follow a series of clues before the animal will spawn. When hunting the Legendary Panther, it spawns to ambush you after finding the third clue. You'll need to dodge its One-Hit KO pounce before you can kill it.
• Hunter Trapper:
  • Plenty are found as NPCs. Trappers are merchants who buy hides and can craft items for you. Many are found as random encounters, such as trappers with their leg caught in their own traps and hunters in the wilderness with their fresh kills on a horse in tow.
  • This is perhaps the most lucrative honorable way to make money in the game. Find perfect animal specimens, kill them in the least damaging way possible (typically a varmint rifle or bow/arrow), skin them, and then sell their hides.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Consumables take effect instantly, and you can chow down hundreds of pounds of edibles or gallons of liquid at once if you choose. Subverted in Chapter 6 once Arthur's tuberculosis symptoms take full effect. You'll only gain benefit from eating a small quantity of food. You can still continue to consume more, but it won't have any beneficial effect.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Arthur to Dutch. Arthur even refers to himself as the "workhorse" of the gang. Virtually all of the gang's successes occur thanks to Arthur's presence, while he also helps to minimize the failures including saving the lives of nearly every other gang member at least once during the main story. Arthur is also apparently the only gang member providing food and, if you choose to do so, will contribute by far the majority of funds to the camp.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: All of the guns not currently equipped to your person are stored on your horse, though only two (plus the bow) will be visible at once.

I

• Iconic Outfit: Like in most Rockstar games, Arthur's default outfit has become this. John's default look from the first game also makes it's reappearance around 3/4 into the story.
• I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Sleepy towns with a Sheriff and maybe a few deputies will suddenly be throwing dozens of heavily armed lawmen at you during major heists. Additionally, if you commit crimes in the countryside, witnesses will be able to report it in less than a minute and the surrounding roads will be swarmed with lawmen on horseback shortly after.
• I Have Your Wife: In Chapter 3, the Braithwaites attempt to pull this on the gang by kidnapping Jack. Cue a Roaring Rampage of Rescue by the gang which results in the deaths of all the Braithwaite sons and their mansion burned to the ground.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • The Night Folk and the Murfree Brood are cannibalistic.
  • The gang occasionally jokes about it, such as Arthur suggesting they eat Pearson, Karen suggesting that they eat Grimshaw or John suggesting that Charles and Jack will eat Uncle at Beecher's Hope.
• I Surrender, Suckers: You can pretend to surrender to Lawmen or Bounty Hunters, and then cancel it mid-way by pulling out your gun. They won't see it coming, and it'll give you some time to think of a strategy.
• I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin:
  • Just before his Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the main story, Arthur passes his hat and satchel on to John.
  • Hamish the hunter will also ask Arthur/John to take Buell before he bleeds out from a gut wound.
• Improperly Placed Firearms: The U.S. Army, just like in the first game, are seen wielding a different weapon than the actual standard service rifle at the time. In the first game, it was the Krag-Jørgensen in place of the Springfield 1903. Here, it's the Winchester Model 1866 instead of the Krag-Jørgensen. The first game got a pass simply because the Springfield isn't in the game, but they get no such excuse here, where the correct service rifle is a usable weapon.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • Arthur's horse can be used to run over and kill bandits or witnesses. He can also deliberately crash into other horses so their riders will fall and either die from the impact or be stunned enough to be finished off. He can do the same with hijacked wagons or stagecoaches.
  • Arthur can use a moonshine bottle to knock out a moonshiner in a mission.
• In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: As usual, with "Rockstar Games Presents" on the cover.
• Incredibly Conspicuous Drag:
  • Charles Châtenay dresses up as a woman to escape Saint Denis in his final mission. He does not shave his facial hair and wears a low-cut dress which shows off his chest hair.
  • "Margaret" the animal tamer is a buff, mustachioed man in a dress who thinks a female animal wrangler will attract a bigger audience. Making matters worse, he has an actual woman as his assistant.
• Incurable Cough of Death: Near the end of the game, Arthur is diagnosed with tuberculosis and may very well succumb to it should the player have a high enough honor to earn a relatively peaceful death. Justified, as there was no real treatment for tuberculosis at that time.
• Indy Ploy:
  • In terms of the narrative, despite all of his reassurances that he "has a plan", it becomes more obvious over time that Dutch has devolved into this. By Chapter 6, several gang members including John and even Arthur himself begin to call Dutch out on this.
  • You can count on one hand the number of missions which actually go according to plan in the main story. When they do go off the rails, Arthur steps up in this regard. Most often, the new plan becomes "shoot your way out".
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Arthur/John will have this reaction when he learns that the Aberdeens are, um, inappropriately close.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Milliken, a Sisika Penitentiary guard, is reduced to this when he’s used as a hostage in order to bust John out of prison.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: You can come upon campsites and homesteads which have been explicitly abandoned for several years in some cases, yet still contain consumable items. This is arguably Justified in the case of canned goods and alcohol, but is not for items like bread, crackers, and cheese.
• Infinite Flashlight:
  • The latern can be used indefinitely to illuminate areas and will never burn out. However, it limits you to one-handed weapons and cannot be used in water higher than the waist.
  • The Miner's Hat is a Hands-Free Handlamp that will also last indefinitely and still allows for two-handed weapons. The downside is that it doesn't light up quite as much as the lantern.
• Infinite Stock For Sale: All merchants carry enough stock in non-unique items to fill your inventory to the max. When you've bought up to your limit, the item will be marked as "sold out" in the catalogue. You can then immediately turn around, use or discard one of the items, re-enter the purchase screen, and the item will be available once again.
• Informed Equipment:
  • Only two trinkets/talismans can be equipped to your character at a time, however, the effects from all of them are applied regardless of which two you are wearing.
  • Several outfits and disguises are not compatible with the bandolier, so it will not show on your character. However, its effects (doubling rifle and shotgun ammunition) are still applied.
• Informed Flaw:
  • Arthur states on several occasions that he is a lousy fisherman. However, you can catch every fish species in the game and even all of the legendary fish without issue.
  • Wearing crafted clothing will get you funny looks and people joking about Arthur's choice of clothes (and not entirely without reason) yet some of the supposedly weird clothing looks completely normal but still causes these comments. For example, the coyote scout jacket looks almost identical to those found in stores, yet talking to people while wearing it will still cause amusement in NPCs.
• In-Game TV: Like its predecessor, you can go to theaters and watch short projected films with narration.
• Injured Player Character Stage:
  • During a Chapter 3 mission, Arthur is captured and tortured by O'Driscolls. Beaten and shot through the shoulder, you'll need to escape their camp.
  • During the opening of Chapter 5, Arthur washes up on Guarma following a ship wreck. He's exhausted, sunburned, and dehydrated. You'll control him as he stumbles to find the rest of the surviving gang members.
  • Toward the end of Chapter 6, Arthur gets ambushed and injured by Micah while in his final stages of TB. You have to fight off Micah for as long as you can, and if you went with John, you'll have to crawl over to Micah's revolver in the final part of the fight while he's chasing after you; if you went for the loot, you'll have to dodge his Finishing Moves via knife attack (though, depending on your honor, Arthur will either get a few more cuts and stab wounds (low) or none at all (high)).
• Inn Security: The first time you make camp in Murfree Brood territory, you'll be interrupted as you sit by the fire by two members of the brood who try to threaten you into leaving their land. Should you make camp in their territory again, it's possible that they will attack.
• Insistent Terminology: Whenever Seamus’ cousins are brought up, he always refers to them as cousins by marriage.
• Instakill Mook: Cougars and Panthers have a pounce attack which, if it lands, will instantly kill the player character regardless of health.
• Instant Death Bullet: A headshot with most weapons on a human enemy will kill them instantly. This is also true for most animals, however, larger animals like bears and buffalo can shrug off single headshots from weaker weapons. The Varmint Rifle averts this; shooting a human with it can cause them to bleed out slowly until they eventually die unless you shoot them in the head.
• Instant Expert: Slightly downplayed when it comes to weapons. As soon as you obtain a new gun, Arthur knows exactly how it operates and how it's reloaded. However, there's a half-hidden^note It only shows up in the Compendium, not in the normal weapon-select screen. familiarity mechanic, which slightly improves the gun's stats the more you use it, reflecting how Arthur is getting used to the gun.
• Instant Fish Kill: Tossing dynamite into a body of water with fish will instantly kill them and cause them to float to the surface for easy collection. However, it does cause karma loss.
• Insult to Rocks: One of the "Antagonize" conversations with Sadie:
  Arthur: I'd call you a fishwife, but I'd be insulting the fish.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Frequent in northern parts of the map - a very aggressive Gravity Barrier kicks in at map edges even if the hill isn't as steep as those you climbed to get there, and many otherwise easily-climbable ledges cannot be grabbed for no explained reason. In fact, some map edges in Ambarino are literally just a pile of large rocks blocking entire pathways of cut areas which can still be seen on the in-game map topography. For a few examples:
  • The most western point of Grizzlies West has a pile of rocks blocking a path to an avalanche (that can even be seen with photo mode), a road/dried riverbed that goes near "Mt. Marston^note The one that John is saved from in the 2nd mission and even some unused valleys that follow the same rules as other playable areas and may or may not have been intented to be part of the map.
  • The cliffs directly to the east from Fairwhale Shanty likewise are just a thin wall of rocks hiding some unfinished-yet-detailed map.
• Interface Screw:
  • Drinking several alcoholic beverages in a short time during free roam will cause the screen to blur and your movements to become slower and more clumsy.
  • During the "A Quiet Time" mission where Arthur and Lenny get drunk, elements of the HUD become more and more distored the drunker Arthur gets. Even the prompt for calling out Lenny is affected, with the letters rearranging and even being spelled backwards.
• Interface Spoiler: Zig-zagged.
  • Until the story is actually completed, the number of total story missions (the grand total being a whopping 109) on the progress tab is listed as "???".
  • The screen that shows how far you are in the story in the "Progress" tab? In an aversion, Arthur dies at 79%. The rest of the game is about John building Beecher's Hope.
  • If one is playing with subtitles on, this can be zig-zagged in regards to Sean's death. On one hand, the subtitles cut off, implying that Sean will die. On the other, the subtitles go a bit further than what he actually says^note Specifically, the subtitles read "I could’a told you that-", but all Sean actually says is "I could’a tol-", lulling the player into thinking he will die later than he does, which makes the actual death scene have all the punch it needs.
  • Those with keen eyes may notice that John's equipment is stored in the exact same places as Arthur's. This is to reuse the existing character animations once you switch to John. Some people actually figured out the twist from mere screenshots because of this.
  • There's also a bizarre zig-zag of this. Wait, why does Arthur have the option to upgrade John's tent? What good does that do me? We're not playing as John.... yet. However, the camp upgrades become unavailable once you actually switch to John.
  • If you browse the items that a Fence can craft, you will see that a lion paw trinket is available, which gives away a huge surprise in the "He's British, Of Course" side mission.
  • The more dishonorable players of I may recognize Micah's horse, Baylock, as being the spitting image of the "Dark Horse", which was only available in I to a low-honor John. It may come as little surprise then, that Micah is a rat and tries to sell the gang out to the Pinkertons in the end.
  • From a dialogue tree in Chapter 6: ARTHUR'S SON??? which reveals an aspect of his life he'd almost never brought up before that point.
  • There's a 'Wellbeing' stat on the Player info screen that doesn't seem to change early in the game. Once Arthur starts succumbing to tuberculosis mid-Chapter 5, it changes to 'Unwell', and once he's officially diagnosed, it reads 'Tuberculosis'. Both statuses have little effect on the game, decreasing the max Cores a bit.
  • The "Own All Outfits" cheat will not give the player any of John Marston's outfits, as the cheat becomes available before the epilogue.
  • As mentioned under Cruelty Is the Only Option above, most of Strauss' debt collection missions are optional, except for the one involving Thomas Downes, which is a main quest mission and is thus required to continue the story. During the mission, Arthur ends up catching the same disease that afflicted Mr. Downes: tuberculosis.
• Interrupted Intimacy: a few of these...
  • In the Chapter 2 mission "A Quiet Time", you can walk in on a couple having sex twice while looking for Lenny. The first time he'll just close the door and walk away with a chuckle, but the second time he's so drunk that he sees both of them as having Lenny's face and screams.
  • There's a random event in Valentine where you can stumble into being a peeping Tom. There's a man laying on the bed being spanked by a woman. If he sees you, he'll tell you he'll kill you if he sees you.
  • A variant on the above is a couple laying in bed in their underwear but high as a kite. They try to have sex but are too stoned to do it. The husband just ends up passing out on his wife.
  • Downplayed during Sean's return party, where he'll steal away to have sex with Karen in a tent. You can eavesdrop and, while it wont stop them much, comment on it mid-act.
• Invisible Wall: While Rockstar is known for avoiding them, if the player tries to swim across the rivers that serve as map borders, they will eventually hit one of these.
• Invulnerable Civilians: Averted, like all Rockstar sandbox games. You can gun down every single person in a given town if you are so obliged. Played straight with most signficant characters and strangers, even after their related quests are over.
• The Irish Mob: The O'Driscolls are a rare Western example.
• Ironic Name: The Elysian Pool is named after the Elysian Fields of Greek Mythology, where the souls of the heroic and virtuous found their final resting place. The pool is poisoned by heavy metals from mining runoff and surrounded by unique "mangy" animals.
• Irrelevant Sidequest: Most Stranger missions, but in a positive way since it's up to the player to decide which quests they want to complete. The game even justifies it by having it explicitly recommended to you to go do things outside the main missions in order to earn money for yourself and the gang.
• I Should Have Done This Years Ago: Twice in Chapter 6.
  • Partway through the chapter, when Arthur kicks Herr Strauss out of the gang, the latter asks, "What are you doing?!" and the former replies, "Something I shoulda done a long time ago."
  • During the climax, when John hears of Micah's treachery from Arthur while they are fleeing from the Pinkertons, John's furious reaction is, "We should have killed him months ago!"
• It Can Think: A Downplayed example with the "she-wolf" in the third "The Veteran" mission with Hamish. She leads him and Arthur into an ambush launched by the rest of her pack. Downplayed because there is no implication of human-level intelligence, but as Arthur notes, this is behavior even beyond what an intelligent animal species like wolves can normally display.
• Item Crafting: You can craft special weapons and ammunition out of the base items by applying other items at any campfire. For example, you can create various kinds of arrow including poisoned and dynamite varieties. You can also, very simply, create "split point" ammo with no additional ingredients (as you are simply cutting the bullets with a knife to make them act as quasi-hollow point ammunition).
• It's Always Spring: No matter how much time actually passes in-game, it will always be May of 1899 until the main mission is complete. While the northern areas of the map are covered in snow, it's specifically stated to be from a late-season storm. The rest of the world is quite green and very spring-like.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: A certain mission in Rhodes has the town surprisingly quiet with all the stores closed. Then Sean's head is blown off.
• It's Up to You: It's almost as if mission givers outside of the main missions are just waiting for you to come along to solve their problems.
• It Will Never Catch On:
  • You can hear in on a conversation between the women of the gang basically saying Women's Suffrage won't ever be a thing. Little do they know, women would gain the right to vote twenty years after the main story of this game.
  • Rejection letters from "Scruffers & Co. Publishers" can be looted as random drops from wealthy NPCs in Rhodes and Saint Denis. Apparently, editor Abner Scruffer has rejected manuscripts about "a dog lost in the snow", "a woman's love affairs during the Civil War", and "a girl learning about witchcraft at a boarding school", believing they won't be popular, and in the latter case outright says it's an idea that won't catch on.
• I Want Them Alive!: In a non-villainous example, the majority of the bounty missions require that you bring the target in alive.
• I Was Quite the Looker: Hosea. While he in the present is good looking for a guy his age, you can find a picture of his younger self in Arthur's camp, with both Dutch and Arthur who are also in their younger days...And boy is he so goddamn fine.

J

• Jack of All Stats: The bow is designed to be the Swiss Army knife of hunting; it has the most variants of special ammunition, all designed to take down different animals with minimal damage to the pelt. Its downsides are its slow speed, stamina drain, and the requirement that most of said special ammunition has to be crafted.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Arthur. He is still a good man underneath his rough exterior.
• Just Before the End: The game tells the story of how the Van der Linde gang began its decline and how Dutch became the madman seen in the first game.
• "Just Joking" Justification: If you choose to defuse after antagonizing someone, Arthur or John would usually claim that they were just joking. It usually works.
• Just Take the Poster:
  • When accepting bounty missions, Arthur will take the poster with him. Justified in that he wouldn't want others to know about the bounty.
  • There is a side mission where Arthur can perform several tasks to aid two escaped convicts, the first of which is to remove bounty posters placed up around town.

K

• Karma Houdini: Margaret from the side mission "He's British, Of Course". His escaped "tiger" (a painted cougar) kills his dog while his escaped lion kills two people and multiple farm animals at Emerald Ranch. The worst thing that happens to him is that he loses those animals mentioned and has to give up a $50 reward.
• Karma Meter: The Honor system of the last game returns. High Honor brings rewards like increased payments for hunting, cleaner killcams, and discounts at merchants. Low Honor players get more money from robberies and gorier killcams, though even at maximum honor they're quite bloody.
• Kevlard: Being overweight increases your damage resistance.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Plenty of opportunity for this, from sticking up townsfolk to antagonizing homeless veterans to literally hitting dogs. For a particularly twisted example, a number of random Stranger encounters on the road have the local criminal gang robbing passers-by, a stage coach, or a stopped train. You can kill the rival gang members, which will earn you thanks from the townsfolk, then immediately turn around and rob them yourself.
  • Thanks to the Dialogue Tree, you can verbally abuse almost every character in the game, from John, to Lenny, to Sadie, to even Jack.
• Kill It with Fire: The Fire Bottle returns and still makes for a particularly gruesome way to dispatch enemies. Self-crafted incendiary ammo and fire arrows are also options.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Low-honor players can lean into this heavily, but even maximum-honor players can take anything with no repercussions as long as it's not owned by anyone living or on the corpse of an innocent. NPCs who notice you take their things may take offense, at which point they may run off to alert the law or just take matters into their own hands by fighting you. Unlike most games, you have several options for dealing with them, such as threatening them into not turning you in or tying them up.

L

• Land in the Saddle: It is possible to jump from up to about two stories on a horse safely. Don't try this in real life...for the horse's sake and yours.
• Laser-Guided Karma / Tragic Mistake: The game's sense of morality, about the strength of making amends, is strong - and swings both ways. In the game's final chapters, particularly the epilogue, John struggles with the choice Arthur gave him: to live peacefully with his wife, or fall into the life he left behind. He nearly loses Abigail and Jack to it, and has to work hard to build his life back up again... but when the choice to finally kill Micah in Arthur's name comes back into his life, he can't help but take it, even as his wife is sobbing, trying to prevent him from possibly throwing their new lives away. She turns out to be right: this choice to become the gunslinger one last time, get bloody retribution and steal the windfall Micah took from the gang, despite not needing it, is then what leads Ross directly to him, spurring the plot of RDR1 to happen and ultimately destroying his family. Much like how Jack killing Ross was not what John wanted for him, Charles points out that high-honor Arthur would not want John to do this, but like Jack, John can't help himself, and so dooms himself.
• The Last Dance: Arthur if you decide to help the Marston family escape at the end of the main story. After holding off waves of Pinkertons, Arthur will either be killed by Micah or succumb to his tuberculosis depending on your honor level.
• The Leader: Downplayed. Arthur, the player protagonist, is essentially the third-in-command of Dutch's gang. As Dutch is slowly losing his marbles and Hosea is killed, the more reasonable members of the gang begin to look to Arthur for orders instead of Dutch.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The mission "Jim Milton Rides, Again?" Sure, John Marston breaks his retirement to help his boss, but we all know the real meaning of the title.
• Leave No Witnesses:
  • It is possible to get away with crimes by killing or threatening all witnesses to it. You'll still need to leave the scene rather quickly, as any other NPCs who stumble upon it become witnesses as well.
  • In some gang hideouts, once you kill most enemies, a few survivors try to run away. If they are not killed, you'll be shot on sight once the hideout repopulates even if you show no hostile intent.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Your allies during missions often fall into this category, especially Micah. In most cases, when the missions include your fellow gang members, they must survive or else the mission fails. Unfortunately, they often fall into some of the same Artificial Stupidity behaviors as your enemies, such as running head first toward groups of enemies entrenched in cover.
• Lethal Chef:
  • Pearson, the Van der Linde Camp Cook, is one per comments made by other gang members. You can choose to reinforce it by bringing him things like rat and crow meat to put into the stew, or help avert it bringing him quality ingredients. (Regardless of what you bring him, the stew still restores your cores just fine when you eat it.)
  • A comment from the bartender when purchasing meals at saloons is "I hope you keep it down". Truth in Television, as the game takes place before the US made sweeping food safety reforms in the early 20th century, meaning you could never be quite sure what you what you were getting if you didn't cook it yourself.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: After Agent Milton is killed, Edgar Ross descends upon Beaver Hollow and the surrounding mountainside with the full force of the Pinkertons to eradicate the Van Der Linde gang once and for all.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • While toned down a bit from the first game, cougars are still fast moving, hard-hitting killing machines that can also survive multiple shots to anywhere but their heads.
  • Bears trade a little of the cougar's speed for more raw power, but are still (realistically) quite fast moving. They too can shrug off multiple shots and can even survive headshots from weaker weapons.
• Limited Loadout: Downplayed but present in terms of the amount of firearms you can carry on your person. You're limited to two long guns (with the bow counting as a long gun) and two sidearms. There is also a limit on the amount of ammo you can carry for each gun type, which can be increased by purchasing upgraded gear. Averted for other types of weapons, you are free to carry a lasso, throwing knives, tomahawks, sticks of dynamite, fire bottles, etc. all at once, and in any location you can have your horse, who carries every weapon you own at once.
• Littering Is No Big Deal: When consuming items from cans and bottles, Arthur just drops them wherever he is.
• Little Useless Gun: The Varmint Rifle is a deliberate example. As a small calibre weapon, it's not much good for combat, a shooting a person with it can result in a slow death as they bleed out. What it is useful for is for shooting small game in order to obtain perfect pelts and carcasses from animals that would be obliterated by larger guns, something Hosea notes that Arthur once did because he hunted rabbits using a shotgun.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Downplayed. It takes about a minute to launch the game, and then another one to load up your save file, but then you don't have to look at another loading screen ever again unless you reload a save. However, you pay for it up front if you bought a physical copy, as the game has to be installed off of a separate disc before it can be played, a process that takes a few hours.
• Loads and Loads of Sidequests: There are some 34 Stranger and Companion missions available, many of which are broken into 3-5 parts, totaling well over 100. There are also at least 25 "encounters" which pop up randomly as you travel, almost all of which can spawn repeatedly even if you've already completed them.
• Lockpicking Minigame: Certain robbery missions have you cracking safes. Its fairly simple in that you slowly rotate a joystick in the given direction until you hear a "click", and then repeat until the safe is cracked.
• Lodged Blade Removal: It happens twice, both times to major characters.
  • During the mission Red Dead Redemption, this can happen to High Honor Arthur Morgan, if he decides to part ways with John and head on a suicide mission to steal the gang's money, despite being half-dead to Tuberculosis, just to get revenge on Dutch and Micah. Micah ends up ambushing him and stabbing him in the side with a knife, inflicting a mortal wound. Arthur pulls the blade out and engages in a final duel with Micah, managing to slice his eye out before dying from the combination of his knife wound and his tuberculosis.
  • During the final mission, American Venom, Sadie ends up being ambushed and stabbed in the gut by one of Micah's men. After Charles shoots her assailant, she pulls the blade out and promptly collapses on a nearby rock. Sadie stays behind with injured Charles, leaving John to face Micah alone. Or not - unlike Arthur, Sadie survives her wound, makes her way up the rest of the mountain and arrives in the middle of the final shootout to get a drop on Micah.
• Logo Joke: The game shows gunsmoke and two shotgun shells being loaded upon launch. The shells, marked with "ROCKSTAR GAMES EST. MCMXCVIII", are briefly seen before being fired, creating the Rockstar logo as a red silhouette.
• Long List: If you buy one more newspaper after completing the Epilogue, you come across an article called "President Signs 1907 Immigration Act":
  President Waxman signed an immigration act in order to prevent unsavory persons from entering the United States.
  The new law, which went into effect immediately, excludes "All idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons, and persons who have been insane within five years previous; persons who have had two or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; paupers; persons likely to become a public charge; professional beggars; persons afflicted with tuberculosis or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons not comprehended within any of the foregoing excluded classes who are found to be and are certified by the examining surgeon as being mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living; persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude; polygamists, or persons who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy, anarchists," from entering the United States.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • If you incur a large bounty, you'll need to pay it off in order to stop waves of bounty hunters from coming after you. Another option is to allow yourself to be arrested by lawmen instead. You'll go to jail and be released a short while later, with your bounty normally deducted from your cash. However, if you don't have the money to cover the bounty, you'll still be set free without having to pay.
  • Several Challenges can be completed in a significantly easier fashion than how they read. For example, one of the Marksman challenges requires killing an enemy with a tomahawk from over 80 feet away. By "enemy", it means someone automatically hostile to you, such as a rival gang member. This means no killing a random stranger camped in the wilderness. However, you can render that enemy completely helpless first by, say, tying him him up first. While he struggles helplessly, you can walk to the required distance and toss tomahawks until you hit. Similarly, the final Bandit challenge requires robbing five trains without dying or being caught. What it doesn't say is that stealthily stealing items from the baggage car qualities as a train robbery. Simply steal something, hop off, return to the train station, repeat five times.
• Loot Command: An option to "Loot" appears when you're next to dead bodies and incapacitated individuals (either knocked out or tied up). Unlike most games, there actually is an animation of you rooting through their pockets.
• Lovable Rogue: Sean. He makes no effort to hide the fact that he's a drinkin', shootin', robbin' outlaw, whose introduction to the gang was attempting to rob Dutch, but he's just so charming. Arthur even compares him to his "little brother" after Sean is killed.
  • Arthur Morgan counts. While he's an outlaw who has killed many people in the past over money, with several negative flaws such as being prone to anger quickly, starting fights, maybe even shooting or knocking out someone at the drop of a hat, he's still rather very likable and can be a genuine Nice Guy when he wants to be, coming off as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at best who's loyal to the people in his camp and friends, showing kindness and being compassionate to innocent townsfolk while often lending a hand to those he comes across, even willing to suck some venom out of a man's leg! Many women find him charming and men think he's a gentleman, although he'll often deny this and tell him he's really a bad man. He highly respects women, talks to them in a respectful manner, and agrees with their rights to be able to vote (speaking the game takes place in a time period where women were treated in disregard and seen as the property of their husbands) and thinks nothing bad of women who can hold her own and often encourages and supports them. He even shows one of them how to shoot a gun properly and being patient with her. He'll even bust doors down and throw up all Hell if he finds out about a woman is being raped or threatened somewhere. He doesn't support racism and is courteous to people of all races. One of his best friends is a black man. Not to mention that he's really affectionate with his horses and dotes on them, and also the stray dogs he meets, and has a low tolerance of animal abuse. He also enjoys literature and can often be seen writing in his journal to reflect on his thoughts and feelings throughout the game, with aesthetically pleasing handwriting and reveals a very eloquent and even sensitive side you'd never guess he'd have, even self-doubting himself at times. He tries his darndest towards redeeming himself towards the end of the game, doing everything he can to help others before his sickness takes over.
  • Dutch is a subversion. He describes his philosophy as "we shoot fellers as need shooting, save fellers as need saving, and feed 'em as need feeding." This attitude has garnered immense loyalty from his gang, who view themselves as an entire group of lovable rogues. However, as the gang's fortunes worsen, Dutch becomes increasingly violent and obsessed with vengeance against people who have wronged him (or possibly wronged him). A frequent topic of discussion in the later half of the game is whether Dutch used to be a genuine lovable rogue or if he was just Faux Affably Evil all along.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The Gambler Challenges. Already based on games of chance, successfully completing the challenges means not just winning, but winning in specific ways which can take a lot of time and effort. Challenge 8 in particular is frustrating for many players. It requires hitting 3 times and winning a hand of blackjack. You have to do this 3 times. Even if you get five cards, the dealer could win or tie. There are players who got it in 20 minutes, and others that have spent hours with nothing to show for it. The other challenges have some degree of skill involved, but this one is entirely luck based.
  • Hunting. Each animal's (sans legendary) condition is measured in 3 star levels, and trappers and Pearson require "Perfect" condition pelts/carcasses (3 stars). However, animals spawn in all 3 conditions, and it can take a good while before the animal spawns and even longer to find a perfect specimen. After this, you need to get a one-hit kill with a weapon that fits the animal (small caliber for small animals, rifles/bow for predators, for example), and hope the shot hits the vitals you were aiming for. And even after this, if you die or a stray bullet hits the carcass on your horse, it'll be lost or damaged respectively. Your odds can be improved with a few tricks and a trinket, ^note The legendary deer trinket gives a roughly 10% chance of the pelt going up a star level upon skinning, although it will never go above the one the animal spawned with and excessive damage won't be fixed, and unlike carcasses, skins cannot be damaged after they're put on the horse but the spawnrates cannot be affected.
• Lured into a Trap:
  • Happens during a Chapter 3 mission where the O'Driscolls invite Dutch to discuss peace. While Colm and Dutch speak, Arthur covers them from a hill with a sniper rifle. However, several O'Driscolls sneak up on Arthur and capture him. Knowing that Dutch will go crazy trying to get Arthur back, they plan to draw him to their hideout while at the same time informing the Pinkertons of Dutch's location. Arthur is able to escape before the plan plays out.
  • Later in Chapter 3, several members of the gang are drawn into Rhodes to discuss a hot robbery lead. However, they are ambushed by the Grays and must fight their way out.

---