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Fallout
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Fallout (Franchise)
"War. War never changes..."
— Ron Perlman, series narrator

Fallout is a series of pulp Science Fiction Western RPGs, originally owned and published by Interplay and Black Isle and currently owned by Bethesda. Right after The Elder Scrolls, it is the longest-running and best-selling single player WRPG series in history, with over 50 million game copies sold since the series began in 1997.note  The games involve adventures in the post-apocalyptic United States of a retro-futuristic Alternate History — a Crapsaccharine World that never quite got over The '50s, powered by Atomic Energy and filled with Moral Myopia.

After World War II, the United States became an okay place to live. The shift towards nuclear energy gave way to technological wonders previously relegated to science fiction, from robot butlers to wrist-mounted computers. Unfortunately, the good times would not last: this inefficient technology depleted fossil fuels even faster than in the real world, causing massive "resource wars" in the early-mid 21st century. In 2066, China and the United States clashed over the Alaskan oil fields, leading to an 11-year military conflict between the two superpowers... then, on October 23, 2077, somebody — nobody is entirely sure who — ordered a nuclear launch. And once one missile was fired, everyone else responded in kind.

The resulting "Great War" lasted a mere two hours, but the atomic fire that burned the world was so incredibly destructive that it caused the total collapse of global civilization. Across the United States, pockets of humanity survived the bombs, either on the surface, in personal shelters, or by hiding in the Vaults, massive underground bunkers built by the Vault-Tec Corporation. But while the Vaults were ostensibly meant to protect America's people from nuclear armageddon, in reality the project doubled as an unethical, government-sponsored research program, with most Vaults' inhabitants living in conditions ranging anywhere from "somewhat unusual" to "outright torturous", all as part of a demented "social experiment" of unknown purpose.

The first Fallout game begins almost a century later, in 2161. Though the survivors in the United States have slowly begun to rebuild with small-scale societies, civilization as a whole struggles to survive amidst scarce resources, vicious mutants, and those who have turned to a Rape, Pillage, and Burn lifestyle. Subsequent games are set successive decades after the first, with the world continuing to evolve with new factions and adventures. There are three coherent story arcs and settings in the main series:

The series began life as a planned sequel or spinoff to the 1988 cRPG Wasteland, but due to licensing issues was retooled into a Spiritual Successor (the Wasteland series would later be revived by inXile Entertainment). As such, the Interplay/Black Isle games followed in Wasteland's footsteps with turn-based combat and 2D graphics, using an isometric perspective. After Bethesda acquired the franchise, the games underwent a Genre Shift to 3D first/third-person shooters with real-time combat, similar to their famed Elder Scrolls series. The original Interplay-era games were notable early examples of open-world Western RPGs, and the later Bethesda installments helped codify the modern Action RPG/Wide-Open Sandbox hybrid.

The games utilize a patented stat and character system known as SPECIAL — players put points into Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, which affect their "derived statistics" (health, action points, damage resistance, etc.) and their starting skill levels. Every level gives some skill points and at certain points (every 3 levels to every level, depending on the game) the player chooses from a list of "perks" that give special bonuses, with certain builds unlocking certain perks. This system remained more or less intact through every game until New Vegas, then Fallout 4 and 76 removed skills entirely and transferring their functionality to the perk system. From there, the player is let loose into the open world with a simple, often vague starting objective and little in the way of equipment and supplies. While the first game made the main story objectives Timed Missions, subsequent games ditched it entirely, encouraging the player to explore the world at their leisure.

    open/close all folders 

    Video Games 
  • Fallout (1997): The grid-based, turn-based RPG original. Technically titled Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role Playing Game. Takes place in southern California, including the ruins of Bakersfield and Los Angeles.
  • Fallout 2 (1998): The second entry, using the same game engine as the original with some enhancements to streamline gameplay. Takes place in northern California and western Nevada, including the ruins of Reno and San Francisco.
  • Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (2001): Spinoff developed by 14 Degrees East and Micro Forte, featuring squad-based tactics gameplay a la Jagged Alliance. Takes place in the American Midwest, from Chicago to Colorado Springs.
  • Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004): Spinoff developed exclusively for PS2 and Xbox. A top-down shooter with light RPG elements. One of the last games produced by Interplay before they went bankrupt. Its setting is vague and unspecified, but generally assumed to be Texas.
  • Fallout 3 (2008): The third numbered entry and Bethesda's first outing with the series, which Genre Shifts to a First/Third-Person Shooter-RPG. Taking a Soft Reboot approach, it distances itself from the setting and story of prior games to establish its own identity, but retains various series staples. Takes place in Maryland and Virginia, including the ruins of Washington, D.C..
  • Fallout: New Vegas (2010): A Gaiden Game by Obsidian Entertainment using the Fallout 3 engine. While both are canon, this entry is more of a direct sequel to Fallout 2 than Fallout 3 was, returning to the setting of the former while incorporating elements of the latter. Takes place in Las Vegas and the surrounding Mojave Desert.
  • Fallout Shelter (2015): A free-to-play iOS and Android game in which the player builds and runs their own Vault. It is not set in any particular locale, though the majority of the game's content is based on Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.
    • Fallout Shelter Online (2019): A free-to-play gacha spinoff/sequel to Shelter developed by Shengqu Games and published by Gaea Mobile LTD under license from Bethesda. Though the game possesses an English language option, it is not available for download outside of select Asian countries.
  • Fallout 4 (2015): The fourth numbered entry, featuring improved First/Third-Person Shooter mechanics and greatly increased Item Crafting variety. It is also the first game in the series to feature a fully-voiced protagonist. Takes place in Massachusetts, including the ruins of Boston.
  • Fallout 76 (2018): A mulitplayer spinoff prequel made with Fallout 4's engine, set in the decades immediately after the bombs fell. Takes place in West Virginia.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Fallout: Warfare — Wargaming in the Fallout Universe (2001): A tabletop wargame based on Fallout Tactics which uses a simplified version of the SPECIAL character system. Only a single basic rulebook was released, via a bonus disk for Tactics.
  • Fallout: The Board Game (2017): A Board Game by Fantasy Flight Games, designed for up to four players. Players can either cooperate or compete in pre-set adventure scenarios, with random location and event tokens to make each game unique. Takes place in either Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Boston, or Far Harbor, depending on the scenario chosen.
    • Fallout: The Board Game — New California (2018): An expansion to Fallout: The Board Game, introducing new scenarios, characters, and more. Set in California, as the title suggests.
  • Fallout: Wasteland Warfare (2018): A tabletop wargame from Modiphius Entertainment, using 32mm miniatures. Available factions include the Brotherhood of Steel, Enclave, Institute, Railroad, NCR, Caesar's Legion, Gunners, and Children of Atom, as well as generic Survivors, Raiders, and Super Mutants.
    • Fallout: Factions (2024): A skirmish style wargame for two players, compatible with the above wargame's miniatures. 
  • Fallout Shelter: The Board Game (2020): A worker placement Board Game by Fantasy Flight Games, based on the mobile game Fallout Shelter.
  • Fallout: The Roleplaying Game (2021): A Tabletop RPG by Modiphius Entertainment, using their 2d20 system. Also referred to as Fallout 2d20. Scenarios and sourcebooks released so far include:
    • Orange Colored Sky (2023): A PDF scenario in which players encounter a wasteland hospital dealing with an addiction epidemic caused by a local raider gang's newest narcotic, "Nectar."
    • Fully Operational (2023): A PDF scenario in which players are hired by an exiled Brotherhood of Steel scribe to search an abandoned West-Tek facility for a set of prototype power armor.
    • Winter of Atom (2023): A sourcebook expanding on the Church of the Children of Atom and the unseen outskirts of Fallout 4's Commonwealth. Contains a full campaign set a year before the events of Fallout 4, involving a radical sect of the Children, led by a deranged prophet known as the "Last Son of Atom," invading the Commonwealth in the middle of a freezing winter.
    • Showdown in Skull Canyon (2023): A PDF scenario in which players embark on an adventure to the secluded settlement of Skull Canyon near Area 51, where a conflict is brewing between the town's enigmatic mutant inhabitants and an NCR patrol searching for some missing troopers.
    • Hunted (2024): A PDF scenario in which players find themselves in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a terrifying creature tearing its way through raider groups and Super Mutant clans in a remote stretch of the wasteland.
    • Into the Abyss (2024): A PDF scenario in which players help a struggling seaside salvage operation make a dangerous dive to a wrecked pre-war battleship prowled by a legendary mutated sea monster.
    • Royal Flush (2025): A sourcebook expanding on mechanics for vehicles, gambling, random encounters and desert survival. Features a full campaign set a year before the events of Fallout: New Vegas, in which a job offer from the crime families of New Reno leads players to discover a mysterious plot to arm radical groups and inflame tensions throughout the NCR's frontier territories, culminating in a road trip to New Vegas to find and confront the mastermind of the conspiracy.
  • Universes Beyond: Fallout (2024): A collaboration with Magic: The Gathering and their crossover imprint Universes Beyond. It uses Magic's existing gameplay and consists of four ready-to-play commander decks, each featuring both all-new cards representing iconinc figures from the games and reprints featuring new Fallout-themed artwork.

    Canceled Games 
  • Fallout: Van Buren: The original Fallout 3, cancelled shortly before Interplay's bankruptcy and the closing of Black Isle. Although never released, aspects of its story and lore were reused in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 76. It was to take place in and around Arizona.
  • Fallout Tactics 2: A planned sequel to Fallout Tactics, which entered pre-production shortly before the release of the first game and was canceled a few months later. According to Micro Forte, this was due to the first game's initial sales not meeting Interplay's expectations. It was to take place in Florida.
  • Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel 2: A planned sequel to Brotherhood of Steel. Was cancelled due to Interplay's financial troubles. It was to take place in Texas, like the previous entry.
  • Fallout Extreme: Working title for a Fallout Tactics sequel briefly developed by 14 Degrees East for Xbox. Planned as a first-person/third-person squad-based tactics game with strategic overworld management similar to Jagged Alliance. It was to take place in multiple locales as part of an odyssey from Southwestern Canada to Alaska, Russia, and eventually China.
  • Fallout Online: An MMO that Interplay Entertainment announced and began development on... after they sold the rights to Bethesda. It was to take place in and around Seattle. Despite the obvious legal issues surrounding such a move, development continued until January 9, 2012, when they finally settled with Bethesda after a drawn-out lawsuit. Bethesda received full rights to the Fallout online game for two million dollars and would go on to develop their own Fallout MMO.
  • Fallout: Resource Wars: A hypothetical game proposed by Van Buren and New Vegas designer J.E. Sawyer at various points, set in Europe during the eponymous Resource wars prior to the nuclear apocalypse. Focused on team-based multiplayer, the gameplay would be a blend of Motocross Madness pacing, Battlefield 1942 foot and vehicle combat, and slightly longer-than-CS duration rounds. A salvaging element would be included giving the player the choice of either repairing damaged vehicles/weapons for use in the next round, or scrapping them for parts. The plot would involve a crew of soldiers from the Royal Armoured Corps, who become stranded in a war-torn anarchistic northern Italy, and have to fight their way to the English Channel in quickly degrading vehicles, while scavenging for replacements, fuel, and weapons as they go.

    Other Materials 
  • The Fallout Bible (2002): A Universe Bible written by Chris Avellone, designer on Fallout 2 and lead designer of the cancelled Van Buren. It contains a great deal of background information on aspects of the series, and expounds upon parts of the story not covered in the games. While its canon status as of Bethesda's acquisition of the series has not been fully defined, aspects of it have been used and referenced in later games.
  • One Man, and a Crate Full of Puppets (2008): A tie-in Webcomic for Fallout 3, created by Penny Arcade with creative input from Fallout 3 lead designer Emil Pagliarulo. It is considered Broad Strokes canon, with the Puppet Man character in particular recieving multiple Continuity Nods in canon media.
  • All Roads (2010): A tie-in Graphic Novel for Fallout: New Vegas, written by Chris Avellone and created in conjunction with Dark Horse Comics. It details the events leading up to the opening of the game, and provides background on one of the game's antagonists. Originally included in the collector's edition of the game, it was released digitally in 2011. With the exception of a single panelnote , it aligns almost completely with canon and is regarded as such.
  • Fallout (2024): A live-action TV series developed by Bethesda in partnership with Amazon Prime Video and Kilter Films, the studio behind Westworld. Executive produced by Fallout 3 and 4 director Todd Howard and fully canonical to the games, it follows a vault dweller from Santa Monica, California as she journeys into the wasteland.

The first few entries also spawned a pair of "sister games" that utilized similar gameplay and design philosophies: Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, a Steampunk fantasy game by former Interplay and Black Isle developers, and Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, a historical fantasy game published by Black Isle and developed by Avalon Interactive, which serves as the only non-Fallout videogame to use the series' patented "SPECIAL" character system.

If you're looking for radioactive fallout, see Nuclear Weapons. The series is not to be confused with Mission: Impossible – Fallout or The Fallout.

Note: Tropes relating to the series and the Fallout Universe in general go here. Please put tropes that apply to individual games in the series on their respective pages.

Tropes. Tropes never change...

    # — C 
  • Abdicate the Throne: So to speak. Sometimes the diplomatic solution in regime-change type quests involves the officeholder stepping down willingly, such as resolving the civil crisis inside Vault 101 in Fallout 3, where the peaceful solution is to convince Amata's father to step down as overseer and let more level heads lead to safeguard the Vault's future.
  • Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Many robots in the series continue to (try to) carry out tasks assigned to them in the prewar years, completely unaware that over a hundred years have passed since America was devastated by nuclear war and their old masters are long dead. One notable example is a Mr. Handy in downtown Washington D.C. that still makes a daily trip to the local market down the street and reads bedtime stories to the charred remains of the children of its owner. Granted, this is less about dedication and more because their programming is too restrictive to allow any sort of deviation. Some individual robots that have outgrown their programming due to being left active for so long can even acknowledge the futility of their work if you press them on it, but still prefer to keep at it, simply because it's all they know how to do.
  • Absurdly High Level Cap: Skills in 2 and Tactics cap at 300%, and 200% in the first installment, though for most of them 100% is all you need (and for the others, like combat-related skills, you tend to stop getting benefits from them just before 150%.) 4 has no hard level cap, but to get every perk and fully upgrade every SPECIAL stat, you'll need to be level 272 (264 if you find the eight in-game SPECIAL boosts).
  • Absurdly Sharp Claws: In the possession of the aptly named deathclaws, genetically engineered killing machines with claws the size of machetes. In each game they are one of the toughest commonly occurring enemies, and their claws can even be MacGyvered into one of the more deadly unarmed weapons in Fallout 3.
  • Abusive Precursors:
    • The Enclave, the remnants of the éminence grise of the United States federal government, the main antagonists of the second and third games.
    • The Pre-War United States as a whole. The whole country became a corrupt, totalitarian police state that put unwilling human subjects through horrific scientific and social experiments. Even two centuries since they all went up in smoke in a nuclear holocaust they helped cause, most of the Wasteland's problems can be tied back to them: Deathclaws, Robobrains, the Vaults, most of the Big Empty, all came from them.
    • The Think Tank also qualifies: mad scientists who were responsible for various horrible experiments carried out on political prisoners.
    • Vault-Tec performed horrible social experiments on the inhabitants of the Vaults, unless you were lucky enough to end up in a control Vault. The effects of these experiments can be seen with several of the factions across the Wasteland. The TV series reveals that they were manipulated by the Enclave into planning a False Flag Operation to intentionally escalate the conflicts of the Resource Wars and even suggesting launching nukes on America themselves (assuming that China didn't beat them to it first), all so they could populate their Vaults and take over the ruined wasteland through economic-apocalyptic means.
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
    • The date that the games take place in vary from 80 to 200+ years after the Great War, and yet the player can still find ruins of civilization mostly untouched, including fridges and vending machines with foodstuffs, military crates and ammo boxes with body armor and munitions, first aid boxes with medical supplies, and so forth. If the wasteland was really a world of scavengers and raiders as the series depicts, anything of value not protected by a lock would have been looted long ago — but that would make exploration mighty boring and unrewarding if there was nothing left for the players to find.
    • Many ruins still contain various rusty metal objects such as chain-link fences, street signs, and car bodies. While it's feasible in the dry deserts that some of the games take place in, several locales take place where it rains frequently or right next to the sea where they'd be exposed to salt spray from the ocean. After 200 years, iron and steel objects would have long since been reduced to a fine red dust.
    • Given that the pre-war world ran on highly inefficient technology, the power systems that run the lights, computers, robots, and other technologies should have run out of fuel within a few decades. But then, that would mean most interior areas would be in total darkness and anything hooked up to or stored on a computer would be inaccessible.
    • In most games, bottle caps are the common currency. However, due to their inefficient size and shape, bottle caps would be difficult to carry in the large quantities shown in the gamenote , and it certainly wouldn't be feasible to haul around several thousand caps, not to mention that reproducing the caps would be trivial for anyone with basic fabrication equipment and access to scrap metal, which is actually a minor plot point in New Vegas.
      • The usage of bottle caps is lampshaded in the Honest Hearts DLC for New Vegas by Follow-Chalks (an innocent but pretty clever young tribal man) asking you why you carry so many of them, because they "jingle like crazy".
    • Radiation poisoning is treated as much less severe than in real life, and is mostly treated as an abstraction because calculating the complex biological effects of radiation wouldn't be fun. For example a dose of 400 rads (equivalent to 4 Grays, the more "modern" SI unit for absorbed dose) absorbed in a short enough time in real life would leave you violently sick and with about a 50/50 chance of death, and require about a year in an intensive care ward, with increased risk of cancer for the rest of your life. A dose of 999 rads (with instant death at 1000 rads) can still leave you able to walk and seek medical treatment, whereas in real life you'd be evacuating your organs through both ends and your odds of survival even with the best medical treatment possible would be "better hope God is in a good mood".
  • Action Girl: Any female PC can choose to be an Action Girl. There's even a Perk with this name for female characters (and Action Boy for male).
  • Action Pet: The dog companions.
  • Adventure-Friendly World: There's essentially no end of undiscovered pre-War experimental tech. The combination of nuclear apocalypse and widespread mutation makes for a lot of separated communities largely ignorant of one another. This all makes for a world where just about any sci Fi trope can be spun out into an adventure and still fit within the canon.
  • After the End: Nobody knew who fired the first missile that triggered the apocalypse, and by the end of the day, nobody cared. It was considered the end of the world. But still, humanity survived — mutated, blood thirsty, and completely shattered — and the world moved on. The Great War wasn't the end, simply one more sad chapter. Unlike a lot of apocalyptic stories which end before civilization starts to get back on its feet, the world in Fallout slowly gets better with each game.
    • By the time of Fallout: New Vegas (204 years After The End), the West Coast of the former United States, primarily the former states of California and Oregon have been mostly rebuilt and united under a single nation that's as close to pre-war America as it gets, and the rest of the wasteland around it, primarily the former states of Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah are occupied by savage but surviving tribes, prosperous settlements, and ambitious nation-states.
    • By the time of Fallout 4 (6 years after New Vegas and 210 years After The End), the East Coast, on the other hand, is still largely fractured with small to moderate cases of powerful factions holding and losing control over territory. However, places like Washington D.C. (called the Capital Wasteland), Pittsburgh (called the Pitt) in Pennsylvania, Point Lookout State Park (called Point Lookout) in Maryland, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (called the Commonwealth), and Mount Desert Island (called The Island) in Maine have all seen a resurgence of human civilization, whether because humanity themselves have eked out a resilient new way of living there or the nuclear devastation wasn't as severe as other places so there's more room for populations, communities, and/or settlements to form and grow.
    • Of course, the player's actions can set things back to square one again (e.g. poisoning Project Purity with a mutated strain of FEV, nuking Dry Wells or the Long 15 or both, switching off Far Harbor's Fog condensers to let the Island's creatures destroy it).
    • Both New Vegas and Fallout 76 offer a case of after the end of After The End:
      • For the Mojave Wasteland, there is The Divide, a nigh-inhospitable region that survived the Great War and was previously a thriving community. At least until Courier Six delivered a package there that armed and detonated the inactive warheads underground, leaving the place as one of the most twisted and hellish places in the Wasteland wreathed in perpetual storms that kick up winds so strong it can tear flesh from a body in seconds.
      • In Appalachia, a mere 20+ years after the Great War devastated the area, humanity started returning and rebuilding. But then chaos erupted again, as a race of mutated creatures called Scorchbeasts were unleashed and wiped out the vast majority of human life in the area through a virulent affliction called the Scorched Plague. By the time Vault 76 opens on Reclamation Day, the Vault Dwellers remain the only shred of human civilization. At least initially.
  • The Ageless:
    • Ghouls, as part of their Cursed with Awesome traits mentioned below, apparently no longer age. Throughout the series, you'll meet several who were alive before the war and you never hear of one dying from non-violent means.
    • Eastern Super Mutants also seem to be immortal, although they grow physically and devolve mentally as they age.
    • The western Super Mutants as well, except no deterioration. Marcus was dipped when The Master was alive, and he was already an adult human, as were all subjects. Roughly 120 years later during New Vegas he is as fit as ever.
    • Lily was already in her 70s by the time her vault was opened. Just as soon as she saw the sky for the first time in her life, she was abducted and transformed into a nightkin. Had she been able to retain her state of mind like Marcus, she could have considered it a blessing in some way or another.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Varies quite a bit. Artificial intelligences are rare, bulky, immobile machines in Fallout (with the exception of the "androids" developed at post-war MIT). Some intelligences are sane and helpful, others are unstable but relatively harmless, and a few are villains.
    • A Brotherhood of Steel computer in the second game implies that a fully self-aware AI is just as capable of going insane as humans are. This causes problems when for example you have one running in complete isolation for years...
  • All Crimes Are Equal: Insofar as the idea of "crime" can exist in a society with no more centralized legal structure. Any sort of wrongdoing will typically be met with the same sort of response — everyone in the settlement attacks you. Take a step into a place you aren't allowed, steal a bottle of Nuka-Cola, or simply act like a Jerkass to the wrong person, and you can expect violence. Subverted in some settlements with jails and order, in these places you can actually be imprisoned. New Vegas gives a Hand Wave that NCR's troops are miserable due to the state of the Mojave and this is why they're so on-edge and don't care to punish crimes fairly, but it's still silly that a dozen armored troops will open fire on you just for taking a tin can off the floor that was marked as owned.
  • The Alleged Car: Or rather, The Alleged Everything. 80% of the tech you find is literally falling apart, broken, or trying to kill you. However, that doesn't mean that technology is useless. There's also an actual Alleged Car that doubles as a Cool Car, the Fallout 2 Highwayman.
  • Alternate History:
    • The Fallout timeline diverges from the real world some time between the end of World War II and the early sixties. Due to a number of unspecified factors, the social, political, and technological status quo of The '50s endured well into the late 21st century. The changes are minor at first but continue to cascade as the decades go by. Briefly:
      • Rather than progressing to thermonuclear bombs, the military focuses on smaller-yield atom bombs to increase their tactical utility, however the design of the bombs never progresses past the large Fat-Man style of WW2 era nuclear weapons. ICBMs serve alongside airplane dropped bombs and submarine launched missiles, forming the nuclear trifecta.
      • The transistor is also not invented until the late 2070s, causing computing technology to remain reliant on vacuum tubes and large bulky monitors.
      • The space race unrolls differently (although the first moon landing is off by only a few days.) Federal power snowballs as the military-industrial complex takes over entirely. The states are rebuilt into 13 'commonwealths.'
      • Communism continues to thrive in China, and it's been implied several times that it is also stuck in their 1950s mentality, albeit how it was when Mao Zedong was in power during that time period (Russia, though still Communist, seems to play a minor role).
      • A-bombs are joined by practical laser, gauss, and plasma-projection technology. Foreseeing trouble, the US commissions private industries (notably Vault-Tec) to construct bunkers that will allow at least some Americans to survive the war (and for... other reasons).
      • Through the mid-21st century, struggles over resources erupt into conflict, leading to wars between a united Europe and the Arabian states. This is followed by a larger dispute between China and the US over oil; at least one significant battle fought on the Moon (at the Sea of Tranquility); the invasion of Alaska; the US annexing Canada; and, finally, global thermonuclear exchange over a span of two hours later known as the "Great War." Eighty years later, Fallout 1 begins.
    • Despite the significant changes, some aspects of American pop-culture seem to have progressed relatively unchanged, or at least diverged at a later date. Conversations in Fallout 2 mention the existence of "Rocket Man" by Elton John directly by name, and one NPC comments how he remembered seeing the same movie after you directly quote The Silence of the Lambs. There's also the Kings in New Vegas, who wouldn't be who they are if Elvis Presley didn't exist. To say nothing of the music and credited artists that are still played over radio stations across the wasteland.
  • Always Chaotic Evil: The majority of the Vault 87 Super Mutants in the third game. Averted with the Super Mutants created in Mariposa, although many are hostile anyway, due to your choices in game.
  • Ambiguous Situation: There are a number of mysteries throughout the series, but the biggest one is the question of who started the Great War. Considering how the United States and China were locked in a lengthy resource war for years prior to the bombs being dropped, the most obvious answer is that China is responsible for nuking America but even if you believe that, it's unclear whether they hit first, or if the US bombed China then got hit by a retaliatory strike. Fallout 3 DLC suggests that the Zetans, an alien civilization studying Earth for centuries, may have done it For Science!. The live-action TV series, meanwhile, confirms that the Enclave manipulated their pawns at Vault-Tec into planning to nuke America in order to ensure that the Vaults would be put to use, which would drive investors to pay for the right to run experiments on a Vault's residents, but it's unclear whether or not they actually managed to go through with that plan, or if the war started in the above case of a superpower reacting to being attacked or preemptively attacking, before they were able to do so.
  • Ammo-Using Melee Weapon:
    • In the Black Isle games, melee weapons like the Ripper and Power Fist require energy cells to function, this was removed from Brotherhood of Steel onwards.
    • For New Vegas, the developers originally intended for the power fist and its several variants to get this feature back, including a Zap Glove hitting with fusion-powered electricity and a Ballistic Fist that is essentially an arm-mounted shotgun, of which requiring the player to obtain supplies of fusion cells and shotgun shells. This was eventually discarded and instead they attack using a universal, unseen, unlimited ammo supply to function.
  • Ammunition Backpack: The Minigun, Grenade Machine-gun, Flamer, and Gatling laser from Fallout 3 onwards.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: The Vaults were never meant to save anyone. The Enclave, a cabal of members of the government and some powerful MegaCorps, were considering colonizing an entirely new world once Earth was laid waste, but wanted to know if people could handle the logistical strain of generation ships. So the Vault Experiment was hatched: except for a handful of "control" Vaults, every supposed shelter would have a flaw that would test the population inside. One was deliberately overcrowded, one's door would never close all the way, one was inhabited by a thousand men and one woman (another had the same setup, but flipped the roles), one would pump hallucinogenic gas in the air systems, one was a test to see how an all-powerful Overseer would behave, and so forth, with cameras and uplinks sending all the data to a secret command and control Vault.
  • Ant Assault: The series features several different classes of ant enemies, most of which congregate either around caves which hold their queen/colony or, in one case in Fallout 3, their leader the Ant-agonist.
  • The Anti-Nihilist: The setting of the Fallout universe is that a large percentage of humanity was killed by nuclear fallout, and structures of the old world are either decayed, eroding or destroyed. Anyone who was able to survive has to live in a world where the remaining survivors are converted into homicidal super mutants or turned into ghouls due to the lingering radiation. A large portion of animals have become hostile predators, robots are still following their programs to a murderous degree and multiple factions are further dividing the survivors due to a war to see who should repair civilization. Vault Tec still has posters and merchandise that promote this trope by telling the occupants to have faith in the government, survivors are trying to be hopeful and upbeat despite the circumstances, and finally people are trying find purpose in this apocalyptic world.
  • Anti-Radiation Drug: The series abounds with various anti-rad drugs that are an essential part of any player's inventory when exploring the more heavily-irradiated parts of the wasteland. Two of the most common ones featured across the series are Rad-X and RadAway: when taken, they increase resistance to radiation and lower the amount of radiation absorbed, respectively. Some perks available to the player can enhance the duration or efficacy of Rad-X and RadAway.
  • Apocalypse How: The Great War caused a near-Planetary Societal Collapse. Fortunately, civilization has been slowly rebuilding, and by the time of Fallout: New Vegas, the less scorched and anarchic areas of the world have small but functioning cultures.
  • Apocalypse Anarchy:
    • Unsurprisingly, this was extremely widespread right after the bombs dropped, which was just made worse by the fact that anyone who could restore order was either dead, in a Vault or had abandoned the country to hole up with The Enclave. Ironically, things were actually at their worst in areas like Boston, which weren't targeted (or the nukes didn't hit properly), because there were more survivors left to fight over the scraps. The precursors to the Raider bands arose during this period, consisting of crazed survivalists, criminals, and desperate civilians.
    • Post-War, this trope is still prevalent in many areas of the former U.S where society never managed to rebuild to any real extent for one reason or another, leaving them overrun with Raiders and Tribals of various kinds. It's only in recent years that this has changed, with the formation of the NCR on one side and Caesar's Legion on the other.
  • Apocalyptic Log: Everything from Holotapes and computer terminals to journals and scraps of paper may contain one of these, both pre-and-post-War ones, though the former is the most common, ending on the day of the Great War or the immediate aftermath.
  • Apocalyptic Logistics: Ammo and pre-war guns, though not always in the best of condition, are still common enough to be in the hands of most mooks, factions, and merchants. Energy weapons are rarer (though the few that still have the means crank out post-war replicas). Despite the 80-210 years (depending on the game) since the bombs fell, pre-war supplies can still be found in abundance in ruined buildings, in areas with beings that would have had found them and used them long before the game even started.
  • Apocalyptic Underground Refuge: The Vaults, underground cities where survivors of the US-China nuclear war fled, are a major part of the franchise. About half the games start with the protagonist leaving a Vault that managed to stay closed up until that point. It also turns out that Vault-Tec didn't actually intend the Vaults as refuges from the bombs, but as sociological experiments that the Enclave could exploit later.
  • Arcology: The vaults themselves. Officially, the vaults were nuclear shelters designed to protect the American population from nuclear holocaust. However, with a population of almost 400 million by 2077, the U.S. would need nearly 400,000 vaults the size of Vault 13, while Vault-Tec was commissioned to build only 122 such vaults, plus a demo vault. The government, and Vault-Tec, never really believed an atomic war would occur; the real reason for the existence of these vaults was to run social experiments on pre-selected segments of the population to see how they react to the stresses of isolation and how successfully they recolonize Earth (or another planet) after the vault opens. Seventeen vaults were the control and worked as advertised; the rest had a deliberate experimental flaw. Some of these experiments were understandable (from a sociological viewpoint), while others were 'mad science' to begin with. Here is a full list of (known) vaults and the experiment conducted.
  • Arc Words:
    • "War. War never changes." No matter the state of the world or civilization, humanity will always be driven to war with itself again, and always for the same fundamental reasons; resources, greed, ideology, etc. Lonesome Road amends the saying to "war never changes, but men can."
    • "Life in x is about to change" appears with rather satisfying regularity. For 1, x was "the Vault" and in Tactics it's "the Brotherhood". In an alternative intro to 2 (that is hidden in the game files), it was 'Arroyo'.
    • The official Penny Arcade comic has "The Vaults were never meant to save anyone," which fans have adopted as an unofficial tagline of the series.
    • "Total atomic annihilation" appears frequently in the more recent games, such as Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, though mostly in the promotional materials.
  • Armed with Canon: When Chris Avellone, who began his involvement in the series as a designer on Fallout 2, got promoted to lead designer for Fallout: Van Buren, he used his semi-official Universe Bible as the basis for much of the plot, allowing him to Retcon and handwave aspects of previous games that he disliked. After the game's cancellation, these decisions were rendered mostly non-canon.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • In the first two games companions will liberally use burst weapons and grenades if they have them and are able to use them; the former is very likely to kill you if you're in the way, and the latter, no companion has the Throwing skill needed to use grenades without dropping them at their own feet, not even the companions who are supposed to be good at it. On the plus side, enemies with burst weapons and explosives will gladly tear their own allies to shreds trying to hit you. Additionally, throughout the series enemies may use explosives like grenades and rocket launchers at point-blank range, hurting themselves as well as you.
    • One of the more baffling things in the first two games is that randomly neutral factions who accidentally hit you in random encounters will then suddenly turn hostile as if you are the enemy despite you and your companions not being aggressive towards them at all.
    • Sometimes in the first two games, the enemy or your companions will just "lock-up" in combat, doing absolutely nothing for several turns in a row, fortunate for you if an enemy stops attacking, not so much in a encounter where your companions refuse to attack enemies at all.
    • In the Bethesda-era games, companions cannot jump over any obstacle. If you jump up or down a cliffside, they will take the long way around, and if they find an enemy along the way they will engage it alone and possibly die if it's a dangerous encounter.
    • In the Bethesda-era games, "stealth" is not in any companion's vocabulary. They will enter Sneak mode and sneak with you, but the second they spot an enemy they charge in guns blazing. Fallout 4 makes them slightly less prone to run into combat when you're in Sneak, but they tend to wander around and not make much effort to be stealthy, which will probably draw the enemy's attention (though at least the enemy will not be alerted to you if your companion provokes them). The only real way to be sneaky is to have companions wait out of the way and go it alone.
    • NPCs universally suffer from Suicidal Overconfidence and will eagerly run into combat with a dozen enemies, even if at a glance the player could tell they wouldn't survive to see their next turn for it.
    • Due to some glitchy programming with how enemies handle aggro, it's possible to accidentally hit a friendly NPC while trying to shoot an enemy, and as a result your companions will presume you see them as an enemy and attack them, or the hit NPC will turn their attention to fighting you. Fight in towns with allies and enemies scattered between innocent bystanders, a single stray bullet hitting a civilian because they ran between you and the enemy could result in you having to massacre the town in self-defense.
    • In Fallout 2, if your stats are high enough, some enemies will flee combat from you. Then when you end combat, they will slowly walk back to where they were at the start of combat, likely triggering combat again. No choice to break the loop but shoot them dead.
    • NPCs have no sense of moderation at all when it comes to combat, and will always use the most powerful weapon you gave them that has ammo. This is particularly annoying when giving your companions grenades or mines (so that you don't have to haul them around yourself) and they wind of throwing them at one-hit-point nuisances like radroaches.
  • Artistic License – Biology: As well as Artistic License – Physics. Don't expect realistic science in this series. It's inspired by pulp sci-fi after all, so this trope is deliberately Invoked:
    • Radiation in particular works considerably differently in the Fallout universe than in reality. For starters, while Fallout has radiation sickness, it's also capable of causing genetic mutations that are directly integrated into a creature's biology, leading to creatures like radscorpions, stingwings, and bloatflies. In reality, radiation simply damages DNA, causing it to replicate improperly and causing the body to function incorrectly. (Although, there are theories in-universe that the mutations are not caused by radiation alone, but none of them are confirmed or denied.) Also, in Fallout, simple hazard suits are shown to significantly or completely block radiation when worn, while in real life, the only way to block radiation is to place enough matter between you and the source to physically block the rays. A suit that truly protects you from gamma radiation would be too heavy to move in (although, in 3 and New Vegas, you can only have so much radiation resistance, about 85%, and in 4 1000%+ RR still lets in 0.5 Rads. This also leads to a Posthumous Character in NV who thought that the old hazmat suit he found let him No-Sell radiation dying from radiation poisoning, all the while blaming his symptoms on food poisoning).
    • The radiation aspect is actually zigzagged (or at least played with). Aside from being Invoked because of the ubiquity of the Nuclear Mutant, there was also a struggle between the original designers; one designer exclusively attributed the mutation not to the radiation, but to the Forced Evolutionary Virus, a mutagenic Synthetic Plague that the US government was cooking up to facilitate bio-engineering projects before the war; when the bunkers containing F.E.V got blown up, the virus was scattered across the world and caused the mutations. The other designer hated this idea, because they felt this undermined the setting's Zeerust aesthetic. The generally accepted compromise is that all of the mutants stem from a cocktail of both radiation and F.E.V.
    • Lampshaded in Fallout 76, where an audio log from a Free States doctor notes that the rampant biological mutation makes absolutely no sense, and she is certain that this has to stem from sources other than radiation, because radiation doesn't work like this. This was even lampshaded as far back as the first game, where the Shady Sands town doctor, Razlo, was completely bewildered at the existence of Radscorpions.
    • Big Creepy-Crawlies (radroaches, bloatflies, radscorpions, cazadors, stingwings, bloodwings, giant mantises, etc...) shouldn't exist at this size, since their breathing system is too inefficient (utilizing either open circulatory systems or more primitive, inefficient exchangers like book lungs) and they would asphyxiate.
  • Artistic License - Firearms: Some of the games feature revolvers chambered in .223/5.56mm. Those rounds are rifle rounds and would have abysmal performance when fired from a handgun barrel, especially with a revolver cylinder (where you generally want a straight casing instead of a bottlenecked case) where an excess of gas would escape via the cylinder and potentially injure you. The barrel's short length would also not play nice with the strict rifling requirement of .223 Remington.
  • Artistic License – Medicine: Critical hits that cripple a body part in the first two games often come with combat blurbs about limbs being flat out broken or utterly destroyed or eyes being destroyed, yet a successful application of the Doctor skill can fix these crippled limbs instantly, in the field without any surgical suite no less.
  • Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: As a video game series set in a post-apocalyptic Atompunk running on 1950s pulp science tropes, it inevitably plays very fast and loose in regards to the nature of radiation and nukes:
    • One of the biggest examples is the setting itself; most of the games are set about a century or two after the last bombs dropped, but much of the United States is still an irradiated wasteland. Realistically, the radiation levels should have dropped to negligible levels decades agonote  and vegetation should have returned to the land, but then it wouldn't look so post-apocalyptic anymore would it?
    • Pre-war food and drink that's been sealed since before the war shouldn't be radioactive unless it soaked up neutrons or had radioactive particles put into the package before it was sealed (which isn't as far-fetched as you think, as radioactive food, drinks and medication was once sold as "healthy" in the early days when radiation was poorly understood). Alpha and beta particles from radioactive fallout couldn't enter the sealed package, and gamma rays can't induce radioactivity into what they touch.
    • Radioactive material is virtually always portrayed as cartoonish glowing green goo, which is just not the case in real life note .
    • The Broad Strokes canon Fallout Bibles mention in backstory that in June 2065 power requirements for New York City were so high that a nuclear reactor struggled to meet the demand and "almost went critical". A nuclear reactor being "critical" means that it has a chain reaction going on - in other words, a nuclear reactor being "critical" means it's on.
  • Asshole Victim: The United States in the backstory. Fallout-universe America is a dystopian, jingoistic, imperialist state that thinks nothing of rounding up political dissidents at gunpoint and sending them to concentration camps to be used as test subjects in perverted medical experiments. Even after the nukes fall, it's really hard to feel sorry for Fallout's America.
  • Atompunk \ Diesel Punk: The setting is a cross of those two (retrofuturistic, while also being effectively The '50s in the future).
  • Attack Failure Chance:
    • Fallout 1: The manual says and implies a lot:
      • Agility and the Small Guns skill matters in hitting enemies with small guns:
        The higher your Small Guns skill the easier it will be for you to hit your target
      • The Jinxed trait's description mentions the existence of Critical Failures doing things like making the held weapon explode, a.k.a Attack Backfire.
    • Fallout 3: VATS attacks change the game from a Third-Person Shooter where the player's aiming skill matters, into a state where time is paused and reminiscent of the Turn-Based Combat of previous games in the series, where body parts are targeted with percentage hit chances, with a maximum accuracy of 95%.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Robots take more damage when hit in the head with a targeted attack—but then again, so does every other enemy in the series.
  • Auto-Doc: The Trope Namer. Autodocs are machines that can do advanced surgeries on par with if not better than any human doctor, but can be operated even by those with minimal to no medical training. For the most part, they seem to work pretty well, but A.I. Is a Crapshoot is still in full effect here. A good example of both instances occurs in the Old World Blues DLC for New Vegas. The Think Tank were experimenting with a procedure to remove a subject's brain and replace it with a Tesla coil, yet retain their personality and memories. Unfortunately a technical glitch in their Autodoc caused the procedure to destroy the minds of all the test subjects, until the Courier's unique bullet-scarred brain forces it to reboot back to its original settings, preventing them from becoming a Lobotomite.
  • Auto-Kitchen: According to advertisements, the G.E.C.K. is capable of creating food using water atoms.
  • Badass Bookworm: Virtually any character build in any of the games that relies heavily on intelligence. The intelligence attribute contributes to skill points granted per level. As a result, high level intelligent characters will almost certainly have mastered a wide variety of skills, including ones related to direct combat. In order to even get access to cybernetic combat implants, one must first have substantial skill as a medical doctor.
  • Ballistic Discount: You can kill pretty much anyone and take their stuff, shopkeeper or not, which includes killing them with a gun they just sold you and taking back your cash. Be aware that eyewitnesses (aside from your ludicrously loyal companions) will open fire.
  • Before the Dark Times: Pre-War United States. While it was better than the Wasteland, it was really a Crapsaccharine World, and an Eagle Land type 2.
  • BFG: The "Big Guns" skill determines how well you can use them. Without question, any given game in the Fallout series has many more BFGs than any other video RPG.
  • Big Brother Is Watching: Thanks to its endless Commie witch-hunt, pre-War America saw this as a good thing. Actual quote from the Museum of Technology Vault tour: "Concerned about security? Our I-On-U camera allows the Overseer to watch your every move. You'll never be alone again!" Yay?
  • Bittersweet Ending: Fallout ends with the player banished from the Vault forever despite saving most of West Coast humanity. Depending on the choices you made in Fallout 2, a lot of places can end up badly despite your best efforts (or more likely, because of them). In Fallout 3, Lyons' Heroic Sacrifice ending probably falls here, as it's your ally sacrificing herself to activate Project Purity to provide clean, fresh water to the Wasteland. It doesn't solve everything, but it's a start. Of course, you're a cowardly bastard for not doing it yourself. The Corrupt and Coward Endings are even worse. Finally, one of the third game's optional sidequests is a setup for a Shout-Out to the ending of the first (and it either hurts just as much or makes you really angry). Pretty much every ending for New Vegas has some negative consequence to it. And Fallout 4 is much the same way as your quest to find and save your son turns out to be fruitless as he is a sixty year old man and a candidate for Big Bad while all the faction endings have at least some bad consequences: Even the ending with the least possible deaths, in which the Minutemen and the Sole Survivor are allied with both the Railroad and Brotherhood of Steel (with those two in a shaky détente), the Institute is still destroyed and Shaun is dead, having died hating you for destroying the place.
  • Black Comedy: All over the place, beginning with educational films which instruct you on what to do in the case of a nuclear apocalypse with a cheerful cartoon like it was an after-school special on how to cross the street safely.note 
  • Bloody Hilarious: The main purpose of the Bloody Mess trait, which causes your enemies to die in the most horrific ways from even the lightest of death blows. At its best, your enemy may spontaneously be reduced to bloody chunks from being hit by a teddy bear. Fallout 3 made it helpful rather than merely amusing by tacking on a + 5% damage bonus. Even without Bloody Mess, you still get this effect from rare, good crits.
  • Blown Across the Room: Most guns simply poke holes in enemies until they fall down, but the Gauss Rifle from Operation Anchorage will send enemies flying on a critical hit. It's a good idea to knock the particularly tough enemies down to render them temporarily out of action. Plus, sending giant scorpions flying around ass over teakettle is hilarious. In the original two games, certain critical hits with most weapons will blow enemies (or you!) right off their feet and send them tumbling across the room, sometimes knocking them unconscious. In Fallout 4, if you're Too Dumb to Live and try to fire a weapon like a Fat Boy indoors without power armor, you'll end up Blown Across the Room in Ludicrous Gibs.
  • Body Horror: In general, any time you hear the words "biological experiment," "scientific accident," or "mutation," brace yourself for a sample of body horror. Note: The Master (boss of the first Fallout) had a nasty scientific accident involving a biological experiment and mutation, so...
  • Boring, but Practical: In all games, Small Guns (or its equivalent) is the combat skill that will get you through with the least fuss. While directed energy weapons and heavy artillery may hit harder and look cooler, they're typically much more difficult to acquire and find ammo for, whereas common ballistic firearms like hunting rifles and shotguns deal consistent and reliable damage and use equally common ammo types.
  • Borrowing from the Sister Series: Beginning with 3 (Bethesda's first developed game in the series), Bethesda adopted the Wide-Open Sandbox approach of The Elder Scrolls to the formerly a top-down, Turn-Based RPG Fallout series. It has remained in each main installment since.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: Deathclaws are the Devil. In all games.
  • Bowdlerise: German, and sometimes European in general, versions of the games are edited to remove gore, violence towards children, and other such controversial content. Besides that, the first game provides option to censor all non-PG level swear words (and some PG-level ones too, apparently just in case).
  • Brain in a Jar: Appears repeatedly throughout the series, most notably the "robobrain" enemy.
  • Brand X: Most notably Nuka-Cola, the setting's version of Coca-Cola — which might never have existed if Coke had agreed to the Product Placement. Intelligence-boosting drug/candy Mentats are named after Dune's human supercomputers and the mints ("Mentos: The Freshmaker!").
  • Breakout Character: The Brotherhood of Steel is a breakout faction. In the first game, they were just one Wacky Wayside Tribe in the Wasteland most notable as the source of Powered Armor, and they had a minor outpost in 2 that had little relationship to the overall plot. But then they got two spinoffs that focused on them, and 3 and 4 were mainline games that featured them as one of the main factions.
  • Brutal Bunker: Prior to the Great War, the Vault-Tec corporation built enormous underground fallout shelters called Vaults to protect America's population in the event that the ongoing conflict with China turned nuclear (which it did). What the prospective residents didn't know was that Vault-Tec had built the Vaults for the purpose of secretly performing experiments on the residents to benefit an apocalyptic Corporate Conspiracy. Though several Vaults succumbed to Fallout Shelter Fail and a few were lucky enough to be spared experiments thanks to being part of the control group, the majority were torture chambers at best and dictatorships at worst, with the Overseers of each Vault heartlessly pursuing their experiment regardless of the casualties.
  • Canon Identifier: Every protagonist receives an In-Series Nickname based on their background:
    • Fallout 1's protagonist leaves the comfort of their vault at the behest of the Overseer, becoming known as The Vault Dweller.
    • Fallout 2's main character is The Chosen One, the descendant of The Vault Dweller who was sent forth on a quest to save the town which was founded when TVD was exiled at the end of the first game.
    • Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel 's features a Brotherhood recruit with the rank of Warrior commanding a squad, eventally defeating the Calculator.
    • Fallout Brotherhood of Steel 's features three named protaganists by the name of Cain, Cyrus, and nadia who are all initiates to the Brotherhood.
    • Fallout 3's hero leaves the comfort of Vault 101 in search of their father (and because his leaving prompted the Overseer into trying to kill them), picking up the title of The Lone Wanderer from the resident disc jockey in the course of their quest.
    • Fallout: New Vegas opens with the PC getting shot in the head and buried alive by a gangster who wanted a package they were carrying. They become known by the job title that got them into this mess: The Courier.
    • Fallout 4 stars a pre-war citizen of the USA who was frozen along with everyone else in their vault before the bombs dropped. They see their spouse shot dead and their infant son kidnapped, leading to them being known as The Sole Survivor.
  • Canine Companion: A dog of some kind is a staple companion character in all the Fallout games. See the individual game entries for details. One of the premises of the Bethesda entries in the series is about you traveling the whole wasteland with a dog.
  • Captain Ersatz: Say "hi" to Riddick in Tactics.
  • Cargo Cult: An interesting version of this was slated to appear in Van Buren; the Ciphers. The tribe was descended from a group of scientists and soldiers from Los Alamos after the Great War, but the original survivors did not have enough resources to actually rebuild like other factions eventually would. Instead, using what pre-War tech they had managed to bring with them, the scientists imparted enormous amounts of mathematics and technology schematics to their descendants, who became experts at fixing and maintaining pr-War technology, even though they mostly live as your average Wasteland tribals. The tribe has passed down the knowledge they had been taught, but only know HOW things work, not WHY it works, and even use wall paintings to write their knowledge down.
  • Carnivorous Healing Factor:
    • From Fallout 3 onwards, a perk called "Cannibal" exists, which allows the player character to consume a corpse to restore some health at the cost of Karma.
    • Fallout 3:
      • The Cannibal perk lets you eat humanoid corpses to regain lost health.
      • The Hematophage perk, a potential reward from the "Blood Ties" quest, which allows blood packs to restore 20 HP instead of 1.
  • Cartography Sidequest: In Fallout 3, you can map out the Wasteland for Reilly after you've saved her squad in exchange for caps. Two smaller ones also appear in Fallout 2. Vault City asks you to map the grid squares surrounding Gecko and to find a route to NCR. Technically, you just have to get to NCR. It doesn't matter if you go by way of New Reno and San Francisco.
  • Central Theme:
    • "War Never Changes" the tagline of the entire series - Even though the world was destroyed by Nuclear War, people will still find reasons to kill each other. It's all about resources, ideology, and control.
    • Another theme is purity, especially racial purity. With the exception of New Vegas and 4, every main game in the series featured a Big Bad who thought they knew what race was most suited for survival. For the Master, it was Super Mutants, for the Enclave, it was "pure (unmutated) humans".
    • The power of a nation's legacy. America in 2077 was a corrupt cesspool where the government abused its citizens, corporations lacked ethical and legal restraint, and social cohesion was barely intact. This does not stop the post-war citizens from glorifying pre-war America. Does a nation survive on its ideas alone, or do the people and the brotherhoods they form compose a nation? Is the America that wastelanders worship really alive simply because it lives on as an idea? Or are the wasteland citizens delusional and selling themselves a lie that they carry on the legacy of America? Even if pre-war America had persevered without a nuclear war, they were probably already on their way out. Everything that America stood for was long gone, even if the nation state remained intact. So if pre-war America proved itself unworthy of its ideals, are those ideals themselves not still worthy? Maybe post-war Americans can learn from the past and build something better if they try. Even if "America" will never live again in the same way it did in the 21st century, its traditions and what was good about it can live on.
  • Chainsaw Good: The 'Ripper' weapon is, quite literally, a chainsaw stuck on a one-handed sword hilt.
  • Chainsaw-Grip BFG: Many heavy weapons are carried this way, particularly the various forms of Minigun.
  • Changing Gameplay Priorities: The series, given its After the End setting, is rife with this trope. Early on, you're either fresh out of the vault or a poor wastelander, making do with near-broken equipment, limited ammunition, and struggling after every battle to keep your health up. Once you've gained some experience and have looted/purchased better equipment, basic survival is less difficult, freeing you up to complete missions and acquire more, even better loot. By the end of each game, you are typically one of the most powerful (and often feared) individuals in the wasteland, wearing the best pre-war gear and exterminating once-challenging foes with little effort.
  • The Chosen Zero: When you have a character with low intelligence, pay a visit to your Vault or your native village and the locals will all express various levels of horror that your drooling moron of a character is the only thing standing between them and total destruction.
  • Church of Happyology: Hubology. See the trope's page for details.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Used quite a bit. In the first three games there is an option so that the offensive words are bleeped out and/or replaced with less offending words.
    ALARM! Intruders in the camp! Wake up you piss ant sons of bitches! I'll swear I'll cut the balls of anyone I don't see fighting! Get up you curs! If they escape, God help me, I'll burn you motherfucking still to the ground!
  • The Colored Cross:
    • Averted in Fallout 1 , 2 (which use the same models), Tactics, andBoS where "First Aid Kits" are White containers with a clear red cross in the center.
    • Played straight in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas which have a black cross in the center of a white box for their First Aid Kits. Fallout 4 changes these to a green cross.
  • Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: In the first two games there are three character templates to chose from that are optimal for completing the game either by fighting, sneaking around, or talking your way out of a situation.
  • Combat Cue Stick: The games have featured pool cues as melee weapons since Fallout 3.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Throughout the series, you'll shoot opponents in the legs to cripple them, shoot them in the eyes to blind them, and use combat drugs and cybernetic implants to give yourself an edge in battle. Even out of battle, major factions often have discreet and indirect ways to break their power without gunning them down directly.
  • Continuity Snarl: Whether the Mr. Handy is a product of General Atomics or RobCo differs by installment.
  • Cool Shades: Appear often; depending on the game they may provide stat bonuses or just look good.
  • Corrupt Politician: Sadly, the majority of officials in every mid-sized to large community qualify. Slightly less common with elected rather than self-appointed or hereditary officials... but only slightly.
  • Cow Tipping: Certain games in the series allow the player to indulge in Brahmin-tipping (Brahmin being two-headed cows that were mutated by exposure to radiation following the nuclear war).
  • Crapsaccharine World: The pre-war America was not an okay place to live. On the surface it's the idyllic image of the "world of tomorrow" envisioned in the 50s — people live comfortable lives in suburbia with robot assistants, swanky-looking cars, and not a care in the world. Just dipping your toes into the lore reveals that the government ran multiple discrete surveillance programs to spy on citizens, brutally put down any opposition to the rule of law, and engaged in human experimentation. The pre-war Megacorps were so rich and powerful that they essentially controlled the government and could do anything they wanted, which included badly polluting the environment, willful neglect of safety laws, mistreating employees, and engaging in acts of violence, murder and even outright terrorism against their rivals. Inflation was so bad that common household products could cost hundreds of dollars, corruption was rampant with bribery and embezzlement at every level of society, and the rich and powerful flaunted their influence without repercussion. Finally, keep in mind this is just what was happening within the United States — we're not mentioning the geopolitical turmoil and the dwindling fossil fuel supplies that led up to the Great War.
  • Crapsack World: The world is a ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It only gets worse, folks. There are giant radioactive insects and arachnids, really unsociable mutants, zombie-like creatures of every flavor and variety, mass starvation, dehydration, radiation sickness, lethal booby-traps and the occasional inexplicable Eldritch Abomination. Humanity has responded to these challenges with rampant slavery, xenophobia, cannibalism, and murder on a scale that can potentially reach genocide. The whole world seems to be designed to remind the human race of how royally they screwed up the planet, and most of the human race still isn't getting the message. There are examples of civilization trying to rebuild itself, but this sometimes results in places like den of vice New Reno and fascist communities like Vault City. Still, the player can - should they so choose - leave the gameworld a little better than they found it. Or just make it massively worse, of course...
  • Crippling the Competition: Throughout the series, you can use target shots to aim at enemy body parts. Shooting the eyes or head lowers their accuracy, shooting the arms may prevent them from using certain weapons, and shooting the legs lowers movement speed.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Played straight in general: everything, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, fights just as well at 1 HP as at 100. However, critical hits or sustained fire to a specific location (usually eyes or a limb) can cripple that part and reduce stats and/or fighting ability.
  • Critical Failure: A prominent feature in the first two games. You can drop your weapon, lose your ammo, lose your turn, injure yourself, and so on. At the extreme end, energy weapons can blow up in your hands. This can also apply to non-combat skills, jamming locks and triggering traps. Oh, and the Jinxed trait in the first two games made it happen to everyone around you, which could make the early game very very challenging since every miss had a good chance of being a critical miss. You could, however, make up for most of the negative effects of the trait by having a high Luck Stat, and you furthermore chose Unarmed, which does not have very harsh punishments for failures, as your primary combat skill, you suddenly have a very effective character build.
  • Critical Hit: Each game has its own Critical Hit mechanics. In general, critical hit rate is determined by the Luck stat, equipment, and perks.
    • In Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Tactics, called shots to specific body parts (especially the eyes) had a higher chance of being critical hits. Critical hits were resolved by rolling on a table that included results like triple damage, bypassing armour, and instant death. Infamously, it was possible to roll an instant death result that did not ignore armour, generating the "[Target] was critically hit for 0 damage and died from the pain" message.
    • In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, a critical hit simply multiplied damage by a weapon-specific coefficient. In addition, a sneak attack critical did double the damage of a regular critical hit. Unless the weapon was a melee/unarmed weapon, in which case it quintupled the damage.
    • Fallout 4 downplays its Critical Hits to merely double-damage attacks that can't be triggered during regular combat, but instead are manually triggered during V.A.T.S. attacks where they guarantee that an attack will hit it's target. Certain weapon mods can increase Critical damage and a number of perks allow the player to store more criticals or even gain criticals outright on a V.A.T.S. kill.
  • Critical Hit Class: While the series does not use a character class system, endgame perks exist that grant extremely high critical rates and most characters take on aspects of a Critical Hit Class.
    • The Better Criticals perk granted better results on the critical table in the classic games. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, it causes critical hits to do 50% more damage.
    • The Sniper perk for ranged weapons in Fallout and Fallout 2. It made a separate roll for a critical (equivalent to your Luck * 10) after rolling for a successful hit depending on the character's Luck Stat. If Luck was maxed to 10, every single successful hit would automatically roll critical. Even more damage could be applied through the use of targeted shots. And yes, full-auto weapons, flamers and rocket launchers (but not grenades) are guaranteed a critical strike on the character you're aiming at. Splash damage to other foes doesn't get an upgrade.
    • The Slayer perk, only in Fallout, Fallout 2, and "Fallout Tactics", was the Sniper perk equivalent for hand-to-hand characters. Instead of rolling for a critical, every hit was automatically upgraded to a critical.
    • All the main games allowed for a type of critical that would trigger if the target was struck while the player was undetected. Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics had the Silent Death perk, which would enable a critical when sneaking from behind, and only while unarmed, while Fallout 3 and New Vegas had automatic critical hits on attacks made while sneaking undetected.
    • Fallout 4's Luck tree of Perks include Better Criticals above, Critical Banker which allows you to save up criticals to use in VATS, Grim Reaper's Sprint which gives a chance to refill your AP gauge with every kill you make in VATS, and Four Leaf Clover which gives you a chance of completely filling your crit meter with every hit you make in VATS. All of these perks synergize very well with each other, and can make a character quite powerful.
  • Cursed with Awesome: As is typical for post-apocalypse scenarios, a handful of 'mutants' turn out to have advantages that go along with their deformities.
    • The Ghouls may make third degree burn victims look pretty, but they are immune to radiation, can't die from old age, and can seemingly enter a sort of hibernation where they don't need food, water, or even air. In fact, if they were able to breed they might be considered an improvement over humanity. Sadly, some ghouls seem prone to eventually degenerate into a 'feral' condition that reduces them to a (hostile) ape-like level of intelligence. In Fallout 2, you can stumble across a ghoul who was Buried Alive in the cemetery outside New Reno. He complains that it took you long enough. In New Vegas, you encounter a group of ghouls who plan on leaving for their lethally-radioactive "promised land" to escape persecution from humans. In Fallout 4, you can discover Billy, a Ghoul boy who has been trapped in a fridge for 210 years (he used it as a way to take shelter from the bombs, but got stuck).
    • Super Mutants (the name stuck before their true origins were learned) were specifically designed to be superior to humans in coping with the harsh Wasteland: they're radiation-proof, staggeringly strong and shrug off bullets... but their gifts came at the cost of them being sterile and not very bright (with a few exceptions). In fact, the vast majority of Super Mutants found on the East Coast are Always Chaotic Evil (although this is justified by them both being created by inferior FEV strains and being largely culled from Wastelander stock - who are already usually dumb to a fault anyway).
  • Cyber Green: As a throwback to the earliest computer monitors, the Pip-Boys use a monochrome palette consisting of black and shades of green. The Pimp-Boy 3 Billion from New Vegas uses an orange palette instead, referencing the amber color that was also common for old-fashioned monochrome monitors and matching it's solid gold exterior.

    D - H 
  • Damage Reduction: The mechanics of Damage Threshold and Damage Resistance, with slightly different formulas in each game.
  • Dangerous Deserter: Subverted with Captain Roger Maxson. During the last few days before the Great War, he led his military unit to declare their secession from the U.S. government after having uncovered exactly what kind of experiments were going on at the Mariposa Military Base (the atrocities actually drove their original commander to commit suicide just before the bombs fell). After the bombs dropped and America ceased to exist as a country, Maxson led his men and their families to the safety of the Lost Hills military bunker, which later became the stronghold of the organization he founded, the Brotherhood of Steel.
  • Dark Lord on Life Support:
    • Mad Scientist Dr. Stanislaus Braun from Fallout 3 has spent the past 200 years in a VR/life support pod overseeing the Tranquility Lane simulation, and is terminally dependent on it, as he tells the Lone Wanderer in the sim.
    • Mr. House from Fallout: New Vegas, who has managed to prolong his life by confining himself to a sophisticated life support chamber. Opening the chamber will ensure his eventual death due to being exposed to outside contaminants.
    • Caesar isn't technically on life support, but has a crippling brain tumor, hence Lanius being Dragon-in-Chief.
  • Days of Future Past:
    • The America of 2077 became an extreme version of 1950s America, with technological progression largely grinding to a halt with nuclear power plants and vacuum tubes, widespread paranoia and social instability amidst an ongoing Red Scare, and crippling resource shortages in the face of rampant consumerism.
    • The societies formed in the post-War nuclear wasteland tend to borrow from ancient cultures as well. Though their interpretations are often severely distorted from reality due to the passage of time, there are very few major factions that do not carry at least some elements of a previous society.
      • The Brotherhood of Steel fashion themselves like an order of medieval knights. They have a strict code of conduct that they adhere to with nigh-religious devotion, refer to each other with terms like "squire" or "paladin", and their signature use of Powered Armor evokes a warrior dressed in full plate armor.
      • The Khans are a long-enduring raider tribe from southern California that style themselves after ancient Mongol warriors. Notably, they actually know very little of Mongol historynote ; a potential ending for their quest in New Vegas involves providing them with a book on the subject that inspires them to migrate to Wyoming and form a mighty and prosperous Empire based on the conquests of Genghis Khan.
      • Dotting the Nevada wastelands are various small towns that are practically plucked straight out of an old Western film. Miners, gamblers, and revolver-toting drifters are common, and lingo has shifted to reflect the Western aesthetic (like scavengers being dubbed "prospectors").
      • From the east of the Colorado River is Caesar's Legion, a faction that styles themselves after Ancient Rome. They carry spears, plate armor, and various antiquated weapons in stark comparison to their high-tech enemies. Also like Ancient Rome, they punish people by crucifixion.
      • The Commonwealth Minutemen fashion themselves after the real-world militia group of the same name from the Revolutionary era. Their trademark weapon is the laser musket (evoking the soldiers' widespread use of muskets at that time) and their M.O. is providing fast support to communities in need, also similar to the real-world Minutemen.
      • The Commonwealth also hosts the Railroad, who help runaway Synths that have escaped the Institute, as a parallel to the real-world Underground Railroad that once operated in the area and helped African slaves escape to Canada.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Every protagonist.
  • Death or Glory Attack: In the first two games, using miniguns against heavily-armored foes tends to serve as this. Either it bounces off harmlessly, or the wielder scores an armor-bypassing critical and tears their target to bloody chunks.
  • Deconstruction:
    • The first two games (and, to an extent, New Vegas) deconstruct the Idiot Hero. True, generating a hero with an Intelligence score of 3 or less makes you have hilarious conversations with the world; but you get fewer skill points from leveling-up, you are locked out of about 90% of the quests since no one wants to deal with an idiot, and most of the NPCs don't give you anything for your efforts and treat you like a joke. Furthermore, an Idiot Hero can't really make a lasting impact on the Wasteland in general. Sure, you save your hometown, but everyone else is pretty much still in the same bad situation, if not worse, regardless of your actions.
    • The entire series is a deconstruction of the supposed "moral purity" of The '50s, showing exactly what would happen if the Moral Guardians who say this had their way and the actual 1950's continued forever.
  • Defector from Decadence:
    • The talking Deathclaws in Fallout 2: somehow they built a moral and social structure, though their creators certainly wouldn't have encouraged it.
    • The Brotherhood of Steel, founded by Captain Roger Maxson and his squad of U.S Army soldiers, who defected from the U.S goverment when they discovered that their superiors had been experimenting on human test subjects with their F.E.V just before the War broke out.
    • The Columbia chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel deviated from their original mission (gathering old technology) to helping the inhabitants of the wasteland. This change led to a significant number of BoS members claiming Lyons was a defector. So the Defectors from the Defector from Decadence became the Brotherhood Outcasts, who are a lot less altruistic, especially if they see you handling any piece of technology more sophisticated than a gun.
  • Diegetic Interface: The Pip-Boy all the protagonists start with manages their inventory and monitors their health/radiation levels.
  • Desert Skull: The series loves this trope.
  • Dirty Communists: Going by Pre-War propaganda, the entire nation of China. Most modern-day humans no longer have any idea what 'communism' is, why it was bad, and what difference it really made in the long run. Military robots, however, remain rabid anti-communists: Liberty Prime figures anyone who gets the receiving end of one of his nuclear footballs is a communist, regardless of what he's actually fighting. Then again, that just makes it better.
    • Ironically enough, many smaller communities across post-war America tend to function as communist collectives, with capitalism and trade only emerging in the more prosperous, productive communities. This tends to mirror reality, where smaller communities with limited resources tend towards a more "do what you can, take what you need" philosophy for the sake of survival.
    • However, the use of currency persists through bottle caps (Originally called Hubbucks) and most settlements have a merchant for the player character to trade with. So the most basic elements of capitalism are still prominent in post-war America.
    • No-Bark Noonan seems to have an idea of who Lenin at least was and feared that the ghouls in a nearby factory were actually Communist ghosts plotting to deface the moon.
    • A handful of surviving ghoulified Chinese communists remain on U.S soil, still intent on carrying out their mission (as seen in Fallout 3). Hell, they're still running an anti-American propaganda radio broadcast ala Tokyo Rose.
    • It's implied that China might be not that different from the USA, since most info about China is from US propaganda. In Fallout 4, when you meet the ghoulified Chinese submarine commander who nuked Boston in the prologue 210 years ago he turns out to be a normal guy serving his country who has grown sick of war, doesn't hold any ill will towards the USA and just wants to go home and rebuild his country. He effectively mirrors the male Sole Survivor, also a veteran of the war against China who has the option of rebuilding the Commonwealth.
  • Different States of America: In the Fallout universe, prior to the Great War, the United States reincorporated the 50 states into 13 Commonwealths in 1969, in emulation of the original 13 colonies, and to help the country present a more united front against Communism. They had a secondary purpose of creating an intermediate body between the state and federal governments, creating legislation that would positively affect individual blocs without interfering with others, but it ultimately ended up causing more infighting as the commonwealths fought to gain national primacy at the expense of all the others.
  • Disaster Democracy: The Enclave, a descendant from the pre-war American government claims to be this, but they're really not much better than a tyrannical dictatorship trying to enforce their rule over the wasteland. The NCR is a better, more noble example, especially by the time of New Vegas. However, they're generally handicapped by the bureaucracy and red tape that plague most democracies while their overambitious expansionist policies leave them with a lot of enemies.
  • Distant Sequel: While individual games are usually set no more than a few decades after their predecessors, and always take place in an After the End Scavenger World, the years add up between installments. Some later games show signs of civilization having been rebuilt considerably — Among other things, agriculture, trade, and nations larger than village-sized city-states all reappear as time goes on.
  • The Ditz: Harry, who is easily the dumbest Super Mutant in the entire series. Which is saying something.
  • Divergent Character Evolution: The Brotherhood of Steel "split" into distinct factions after Fallout 2, each faction demonstrating very different behavior:
    • The West Coast side devolved into Knight Templar, becoming hostile to any outsiders they deem unfit to use advanced technology, even exiling disidents and sending them to lands unknown (See Tactics). Using force to keep their bases safe, and being very hesitant to accept aid from outsiders.They quietly acknowledge however that their xenophobic policies will get their faction exterminated since their numbers are dwindling and their technology is becoming outdated, but they keep to the codex anyway, and as a result have divided even further into isolated chapters with differing ideals and little unity.
    • The Chicago Brotherhood became more egalitarian recruiting Ghouls, Supermutants, and even Deathclaws. Although one ending has them recind this, with previous members founding the Mutant Liberation Army in retalitation.
    • The East Coast Brotherhood led by Elder Lyons decided that their advanced technology would be put to better use helping people rather than just being hoarded, so they turned their attention to patrolling the wasteland trying to protect people from mutants and raiders, their ranks are open to outside recruits, and they offer aid to outsider projects they deem worth the manpower. While this has arguably made them the most successful branch of the Brotherhood, it also violates much of the Codex, and pressure is mounting within the chapter as the few original members who haven't deserted continue to question where their loyalties lie.
      • Fallout 4 takes place 10 years after 3, and Elder Lyons has passed away in that time. The Brotherhood decided to revert closer to the original West coast counterparts (or East coast Outcasts) in terms of philosophy, but are still open to outside recruitment to get around the West Coast "dwindling population" problem. They keep some of their old beliefs from the Lyons era as they also ostensibly aim to protect the commonwealth (at least its unaltered human population) from the Institute, super mutants, raiders and other perceived threats. These good intentions however are counterbalanced by the Brotherhood being violently xenophobic and tyrannical, having no issues with using force to get "cooperation" from less powerful groups or exterminating non-humans who pose no actual threat to the Commonwealth.
    • The Brotherhood Outcasts left the East Coast chapter because they felt Lyons betrayed the Codex, and while they take the name "Outcasts" as a jab at him, they consider themselves the real Brotherhood of the East Coast and see Lyons as a traitor who will be brought to justice. They are willing, though reluctant, to accept aid from outsiders and will open their base to one they trust enough, but do not offer membership, bolstering their ranks with robots instead. They patrol the wastelands salvaging old technology, and their patrols deal with hostiles like mutants and raiders. Interestingly, the "outcasts" are closer to the Brotherhood's behavior in the original Fallout than either the East or West Coast sides.
      • As of Fallout 4, the Outcasts have since rejoined the main East Coast Brotherhood after Arthur Maxson became Elder.
  • Doomed Hometown: The first two games start out with the player having to stop their hometown's impending destruction. In the fourth, you get to see the hometown before the nukes fall, and then again after spending 210 years as a Human Popsicle. Unlike most examples, you actually get the opportunity to rebuild it if so inclined.
  • Downer Beginning: The series, as a whole, begins with the Great War that leaves the world an irradiated wasteland. It doesn't get much better in the games, where the player character starts off in a terrible situation before setting off. Most entries have them raised in a Vault, where something goes wrong even before they open the door:
    • Fallout 1: Vault 13's water chip has broken down. Unless a replacement can be found, the water purification system in the Vault will fail, and everyone in the Vault will run out of water and die.
    • Fallout 2: Your village is experiencing a terrible drought that may spell the end of your community, which compels the village elder to send you on a quest to find an obscure pre-war terraforming device known as the Garden Of Eden Creation Kit, or G.E.C.K.
    • Averted in Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel where you are just a new recruit.
    • Fallout 3: Your mother dies in childbirth, your father is forced to take flight from the Vault for reasons you don't understand, and you end up getting chased out into the wastes.
    • New Vegas: A rare case where you don't start from a Vault, you instead play as a Courier who gets caught by some raiders led by a notorious crook, the package you were supposed to deliver stolen before you get shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave. You get better, though.
    • Fallout 4: You, your spouse, and your child are forced to evacuate to a Vault just when the Great War begins. Your family is placed into cryogenic stasis, only for a mysterious mercenary to abduct your son and murder your spouse.
    • Double Subverted in 76: You emerge from the Vault, one of the few control Vaults that worked as intended, to a wasteland that is practically untouched by the ravages of war...and completely depopulated due to a mysterious plague.
  • Downer Ending: They're available if you really go out of your way to achieve them. Bear in mind that since even 'good' endings tend to be bittersweet, the "bad" endings can be hugely depressing.
    • The Pre-War world struggled with resource shortages, oppressive governments, and brutal warfare for twenty-five years before it all ended in a blaze of nuclear fire. What's worse is that most of their problems could easily have been fixed as the technology for renewable energy and resources already existed before the War broke out, but the surviving nations had been fighting the same war for so long they were incapable of changing. Ironically, many of these technologies survived the war, hidden away in protected government bunkers, and can be found and revived by the player.
  • The Dragon: The Lieutenant to the Master in 1, Frank Horrigan to Richardson in 2, Attis a former commander for the Master in BoS, and Colonel Autumn to Eden in 3. In Vegas, Caesar's right hand is Legate Lanius, while President Kimball's number two is General Lee Oliver. Benny was this to Mr. House (and you can take his place), and Yes Man is this to you, if you choose the Independent path. In 4, Lancer-Captain Kells is this to Elder Maxson, but there is no real character that fits this role for Father; the closest fit is Kellogg, who performs many of the duties a Dragon normally would, but he's an amoral mercenary who isn't actually part of The Institute, and Father despises him since Kellogg is the one who killed his (i.e Shaun's) other parent during the opening scene, and only keeps employing him since Kellogg is the most skilled Commonwealth operative the Institute has access to. Kellogg ends up becoming a Disc-One Final Boss after the Sole Survivor tracks him down and kills him before even meeting Father.
  • Dragon Their Feet: In Fallout 2 and 3, you don't confront Enclave superweapon Frank Horrigan or Enclave military commander Colonel Autumn, who will "spare" you with a successful speech check until after you've already killed the Big Bad President and wiped out the Enclave's main base. Likewise, in Fallout, the final two missions are to kill the Big Bad and to destroy the Super Mutant vats (guarded by The Dragon), and you can tackle them in any order you want (Although canonically The Dragon and the vats were destroyed after the Master's death). Likewise, in Vegas, Legate Lanius and General Oliver lead the Caesar's Legion and NCR forces during the game's final battle, despite Caesar himself and President Kimball both likely having died earlier in the game.
  • Drive-In Theater: You find a few in 3 and New Vegas. In the latter, it's where you start off the Old World Blues DLC. You can start a settlement at one in 4.
  • Drugs Are Bad: Zig-zagged. Drugs are all over the wasteland — Buffout, Mentats, Psycho, Jet, Med-X, Rad-X, Radaway, and numerous others — some of which are medical drugs (Rad-X and Radaway are anti-radiation chems, Med-X is a censorship-friendly take on morphine) and others are recreational (Psycho, Mentats, and especially Jet, are used mainly for the high). The games universally frame drug-pushers as villainous characters, and one of the main types of enemy you'll deal with, Raiders, are emphasized as drugged-up murderous outlaws. On the other hand few speak poorly of the drugs themselves, just those that use them, and most merchants have no problem buying and selling chems. Additionally, chems give you temporary stat boosts and can make a huge difference in fights, so you'll likely end up carrying a few with you and popping them to give you a bit more zip, and as long as you don't get addicted you'll be fine and few will judge you for it. Flavor text also mentions that before the Great War some of these chems are readily available in stores, even if frowned upon, and there was controversy over some that seemed to have potential for legitimate health benefits (Mentats were actually being marketed to children!)
  • Drug-Crazed Savagery: The appropriately named "Psycho" is a performance drug that increases the user's damage output and damage resistance. Although it was developed by the US Army to increase the combat effectiveness of the soldiers, it caused hyperaggression and isn't really used recreationally except by post-war raiders and other such maniacs:
    Loading screen hint: Originally developed by the United States military to increase soldiers' combat effectiveness, Psycho grants the user increased Damage output and Damage Resistance for a limited period of time.
  • Dump Stat: The exact usefulness of individual SPECIAL stats varies between games, but often a few are near useless. Fallout 4 mitigated these problems by tying SPECIAL stats directly to which Perks you can take, but earlier games had no such system.
    • In the Black Isle games, Strength. A Strength of 5 gives respectable carry capacity and Hit Points and enables the use of most weapons, and if you ever need to pass a skill check you can just pop a Buffout for a temporary buff. Some BFGs require higher Strength to wield properly, but they're late-game weapons which are often Awesome, but Impractical. Also, Power Armor boosts Strength several points and both games let you receive an implant to boost it again, so by the time you get to the late game you'll have no problem wielding naything
    • Across the series, Charisma. It only affects the Barter and Speech skills (a few extra skill points make up for low starting Speech), the Perks that use it are either poor or glitched and don't work, and it isn't needed for any critical skill checks. Fallout 2 ties Charisma to how many companions you can have, one for every two points of Charisma, but also added two ways to permanently boost Charisma and an item that also boosts it, so a starting Charisma of 3 is still enough to get a fair-sized party. In the Bethesda-era games, chugging alcohol will temporarily boost Charisma and there's the Bobblehead/Implant to boost it again, and you can get Grape Mentats (3) or craft Party Time Mentats (New Vegas), which temporarily boost Charisma by 5.
    • Outside New Vegas, Luck was only useful for builds centering on Sniper. Otherwise all it gives are minor boosts to critical hit chance and an extra couple of points to all skills. A Luck of 6 is enough to take most Perks that need a Luck requirement, and Fallout 1 and 2 both have ways to permanently boost Luck by at least 1 point, so the starting 5 is fine.
    • In terms of Skills, Throwing in the first two games. Grenades are Awesome, but Impractical in the Black Isle games, and aside from grenades there aren't many throwing weapons at all, and they usually suck anyway.
    • Zigzagged with Unarmed in Fallout 2. While unarmed combat is a viable, if inefficient option, the player never needs to spend skill points on it — the game offers numerous trainers that increase Unarmed by several points, so it's possible to get 100 points in it without spending skill points. Played straight with Unarmed in the first Fallout, where there is no variety to unarmed attacks and only three weapons that use the skill.
    • Barter. It only affects the price of objects you buy, you always sell your stuff at the same price. Inevitably, you'll end up rolling in caps and can easily afford most anything you need. The only time Barter may help is in the early-game when you have few supplies and little cash, but your Barter skill will be too low to make much difference anyway.
    • First Aid. It just restores a couple of hit points in games where Stimpaks are not very rare. Furthermore the Doctor skill heals more, can heal crippled limbs, and is needed for quests and Perks; the only Perk needing skill in First Aid is Medic, which just boosts the stat further. Worse is that First Aid can be increased by skill books, which can be bought an unlimited time, meaning every stat point put in First Aid is effectively a waste.
  • Drugs Causing Slow-Motion:
    • In Fallout: New Vegas, the chem Turbo slows down time to 1/3rd normal speed while keeping the player at full speed, allowing them to dodge attacks easily and attack much faster.
    • In Fallout 4, Jet now has a slowdown effect. However, the player also suffers a speed penalty under its effects.
  • Eagle Land: The Pre-War United States depicted itself as a world standard of democracy, freedom and prosperity, but was in reality heavily corrupt, imperialistic, plagued by unregulated capitalism, and rapidly deteriorating civil rights. Fallout is one of the very few cases in Western media in which the USA is actually depicted as being outright villainous; the Pre-War government was an Orwellian nightmare that makes the real-world Soviet Union look positively warm and fuzzy in comparison, and their successors, the Enclave, are even worse. Most frightening of all; given the nightmare the world was becoming on the eve of the Great War, it's not much of a stretch to think the United States became the way it was out of the need to survive the Resource Wars. When nations are annihilating each other over what few resources still exist on a global scale, looking out for your own country and people at the expense of all others becomes a grim necessity.
    • However, it's implied in some of the historical documents that the U.S was rotting from the inside long before the Resource Wars, possibly as early as the Space Race.
    • Put another way: a lot of players might argue that while the post-apocalyptic United States-That-Was is full of radiation, horribly mutated predators, malfunctioning war robots, sadistic raiders, warring tribals and every kind of human evil you could imagine, it's actually better in many ways than in living in the Orwellian-corporatist nightmare that the Pre-War United States was.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: 1 and 2, and to a lesser extent Tactics, were much Denser and Wackier than all the games that followed since, with the possible exception of New Vegas if you have the Wild Wasteland Trait. Some, however, including Chris Avellone himself, argue that many of the "sillier" parts of the first two games should be considered ambiguously canon at best, much like the aforementioned Wild Wasteland. More noticeably, the first two (three really, because of Tactics) were isometric turn-based role playing games with combat based on pen and paper systems, while the games 3 and onwards are first person shooter action role playing games.
    • The Brotherhood of Steel, in the first two games, was merely one of many isolated communities the player could find. While notable for being one of the very few sources of power armor (The only, in fact, in the first game), they ultimately played no great role in either game's story. In addition, the Brotherhood is so secretive in the first two games that it's entirely possible to play through them without even knowing they exist. Compare this to the later games, where they have much greater prominence, and just about every wastelander has at least heard about them. They're directly tied to the story and act as the Big Good of Tactics, BOS, 3, and are one of the major factions that the player can align themself to in 4. Even New Vegas, a game that depicts the Brotherhood at arguably its weakest in the series and written by the developers of the first two games, requires you to have extensive dealings with them in 3 out of 4 of that game's routes.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: Fallout 2, New Vegas, and 4 all count for this several times over.
  • Easter Egg: Most of the 'special encounters' in 1, 2, and Tactics. Some are just there to be goofy, while some (while still pretty goofy) offer some awesome weapons and equipment.
  • Efficiency Limit:
    • Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 both have damage reduction systems for armor, which reduce damage up to a maximum of 85%.
    • Fallout: New Vegas have a damage threshold system, which allows armor to negate all damage, provided it's below the armor's DT stat.
  • Elaborate Underground Base: The Vaults as well as "Fallout's" Lost Hills and Fallout 3's Raven Rock. Both justified, as some of the Vaults are supposed to hold hundreds, and in a few cases thousands, of people, Lost Hills being a prewar militery base, and Raven Rock based on actual Raven Rock government complex. The Institute also counts as this, being located far below the C.I.T. ruins.
  • Eldritch Abomination:
    • Prolonged FEV exposure can mess you up in an impressive manner. The Master began as a human who got dipped in an FEV vat for an unusually long time, and emerged as a formless, tormented mass of flesh that expanded throughout the entire base, merging with its electronics and computer systems, and absorbing any other life form it found into itself, becoming a demented Hive Mind that viewed itself as a perfect being.
    • There's also a number of Cryptic Background References, most (but not all) involving Dunwich Borers LLC, that suggest several truly Lovecraftian abominations exist in the world. Not mutant results of the Great War, but the real deal: vile, possibly genuinely magical entities pre-dating human civilization itself.
  • Elite Mooks:
    • Fallout 1 had the cloaking-device-equipped Nightkin as the Super Mutants' Elite Mooks.
    • Fallout 2 had the Enclave Soldiers in the Oil Rig, wearing Advanced Power Armor (Mk. 1 & 2), equipped with energy weapons and full of stimpaks.
    • Broken Steel includes the Enclave's elite Sigma Squad and various Hellfire Troopers.
    • New Vegas had NCR Rangers and Centurions.
    • Fallout 4 had the 'Legendary' enemies. Bigger and tougher versions of normal enemies that can completely regenerate their health when brought down to 50% of it. By way of compensation they always drop a unique bit of loot.
      • More specifically for the game's factions, the East Coast Brotherhood has their Power Armor-clad Paladins and Knights, the Institute has their Coursers, and even the Railroad has their Heavies. Only the Commonwealth Minutemen lack their own Elite Mook.
  • Enigmatic Institute: It was part of the role of the MegaCorp Vault-Tec before the War: they secretly set up the Vaults for different experiments such as human hibernation, epidemiology or the FIV.
  • Escort Mission: Fairly common in this series, but most of them are pretty relaxed. There aren't very many situations where the escortee moves at their own pace. Most of the time, they're just following you.
  • Evil States of America: It really says something when post-war America, an irradiated wasteland filled with vicious mutants, warring tribes, and every example of human evil imaginable is still a better place to live than Pre-war America.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: If you get the "Childkiller" Reputation in Fallout 1 or 2, both good and evil NPCs will have a negative reaction to you.
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: And not just regular Pintos, nuclear-powered Pintos. Broken down, nuclear-powered Pintos. That produce a mini-nuclear explosion, complete with mushroom cloud, when you shoot them. A notable example from Fallout 3 is a section of highway that is just loaded with them, and a raider camp living in between them all. Set off one on the end of the highway and watch the chain reaction.
  • Expanded States of America: The United States invaded Mexico for the purpose of protecting oil interests in 2051 and annexed Canada in 2076, although whether or not the two countries were split into states, made into commonwealths, or just remained occupied territory is unclear.
  • Expansion Pack: Bethesda Software added a lot to the main questline of Fallout 3 with the downloadable add-ons, including one module that revisits a key battle in the background of the Fallout world (the Battle of Anchorage), another that allows players to visit a city mentioned in passing by another NPC, and one that promises to address the brevity of the main questline by allowing players to continue the game after the controversial ending.
  • Extremity Extremist: It is possible to play this way in all games, with attacks governed by the Unarmed skill. This skill also includes augmented unarmed attacks (e.g. brass knuckles, power fists). Of the games in the series, Fallout New Vegas gives the most options for unarmed combat, with multiple individuals giving instructions on their unique melee attack.
  • Eternal English: Zigzagged. On the one hand, the more civilized groups and factions (be it frontier towns or the likes of the Brotherhood of Steel and NCR) still speak a modern American English that someone from before the Great War centuries before could easily understand. This is justified due to the presence of ghouls who were around in 2077, lingering traditions carried over from the Old World and concerted efforts to preserve (and add new) knowledge. Tribals on the other hand are shown as having undergone Language Drift over generations, their languages being creoles descended from English and whatever other tongues their ancestors spoke to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Some Tribes in Fallout Tactics almost descend into You No Take Candle territory.
  • Eye Scream: Eyes can be targeted in the first two games. Get your accuracy with any weapon class up to a high enough level, and shots to the eyes can and will solve most of your combat-related problems. Eyeballs are part of the burst of gore that follows a head-shot in Fallout 3, and if a critical hit to the head is scored they will fly out at high speed, sometimes hilariously towards the camera in VATS mode. Lampshaded by one character's combat taunts: "There's nothing wrong with you that a critical to the eyes won't cure."
  • Fallout Shelter Fail:
    • With a nuclear war with China inevitable, the U.S. government contracted the Vault-Tec Corporation to build a series of underground shelters to protect chosen members of the population until it was safe to begin repopulating the planet... or at least, that was the cover story. The unfortunate reality was that the overwhelming majority of the vaults weren't meant to save anyone: most of them were actually research facilities where the population were used as guinea pigs for whatever Vault-Tec and the Enclave wanted to study. Hallucinogenic gasses were pumped into the ventilation, psychological experiments turned neighbour against neighbour, sonic weaponry was tested on musicians, recovering drug addicts were forced back into their old habits, residents were dosed with the Forced Evolutionary Virus, and a single inhabitant was locked in a vault with no company except for a box of puppets. Consequently, of the two hundred plus vaults constructed by the company, the ones that were successfully opened and emptied without nightmarish results can be counted on one hand. Plus, a even if the inhabitants didn't end up suffering terribly, a few vaults ended up failing anyway due to hardware failure, supply shortages or sheer bad luck.
    • The series also features Pulowski Preservation Shelters, tube-shaped coin-operated shelters advertised as affordable alternatives to the underground facilities of the competing Vault-Tec. Given that they're often found occupied by the skeletons of their last customers, they didn't work very well.
  • Fantastic Drug: Jet, Mentats, Psycho, and Buffout, the series stand-bys, among numerous others.
  • Fantastic Measurement System: In the FEV experiments disk, there's mention of infected raccoons going up an additional 19 points on the Schuler-Kapp index, which seems to measure intelligence and manual dexterity.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The most blatant is Caesar's Legion, which was modeled in-universe on The Roman Empire - and is sometimes hard to tell apart from the real thing. It also has some elements gleaned from ancient Sparta. The New California Republic is very much like the Pre-War United States mixed in with both the Roman Republic and the U.S. during the Wild West. The Shi Empire is pretty much Imperial China reborn. The Great Khans intentionally base themselves after the Mongolian Empire (which gets downplayed by the fact that horses have yet to be seen in this series), and can even be encouraged in New Vegas to take this more to heart in one of their endings. While probably not deliberate, Lyons' Brotherhood of Steel has a lot in common with early Prussia. Similarly, Arthur Maxson's Brotherhood is equal parts medieval Europe and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, while the Institute are loosely inspired by both the Illuminati and the Soviet Union. Also, the Commonwealth Minutemen are based on both Revolutionary America and the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Church of the Children of Atom are now essentially the Crusader States (though their religous practices actually bear more similarities to the ancient Egyptian cults dedicated to Atum).
    • Most can be justified at least marginally considering that the universe of Fallout is not based on some other world, but a divergence of our own world, so cultures would have tried to base themselves off of some kind of history in many cases. An inversion of sorts in some of the cultural inclusions as they end up based not on real world historical cultures, but fantasy sources, such as books or movies that were popular in or around the 1950's.
  • Fast-Killing Radiation: Throughout the series, areas that have been dumping grounds for toxic waste or the site of bomb hits are radiated. The more time you spend in them the higher your rad count climbs, eventually causing illness and death if you don't get it cured.
  • Fate Worse than Death: This has been the case since the first game and was used for its Talking the Monster to Death option. The handful of talking Super Mutant NPCs in the first two games occasionally mention it.
    • The Feral Ghouls. Especially how they're portrayed in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. They're ghouls rendered completely insane and hardly sentient anymore. You'll get positive karma by killing them. Fallout 4 makes so they can survive having multiple limbs blown off, doubling the amount of potential body horror.
    • Robobrains. Those human brains used as central processors were not volunteers, they're enemy POWs, political prisoners, conscientious objectors, executed criminals (both sane & insane), and deserters whose brains were forcibly extracted while they were still alive, shoved into a robot body while perfectly conscious and aware, and left stuck in a never-ending nightmare, kept constantly awake and alert by the machines they're wired into and completely incapable of doing anything at all they aren't specifically programmed to do. The countless testing logs found scattered throughout the testing facility in Fallout 4: Automatron is a perfect example of how unbearably horrific the process was.
  • '50s Hair: Since this universe remained technologically and culturally stuck in The '50s, the hairstyles can be prim and proper as it gets even in the midst of dirt and radiation.
  • Five-Token Band: Varies by game, but you're almost always going to have a colorful entourage. Humans, ghouls, Super Mutants, robots, dogs, robot dogs, and even a friendly neighborhood Deathclaw!
  • Flawed Prototype:
    • The T-45 Series of Powered Armor. Rushed into production and service, it burnt through energy cells like popcorn, offered rather lackluster protection with its riveted plates, had servos and internal systems exposed at the joints, and was overall ungainly to use, with the operator required to don a bodysuit to provide additional layers of defense the armor itself could not. Only later versions, like the T-45d, included a proper fusion cell for extended use, and was soon rendered obsolete anyway by the T-51b, which had more responsive actuators and a fusion cell powerplant as part of the design from the start.
    • The Fallout Bible mentions several other unworkable prototypes were created for the Power Armor Project before officially releasing the T-45 series. While these unspecified models failed, their research and development laid the foundation for future industrial projects (until the bombs dropped little more than a decade later).
  • Flushing-Edge Interactivity: Subverted, as the player can actually drink from a toilet — though the water, like all non-purified water in the game, is irradiated.
  • Franchise Three-Invention: The first two numbered Fallout games are isometric RPGs with point and click controls and turn based decision making, similar to a Tabletop RPG,excluding Brotherhood of Steel. The Bethesda era, Fallout 3 forward, transforms the series into real time first person shooters with RPG elements.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: Deathclaws are killing machines which mutated from the modestly-sized and inoffensive Jackson's Chameleon.
  • From Zero to Hero: Most entries utilize this trope, with an average person ascending to savior/scourge/wildcard of their region of the Wasteland. The numbered series protagonists (the Vault Dweller, the Chosen One, and the Lone Wanderer) fit this trope absolutely to a tee. An exception is Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, where you're already a trained Elite Mook before the game begins.
  • Full-Conversion Cyborg: Robobrains are robots controlled by a human brain implanted into a transparent tank on their heads. Most are little more than psychotic automata due to the extensive conditioning and mental scrubbing, but one group of eccentric magnates deliberately turned themselves into robobrains, minus the conditioning, to make themselves immortal.
  • Fun with Acronyms: Loads of them
    • Strength. Perception. Endurance. Charisma. Intelligence. Agility. Luck.
    • Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test.
    • Garden of Eden Creation Kit.
    • Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System.
  • Gaia's Lament:
    • This is the state of the world following the Great War of 2077. It's not called a Wasteland for nothing. The real damage came from a black rain filled with soot, ashes and poison several days after the nuclear exchanges. The rain lasted four days and killed off much of the plant, animal and human life that had escaped the initial destruction. While there are spots where nature is thriving like Zion Canyon or the Oasis, much of the Wasteland may never recover.
    • Even before the war the situation was disastrous. The Great Canyon had lost its protected status and was turned into an uranium mine and later a toxic waste dump. Speaking of toxic waste, drums of radioactive goo were pretty much dumped everywhere with complete negligence. Terminals from the Nahant Oceanographic Society in Boston mention that the entire Atlantic Ocean was pretty much dying.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Various issues specific to each game can be found on their pages.
    • No matter how dangerous- or mutated-looking your henchmen are, NPCs will never react with the immediate violence that one might expect from bringing, say, an eight-foot-tall creature in an all-concealing robe (Goris) - or a giant yellow-green mutant with a gatling laser (Fawkes) - into their secret base/peaceful village.
    • Up until Fallout 4, SPECIAL stats and Skills had no correlation besides the former giving a small boost to the latter. This allowed for the amusement of a character with a Charisma of 1 being able to max out Speech to be a slick smoothtalker, or a character with an Intelligence of 1 to max out Repair and Science to be a master craftsman and programmer.
  • Gatling Good: Miniguns are generally pretty good weapons, though not particularly reliable against heavily armored opponents. They tend to veer between Ludicrous Gibs and just bouncing off.
  • Gay Option: In Fallout 1, rescuing Sinthia at the hotel in Junktown will get the player a 'reward'… whichever the main character's gender may be. Fallout 2 there are same-sex Optional Sexual Encounters available for both sexes, though significantly more for women than men (in fact, there are more lesbian options than straight ones for women). "Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel" includes the option of Nadia 9a player Character) to sleep with ruby, a prostitute. Fallout 3 mostly avoids the issue altogether by not even including a straight option. Male and female player characters can hire Nova, the town prostitute in Megaton, and Bittercup, the town goth in Big Town, develops a crush on the player regardless of gender (though her crushes are mostly her turned into a Perky Goth and giving you whatever crap she found in the patrols). New Vegas adds 2 new perks, Confirmed Bachelor for men, and Cherchez La Femme for women, which will give special dialogue options when dealing with an NPC of the same sex, (and a 10% damage bonus against the same sex) much how the Black Widow and Lady Killer perks function when dealing with the opposite sex. If you have this perk, you can recruit one follower (which one depends on your gender, there's one for each) bypassing the usual skill check needed by flirting with them, essentially giving you a same sex romantic option. If you are a man with the perk, you can also get all your stuff repaired for free any time you want by flirting with an NPC and asking him to be "friends." Unrelated to the perk, but you can also hire same-sex prostitutes, male or female, in New Vegas if you should so choose.
  • Generation Xerox: Everyone from the original Vault 13 Dweller's bloodline seems to have pure badass embedding in their genes. First there is the Vault Dweller, who stops a plot to turn the population of the Wasteland into super mutants by destroying two underground lairs, saves quite a few communities along the way, and ends up as the chief of a newly formed tribe, before going adventuring again in old age, presumably dying somewhere out in the wastes. Then, 80 years later, his grandchild, the Chosen One, stops a plot to commit a holocaust on the Wasteland by blowing up an oil rig, again saving some developing communities along the way, and ends up becoming head of a new society (New Arroyo). And in one of the endings in Fallout 2, the Chosen One fathers a bastard-child with one of the Bishop women from the Bishop crime family, who, already at age 13, takes control over the family, and leads it to victory over New Reno's other crime families and, despite being a powerful Mafia boss in a crime ridden city at a time where the average lifespan is low, manages to live to the age of 73, where he dies peacefully in his sleep. This ending was confirmed as canon in New Vegas, by Bruce Isaac, who fled town after stealing from the casino and sleeping with Mr. Bishop's daughter.
    • Likewise, the Cassidy clan are also hardasses with a tendency to associate with legendarily awesome people.
  • Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: The "forced evolutionary virus," although it doesn't quite work as intended.
    • And of course because this is Fallout, the Pre-War government's love of genetic engineering, though great, doesn't hold a candle to the Pre-War love of nukes.
  • Genius Ditz: In every game you can set your character's Intelligence so low they're incapable of speaking properly and can't understand what others are saying either. Doesn't stop you from using skill points to let them pick locks, hack computers, and be master doctors. It'll just take longer since lower Intelligence means fewer skill points.
  • Genius Serum: The drug Mentats (yes, named after the human supercomputers from Dune and the mint candy) temporarily increases the user's Intelligence and Perception stats by +2 and their Charisma by +1.
  • Giant Robot: Surprisingly uncommon. But there are a few.
    • Fallout Tactics features a few as enemies towards the end of the game. Best dispatched at long range with volleys of plasma/laser fire.
    • Fallout 3/4: Liberty Prime.
  • Global Currency: Bottle caps in the first game (originally called Hubbucks), endorsed by the Hub Trading Companies due to their rarity and the difficulty in counterfeiting them. New California Republic Dollars in the second, as the NCR is the dominant power in the region. Tactics used the ring pulls off soda cans. Caps show up again in Fallout 3, implying that the popularity of caps caught on in the East note  Caps again in New Vegas because the NCR lost the gold it backed its dollars with and the trading companies are honoring old promises. There is NCR paper money and Legion coin, but those are treated as barter items with fixed values in most cases.
  • Gone Horribly Right: One of the intended functions of the Forced Evolutionary Virus was to repair chromosomal damage. One problem with this is that normal reproductive cells only have half the chromosomes of regular cells, and in fertilization these join to form a single cell with a full set of chromosomes. FEV "repairs" reproductive cells to have a full set of chromosomes, thus rendering everyone infected sterile.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: The experiments conducted in the Vaults tend to have very unfortunate results. To name some examples:
    • Vault 19 divided its inhabitants into two groups led by two seperate overseers, with the inhabitants fed subliminal messages that sowed distrust towards the other group. In the end, a civil war broke out in the Vault, leading to the deaths of all inhabitants.
    • Vault 34 had an abundance of weapons and ammunition, and a lack of safeguards for said weapons and ammunition. Some of the inhabitants left to found the Boomers tribe. Most of the rest would die in a later civil conflict that saw the Vault's reactor sabotaged.
    • Vault 87 was a Forced Evolutionary Virus research center. An outbreak of the FEV either killed or mutated all of the inhabitants.
    • Vault 101 was to be sealed indefinitely while the Overseer was given broad latitude to reign with near impunity, giving way to an authoritarian society, and to study the effects of what would happen in the event of isolation being broken. The result was a civil conflict between the Vault's youths and the leadership, which can potentially end in the Vault being rendered uninhabitable.
    • Vault 111 was a study in the effects of long-term cryogenic stasis. A shortage of supplies caused by surface radiation lasting longer than anticipated led to a revolt by the security staff and the stasis pods being abandoned to eventually break down from power failure, leaving only two survivors: the player character, and their infant son who was abducted by outsiders before the power failed.
  • The Goomba: Radroaches tend to fill this role in the games, being weak and easy to kill.
  • Good Is Not Nice: The Brotherhood of Steel in general, though it does have a few genuinely kind members.
    • Despite being one of the nicest major factions in the series, many of the New California Republic's actions in Fallout 2, such as hiring raiders to attack Vault City and having dealing with the crime families at Reno, are morally questionable. There are also certain political elements within the government who are attempting to turn the alliance into more of a fascist police-organization. As one NPC puts it, "Their heart is in the right place, but their head is up their ass!"
  • Good Is Not Soft: A universal truth in the games. You can play an All-Loving Hero who upholds morality and protects the innocent, but there's a lot of nasty people out there looking to ruin your hard work, and they are not going to survive the attempt.
  • Good Old Ways: A common trend you'll see in the Wasteland. A lot of people dress like the pre-war Americans did, talk like they did, and preach the same virtues of liberty and justice that America stood for. The sad reality that undermines this hero worship of the pre-war America is that even before the bombs dropped, America was already on its way out. Even if America had overcome the resource problems, it was socially a mess that had undermined its Constitution and its traditions in just about every way. The "land of the free and the home of the brave" was long dead by that point. The America the Wasteland worships is more or less a lie. For the rare few who are aware of these flaws, they just take that as a challenge to to make the ideals of America a reality in a way their forefathers never could. Anti-communism and anti-Chinese sentiment is not unknown in the Brotherhood, acting much like their pre-war jingoistic forefathers. By contrast their leader Arthur Maxson in Fallout 4 notably blames both pre-war America and China for causing the mess they're in, but uses that as motivation for why the Brotherhood of Steel needs to get right what the former United States got wrong.
  • Government-Exploited Crisis: A major antagonist throughout the series is the Enclave, The Remnant of the United States government. The Enclave have descended into paranoid xenophobia over the past 200-ish years locked up underground, and have declared anyone who wasn't born in a Vault to be a dangerous mutant. Rather than trying to help, they usually try to wipe out everyone else, either through direct warfare or by sabotaging the reclamation efforts of the Brotherhood of Steel.
  • Great Offscreen War:
    • Fallout 3's Broken Steel DLC has the East Coast Brotherhood of Steel's war against the Enclave, in which the Lone Wanderer gets involved only at the tail end of said war.
    • New Vegas has a number of events mentioned, like the First Battle of Hoover Dam as well as the crushing defeat of both the West Coast Brotherhood and Enclave at the hands of the NCR. All of which have lasting repercussions by the time the Courier enters the picture.
      • In the DLC Honest Hearts the White Legs tribe has attacked and razed the settlement of New Canaan. Since you joined a trading caravan headed there unaware of the events, this changes the entire premise of the DLC.
    • Fallout 4 has not only the espionage war still being waged between the Railroad and Institute (of which the Sole Survivor's timely intervention will permanently decide the conflict's resolution), but the fall of the Commonwealth Minutemen in the game's backstory.
    • The Resource Wars are one for the series as a whole. Between 2050 and 2077, conflicts in the mid-to-late 21st century broke out in response to the decline of oil. Major events include the U.S. destabilizing and invading Mexico, the collapse of the United Nations, the European Commonwealth invading the Middle East and waging war for eight years before pulling out when the wells dry up, which was followed up by a civil war; China invading Alaska, and the U.S. annexing Canada before retaking Anchorage and sending troops into mainland China. Justified since this took place over 200 years ago.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: The Pre-War United States of America and People's Republic of China are responsible for virtually all of the terrible things in the series thanks to the Resource Wars waged between the two countries that ultimately culminated in the Great War.
  • Grenade Tag: Planting explosives on someone via pick-pocketing.
  • Grey-and-Grey Morality: Nobody knows (or cares) whether the US or China started the war. All that matters is that the entire world was almost completely destroyed because two superpowers couldn't get along. China tried to annex Alaska, while the US government showed summary executions (with the executioner laughing no less) as pro war propaganda. Nobody is really innocent here.
    • Though given some of the things you read about the Pre-War United States, the conflict probably counts more as Evil Versus Evil. China was a brutal dictatorship which conquered and subjugated her neighbors with armies of Sociopathic Soldiers in a vain attempt to alleviate crippling economic problems. America was the exact same except with the added caveat that it was run by the Nazi Illuminati behind a puppet government and it also shamelessly poured resources into a number of horrific science projects (the Robobrains, various bioweapons like the FEV and alien-like 'wannamingos', etc.) and often using incarcerated Chinese-American citizens as guinea pigs.
    • The series as a whole generally likes this trope, although it typically leans more on Black-and-Grey Morality. New Vegas and 4 probably play this trope the straightest with their central conflicts.
  • Groin Attack: The first two games featured the groin as a legitimate target on any creature. Yes, you can punch rats in the groin. Even better, you can sledgehammer a rat in the groin. Which is still nowhere near as twisted as firing a rocket at a child's groin. In terms of gameplay, groin attacks will usually leave an enemy stunned, slumped on the floor, longer than usual. Fallout 1's combat dialog is rife with commentary about getting hit in that exceptionally painful area. Female Groin Invincibility is firmly established to not be in place, as the messages on scoring critical hits in the groin areas of female NPCs plainly states:
    She takes it like a man. That is to say, it hurts.
  • Guide Dang It!: Parts 1, 2 and Tactics allow to use crowbars to pry doors and locks open, as long as your character pass the Strength check. Just good luck figuring how to do it all by yourselfnote , rather than using it as a mid-tier melee weapon.
  • Harmful Healing: Super stimpaks cause damage after healing and can be used as a potential assassination tool.
  • Harmless Luminescence: The series features numerous nuclear explosions, all of which you can stare directly into without suffering any eye damage. For example:
    • The destruction of Megaton by nuke in Fallout 3.
    • The nuclear attack at the beginning of Fallout 4.
    • Any of the player-launched nukes in Fallout 76.
  • Hate Crimes Are a Special Kind of Evil: Of all the various factions in the wasteland, the one that is most consistently portrayed as nigh-irredeemable is the Enclave of the United States of America. While other supremacist organizations exist in the series, they're usually either short-lived or are primarily motivated by something unrelated to their prejudice. The Enclave, meanwhile, was built on an entire platform of genocide and operated with impunity for over a century — they mercilessly slaughtered mutants without remorse or regret as their driving purpose, and their definition of "mutant" is "anyone whose ancestors have at any point since the bombs fell lived outside of an environmentally-sealed bunker or offshore shelter." In the two games they appear, they are the main antagonists and aim to wipe out out all life on earth that has experienced even the slightest degree of genetic drift since the bombs fell, to the point that they don't consider anyone born on the Earth's surface human. By the time of New Vegas, the Enclave have been almost entirely wiped out, with the children of surviving members viewing their family's involvement in it as a mark of shame.
  • Heal It with Blood: Blood packs first appeared Fallout 3, but they only heal a measly 1 point unless the player gets the Hematophage perk, which increases the healing to a decent 20 points. They return in Fallout: New Vegas, but there aren't perks that improve their healing, making them poor healing items. Thankfully, Blood packs become more effective in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, now that they heal the player by 50 points per second at the cost of drawbacks (for the former, the player gets a 7% chance of getting infected with diseases in Survival Mode; for the latter, the player gets 10 points of radiation).
  • Hegemonic Empire: The New California Republic have annexed regions by military force, but they prefer to expand through peaceful settlement and inviting existing frontier settlements to join them. By the time of Fallout: New Vegas, it is engaged in a three-way power struggle over control of New Vegas, a very advanced, prosperous, and independent settlement.
  • Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Used in the first two games for all non-voiced dialogue.
  • Hero of Another Story: Many, but especially your companions.
    • Harold, who has lived for over two centuries, been in every game but New Vegas, and 4, has wandered almost the entire United States Wasteland, was a fellow-adventurer with the Master before they were both mutated, found his way to Los (A city of ghouls), and may eventually bring an ecosystem back to the Capital Wasteland, since he's now permanently rooted there.
    • In New Vegas, all of the DLCs have a character who is this to some extent, and nearly all of them are (or at least presented as) antagonists at some point. In Dead Money and Lonesome Road Father Elijah and Ulysses respectively went on long incredible journeys involving post-war organizations, settlements, and tribes otherwise unmentioned in the series. In Honest Hearts there is Joshua Graham, who was formally both a Mormon missionary and the legate for Cesar's Legion. Dr. Mobius of Old World Blues was a prewar scientist and Brain in a Jar who eventually used SCIENCE! to prevent his former colleagues from ravaging the post-apocalyptic world.
    • 4 gives not only the backstory of Conrad Kellogg, but also has several Apocalyptic Logs detailing the exploits of Paladin Brandis and Recon Squad Artemis. There's also the exploits of the Quincy refugees - Preston Garvey, Sturges, Mama Murphy, and Jun & Marcy Long - found in the Museum of Freedom at Concord near the beginning of the game. Terminals found scattered across the Commonwealth tell more of their struggles to survive after the Quincy Massacre.
  • Hide Your Children: Completely averted in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. Kids are a regular part of the civilian population, and you can freely blow them away in a variety of gruesome ways. The game even produces funny * wink* * wink* * nudge* * nudge* combat dialogue if you do so. Further, in one town, you are practically encouraged to do so, as the little bastards hang around in front of quest-critical stores and attempt to pickpocket you (and no matter how high your steal skill, it's nigh-impossible for you to take what they have back; you have to buy them from the merchant they report to). Note, however, that actually killing children will mark you as a "Child Killer," which causes pretty much everyone except the most evil characters to hate you on sight. This was taken literally in the European releases of both games, in which the children were simply made invisible (they're still there - they will steal from you and occasionally say things and can be killed with explosives). Fallout 3, though, used the "children are present but invulnerable" variant (though you can at one point help a slaver kidnap one and sell another into slavery yourself).
  • Horror Hunger: Cannibalism, in addition to being a favored pastime of rabid psychotics, can sometimes stem from a mutation. While most humans must choose to eat people (and even suffer from the real-world side-effects, like brain diseases), a small number of people have mutated a natural compulsion to eat human flesh, as well as the ability to eat it without getting sick. Several organizations of cannibals exist who have either kicked the habit, tried to and failed, or found a substitute.
  • How Unscientific!: While the series is firmly in the realms of science-fiction, even if it's extremely fantastical at times, there are things that are definitely supernatural and cannot be explained away in a rational manner. The most prominent of these are psychic powers, with psychic visions of the past and future and characters able to send telepathic messages across vast distances. While psychics do exist in-game as a strain of mutant, not all of these experiences can be attributed to them. The most overt instances of mystical events happen in Fallout 2, where among others, you get several psychic dreams from your village elder and can actually meet and interact with a genuine ghost. Then there's the numerous references to H.P. Lovecraft in the Bethesda-era games, which make it clear that dark forces beyond the realm of science are out there. There's also several Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane examples across the franchise with hallucinations that seem a bit too real to just be a figment of your imagination or the result of taking too many chems.
  • Hover Bot: The common Mr. Handy utility robot is a floating sphere with several arms, vaguely resembling an octopus. The sphere has three eyes on stalks to act as an expressive "face".
  • Human Resources: In Fallout 1, your character could discover through simple investigation that the meat used by Iguana Bob, the local fast food vendor, was actually chopped up human cadavers. If the player has high enough stats they can blackmail Bob. By Fallout 2, his great-grandson has built an entire franchise...
  • Humiliation Conga: Every time the Khans try to rebuild, a protagonist will come to slaughter them. By the third time, they're so beaten down, you can convince them to go on a suicide mission and end their legacy with a bang.
  • 100% Heroism Rating
  • Humanoid Abomination: Frank Horrigan, the genetically engineered synthetic cyborg homocidal maniac specially created by the Enclave, who is forever sealed in a suit of power armor that continually pumps him with life support. Dead Money, the Fallout: New Vegas DLC, has the Ghost People. The Cloud apparently changed normal human beings into feral, nocturnal, gas proof, limb-regenerating, and hard to kill abominations sealed in hazmat suits, with their only purpose now being to stab, throw spears, and chuck bombs. The Church of the Children of Atom also seem to be this, as they look like completely ordinary humans but can survive ungodly amounts of radiation.
  • Humans Are Bastards: Has tons of this. Humans in this universe were certainly bastards enough to destroy themselves and the world in a nuclear holocaust driven by desperate necessity for reserves and political tension, and post-apocalyptic living has not improved things.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Played straight, eating nets you a few HP. This can also be gained as a perk; it increases your vulnerability to poison and radiation, but increases the health you get back from food and medicine. Builds favoring the Survival skill over Medicine in New Vegas can actually heal gunshot wounds better by eating than by using stimpaks. There's even a drug ("Hydra") that can regrow broken limbs!
  • Hypocrite: The Enclave. The remnants of the old United States government wants to kill everyone and everything who's DNA has been exposed to radiation so that only "pure" humans will remain to reclaim the wastelands. They sure don't mind having a super mutant-turned-cyborg leading their armies. Or harming other "pure" humans from the Vaults to further their agenda.

    I - Q 

  • Iconic Outfit: Each game has one, typically depicted in the cover art of the game.
    • Fallout 1 and Fallout 76 have the T-51b Power Armor.
    • Fallout 2 has the Enclave Advanced Power Armor Mk2.
      • Seen in a loading screen when booting up the game, there's also a damaged and hollowed out T-51b Power Armor helmet with tribal markings and the bulletproof lenses removed, used as improvised regular headgear. As the screen depicts the Enclave's Oil Rig in the distant background, it's presumed this is the Chosen One.
    • Fallout Tactics has the Brotherhood Power Armor.
    • Fallout 3 has the T-45d Power Armor.
    • New Vegas has the NCR Veteran Ranger Armor.
    • Fallout 4 has the T-60c Power Armor.
      • The Silver Shroud costume also counts as this, albeit from an In-Universe perspective.
    • Additionally, all games except Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel give the main characters Vault jumpsuits as their default attire, and they're typically depicted wearing armored versions of them in cutscenes and artwork.
  • Iconic Item: The 10mm pistol has shown up time and time again in the series outside of Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel as one of the player's initial weapons with the 10mm submachine gun usually showing up not too long later with New Vegas even having a special 10mm pistol as part of the Classic pack pre-order bonus/Courier's Stash set. It eventually becomes Lucy's sidearm in the series as well.
  • Identical Grandson: Fallout 2 has you play as the grandchild of the original game's protagonist, and since the game recycles the sprites for the main character, you look exactly alike. The uncanny resemblance is commented upon by Tandi, a character appearing in both games.
  • Idiot Savant:
    • In the Interplay games and Fallout: New Vegas, your character can be mentally challenged to the point of being incapable of forming coherent speech but can still learn to hack advanced computers and repair complex machinery. Lampshaded by Loxley in the original:
      Loxley: Bloody fine job making it through the defenses, mate! I'm rather impressed. Toss me your name!
      You: Nuhhh?
      Loxley: Well, "Numa-numah-num-nuhhh", how did a total moron, such as yourself, get past my defenses? Sorry, no idiot savants allowed, we like good conversation here. Jasmine, show our drooling friend the door please.
    • Fallout 4 includes a perk in the Luck tree explicitly named this. It grants a passive ability where the PC has a random chance to gain 3x XP from any related source, which is tracked in the game stats as "Bright Ideas," and the chance modifier increases the lower the PC's Intelligence stat is. These are also accompanied by a Rimshot and sound of goofy laughter
  • I'm a Humanitarian: Many have taken to consuming human flesh in the post-apocalypse, from lone travelers to entire towns. The player can become one from the third game onward with the "Cannibal" perk, which allows them to devour corpses on the spot in exchange for negative karma and hostility from witnesses (and disapproval from most of your non-cannibal companions in the fourth game). New Vegas adds the "Dine and Dash" perk as well, which allows you to bypass the risk of retaliation by subtly scavenging bits from dead enemies for later consumption.
  • Implacable Man: The Khans are an implacable organization of raiders. Even if you storm their base and wipe them out down to a man (which has canonically happened twice now), there will always be a survivor somewhere who will revive the band and continue their vendetta against the NCR.
  • Indestructible Edible:
    • All the packaged foodstuffs you find are 80-210 years old, and perfectly edible, although irradiated, and the soda is "warm and flat". Perhaps justified, because irradiated food won't spoil (although the preservatives should have turned toxic by then). Fallout 4 lampshades it with the "Perfectly Preserved Pies," slices of totally unblemished, good-as-the-day-they-were-baked pie that can rarely be found in ancient vending machines — yet one character warns that you shouldn't trust anything that looks that good after so long.
  • Inescapable Ambush: Having a very good or very bad (karmically) character is a good way to have a price put on your head. A very good character is less likely to encounter an ambush that's inescapable, though, particularly with a high level of Outdoorsman. The ambushes in general start being (somewhat) escapable in Fallout 3.
  • Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: The series always has tons of pre-war food (even in the first game, the Great War happened almost 100 years ago) that's still perfectly edible, including the inexplicably popular Nuka-Cola. Fallout 3 and New Vegas work to subvert this somewhat, as eating pre-war food will still boost the player's health, but also inflict them with minor doses of radiation (and explicitly irradiated food that deals even more radiation when eaten can be found.)
    • Justified in that all pre-war food in the Fallout series appears to be preservative-laded, inorganic, sealed junk food like chips or instant noodles, which was also sterilized by radiation.
  • Infinite Stock For Sale: The games in general are aversions, as shops only have limited stock. Not only that, but the shop owners had limited money as well, meaning that if you're selling items to them, you could only sell them so much before they were out of money. This can lead to situations where, if you have a high-value item, you can't sell it to some shops without taking a loss (i.e. it might be worth 1000 caps but the shop keep only has 400 on hand).
    • This is one of the reasons to trade heavy items for zero-wright chems.
  • Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: At least one in each game... ZAX in Fallout, SKYNET (no, not that SKYNET) in Fallout 2, and President Eden (also of the ZAX series) in Fallout 3. Interestingly, ZAX and SKYNET are mostly benevolent (although it's suggested SKYNET is not to be entirely trusted), while Eden ends up as the game's Big Bad.
    • At the end of Fallout Tactics, after defeating a army of cold, merciless robots and exploding the front door of Vault 0 with a nuke, you came face to face with the Calculator, a super-powerful AI that's pretty much Instant AI, except you had to add... brains. Human brains, if possible, but rat brains worked as well. Some other robots are also powered like that, like the Robobrains, SKYNET and Protectrons.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Appears in most of the games. Fallout 1 and 2 were in the era of game interfaces where such fences were the norm. Fallout 3 made certain piles of concrete debris 'insurmountable' to force you to detour through tunnel zones, though equally high piles out in the open countryside could readily be scaled. Fallout: New Vegas has some particularly lazy examples of this; the overworld is cut into cells to ease loading times, and one can only transit between cells at passes. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell this to the designers who made the visual landscapes, meaning the Courier is often unable to climb two-degree slopes at the edges of cells. In particularly buggy areas such as the area around Nelson, the Courier can end up several dozen feet off the ground by skimming a cell edge.
  • Interface Spoiler: It's arguably a game mechanic in the Black Isle entries. When moving the mouse cursor over NPCs and objects, the information window will display a brief descriptor: "raider", "computer", "table", etc. However, important characters and environment objects you can interact with on a deeper level are almost always given a unique description, or at least a more distinct wording. For example, if you find a room full of computers and all of them are described as "computer" except for one which shows up as "an old computer console", that's the one you want to have a closer look at.
  • Invulnerable Civilians: In the first two games, all characters were killable by the PC (Besides the Overseer in 1), but were never subject to random deaths by other objects in the gameworld outside of battles that put NPCs in harm's way, such as the large Regulator shootout in the Boneyard in Fallout 1. Also, NPCs accidentally hitting (usually shooting) other NPCs in combat would often cause the injured party's AI to retaliate, along with other NPCs on the injured party's computer-defined "team." In a densely populated area such as the Den with many "teams" a few stray bullets or molotov cocktails can easily result in the townspeople all but wiping each other out with no input from the player.
  • I Want My Jet Pack: Nuclear cars were a big thing in the 50's, and were thought to be replacing gas-powered ones. They obviously didn't work out. The retro-future of Fallout began to gradually phase out gas engines in favor of miniature reactors in the mid-2070s, because by that point the world's supply of gasoline was nearly exhausted. This is a major part of the backstory - the Resource Wars that eventually led to the whole nuclear apocalypse were fought over petroleum, and uranium once the world's petroleum was depleted. In the first two Fallout games nuclear-powered vehicles were extremely rare, with most vehicle wrecks you find being of conventional, non-explodey gasoline-powered cars. Nuclear-powered cars were presumably more common on the East Coast because either the factory producing them was closer or they were simply more widely distributed there, although the most likely explanation is simple Rule of Cool.
  • Jerkass: It probably has something to do with the fact that their civilization has been reduced to rubble and every day is a struggle for survival, but even setting aside the various raiders and slavers, there sure are a lot of assholes wandering around. Almost every single person you meet has some kind of chip on their shoulder.
  • Karma Meter: Each of the games (minus the fourth one) has one (see their pages for details). It affects NPC reactions, and can cause hostiles opposed to your philosophy to ambush you.
  • Killer Robot: Robots in general are fairly homicidal in this series, but special mention has to go to Cerberus, guard dog of the Ghoul city Underworld. He will extol the virtues of his Ghoul masters, then curse the "pansy zombie programming" which prevents him from slaughtering them. If you have the Robotics Expert perk, you can remove his combat inhibitor. Cerberus by himself can slaughter the entire population unaided in some cases. Of course, he'll try to kill you given the chance, too, but he's not that strong compared to you.
  • Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Zigzagged all over the place, as different games have different weapons available, and in some cases energy-based weapons are rarer and don't scale well into the late-game compared to ballistic weapons. The damage resistances of armor also play a factor, and in games where you can expect to deal with a lot of opponents wearing power armor, you'll want to use ballistic weapons more because power armor tends to have exceptionally high energy resistances, moreso than ballistic resistance. Additionally a lot of games also have ballistic weapons with the option for armor-piercing ammunition, while energy weapons have no such alternatives (some games give them innate damage resistance to compensate). Regardless, in-universe energy weapons are regarded as more dangerous than ballistic weapons, regardless of Gameplay and Story Segregation. The Salvatore crime family from Fallout 2 is feared for their "lightbringers" (laser pistols), and apparently one Salvatore massacred an entire room of enemies by themselves while their foes had ballistic weapons. In the same vein, a major advantage of the Brotherhood of the Steel and the Enclave is their access to laser and plasma weaponry.
  • Keywords Conversation: The first game allowed the player to type in keywords freely in addition to Dialogue Trees that automatically came up when talking to an NPC.
  • Knight Templar: The Enclave, at least in Fallout 2. All mutants must die for the 'true' humanity to rise again. 'All mutants', at this point, is basically all of the surviving humans - after all, unless they've been kept isolated they may have recessive mutant genes!
    • The Brotherhood of Steel's dogma maintains that they're the guardians of the all the old world's advanced technology. They therefore hoard all the tech they have without sharing, and steal tech from their neighbors to "keep it (the technology) safe from abuse". They help you against The Enclave because the latter are a threat to their technological superiority.
    • The Mid-Western Brotherhood of Steel, based in Chicago, are a little better in that they interact peacefully with the tribals around them and help them. They are still a fascistic militant group and their 'interaction' is basically a glorified protection racket "for your own good", but they at least seem intent on including outsiders in building a better tomorrow.
  • Legendary in the Sequel: This is relatively common for protagonists in the series, due to each game taking place decades after the previous one. The only exception seems to be Fallout 4, which makes no mention of the Lone Wanderer from Fallout 3.
  • Lethal Joke Item: The Red Ryder Limited Edition BB Gun. It does virtually no damage to enemies... unless you hit them in the eyes, in which case it becomes the most powerful weapon in the entire game and has a near 100% crit rate, regularly resulting in Ludicrous Gibs even against Super Mutants and Nightkin. It is, however, useless against enemies that don't have eyes. The same BB Gun makes its return in New Vegas. The weapon has an extremely high critical damage multiplier and perfect accuracy, and while hidden, with the right perks, its damage output surpasses everything short of an Anti-materiel rifle with a sneak attack critical.
  • Living Legend: By the end of any given game, the protagonist will have been everywhere, met everyone, changed everything for better or worse, and become a legend. Or maybe you just skipped right to the end, because you can do that.
    • The Courier is unaware until Lonesome Road that they already were this to the people of the Divide, and not in a good way.
  • Living Relic: Despite the nuclear annihilation and the 210+ years that have passed since then, there are still several characters that serve as living remnants of Pre-War America. There are a significant number of Pre-War ghouls (most prominently Desmond Lockhart from Point Lookout, Raul Tejada from New Vegas, Dean Domino from Dead Money, The Vault-Tec Representative from 4), a handful of sentient computers (ZAX, SKYNET, Button Gwinnett (possibly), and President John Henry Eden), a few Brains In A Jar (Professor Calvert, the Think Tank, and Jezebel), and a few Pre-War individuals who were preserved in suspended animation (Mr. House, the Tranquility Lane inhabitants, the prisoners aboard Mothership Zeta, and the Sole Survivor in the fourth game). Of them all, most have either adapted to the new world (in the case of the Ghouls), or are cripplingly insane (in the case of Calvert and the Think Tank), with only Mr. House and President Eden really holding onto the vision of Pre-War America and trying to restore it in the Wasteland in their own way.
  • Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: An underlying theme of the game. Especially prevalent in 3, where you see the ruins of Washington D.C. Several landmarks are crumbling shadows of what they once were. The White House is simply gone. And it's eerie and nearly empty despite a few survivors and a plethora of things (human or otherwise) that want to kill you. On the other hand, the fact that these landmarks are still standing at all after dozens of direct atomic bombings followed by 200 years of neglect and elemental exposure is indicative of the opposite trope.
    • Also happens in New Vegas if you don't ally with Mr. House, from his perspective. He singlehandedly saved Las Vegas from the nuclear apocalypse with his technology and foresight and left it one of the few civilised places left in the entire post-war United States, but he couldn't have predicted that people in the future would take it away from him (either the NCR or Caesar's Legion remove him from the picture and seize the city for themselves or his own underlings betray him and take over - what Benny hoped to do and what can you end up doing).
  • Loophole Abuse: In the first two games, the player can open combat at any time, but unless something is hostile to them or they attack something, combat will end once they take their turn. The catch is that while in combat, NPCs that would automatically initiate conversation with you cannot do so, and if they would initiate combat with you on-sight, they can't do that either because they have to be the ones to initiate it, the combat sequence you begin yourself won't do it. Further, if the player is quick enough, they can hit the key to initiate combat again as soon as it ends, and do so before the NPCs react. The player can exploit this to "sneak" past various points where they would not be allowed to go, such as getting into Vault 8 without earning their trust and avoiding the lengthy sidequest involving Gecko's power plant.
  • Low-Tech Spears: In Fallout 2 and in the game lore, the spear is a typical weapon of tribals (possibly including your character at the beginning of the game), whose prominent members have stereotypically native trappings and live a more subsistence-based lifestyle compared to other more technologically advanced Wasteland factions such as the NCR or Brotherhood of Steel. For comparison, Fallout: New Vegas arms its tribals with a much wider array of weapons, and the spear is much less prominent among them.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Travelling in the first two games (and to a lesser extent in Tactics) if you aren't a fully equipped combat character or have a high outdoorsman stat (which allows you to choose if you actually go into an encounter or not) is this as you can either find a few easy to fight rad scorpions (Which can still be a problem if your character isn't a combat character) or a bunch of raiders equipped with shotguns and 10mm submachine guns who can kill you in 1 turn with no way for you to survive. (This is mitigated in Tactics as the player has a full party much quicker and always starts with a decent submachine gun.)
  • Luck Stat: Puts the L in SPECIAL. Atypically for RPGs, it's actually a quantification of one's ability to calculate and manipulate probability; Mr. House, who was able to predict the exact day (and, very nearly, the exact hour) of the Great War, has 10 Luck. Increases your chances at critical hits, positive Random Encounters and all sorts of other nice things. In New Vegas, one dialogue option for characters with high enough Luck lets you successfully guess a password off the top of your head. And it's not even "swordfish". Another lets you perform brain surgery with a tiny fraction of the Medicine skill you'd need otherwise. Getting it up to 8 or 9 will allow you to clean house at the Blackjack tables.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: Will happen after taking the Bloody Mess perk/trait, which does exactly what it says to your enemies. A starting-out character with the trait can punch a hole in a gecko, or kick a rat and make it explode.
    • In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, the Bloody Mess perk can actually make corpse looting tedious if you mow down a large number of targets in a small area; you'll likely take a while sifting through the mess. Which spatters of meat belonged to which enemy?!
  • The Man They Couldn't Hang: Van Buren was going to have one, called The Hanged Man, as a companion NPC. He was retooled, along with a lot of content from Van Buren, in New Vegas as the Burned Man. He comes up a lot when speaking about Caesar's Legion, and eventually appears in the Honest Hearts DLC as The Atoner. There, he's revealed to be Joshua Graham, Caesar's former Legate who was burned alive and thrown into the Grand Canyon for failure during the First Battle of Hoover Dam, only to survive and return to his home of New Canaan (formerly known as Ogden).
  • Mascot: Both in-world and out-of-world, the Vault Boy - the wavy-haired, perpetually smiling figure in the jumpsuit whose picture accompanies all Skills, Traits, and Perks. In-world, he was the mascot for Vault-Tec Industries. Out-of-world, he serves the same purpose for the franchise.
  • Max-Level Bonus:
    • Fallout 3 has a number of "capstone" perks that are only available at the max level, which is 20 in the base game and 30 with the "Broken Steel" DLC:
      • Level 20 perks are Solar Powered (gain boosted stats when outside and in daylight), Ninja (boosts the damage from sneak attacks, better Critical Hit rate with melee weapons), Grim Reaper's Sprint (killing an enemy with V.A.T.S. restores all expended AP), or Explorer (All undiscovered locations are added to the map).
      • Level 30 perks are Nuclear Anomaly (Trigger a nuclear explosion as a Desperation Attack if your hitpoints are reduced below 20), or Almost Perfect (All the player's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats are boosted to 9).
    • Fallout: New Vegas: If the player reaches level 50 with all 4 DLC installed, they have the option of taking one of three capstone perks, based on their current position on the Karma Meter:
      • Evil Karma grants "Ain't Like That Now", giving a +25% bonus to AP regeneration and +20% to attack speed.
      • Neutral Karma grants "Just Lucky I'm Alive", giving a temporary +4 bonus to luck if the player has less than 25% of their health at the end of a fight, and a +50% damage boost to Critical Hits.
      • Good Karma grants "Thought You Died", giving a bonus to max hit points and +10% to all damage inflicted.
  • Medieval Stasis: Zig-zagged throughout the series. Averted on the West Coast, especially in California, where the NCR has been able to recreate pre-War standards of living for several decades. Played straighter on its face in regards to the East Coast, but it's justified in that there are more factors (sometimes deliberately) preventing widespread society from being rebuilt, such as Troglydyte Degenerative Condition in the Pitt, the Vault 87 Super Mutants and poisoned Potomac River basin in the Capital Wasteland, the recent fall of the Minutemen, the Institute's meddling, and the presence of the Glowing Sea for the Commonwealth, and rhythmic cycles of the Fog on The Island.
  • MegaCorp: A number of these existed in Pre-War America, including Poseidon Energy and REPCONN, with some of them in time becoming part of the Enclave. After the Great War however, a number of new businesses had risen to become the post-apocalyptic equivalent to those old corporations. One example being the Gun Runners, who had become the premier arms manufacturer for the New California Republic by New Vegas.
  • Megaton Punch: Power Fists allow for this. With the Bloody Mess perk, players can punch through opponents with killing blows.
  • Merchant Money Cap: After Bethesda purchased the rights to the series, they added their standard merchant cap starting with 3.note  Much like its Elder Scrolls sister series, each merchant has a limit on their bottle caps that resets after a certain amount of in-game time passes. 4 also borrows the idea of "investing" in a store via a perk that permanently increases that merchant's cap from The Elder Scrolls.
  • Mighty Glacier: A possible character build in the first and second game with the "Bruiser" trait, which gives you two extra points of strength, while reducing your actions points per round by two.
  • Money Spider: Mostly averted in that only humanoid enemies drop money. Played straight with centaurs in Fallout 3 though, but that's because they used to be human.
  • More Dakka: Everyone loves Miniguns, and you should too. Speaking generally, the best guns in the games are either a minigun of some type or Energy Weapon of some kind. (See also Beam Spam.)
  • Multi-Melee Master: If you have a high enough melee score, you can use anything from a steak knife to a butane-soaked lawnmower blade to a chainsaw to a genuine Masamune katana.
  • Multiple Endings: Yet another staple of the series. Developer's Foresight is in full effect here.
  • Mushroom Samba: Depending where you wander, you may enter a hallucinatory state.
  • Must Have Caffeine: In Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics, the player can become addicted to Nuka-Cola, though the only withdraw effect is a message that you crave another Nuka-Cola.note  In later games the player cannot become addicted to Nuka-Cola (only to Nuka-Cola Quantum in Fallout 3 and New Vegas), but various NPCs are addicted to the soda, including the recurring character Sierra Petrovita.
  • The Musketeer: Enemy too close? Ditch the guns and pull out the sledgehammer.
  • Mysterious Protector: The "Mysterious Stranger" perk in 2,3 and New Vegas, with the Miss Fortune Perk added in the last.
  • invoked Mythology Gag: In Fallout, the recruitable NPC Tycho mentions he's a Desert Ranger. The Desert Rangers were the protagonists of Wasteland, the game to which Fallout is a Spiritual Successor. The Big Bad of Fallout Tactics also seems to be a subtle Shout-Out to the Big Bad of Wasteland. As per Word of God, Tycho's outfit became the basis of the Desert Ranger Combat Armor, which in itself inspired the Iconic Outfit of the NCR Veteran Rangers. And in Fallout 4, the Commonwealth Minutemen's relationship with the Settlers under their protection is based after that of Wasteland's Desert Rangers.
  • A Nazi by Any Other Name:
    • The Master in the first game outright states that he and his Super Mutants want to create a Master Race, and that only when there is "one race" and "one goal" can there be peace on Earth. Though, his goal consists less of wiping out the 'inferior races' and more converting all humans to his 'master race', which is more reminiscent of another infamous ideology.
    • The Enclave, due to their autocratic and militaristic rule and their stated goal of wiping out all "mutants" to keep humanity "pure".
  • Nebulous Evil Organization: Vault-Tec. It's made clear in the original Fallout that the vaults were intended as social experiments where its denizens were subjected to numerous (and often catastrophic) experiments. They claim it's to study mankind if they ever need to colonize space. Fallout 3 was the first to suggest that Vault-Tec's intentions were more than scientific, but Fallout 76 reveals that Vault-Tec claims themselves the sole rightful heir of the U.S. Government and remaining world, and will fight the remaining U.S. Government and anyone else if they stand in their way.
  • The Needless: Ghouls again, as part of their Cursed with Awesome traits. Based on Ghouls found buried alive and one trapped in a refrigerator (since the bombs fell over 200 years prior), they do not seem to require food, water, or possibly even air to continue living.
  • Nerf: Power Armor got this treatment immediately after the second game, and seems to get more plentiful across the wasteland with each Fallout installment. At first, it was nearly impenetrable and could only be gotten through a particularly difficult sidequest for the Brotherhood Of Steel. By Fallout 4, even the Raiders have it, and the player can get any armor by simply killing the wearer and walking away with their suit. On top of that, it's also gotten much more difficult to maintain and use.
  • New Eden: Van Buren was going to feature "The Nursery", a side-project of a group of Vault-Tec scientists who were concerned about preserving the flora and fauna of Earth and not just humanity (not being privy to the real plot behind the Vaults). They created a self-sufficient oasis in the middle of the Arizona desert, far away from any nuclear target zones, sparing it from radiation and nuclear fire. Unfortunately, the scientists never made it back, and while the Nursery has survived okay on it's own, it's been infested with mutant carnivorous plants, leaving it up to the player to wipe them out and restart the various computer equipment needed to bring the oasis up to maximum effectivenes. Part of this concept was recycled for Vault 22 in New Vegas, while making it a whole lot darker.
  • New Old West: Certain elements of the Capital Wasteland (mining and 'frontier' type towns, bounty hunters, travelling traders beset by robbers, a heroic (or villainous) drifter, etc.) hearken back to Westerns, but with places like Rivet City or the Vaults, those elements are mixed in with Sci-Fi. Essentially, wherever the post-apocalypse survivors can't scavenge old technology, the lack of oil or uranium leads to nineteenth-century technology being their ceiling - and everywhere is a frontier. Considering that the USA in Fallout never left the 1950s culturally and Western stories were popular in that decade, it's not surprising that America would revert to resembling the Old West after the apocalypse.
    • New Vegas features this trope heavily. Revolvers and dusters and other parts of cowboy culture are given great focus, and several towns (like Goodsprings in the beginning of the game) heavily resemble the Old West.
    • Fallout 4 has heavy Wild-West undertones - the Commonwealth Minutemen are pretty much an entire knightly order of Cowboy Cops - but adds in influences from Colonial and Civil War-era Americana.
  • New Perk Every Level:
    • Fallout 3: The Lone Wanderer gets to get a new Perk every level up.
    • Fallout 4: The player may obtain a perk rank on every level, or use the bonus to gain progress on one of the Special stats (which in turn unlocks additional perks that can be obtained.)
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: In Fallout 2 a special random encounter sends you back in time to Vault 13 shortly before the beginning of the first game... where you do a nice job breaking their water chip. You cannot return to your own time without doing so.
    • Pre-War America decided, sometime before 1969, to divide the states by region into 13 commonwealths. They hoped that this new layer of bureaucracy would benefit states with common regional concerns, but wouldn't affect those states with dissimilar interests or political cultures, helping strengthen the country as a whole against the threat of communism. Instead, the commonwealths began viciously competing against one-another, only weakening the US as a whole. This served to be the first in a long line of decisions that turned America into an Orwellian Police State.
  • Nice Job Guiding Us, Hero: If the Vault Dweller recruits water merchants to send supplies to Vault 13, they will extend the water chip deadline with 100 days, but it allows the Master's super mutants to find the Vault earlier.
  • Night of the Living Mooks: Subverted. Ghouls are actually the most peaceful "race" in the Fallout universe - implied to be because while they may be tough, they're really not good fighters - although you do very rarely have random encounters with Ghoul bandits and psychotics. They're also immortal unless they die by violence, which provides a strong incentive to avoid it.
  • No Canon for the Wicked: The canon Vault Dweller and Chosen One were both great inspirers of hope and progress throughout the Wasteland.
  • No Control Group: Averted. Unlike most fictional experiments, there was a control group for the Vault-Tec Vault experiments - the seventeen unmodified vaults that operated as advertised and opened on time.
  • Nominal Hero: The player can make their character one. You can openly be a sadistic bastard who steals, lies, backstabs and murders their way through the wastelands, but by the end of the game your character will be a hero known across the Wastelands for their great deeds. Played straightest in Fallout and Fallout 2, where your character will become famed in later games regardless of their actions towards the other settlements. Played with in Fallout 3 where there were evil endings and characters reacted appropriately to you taking them. Averted in New Vegas where if you join House or NCR with negative karma, people and the endings will acknowledge you as an evil person that just happens to feel like working for the good guys, and if you join the Legion you are vilified along with them. The narrator will even dwell a bit on the contradiction of a character with good karma helping the Legion to achieve their goal.
  • Non-Combat EXP: The series awards XP for doing non-combat related things, which may bypass combat altogether, such as lockpicking, hacking and persuasion.
  • Non-Human Sidekick: Every game has at least one, even if it's just a trusty dog.
  • Non-Indicative Name: The Science skill mostly just boils down to knowing how to use a computer: other science applications are few, far-between, and usually quest-specific.
    Lone Wanderer: I had no choice. You didn't adhere to the scientific method.
    Dr. Lesko: You're right.
    • Averted somewhat in the later games (especially New Vegas and 4), where the Science skill also allows building and repairing of high-tech items, and grants access to science-specific perks.
  • Non-Standard Game Over:
    • Selling out your people to the Big Bad in Fallout 1.
    • Attacking anyone in the starting village in Fallout 2.
    • Revealing the code to the purifier to The Dragon in Fallout 3 will have them shoot you dead on the spot.
    • Waiting too long to head to the vault in Fallout 4 will lead to you getting caught in the nuclear explosion.
  • No Such Thing as Dehydration:
  • Nuclear Mutant: Invoked and Zigzagged. The games are crawling with all manner of hideous, unnaturally mutated plants and animals, because that's part of the Zeerust post-apocalytica aesthetic. However, the mutations actually stem at least in part from a mutagenic Synthetic Plague called the Forced Evolutionary Virus, although the ratio of F.E.V to radiation is uncertain and was the subject of creator dispute. Certain species, such as the ubiquitous Deathclaws and the Fallout 2'-exclusive Wanamingos, were actually experiments in bio-engineered Living Weapons conducted by the US Government before the bombs dropped, and managed to survive in the wasteland; Fallout: New Vegas also has mutant monsters engineered by the Mad Scientist Think Tank of the Big Empty, including the rattlesnake/coyote Nightstalkers and the Cazadores, gigantic tarantula hawk wasps.
  • Ominous Hair Loss:
    • Hair loss is usually part and parcel of transformation into a ghoul, though to varying extents: some ghouls are completely bald, while others have only mild cases of alopecia, and occasionally it's possible to meet a ghoul with a full head of hair.
    • Despite the deliberate inaccuracies featured throughout the games, the series occasionally likes to incorporate some of the real-world results of radiation exposure - including hair loss. In one morbidly amusing case, this led to a man believing that exposure to radiation was transforming him into an immortal ghoul after he found himself losing clumps of hair, when in reality he was just dying of radiation sickness.
    • Subverted in Fallout: New Vegas with Chris Haversam, a human from Vault 34 who has joined the all-ghoul Bright Brotherhood religious group. Chris believes himself to be a ghoul because, as Vault 34's reactor technician, he was exposed to a large amount of radiation, he speaks with a gravelly voice (a trait many ghouls share), and eventually his hair began to fall out. The last part was in all actuality, just male pattern baldness setting in. Ironically, Vault 34's reactor malfunctioned after he left and turned most of the other dwellers into ghouls.
  • One-Hit Kill: In Fallout 1 and 2, if a targeted shot rolls an extremely high critical (101+ ), it will result in an instant-kill, even if the actual damage is not enough to fell the enemy. This can happen only on targeted attacks to the head, torso, or eyes.
  • Onesie Armor:
  • One Stat to Rule Them All:
    • Intelligence across the series. Higher Intelligence means more skill points per level, unique dialogue options with characters that unlocks hidden quest paths (usually better ones than what are otherwise available), and it increases the Science and Repair skills, which are very useful skills needed both for general gameplay and for quests. Even with Fallout 4 removing Skills, Intelligence is tired to several Perks critical to gameplay, including Gun Nut, Science!, Medic, and Hacker, so you'll want an Intelligence of at least 6 and will be sinking a lot of Perk points into that part of the chart.
    • In the first two games, Agility. It increases your three primary combat skills (Small Guns, Big Guns, Energy Weapons), boosts Lockpick, Steal, and Traps (utility skills you'll need, especially Lockpick), and increases Armor Class. Most importantly though, it boosts Action Points, which determines how much you can do each round, so a higher Agility makes combat under any scenario easier to handle. And Agility is tied to several Perks that either give you more Action Points or let you do things for fewer Action Points. In the 3D games, Agility only affects Small Guns and Sneak and VATS is optional for combat, so its importance is lessened.
    • Naturally, depending on their weapons of preference, the player is probably going to want to sink as many skill points into their primary combat stat as they can; Small Guns, Big Guns, or Energy Weapons, mostly likely.
    • Across the series, you'll always end up sinking lots of skill points into the Science and Lockpick skills. Science lets you hack computer terminals, unlocks hidden quest paths, lets you understand technology better, and generally just opens up a lot of gameplay options you'd otherwise miss out on. The same goes for Lockpick, because the world is full of locked doors and locked containers protecting valuable items and they tend to be good ones, so of course you'll want to get them.
  • One-Word Title: Fallout is referring to "nuclear fallout", the residual material falling out of the sky after a nuclear explosion. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic setting after a nuclear war.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Player characters across the series. Games occasionally include the option for you to mention your name in dialogue, but in the Bethesda-era entries, for obvious reasons (ie, all NPCs are voiced) no one will ever refer to you by name. The first game never gave you a name or nickname, but games since have dubbed the player character of the first game is "The Vault Dweller". The second game, you're "The Chosen One", but no one outside your tribe refers to you this way and will be amused if you say that it's your title. In Tactics, you're only known as "The Warrior". In BoS,, you're the Initiatenote . Fallout 3, Three Dog dubs you "The Lone Wanderer" but no one else uses the term. New Vegas flips this, as you're "The Courier" to everyone except Mr. New Vegas, who just refers to you as an anonymous civilian contractor or courier. Fallout 4 is an interesting case; you're given the option to actually name your character, but only one NPC in the entire game actually refers to you with it, and to everyone else you're the "the Vault Dweller" or "Blue."
  • Oppressive States of America: The Pre-War United States of America was not pretty. The infrastructure of America had collapsed due to the resource shortages (food, fuel, and material) while unemployment was skyrocketing. The government responded by becoming a police state and by trying to blame their problems on Communists, then brutally cracking down on anyone who spoke out against their regime. Arrests, "re-education," and in some cases outright murder followed as the government tried to keep the population in line. At the same time, the New Plague (suspected to be a bio-weapon unleashed by one of America's enemies) began to spread, leading to nationwide quarantines. Before long the government had given up trying to cure it and decided to use the paranoia created by its spread as a cover in order to break up assemblies and register people. Eventually, civil liberties became virtually non-existent. In one example the commanding Officer of the Hopeville missile base, Commander Devlin, had a protest group arrested and sent off for human experimentation, claiming it would give them "the white-hot rage of capitalist justice." These tactics made things worse, and by the end of 2077 the United States was on the verge of a massive civil uprising.
    • This was done because the éminence grise of the federal government (The Enclave) realized it was likely only a matter of time until total nuclear war occurred, and knowing that the common man would not survive it they believed that they alone were worthy of re-colonizing the planet. Though their original plan was to develop generation ships to travel to other planets, they could not succeed in this goal and decided to re-colonize the planet they were already on.
  • The Order: The Brotherhood of Steel, who are deliberately modeled after medieval knightly orders.
  • Organizational Purpose Drift: The Brotherhood of Steel was founded almost immediately after the Great War as a military unit attempting to preserve and protect pre-war technology. Over time, they grew into a monastic-tech order so obsessed with following their "codex" (enforcing strict isolationism, denying outsiders entry, and focusing almost entirely on recovering and hoarding technology) that the West Coast branch became a Terminally Exclusive Club through attrition and a population crisis, which is possibly on the brink of extermination by the end of New Vegas depending on player choices. The East Coast branch under Elder Lyons instead moved away from the codex, deemphasizing technological preservation in favor of becoming protectors of humankind against "mutant" threats in the wasteland while being open to outside recruitment, as seen in 3. They shift a little back toward their original purpose in 4, with Elder Maxson reinstating certain parts of the codex, but keeping many of the changes that allowed them to thrive and essentially establish a fiefdom in the Capital Wasteland while expanding toward the Commonwealth. In their case, the Brotherhood of Steel "drifted" from a small, fanatical order of tech hoarders into one of the most powerful military forces in the post-Great War world.
  • Outcast Refuge: Extremely common throughout the series, typically established by the various groups who face ostracization from surviving humans. Ghoul settlements are a prominent example, with at least one (Necropolis, Underworld, The Slog, etc.) appearing in every main series game.
  • The Outside World:
    • This applies to a surprisingly large amount of characters, even some player characters. The protagonists of 1 and 3 were both raised in Vaults, while the Chosen One from 2 was raised in a tiny, isolated village. All the characters who grew up in the Vaults had no contact with the outside until the Vaults opened for many different reasons, exposing them to a huge but very dangerous world.
    • Virtually nothing concrete is known about the post-nuclear world outside of North America; the vast majority of characters in the series are either from the North American continent, traveled there and were on it when the bombs fell and survived through mutation, or are long-dead by the time the player "encounters" them. To date, only two characters have been outright confirmed to have travelled to the continent post-war: Word of God confirmed that Allistair Tenpenny and Colin Moriarity in Fallout 3 had both immigrated across the Atlantic from the British Isles, which indicates some measure of human civilization there; speaking with them in-game, however, the former refuses to talk about his origins and the latter outright lies about his, claiming to have been born and raised in the D.C. area despite his thick Irish accent.
  • Pacifist Run: While possible in nearly all games in the series, they tend more towards being a Technical Pacifist run, as many of them have points where certain characters must die to progress the story; players will typically have to arrange for these characters to be killed by other NPCs. The first two games are even more notable in this regard, as it is entirely possible (though very challenging) to do an Evil Pacisfist Run.
  • Padded Sumo Gameplay: The first two games have this issue in the very late game. Power armor is strong enough, for the player and NPCs alike, that attacks from nearly any weapon short of the games' Infinity Plus One Swords will either be fully negated or reduced to single-digit damage, the only exceptions being armor-piercing Critical Hits. As a result, late game combat basically boils down to watching both sides repeatedly get "hit for 0 damage" until someone, be it an enemy or the player, gets obliterated when they're "critically hit for [absurdly high number] damage, bypassing the armor."
  • Permadeath: Once a team member is killed, they're dead forever. In the first two games, every NPC (including essential quest providers) is killable. In Fallout 3 every character except children and those deemed essential are, meaning you can always progress in the game but can screw yourself out of a lot of potential loot and XP. In New Vegas, your allies are just KOed for a few seconds in normal mode. In Hardcore difficulty, though, it's permanent.
  • Phlebotinum Worship: The Children of Atom are a cult who worship radiation and nuclear explosions, believing that the splitting of an atom that causes a nuclear blast leads to the birth of countless new universes. For good measure, in this setting, radiation induces hideous mutations in animals and transforms the humans it doesn't kill into zombie-like beings called ghouls, yet many Children of Atom are mysteriously unaffected by it — which they regard as further evidence of Atom's favor. Their holy sites generally consist of particularly irradiated parts of wasteland (such as the Crater of Atom in the Glowing Sea), unexploded nuclear bombs (such as the one the town of Megaton was founded around) or pre-war military bases with stockpiles of nuclear devices (the Sentinel Site, and the Nucleus submarine dock).
  • Planimal: Spore plants, one of which becomes sentient through further experimentation.
  • Plasma Cannon: Plasma weapons are high-end energy weapons. In the first two games, the Glock 86 Plasma Pistol and Winchester P94 Plasma Rifle (stretching the definition of rifle, being held like a heavy weapon) filled the role. In Fallout 3, a completely new style of plasma weaponry was introduced, using an Raygun Gothic styling and visibly showing the plasma arcs in the firing chambers. This latter style was retconned/reconciled in Fallout New Vegas as being a more standard-issue-practical plasma weapon compared to the pre-Fallout 3 versions that never made it past prototyping before the Great War. In game terms, the Fallout 3-style weapons were lower-tier, and the (renamed) Fallout 1-style weapons were higher-tier. In New Vegas, you can even find the Super Prototype of the Fallout 3-style rifle, the Q-35 Matter Modulator.
  • Points of Light Setting: Fallout is mostly this kind of setting. Although a few regional powers begin to rise as the series progresses, the world is mostly made up of isolated settlements cobbled together from the ruins of civilization and a handful of Vaults that haven't managed to kill their inhabitants. The wasteland is otherwise populated with raiders, mutants, ghouls, pockets of radiation, and various other horrors which only a few brave traders and heroes attempt to navigate.
  • Politically Correct History: Downplayed. Despite the culture of the pre-war world being based on the 1950s United States, no Fallout title contains any solid evidence that racism (except against Chinese-Americans), sexism, or LGBTQ+ discrimination existed in that time, and no one in the post-war world shows any signs of prejudice in such a manner. New Vegas has Caesar's Legion which does not allow women to serve in the military (and uses them heavily as slave labor), but such a stance is not based on sexist attitudes according to Word of God, and while the NCR is implied to frown on homosexuality, it isn't stated outright and in-context may not necessarily mean they disapprove of it. May be justified by the fact that even if the series' pre-war culture is based on the 1950s, the Great War happened in 2078 — it's plausible that over the intervening century, such attitudes faded from society even if other 50s values didn't.
  • Polluted Wasteland: Obvious to anyone who plays the game for even five minutes, the entire series takes place across various irradiated wastelands.
  • Position of Literal Power: Seen in Fallout 1 with the Lieutenant and the Master. Averted in Fallout 2 with President Richardson, who's a standard unarmed civilian, and in Fallout 3 with Colonel Autumn, who is only slightly tougher than a normal enemy soldier. Played straight in Fallout 3 with Commander Jabsco of Talon Company (who has a rocket launcher and more health than almost any other character in the game), and Chinese General Jingwei in the Operation: Anchorage DLC expansion (who has an insane amount of health which, combined with his body armor, makes him the 2nd toughest enemy in the entire game next to the 15-foot tall Super Mutant Behemoth, possibly to encourage the player to convince him to surrender instead, or maybe just an example of Executive Meddling on the part of General Chase). Both seen and averted in New Vegas. The NCR President and General are both bog-standard humans, while Caesar himself is only about as tough as an Elite Mook. Legate Lanius, however, is a murder machine (for reference, the guy can take multiple anti-tank rounds to the face and still have more than 3/4ths of his health left).
  • Post-ApocaLARP:
    • Founded at the end of the first game and becoming a political powerhouse in the ensuing decades, the New California Republic is a government founded by a coalition of major settlements in southern California based off the model of the pre-War American government, including a federal legislature, a judiciary, a standing military, and minted currency (originally gold coins, later paper bills). Its flag is even the same as the old California flag, with the sole difference of the bear being a Nuclear Mutant with two heads.
    • Played With in the case of the Khans, as well as their successors the New Khans and the Great Khans. They get their name and aesthetics from a pre-War biker gang, who in turn took their name from ancient Mongol warriors, though the distinction between the two has become muddled with time. One mission in New Vegas involves helping the Great Khans learn more about the historical Mongols, inspiring them to "find themselves" culturally in the hopes of one day creating a proud nation of their own.
  • Post-Apocalyptic Gas Mask: Despite featuring an irradiated wasteland, gasmasks are not a requirement but Powered Armor suits which feature gasmasks are emblematic of the franchise.
  • Post-Peak Oil: Before the Great War, peak oil was the cause of the Resource Wars that devastated both Europe and the Middle East. Gas prices reached up to $1450.99 per gallon for regular. The United States (and possibly China) were only saved by going to an all-nuclear society, while the rest of the world ended up collapsing. It was all made moot however, when everyone started to sling nukes at each other.
  • Powered Armor: Iconic to the series. Some variant of it is always the best armor in the game—whether Hardened Power Armor in 1 or Advanced Power Armor Mark II in 2—providing excellent protection from firearms and environmental hazards as well as a significant strength boost. Worn by both the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave.
    • In the third game, however, it loses a little of its luster as all forms of it - excluding the Infinity Plus One Armor - decrease Agility, which is the primary statistic for VATS. Other armor types nearly match the T-51b in protection, while being far lighter. The Operation Anchorage DLC fixed this unintentionally with the glitched Winterized T-51b, which is essentially indestructible in addition to having the highest damage reduction available: Broken Steel also added Enclave Hellfire armor, which doesn't have the Agility penalty.
    • Fallout 4 completely overhauls how power armor works. Instead of being an inventory item, it's now a separate world object that you have to enter and exit. It still boosts your Strength and other stats (depending on how you customize it). You can detach and swap out armor plates from the main armor frame, and you can customize your armor with different features (including a jetpack). You also take no fall damage from any height and can actually inflict damage by landing from a height near NPCs. In addition, your damage resistances are raised to extremely high levels, and you take almost no radiation damage. To balance it out, however, they now require the relatively rare Fusion Cores to be operated, and they only last about 20 minutes (shorter if you run/sprint or use the jetpack) before you need a new one, or else become severely encumbered. Also, Power Armor is the only armor with item health, with each armor piece separately taking damage and requiring frequent repairs with semi-rare components at Power Armor Stations.
  • Power Fist: Infinity +1 Sword for characters using the Unarmed skill; can be upgraded to a Mega Powerfist in some games.
  • President Evil: Little is known about the U.S Presidency pre-War, but what is known doesn't look good at all. Surviving documents portray the unnamed Presidents as corrupt and callous, and in the games themselves, there's President Dick Richardson, the Big Bad of Fallout 2, and John Henry Eden, the Big Bad of 3. Both of them are Eagleland Type 2 assholes who want to exterminate all mutated humans and repopulate the world with the Enclave citizenry, and are still obsessed with wiping out China. What arguably makes them worse is that they're not loud-mouthed racists, they genuinely believe that only the Enclaves example of humanity deserve to exist.
  • Press X to Die: See the specific game pages for examples. Speaking generally, this series will not protect you from the consequences of really, really, really bad decisions.
  • Previous Player-Character Cameo: The player character from Fallout reappears in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel games as an NPC.
  • Progressively Prettier: Ghouls, the wasteland's most common species of humanoid mutants, have undergone this over the course of the series. In the original Interplay-era games, they looked like hunch-backed, bug-eyed zombies with melted-looking flesh and exposed bones. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, they're proportioned like ordinary humans, but with flaky, rotting skin and bloodshot eyes. Come Fallout 4, they merely look like moderate-to-severe burn victims with blacked-out eyes, some even having full heads of hair. Interestingly, this is reversed for the animalistic "feral" ghouls, who went from being identical to regular ghouls in the early games to emaciated, skinless husks in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and then freakish, deformed zombies riddled with cancerous growths in Fallout 4.
  • Punch-Packing Pistol: The unique .223 pistol deals damage on par with mid-to-high tier rifles. Justified, because it is a rifle that got cut-down and further modified to be a pistol. As far as small arms go, this is the most powerful handgun in the game and by a large margin.
  • Punched Across the Room: Requires a very good damage roll if fighting barehanded, but it is possible to hurl someone a fair distance (a couple hexes, depending on damage, in the first two games) if you do more than 10 points of damage in melee. The sledgehammer weapons greatly increase the distance traveled. If an enemy ends up sliding more than 4 hexes after a sledgehammer strike, there was a significant chance they weren't going getting up again.
  • Punch-Clock Villain: One recurring theme throughout the series regarding the major evil organizations; the leadership is ruthless, and the rank-and-file have their share of True Believer fanatics and sadists, but many of them are actually just regular joes who think they're doing the right thing, simply obey because they've never known of any other alternative, or are trying to make the best of a bad situation. Members of the Big Bad faction of one game often show up in later games as friendly supporting characters, having chosen less antagonistic lifestyles or better role models.
    • Fallout 2 has two notable examples. If you decide to eradicate everyone in the Enclave military base, the only NPC who asks you not to kill him is the cook in the mess hall, because that's all he does and didn't care who his employer was. The Hubologists have a scientist working for them who thought that all of them are whacked out crazy, but they pay him handsomely with good money and women, so he just goes along with it despite having no loyalty towards them.
  • Putting on the Reich: The Enclave are very similar to Nazis, goals and method-wise. And the entire Pre-War American government too, straight down to using Chinese-Americans as guinea pigs for mad science experiments... if not outright exterminating them in death camps.

    R - Z 
  • Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Certain perks, and some equipment, give the player character various bonuses while being irradiated or while suffering from various degrees of radiation poisoning. These include health regeneration, increased strength and speed, and more Action Points (essentially faster reaction time).
  • Radiation-Immune Mutants: Ghouls, who can even heal from radiation. Super Mutants are also immune, though they aren't healed by it. Super Mutants do seem to find large sources of radiation somewhat pleasing to be around though, if Black Mountain Radio in New Vegas is any indication.
  • Ragnarök-Proofing:
    • invoked Averted in the first two games, which pretty much assume complete destruction of every identifiable landmark that hasn't been constantly maintained (one location, appropriately called Junktown, is apparently constructed entirely out of scrap wood, stone, and metal).
    • Played incredibly straight in 3, where (despite heavy atomic onslaught and 200 years without maintenance), historic DC landmarks are still standing and almost completely intact; you can still generally get lights and (heavily irradiated) running water wherever you go.
    • In New Vegas, it's justified thanks to Mr. House's long-term planning (and anti-missile laser defense system) sparing Vegas and the Mojave (and even more so, Hoover Dam) from the worst of the Great War. Additionally, Las Vegas was said to be heavily dilapidated and ruined when Mr. House woke from his coma and formed an alliance with the tribals inhabiting the ruins: Vegas had only recently been restored to an approximation of its pre-War glory in order to "roll out the red carpet" for the arrival of the NCR.
    • 4 also plays this trope relatively straight, but is partly justified due to the fact that only one atomic bomb was aimed at Boston, and it missed, sparing the city from atomic annihilation.
    • 76 has this closer to an aversion courtesy of being set around a mere 20+ years after the Great War, with the further factor that Appalachia remained inhabited for some time during those two decades and efforts were made to conserve standing structures if only for the purposes of shelter, at least until the Scorched Plague finished the job and depopulated the area until Vault 76 opened.
  • Random Drop Booster: Scrounger perk allows for finding a lot more ammunition than before.
  • Random Encounters: Happens whenever you travel across the map screen in Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics. Not all random encounters are hostile though, some are even beneficial, and with a high Outdoorsman skill you can circumvent most of them. Tactics is particularly annoying about this, as it activates a type of Rail Roading. You are likely to encounter something with each step if you traveled too far out of the way from your destination. Having a high outdoorsman skill allowed you to choose if you wanted to engage the encounters, but you'll be clicking "No" a hundred times just to get back to your base if you choose to explore the map.
  • Randomized Damage Attack: Weapons in the series generally have a damage range listed in their stats.
  • Regional Redecoration: During the Great War in Fallout's backstory, it's said that entire mountain ranges were created as the ground buckled and moved under the strain of thousands of atomic explosions. It's unknown if this is true or not, as none of the locations shown in the actual games are all that geologically different, aside from the occasional craters. Of course, the more obvious case of redecoration is that most environments have become the scorching radioactive desert known as the wasteland.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Radiation poisoning is the one condition in the series which must be treated, since it doesn't go away on its own. In real life, radiation sickness is like the common cold: the body heals itself. There are some treatments of minor value, such as the use of steroids to boost the healing process, but assuming you survive the original exposure, radiation sickness eventually goes away on its own.
  • Recurring Element: Harold, who started out as an ordinary scavenger about 50 years after the bombs fell, has been Cursed with Awesome and progressed from shanty-dwelling beggar, to mayor, to unwilling god of a benign cult.
    • You will always have a Canine Companion, and will never be without your Pip-Boy.
  • Recycled In Space: The Enclave are essentially Nazis... in America. Caesar's Legion are Imperial Romans... in America. And the Institute are (more or less) The Illuminati... in America.
  • Reduced to Dust: Scoring a critical kill with energy weapons have a chance to reduce enemies to smoldering ashes. Certain death animations in the first two games showed enemies being disintegrated in pretty graphic fashion, while the 3D games just show them turn to a pile of smoldering ashes almost instantly.
  • The Remnant: Where to start? You've got the remnants of the Master's Army and the Enclave (the remnants of the éminence grise of the US government) in Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, as well as the game's Ghoulified Chinese soldiers on U.S. soil, still holding their positions and waiting for word from a headquarters that was (presumably) vaporized long ago.
    • The Brotherhood of Steel is technically a Remnant of the U.S Armed Forces, though their founders deserted the government just before the War.
    • In New Vegas, you get the Enclave Remnants, a group of elderly Enclave veterans having assumed new lives in the Mojave after the Enclaves destruction, making them the remnant of the remnant. Possible Follower Arcade Gannon is the son of their former squad leader, and his side quest revolves around recruiting the Remnants
    • The NCR was going to be this in the cancelled Van Buren, having lost contact with the original California region years ago. However, New Vegas, while incorporating a lot of Van Buren, did not include this ,as the NCR is perfectly intact, if stretched thin trying to turn back Caesars Legion.
    • 4 has Zao, the Ghoulified captain of a Chinese submarine that was left stranded in Boston Harbor after (it's heavily implied) launching its nuclear payload and irradiating the surrounding area of what became the Glowing Sea. Unlike other Chinese remnants, he has had 200 years of isolation to come to terms with his actions and only wants to repair his ship and return home, or whatever's left of it. There's also the shipwrecked & Ghoulified remnants of a Norwegian freighter, who have since then degenerated into Raiders in order to survive.
  • Retro Universe: Fallout's America is an amalgam of all the decades of the Cold War, as well as the Sci-Fi produced during those decades. The '40s give the setting its wartime propaganda, urging you to buy Victory Bonds. The '50s give it their Pre-War fashions and car designs; Fifties Sci-Fi gives it nuclear cars and the styling of its robots. The '60s give it the use of the word "hippies" (in Fallout 3) and anti-war graffiti (all over Hidden Valley in New Vegas). The '70s give it the punk fashion of the Raiders, the oil crisis, and the Institute's general design aesthetic. The '80s give it the drug crisis and emerging biological warfare. The Post-War civilizations also show elements of The Great Depression and The Wild West.
  • Riddled and Rattled: Since both Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 use the same animation sprites, a common form of overkill with automatic weapons is to see the enemy twitching in place while getting filled with bullets in the chest before finally falling over dead. In the case of heavy weapons like the chainguns), the enemy's torso and head will be turned to Ludicrous Gibs as their body is ripped apart by the bullets, leaving only the legs and skeleton intact before they fall over.
  • Riddle for the Ages: Who started The Great War? Was it the United States, China, Russia, Vault-Tec, rogue AIs? There's even a hint it might have been aliens. There's never been any concrete evidence to prove who it was, just hints and nudges that are circumstantial and/or come from biased and untrustworthy sources. It's dubious we'll ever know for sure, since most characters who would know it are dead and most records that would reveal the answer are lost. It's heavily implied it was the Chinese who fired first, which would make sense in-canon, but it isn't confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt.note  Regardless, many characters espouse it ultimately doesn't matter who fired first: the world burned all the same and took the global superpowers that fired the nukes with it, and the survivors who are rebuilding civilization now have little reason to care how it happened and no means to find out. On October 26th, 2023, RPG producer and broad-strokes creator Tim Cain revealed in an interview that China ultimately fired the first nuke, but only because the United States didn't put a stop to their illegal bio-weapon research with the Forced Evolutionary Virus.
  • Ridiculous Future Inflation: The Pre-War World had a seriously insane case of this. Fallout Tactics has a gas station where the price of regular gasoline is somewhere in the $4500 range. Premium fuel was $8000.99 per gallon. (Then again, this may have been more due to the lack of oil. The shock of the price is still jarring to those who do not know about the oil shortage of the past). The intro also shows an ad for a car advertised as being fully analog, with no computers, and costing "just" $199,999.99. The newspapers from the 2050s and 2070s shown in the Fallout 3 loading screens cost $56 each. In Fallout 4, as evidenced by a terminal in Gwinnett Brewery, a pint of beer cost $39 in 2077, the year the Great War started. A six-pack cost $200, and a donut is proudly advertised for the low, low price of $30.
  • Robot Buddy: Skynet and K-9 in Fallout 2, RL-3 in Fallout 3, ED-E and Rex (technically, it's a cyborg dog, but still...) in New Vegas, and Codsworth & Curie (the latter only initially, at the very least) in 4.
    • Also in New Vegas, you have Yes Man, who helps you take over New Vegas for yourself if you help him and is always cheerful and friendly.
    • 4's Automatron DLC gives you the ability to build and customize more robot companions, who can be of any make that the player encounters during the game, including Sentry Bots and Assaultrons. They can also be used to staff the player's settlements, if you're feeling generous.
  • Robot Police:
    • One model of Protectron was often used in police work before the bombs dropped. As seen in Fallout 4, they can be distinguished from their regular counterparts by their stun guns and electric attacks.
    • The Securitrons are robots that serve as law enforcement on the New Vegas Strip alongside NCR MPs, and their most basic version has the image of a police officer's face on their screens.
    • In Fallout 4, Nick Valentine is an older-model Synth whose degradation makes him obvious that he's a Synth, and therefore not trying to infiltrate Diamond City incognito; he styles himself as a Noir detective, taking up cases around the settlement in an effort to earn his keep. His mind is also a replication of a pre-war police officer, also named Nick Valentine.
  • Rock Beats Laser:
    • Powered Armor is nice, but it is shown several times that enough bullets can overwhelm the protection and kill the wearer, and a improvised anti-personnel mine made with bottlecaps for shrapnel and a lunchbox can possibly blow the wearer's leg off.
    • In Mothership Zeta, there is a possible Offscreen Moment of Awesome where a Samurai warrior cleaves through an entire room of raygun-armed aliens with nothing but his trusty katana. Said katana is also one of the top tier melee weapons in the game, even though it was forged in the 16th Century.
    • In New Vegas, the Brotherhood were decisively defeated in a brief war by the NCR. As one scientist puts it, Powered Armor and bravado doesn't mean much against an enemy who outnumber you thirty to one. The NCR themselves find a stalemate against Caesar's Legion, because despite the Legion viewing overreliance on technology as a weakness, they are more numerous and clever at using guerrilla warfare, and their leader is very good at inspiring fanatical loyalty in his Legionnaires and also manipulating other factions to do his dirty work.
    • In the fourth game, you can lead the Railroad or the Minutemen to victory over the Brotherhood and the Institute. The Brotherhood have Powered Armor, widespread laser weapons and a fleet of Vertibirds stolen from the Enclave, while the Institute are advanced enough to effectively 3D-print humans. The Railroad and the Minutemen are just a disparate group of Wastelanders who have some clever disguises and homemade firearms made from metal piping, the Railroad Rifle (which is a steam-powered rifle that shoots giant iron spikes, crudely-made, hand-cranked "Laser Muskets" and some repurposed 19th Century-era field guns.
  • Romance Sidequest: Averted prior to Fallout 4. In Fallout 2 you could get married, but it was a Shotgun Wedding with a one-night stand treated mostly as a joke, and you couldn't have any meaningful interactions with your spouse after the marriage anyway. An optional romance subplot was planned for New Vegas but it was ultimately scrapped (as many of Obsidian's creative staff are on record as not being fond of typical "video game romance"). Fallout 4 allows all human companions (and one robot) to be romanced regardless of gender, but you still gotta work to earn their affection.
  • Running Gag:
    • Corporate warfare between soda brands. Starting with New Vegas, old terminal entries can be found detailing the Nuka-Cola Corporation's attempts to monopolize the American soda market while covering up their comically shady business practices. Sunset Sarsaparilla was among their few major competitors, but they struggled to do so amid health code violations and lawsuits. Fallout 4's DLC introduces the underdog brand Vim!, localized almost entirely within Maine and besieged on all sides by Nuka-Cola's sabotage, espionage, and copyright infringement. The fact that all this drama was rendered utterly meaningless by the apocalypse is the icing on the cake.
    • Cow tipping is also a recurring joke across all the games.
    • And after Bethesda Game Studios took over the series, Lovecraft references are often found throughout the Wasteland.
  • Scavenged Punk: Much of the weapons, equipment, clothing, armor, and at least one entire city are made of Pre-War junk that's distinctly Atom Punk in style. 2 introduced "pipe guns," ramshackle firearms made out of wood, scrap metal, and prayers that were the favored (i.e. only one they could afford) firearm of the Klamath gecko hunters. Pipe guns got more play in 4 as the firearm of choice for the truly desperate.
  • Scavenger World: It's a post-apocalyptic series, it goes without saying. That said, it's not like scavenging is the only thing people do, and there are several communities dedicated to rebuilding and creating things anew. In Fallout 2, New Vegas, and 4, many parts of the Wasteland have actually become quite civilized again.
  • Scenery Gorn: Naturally. The series lovingly shows countless destroyed buildings, irradiated deathtraps, and ruined cities.
  • Schizo Tech:
    • People before the Great War had robots with advanced AI, wrist-mounted computers, laser and plasma weaponry, powered armor, electric cars, and possibly even anti-gravity levitation devices; but they were also stuck on rotary phones (mobile phones don't exist), radios were bulky and not much smaller than a television, color televisions were a luxury, most homes didn't have a personal computer, their recording devices were audio-only reel-to-reel cassettes, their electric cars used disposable fusion cells like batteries, and it's heavily implied they never developed the internet to the extent of the real world, as only major corporations have internal email services within the building's terminals and possibly connections to other buildings. The computers are also extremely primitive, using an archaic and simple interface of primarily bright green text on a black screen, most powerful ones require massive terminals to operate, and reading the system specs given about them shows them to be utterly pathetic compared to modern home computers even in the 90s. And this is not even getting into what the big companies like Vault-Tec, Big MT, and the Enclave were cooking up behind the scenes. The reason for all this is two-fold, partially to conform to the franchise's Raygun Gothic motif, and partially to explore what kind of gaps in technological progress could result in that aesthetic becoming reality.
    • The Post-War world naturally has even more of this going on, since people have to make a living with whatever they can scrounge up that may or may not be functional anymore. It's completely normal for wastelanders to live in ramshackle houses built from plywood boards and chain link fences, get their drinking water from hand-crank water pumps, and defend their homestead with a semi-automatic laser rifle and a pre-war combat robot they repaired. On the other hand a scavenger might explore the wasteland outfitted in a suit of Powered Armor and armed with a homemade pipe rifle held together by duct tape and hope. Major factions like NCR, the Brotherhood of Steel, and the Institute, tend to have a more uniform level of technology since they have the means to mass produce and repair things to outfit large armies.
    • The weaponry of the series is very much Rule of Cool even disregarding the highly advanced plasma weaponry, the generally most common handgun/sub-machine gun cartridge is 10mm ( A cartridge that debuted in the 80's and mostly fell off in popularity afterwards in the real world) often loaded in fictional bulky weaponry alongside modern rifles and ancient Mauser C96 handguns or even Wild West-era weaponry in New Vegas.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Without constant maintenance the works of man crumble away, but not in the Fallout universe. The wastes are on the whole in much better condition than they should be given the passage of time. Skeletons which apparently date back to the bombing litter the landscape despite decades or centuries passing, long past when they would have crumbled to dust or been scattered by animals (graves slow decay). Intact bodies with no sign of decay can also be found weeks or years after they've died. This is especially jarring in Fallout 3 and 4 because human structures without maintenance will entirely disappear in 200 years unless entirely made of stone. Even those will be heavily overgrown and compromised by plant life.
  • Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Plenty of opportunities to do this in all the games since they keep track of the multiple factions.
  • Shadow Government: The Enclave is the remnant of the US Federal government after the nuclear holocaust that the games are set in, but even before the bombs fell they existed as a shadow government which held the real power, democracy having become a façade in the setting.
  • The Short War: The pivotal events of the Great War that shaped the wasteland as it is occurred over the span of a mere two hours. Vault-Tec analysts projected that the radioactive fallout of thermonuclear exchange would take at the very least 120 days to completely clear from the ruined landscape; empirical evidence gathered post-War indicates large swaths of the former American continent were habitable after just two.
  • Shout-Out: Enough for its own page. Most of the special encounters are Shout-Out material. Everything from Monty Python to Star Trek to half the post-apocalyptic science fiction ever made: Mad Max, A Boy and His Dog, Logan's Run, and more.
  • Shown Their Work:
    • Fallout 1 featured a detailed description of cell division, and how a mutagenic artificial virus interfered at the anaphase stage. In many ways, the result of this interference is the single most fantastic element of the story; everything else follows reality.
    • In Fallout 2, Myron's explanation for how Jet was discovered, although somewhat fantastical, is quite complex.
    • The Bethesda-era games (New Vegas especially) put tons of work into making their in-game settings be as accurate to their real-world counterparts as possible (within reason, of course). This includes landmarks both famous and innocuous, the local geography, and the layout of streets.
    • In New Vegas, Caesar's Legion are heavily based after the Roman Empire In-Universe - and it can actually be pretty hard at times to tell them apart from the real thing.
    • While not nearly to the Legion's extent, the Commonwealth Minutemen in 4 are based after the real-world colonial militias that fought in the American Revolution on not just an aesthetic level. Similarly, most of the espionage tactics used by the Railroad (i.e., dead drops) are based on methods used by the CIA during the Cold War.
    • In all games accumulating one thousand rads of radiation will lead to the character's death. In reality, that is roughly the point where death from radiation poisoning is certain. (Of course in practice it varies from individual to individual, but hey, it's a nice round number!)
  • Sickly Green Glow: Nuclear waste in general, but also the Glowing Ones- Feral Ghouls who have adapted to extremely radiated areas.
  • Skippable Boss: Thanks to Fallout's commitment to "multiple solutions," there are several. This includes the Lieutenant and the Master in the first game, General Jingwei and Colonel Augustus Autumn in the third, Legate Lanius, General Oliver, Father Elijah, the Think Tank and Ulysses in New Vegas, and Swan and Oswald the Outrageous in the fourth. Subverted now and then: Frank Horrigan in the second game will only let you get out over his dismembered corpse, and Kellogg even lampshades the series' tendency for this to happen before starting combat. Check the particular game pages for more details.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Surprisingly, somewhere in the middle, though ultimately leaning towards the idealistic end of the spectrum. It seems at first glance to be strictly on the cynical side. After all, the game drills you constantly with the fact that war never changes, and the world is host to all manner of unsavory characters and vicious animals who will kill you or worse.. However, the games also heavily emphasize that Hope Springs Eternal. Humanity lifts itself by its bootstraps to rebuild, and individuals rise up to meet the challenge to make the world a better place. In fact, idealism vs. cynicism might very well be the defining theme of the entire series, since the protagonists can be played as either evil bastards or valiant heroes that bring progress to the wastes and nurture good in all they meet. Fallout's part of the reason why tropes like Earn Your Happy Ending exist.
  • Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Action by Action by virtue by the action point system.
  • Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration
  • Social Darwinist: Some of the Villain by Default factions, and even some of the seemingly-nice groups, hold this opinion.
  • Sociopathic Hero: Many dialogue options invoke this character trope.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: A staple of the 3D games' radio stations, 3 and 4's especially. Most of the song are about how great nuclear power/modern civilization/America is while you stand knee-deep in the ruins all three left behind.
  • Soviet Superscience: Surprisingly inverted. Based upon what precious little we've seen of Chinese Pre-War technology, it wasn't the communists who had the advanced tech. While the Chinese were beginning to close the technological gap by the end of the war, their only real achievements were invisibility fields and simplistic combat drones. The US, by comparison, had developed three generations of Power Armor and deployed two, created efficient and reliable laser and early generation plasma weaponry, intelligent domestic robots, intelligent combat robots, and cold fusion batteries, the latter of which made all the others possible. The U.S. had invaded Mainland China and was on the verge of an overwhelming victory when the nukes launched.
  • Standard Post-Apocalyptic Setting: The franchise is at its core an homage to this trope. A devastating nuclear exchange between the despotic governments of China and the US left the world a scorched, barren wasteland, roamed by horribly mutated animals and humans, rogue war robots, genetically engineered bioweapons that breached containment and went feral, and bands of barbaric raiders with few ambitions beyond killing, stealing, and wasting their lives on alcohol and drugs. Plant life is mostly of the scattered, sickly, and barren sort; lush growth mostly exists in sites where the old government ran biological experiments and is rarely safe to be around. Surviving settlements tend to be insular and shoddily built, and often rely on small-scale agriculture and scavenging for survival; by the later games, however, larger nations and trade networks begin to form. Not all of the emerging governments are very benign, however, and numerous areas and cities are under the rule of ambitious warlords, criminal syndicates, and large neo-barbarian hordes.
  • Stat Death: Although the player character's primary stats cannot normally be reduced below 1 (or 2, if the stat in question is boosted by a trait), the first two games made an exception for the stat reduction caused by radiation sickness. If it reduces any stat to 0, you drop dead even if you haven't reached the actual lethal dose yet.
  • Stock Footage: One piece of promotional art for New Vegas◊ was just concept art for Paradise Falls◊ from Fallout 3, with the sign in the background changed.
  • Strange Soda: The most popular soft drink in pre-War United States within the setting is Nuka-Cola, which came in many flavours. For the most part, it's a normal soda, if excessively sugary and caffeinated, but there's one line called Nuka-Cola Quantum which contained an isotope derivative of strontium-90, giving it a bright blue glow, but also making it hazardously radioactive. Although claimed to be "somewhat safe", testing with Quantum killed dozens of people. It also contained twice as much sugar, calories, and caffeine as the normal version, and had a slightly unusual soda flavour addition: pomegranate.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: Each Definitely Final Dungeon inevitably ends in this, in every game. In Tactics, you choose whether it does or not.
  • Subsystem Damage:
    • Fallout 1 and 2 have locational targeting for both robots and living things (for example: The head, eyes, torso, arms, groin, and legs on anthropoids.) Accuracy, damage, and critical hits are affected by which body part is attacked, but the health of individual body parts aren't tracked. Attacking some extremities will result in an injury (limp, blindness, etc?) which can't be healed without the services of a surgeon.
    • Fallout 3, on the other hand, does track damage to body parts, though there are no adverse effects until they have been entirely crippled. Crippled arms decrease accuracy, crippled legs decrease running speed, a crippled head causes a concussion halo effect, and a crippled torso amplifies all subsequent damage. They can simply be healed with stimpaks (which your average player tends to stockpile, but your average NPC doesn't) or by sleeping in any bed. This becomes a life saver when fighting Deathclaws, giant lizards with machete-sized claws, as you can cripple their legs with ease by using the Dart Gun to slow them down to a crawl.
    • Hardcore mode for Fallout: New Vegas uses the same body part hit point system as Fallout 3, but makes recovery much harder: limb damage can only be repaired partially by certain items (the uncommon, but craftable, Doctor's Bag, and the addictive chem Hydra) or entirely by an NPC doctor or a bed the player owns. With Hardcore disabled, gameplay is the same as Fallout 3.
    • Although item health has been removed for most weapons and armor, Powered Armor in Fallout 4 still has item health for each of its 6 individual armor segments: the helmet, the torso, and the 4 limbs. If any of the parts drops below a certain amount of health, the Heads-Up Display will show that particular part in red instead of orange.
  • Super Prototype: There's the T-60 Series of Powered Armor, which was invented just before the Great War as an upgrade of the T-45, and was ultimately intended to replace the T-51. It only saw limited deployment by the U.S. military, and despite overall mechanical superiority to the T-51b, the T-60 suffered from both a comparative cost of resources and lack of agility in battle, leaving the T-51b as the best Pre-War Power Armor series.
  • Super-Soldier: The original and current point of creating Super Mutants, Deathclaws, and Power Armor. Really, this was the US's hat before the war. The Institute have since taken up that hat with their creation of Coursers.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Even with some of the wackier aspects put into consideration, this still very much applies.
    • Using VATS to shoot a woman in the crotch hurts them every bit as badly as it does a man. Plus you get a special funny message out of it.
    • As early as Fallout 1, letting others know of Vault 13 is a good way to get the Master's attention much earlier, as news of a still-active Vault does spread relatively quick in the Wasteland.
      • Similarly, Settlers are notified by Radio Beacons in order to join Minutemen settlements in 4. However, this also means that the knowledge of new & relatively rich towns now open for plundering will spread like wildfire, so the settlements should be prepared to fight off attacks from Super Mutants, Raiders, and Gunners.
    • The Brotherhood of Steel in the West Coast for the longest time held to the belief that their power armor, high tech arsenal and increasingly dogmatic adherence to the Codex would be enough, despite their small numbers and dwindling tech advantage. Until they were defeated by an ever more powerful (and numerically superior) NCR, while their isolationistic doctrine made them unable to replenish their ranks. The remnants of the West Coast Brotherhood can still refuse to see the painful truth even after the lost war.
    • In the First Battle of Hoover Dam, Caesar's Legion learned a brutal lesson on how their tactics and general M.O., which has allowed them to absorb and steamroll the tribals that had been their enemies for so long, mattered little in the face of an organized country's firepower, as the NCR demonstrated.
    • For all their benevolent intentions, the Commonwealth Minutemen's absurdly weak command structure led to over-extension and a truly humiliating decline in regional power & influence, to the point that there's literally one Minuteman left in the entire Commonwealth at the start of the story.
    • The Appalachian branch of the Brotherhood of Steel frequently clashed with the Responders, often threatening them for supplies or technology. However, when the Brotherhood found the Scorchbeasts, they attempted to get supplies from the Responders to fight them, but the Responders refused again because the Brotherhood had bullied them so much that they had no reason or desire to offer them help, plus the Brotherhood didn't bother informing them of the threat and why they needed their help. As a result, the Brotherhood ended up without allies and were wiped out because they hurt relations to the point where the Responders just told them off. In turn, this caused the Responders to fall because the Responders were not prepared for the Scorched until it was too late.
  • Survivalist Stash: All over the place, with varying degrees of loot. Some have their locations hinted at by notes or dialogue, and some are just lying in the middle of nowhere. And, of course, you're likely to stockpile a few of your own once you start to exceed your encumbrance limit.
  • Take That!: The series as a whole is one to those who idealize the past, and wish they were born in a time other than the period they live in now (though it mostly applies to the 1950s in particular).
  • Take Your Time: Averted in the first game, where you have 150 days to find a new water chip and save your vault, and then 500 days to destroy The Master's army (although finishing as fast as you can determines whether the Mutants destroyed the various settlements or not in the ending.) Fallout 2 gives you a 13 year time limit due to technical limitations. Played straight in all subsequent games.
  • Taking You with Me: While no-one knows for sure who first let the nukes fly, documents in Fallout 4 implies it was China. If this is true, China was likely trying to invoke this trope due to the U.S sending troops into mainland China after beating them in Alaska. With the war about to be lost, China preferred facing nuclear annihilation.
  • Talking the Monster to Death: A very common way to deal with the Final Boss and/or Big Bad is to talk your way out of the fight, or you can avoid it entirely.
    • In 1, the Master can be talked into destroying himself if you convince him his plan will fail. The Dragon, the Lieutenant, can be avoided by self-destructing the base.
    • 2, you can talk the Mad Scientist who is responsible for the Big Bad's scheme into sabotaging it. The Big Bad will happily converse you with, but conversation goes nowhere and he's not a fighter so he doesn't attack you unless you strike first. You also set their base to self-destruct, ensuring his death anyway. In a rare case for this series, the Final Boss cannot be talked down, and this is almost lampshaded by allowing you to ask "can't we talk this over?" and the villain laughing "we just did".
    • 3, Autumn can be talked into walking away by convincing him he fights for a lost cause.
      • The add-ons: Operation Anchorage lets you convince the final boss to kill himself. The Pitt lets you talk one of the two villains (depending on quest options) into fleeing, the other must die. In the other three add-ons, the final villain must be killed.
    • New Vegas, you may face one of two final bosses, or both. Both can both be talked into standing down without a fight. The Big Bad of the Legion, Caesar, must be killed, but his death is not demanded by the story.
      • The add-ons: Old World Blues lets you talk the villain into reforming, Dead Money lets you snare the villain in a Death Trap without fighting him, and Lonesome Road lets you talk down the final boss. Honest Hearts plays with this by having Joshua Graham subdue the villain, Salt-Upon Wounds, in a cutscene, and you can either talk down Joshua into letting him live, letting him fight for his life, or just let him kill him.
  • Techno Wreckage: Lots of high-tech sites: the abandoned vaults, the Glow, the Sierra Army Depot, and more.
  • Teens Are Monsters: Very often. Seventeen year old Myron in 2 is a lecherous Teen Genius drug cook who made Jet, the most addictive and dangerous drug in the Wastes which has ruined hundreds if not thousands of lives, and will proudly discuss his magnum opus over a cold beer with you. The Lone Wanderer in 3 is canonically nineteen years old and can potentially become one of the most menacing people in the Wastes depending on your choices. It's also suggested that a lot of Raiders you encounter in the game are about your age.
  • Time Skip: Each Fallout game takes place a (more or less) decreasing number of years after the previous one. Fallout 1 begins in December of 2161, 2 begins in May of 2241 (80 years after 1), 3 begins in August of 2277 (36 years after 2), New Vegas begins in October of 2281 (only 4 years after 3), and 4 begins in October of 2287 (6 years after New Vegas).
  • Token Heroic Orc: The series carries a tradition of having a few friendly super mutants per game, with at least one being a recruitable companion:
    • Fallout 2 Marcus the Super Mutant. A former solder from the Master Army, who with a Brotherhood Paladin creates a town where humans, mutants and ghouls can live together. He later joins your party, if you're good.
    • Fallout 3 has Fawkes, who is simply more intelligent, better-natured (and more cultured, thanks to him studying the records in a cell he was trapped in) than his "peers". He helps you retrieve a MacGuffin, helps you escape when you're captured with it and joins you as an ally if you have high enough karma. There's also Uncle Leo, who appears as a Random Encounter and will give you random stuff simply by talking to him, lamenting that he cannot give you more.
    • Fallout: New Vegas has Lily, a Nightkin. Unlike most Nightkin, she's fairly sane (and you can make her even more sane if you wish) and friendly, to the point she regards the Courier as a surrogate grandchild. There's also Mean Sonofabitch, a friendly supermutant who protects the community of Westside from raiders. Marcus also returns, and is now the leader of a small isolated community of super mutants who simply want to be left alone.
    • Strong of Fallout 4 is something of a mixed bag. While he is comparatively heroic for a Super Mutant and approves of acts of benevolence and selflessness, he's also the most brutish and savage of the companions and loves acts of violence and killing.
    • The Far Harbor DLC has Erickson, a friendly Super Mutant dog trainer who was altered by the radioactive fog to realize how pointless the lifestyle of a typical Super Mutant was and lives a quiet secluded life. He also sells you dogs to guard your settlements with, and gives you a bandana if you have Dogmeat in your party.
    • Files of the first game feature Re/Rae — a rebellious supermutant. If we have enough speech skills, we'll be able to talk him to helping us killing The Master. Sadly, he isn't present in the game, though there are mods fixing it.
  • Trailers Always Spoil:
    • The box for the Fallout Trilogy has a screenshot of the final boss battle for Fallout 2.
    • In Fallout 4, the launch trailer's narration is actually one of the ending narrations.
  • Transflormation: Harold undergoes this over the course of several games, pausing at Plant Person and ending up as a Wise Tree.
  • Trouble from the Past: Half of the problems in the entire series are leftovers from the past, either in the form of radiation, Old World machines, or other leftover messes.
  • Urban Ruins: The Fallout series has its protagonists visiting the ruins of cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C, and Boston.
  • Underground City: The Vaults were designed to function as these. Ghoul communities tend to be found in subterranean locations, such as Necropolis located in the ruins and sewers of Bakersfield, as well as Underworld in the Capital Wasteland.
  • Uniqueness Decay: In the first Fallout, T-51 Power Armor was exclusive to the Brotherhood of Steel and getting into their base to talk them into giving you a suit was very difficult. In Fallout 2, T-51 Power Armor can be found in a couple late-game dungeons and there is the even stronger Advanced Power Armor. Fallout 3 introduced T-45 Power Armor and the Advanced Power Armor also returns, and there are unique variants of each as the T-51 being a unique Power Armor (with a variant added in a DLC). New Vegas has T-45 and T-51 armors with the Advanced Power Armor used by a small group of Enclave remnants and other pieces can rarely be found in the wasteland. Fallout 4 has suits of armor all over the Commonwealth due to the many military outposts and convoys that were in the area when the Great War began, and the T-45, T-51, the new T-60, and the Advanced Power Armor (now given the designation X-01) can be found everywhere, to the point even some Raider bosses have gotten their hands on old suits and jury-rigged their own armor plating for them. Fallout 76 has all that Fallout 4 did with even more variants and more new models, including the T-65.
  • Universal Ammunition: Justified with energy weapons, where the ammunition is essentially just batteries, and only a few different sizes exist. Averted for firearms, however. Various ammunition types exist in the game, and each gun will only fire ammunition it's chambered in. New Vegas extends this to include traditional "low power" civilian loads, such as using .38 Special in a .357, or .223 in a 5.56mm, provided the cartridge dimensions are near-identical. This mirrors reality as well.
  • Universe Bible: A semi-official one was written by Chris Avellone in 2002. It was the basis for much of the cancelled Fallout: Van Buren, and is still generally considered Broad Strokes canon. It can be found here, among other places.
  • Useless Useful Spell: There are a few traits and perks in the series that are theoretically awesome but useless in practice, such as the third game's 'Nuclear Anomaly' perk (funny, and occasionally handy, but it doesn't discriminate between friend and foe and cannot be turned off), the first and second game's 'Skilled' and 'Night Person' traits and 'Presence' perk, and a few others.
    • Fast Shot (-1 AP to shoot, no aimed shots) + One Handed (Bonus to hit with one-handed weapons, penalty with two-handed) is a fun combination for role-playing purposes and not using Gifted. Pretty viable in Fallout 2 with some Melee/Unarmed skill and gets better once you get a .44 Magnum.
    • Computer Whiz and Infiltrator in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Respectively allows you to re-hack a computer if you locked it after failing to hack it and to pick a lock you've broken by trying to force it. Useless for two reasons: you can leave the computer and retry anytime as long as you didn't lock it and forcing the lock is an option.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means: The M.O. of quite a few villains throughout the series. In fact, every Big Bad has had this goal - the Master, Presidents Dick Richardson and John Henry Eden, Caesar/Edward Sallow, and Father/Shaun.
  • Vague Age: Averted with the protagonists of Fallout 1, 2, and 3; the Vault Dweller and Chosen One's ages can be specified in character creation, and the Lone Wanderer is stated in-game to be 19 years old when he/she leaves Vault 101. Played straight with New Vegas and 4, where even though character creation allows the Courier and the Sole Survivor to look however he/she wants (even elderly), their ages aren't explicitly stated in-game outside of a few (often vague) hints.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Five of them:
    • Fallout: A big Cathedral in the middle of the ruins of Los Angeles is inhabited by strange cultists and a shadowy atmosphere. Below, there is a dark Vault filled with Super Mutant Nightkin elite troopers, mad scientists, mutated aberrations, cultists and crazy FEV-induced psykers. The walls are full of a grotesque biological goo that looks strangely alive. At the end of your way, you have to pass a corridor where your nemesis starts blasting you with his immense psionic powers. At the end, you meet what can be accurately called the strangest being of the wastelands: insane, super-intelligent, grotesquely mutated. There's also an old military laboratory in the remote badlands west of Vault 13, guarded by strong mutant soldiers and robots. The base is brightly-lit, yet the atmosphere is dense and shadowy. In the depths of the base, big vats of bubbling green fluid contains, depending on the point of view, either the key to the evolution of the human race, or its eventual demise. The game lets you choose which one you want to destroy first though, and you're not trapped inside them once you enter and are forced to finish them.
    • Fallout 2: The Enclave Oil Rig, the stronghold of the extremely well-equipped remnants of the éminence grise members of the United States Government, a massive fortress significantly larger than any other settlement or dungeon, populated by an army larger than all other armies combined, consisting of incredibly tough Powered Armor-wearing soldiers loaded with the best weapons in the game and lots of stimpaks. Indeed, unless you're an insanely tough, completely combat-oriented character, your only viable means of getting through is to disguise yourself by wearing one of their own armored suits and sneaking past everyone.
    • Fallout Tactics: Vault 0. For most of the first half of the game, you are just expanding the Brotherhood's influence, crushing rebellions, killing raiders, so on and so forth, but then you run into the Super Mutants, who were the reason the Midwestern Brotherhood was sent over the mountains in the first place. But even they're not the true enemy- they were merely mobilizing to fight an even more significant threat- robots, centered around Vault 0, and towards the end of the game you move further and further into Colorado and into the mountains, until you start seeing real snow (unusual in a setting without much weather) and finally end up getting into the heavily-guarded Vault 0... by blasting it open with a nuke. From that point on, all bets are off, and you can't go back to home base...
    • Fallout 4: If you were disgusted by them, you and your army storm The Institute and blow it up with its own reactor. If you decide to side with them, then you fight the Brotherhood of Steel at their airbase and hijack Liberty Prime to see their airbase as a giant Communist vehicle. "Boom".
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can be a sick, sick bastard if you so desire. Pimping your wife and then divorcing her, becoming a slaver, causing gang wars, murdering children... if you count post-end-of-game results, your actions can cause entire cities to fall apart.
    • A minor, but rather poignant, bit of cruelty is convincing Moira Brown to give up on her Wasteland Survival Guide. Not only is this considered evil, but it gives you a perk called "Dream Crusher" (a perk that prevents enemies from scoring critical hits) and forever dampens her ordinarily cheery attitude. They really went out of their way to make you seem like a bastard for doing it.
      • In Broken Steel you can wipe the Brotherhood HQ right off the map, kill off any stragglers, and get a special Magnum if you do.
      • However, what most consider to be quite possibly the most reprehensible act you can accomplish in Fallout 3 is going to Rivet City and convincing the mentally unstable Mr. Lopez to commit suicide. It's notable that while people will happily upload videos of nuking Megaton, virtually no one has really posted videos of this online.
    • Mid- to endgame main quests in New Vegas requires you to screw over each main faction except the one you favor, and it's quite possible to have them think you're working for them up until the moment of betrayal. It's quite easy (and historically appropriate) to visit Caesar for a negotiation and stab him to death, and Mr. House, well... given what a pitiful creature he's become, it's hard not to feel like a heel for ending his dream.
    • Fallout 4 downplays this the most out of the series...and you can still do some utterly despicable things. For example, you can sell a Ghoul child to some slavers, or if you refuse, give up his entire family to the slavers. In one Diamond City quest, you can ambush a chem deal, and then murder your partners to take all the chems and money for yourself. Also, the vast majority of the populaces of the Prydwen, Institute, and Railroad HQ aren't immortal, meaning you can go on a kill-happy murder spree if you want to.note 
  • A Villain Named Khan: The game has the Khans as a gang of Raiders, later reformed into the Great Khans. The latter particularly take inspiration from Mongolian history, and a possible ending for them in Fallout: New Vegas has them emulate the Mongolians further as a basis to reform their tribe around.
  • Villainous Legacy: Non-character example. The Big Bad of the first game, The Master, was using the Forced Evolutionary Virus to mutate humans. The villains of the second game excavated the ruins of his lair to retrieve the FEV for their own uses, and the villains of the third synthesized their own version for their plan as well. And while it's not an essential part of the game's plot, the fifth game (Fallout 4) reveals that the Institute also had samples of FEV, which they used to help experiment with the creation of synthetic tissue - which inadvertently created the Commonwealth's breed of Super Mutants.
    • On a more direct note, the Super Mutants that he creates are the main catalyst for the plots of Tactics and BoS, being significant enough threats to, at least on paper note , send Brotherhood expeditions to the Midwest and Texas, respectively, kicking off the plot of each game.
  • Villain Protagonist: Just one of the many possible playthroughs for the player character in Fallout.
  • Virus and Cure Names: The cure for the original strain of the Forced Evolutionary Virus is a retrovirus, sometimes referred to as the Retrovirus. While this is merely the taxonomy of the virus, akin to coronavirus and megavirus, it was picked because its etymology, 'retro-', means to go backward and thus runs counter to the idea of evolution, which for most people, means to move forward. Furthermore, the Forced Evolutionary Virus was bioengineered from the Pan-Immunity Virion. Virions are the viral particles as they exist outside of any host, while virus, the broader term, also refers to the pathogen in its infectious stages. This is a parallel to the Pan-Immunity Virion being conceived as a potential cure for the New Plague.
  • The Wandering You: Appears in all of the games of the franchise. Aside from the many enemies you will find wandering the wasteland from quest location to quest location you will also find many new quests and other small events.
  • War Is Hell: When you boil it down, the franchise runs entirely on this, focusing on how much society can change into a grotesquely bleak apocalyptic hellscape after a war (especially a nuclear one). What else would you expect from the Arc Words, "War. War never changes."?
  • Was Once a Man: Every Ghoul and Super Mutant you encounter was a human once, as the Forced Evolutionary Virus "blesses" it's victims with biological immortality, while turning them into monsters. Many of the ghouls around the Wastelands have been alive since before the Great War.
  • Wasteland Elder: A lot of towns have them. This even includes Little Lamplight, whose "Elder" is about 12.
  • Weather Gameplay Mechanic:
    • The first two games from Black Isles did not have any sort of weather system due to their top-down, isometric design; some NPCs in 1 still mention rainfall, and even glowing rainfall, but it never appears. The surrounding valley of Arroyo suffering the worst drought it's ever seen, serves as the inciting incident for the whole plot of 2, but one can hardly tell just from dialogue alone. Fallout 3, published by Bethesda Softworks, similarly lacks varied weather, which left everything in Washington D.C. under an infamously radioactive-green overcast for the whole game.note 
    • While base game Fallout: New Vegas continues after 3 by largely keeping to a sunny desert overcast, its DLC Honest Hearts served to buck the trend for the franchise by introducing a dynamic weather system: in Zion Canyon, the skies can go from sunny to cloudy to actual rain and thunder.
    • Fallout 4 ran after Honest Hearts walked through fully adopting a dynamic weather system including misty and foggy atmospheres. It also introduced a new environmental hazard tied to the weather in the form of radstorms, region-wide thunderclouds that dose everything with low levels of rads every time there's a crack of lightning. The Contraptions Workshop DLC tacked onto this by introducing weather change mortar shells that can be fired into the sky to manually clear the weather, or to induce a rainstorm or radstorm. The Far Harbor DLC makes unnatural weather a core part of its overarching story with the Fog, a radioactive cloud mass that has enveloped large swaths of Maine, rendering the land uninhabitable to humans and filled with horrific mutant creatures, not to mention drawing the militant worship of the Children of Atom who look to go to war with the Island's native inhabitants to completely swallow it in radiation.
    • Fallout 76 retained the weather system from 4, but tweaked it to where systems of rainstorms and radstorms are more localized to distinct regions rather than covering the entire map simultaneously, which allows for players to see them coming from a distance and prepare accordingly. It also brought in more man-made weather changes such as ash storms occurring around the heavily industrialized region of the Ash Heap, and a perpetual lightning storm in the expanded area of Skyline Valley.
  • We Can Rule Together: The Master, President Eden, and Caesar all make similar offers to the player character. The Master is actually good for it, while Eden's plan will get you killed (although in his defense, he was genuine about his wanting you to join him, your inferior Wastelander biology just served as a Spanner in the Works), and Caesar doesn't exactly have the best track record of keeping his promises (especially if you're playing a female character, given Caesar's view on the place of women in society). The Institute under Father/Shaun also make this offer to you — and, like the Master, they're actually pretty good for the offer.
    • In Dead Money, the player can make this offer to the Big Bad, Father Elijah, but only if they've talked to Veronica about him and have a negative relation with the NCR, whom Elijah wants to overthrow.
  • Web Games: Bethesda created a demake of Fallout 3 for browsers. The graphics are 8-bit style and similar to the early Dragon Quest games. The demake is currently only in Japanese, but it's fascinating: http://www.bethsoft.com/jpn/fo/fo_quest/index.html
  • We Have Reserves: The New California Republic defeated the Brotherhood Of Steel because the Brotherhood, being an elitist order, had too few members to conscript for troops. For years, they fought the war under the assumption that their technological superiority gave them the advantage, until it became clear that they were doomed because they could not replace their troops fast enough.
    • The Institute also has this advantage. On the one hand, their vast Gen 1 & 2 Synth armies are individually weaker than humans and have weaker laser weapons than even those from the Pre-War days. However, that doesn't matter. Why? Because not only are the Institute The Conspiracy, but they can produce Gen 1 & 2 Synths by the veritable millions.
  • Weird Science: The Fallout 'verse runs on 50-style B-movie SCIENCE!
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Most major villains tend to be these (or at least, they think that they are).
    • The first game has its Big Bad, the Master, who is kidnapping innocent people and forcibly turning them into Super Mutants to serve in his army. His reason? He sees this as a necessary step to take for humanity to survive, and thrive, in the post-war world. Explaining the flaws of his plan will actually cause him to take a step back and seriously reconsider it.
    • While the Institute is considerably grayer on the morality spectrum than both the Legion and Enclave, they also are examples of this. They justify both their brutal conspiracy over New England and the enslavement of Synthkind by arguing that surface society is a lost cause impossible to save, and safeguarding the future of humanity rests solely on their shoulders. Forever keeping Synths as a glorified Slave Race along with oppressing the Commonwealth to make it easier for their resource-salvaging missions to go un-impeded? They are required Dirty Business in order to help create and preserve a utopia where they can "redefine mankind".
  • We Will Use Lasers in the Future: Man-portable energy weapons were considered the future of firearms in the 2070s, with laser weapons having seen widespread adoption by the United States military by the time of the atomic war, even entering the civilian market to a limited degree. It got to the point that Guns & Bullets ran a headliner article about the practicality of laser rifles as hunting weapons, and the ATF was transformed into the BADTFL: the Bureau of Alcohol, Drugs, Tobacco, Firearms, and Lasers. In terms of gameplay, their position varies throughout the series - in the first game they were far and away superior to nearly all of the game's ballistic weapons, balanced by being rarer and more expensive. Subsequent games would increasingly shift towards a more equal power balance, with lasers becoming increasingly common as a result.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Explored throughout the series is treatment of non-human races, such as Ghouls, robots/A.I.s, and Super Mutants. The fourth game's story centers around this in regards to synths, Institute-made artificial humans created as spies, assassins, and slave labor. Synths are so incredibly life-like in appearance and biology that they are practically indistinguishable from humans, such that there are synths that don't even realize they are synths and think themselves flesh-and-blood humans! Because the Institute likes to switch people in the Commonwealth with synths, there is mass paranoia over them, to the point where family will turn their guns on each other at the mere suspicion that they have been replaced with a synth. The Institute consider synths little more than machines, no more human-like than a Mister Handy robot, and treat them as machines. The Brotherhood of Steel consider synths a danger to humanity and seek their complete eradication. The Railroad, meanwhile, consider synths to be people and seek to liberate them (and even then, that's only taking into account the lifelike Gen 3 synths: there is internal debate over whether earlier and more primitive Gen 1 and Gen 2 synths count as people).
  • With This Herring: Players are given a very small handful of supplies at the start of each game, typically a handgun with some ammo, a few stimpaks, and maybe a couple other things. Details depend on each game:
    • In the first game, you get a pistol with ammo, a knife, two flares, and four stimpaks. Players can find out later that you're not the first guy they've sent out to find a new water chip and the rest haven't come back and aren't expected to, so they went light on supplies assuming you'd be the same — when you return to the Vault later, you have the option to convince them to give you more gear. You can also start with specialty items (additional ammo, a set of lockpicks, some chems, etc) depending on your Tagged Skills.
    • In the second game, you have a spear, a knife, a handful of cash, and whatever you have leftover after the Temple of Trials. But your village is a primitive tribe, this is really the best they can offer, and searching the huts will turn up nothing but random junk and maybe another knife. You can do some sidequests to get some healing powder and a sharpened spear before you leave, but you have to scrounge up the materials for them on your own so the other villagers can make them for you.
    • Tactics is an exception, as you start with equipment that, in earlier games, would've been reserved for the second town (Junktown in Fallout, the Den in Fallout 2) — leather armor, an SMG for the protagonist, appropriate equipment for the protagonist's tag skills, a hunting rifle for one squad member, and a shotgun for another. Being a member of the Brotherhood of Steel has its perks, after all.
    • In the third game, you're woken up in the middle of the night and barely have time to grab some of your personal belongings and take a gun your friend offers you before you have to flee the Vault. You can at least loot the Vault guards you kill and find some other stuff along the way, letting you get your hands on low-level armor and other items before you're thrown into the wasteland.
    • In New Vegas, the people who left you for dead took more than just the MacGuffin you were carrying, so when you wake up the doctor gives you back what you had left on you, a pistol/straight razor/hand wraps, a handful of caps, some stimpaks, and a few bobby pins. Skill checks with the doctor or his equipment can reward a couple more items.note  This is completely averted with the Courier's Stash DLC, which gives you all five pre-order bonus packs at the start of the game, giving you multiple weapons and suits of armor along with many more healing items and other things of use.
    • In the fourth game, you wake up from cryo-sleep to find your already smaller-than-normal Vault has long been abandoned and most things of value have been taken by the former staffers or other looters. The only things left are a handful of stimpaks, a couple of police batons and pistols, and general junk. There is a valuable unique weapon here, the Cryolator, but it's in a security case with a Master-level lock, which is why no one has taken it already and it'll be a long time before you can get it without cheating.
  • World of Badass: Absolutely! The player and their companions each game count as a One-Man Army unto themselves, racking up hundreds of kills on an average playthrough. In a world where your little village could get overrun at any time by super mutants, feral ghouls, slavers, raiders, mutated animals, or power-armor clad extremists, not to mention that just being able to feed yourself for the day and go to sleep on a bed are luxuries many do not have, and just being able to survive to old age is a test of strength and will of anyone in the wasteland.
  • A World Half Full: The series in general. Yes, it's a post apocalyptic wasteland, but the remaining inhabitants are more or less able to get through the day, and there is a lot of emphasis on hope and optimism, and people's ability to learn from past mistakes and build a better future for themselves and their community. Of course, playing a Good character makes it count even more.
  • Wretched Hive: Being set in a lawless, apocalyptic wasteland means these crop up quite a bit throughout the series, with varying degrees of wretchedness. One location in Fallout 2 is even described as such, word-for-word. Perhaps the most notable example is the slaver den of Paradise Falls in Fallout 3 - razing it to the ground is practically a rite of passage for good-karma players.
  • Xeno Nucleic Acid: In a world set after a nuclear war, there are bound to be countless genetic abnormalities out in the wasteland. However, one pre-war example would be the experiments performed in the Pan-Immunity Virion Project. In their goal to protect America's population from Chinese bioweapons, they created a retrovirus that could transform all the DNA in a host cell into a quad-helix structure, which they hoped would prevent diseases from taking hold. Their crowning achievement, however, is the Forced Evolutionary Virus. The FEV is described as a Megavirus with a protein sheath reinforced by ionized hydrogen that protects it from radiation. The virus has pre-programmed introns specified for the species it infects. It works by copying the host cell's DNA and placing the data into exons, which is taken back by the virus and then re-introduced into the host's cells alongside the introns, which induce the radical mutations the FEV is known for. note 
  • Your Princess Is in Another Castle!
    • Inversion - while searching Vault City's database for your Vault in Fallout 2, your character will notice a Pip-Boy hole if his/her Perception is above or equal to 7. Shoving your Pip-Boy in will give you the location of nearly all the locations. (Normally, finding the vaults would be an arduous task with several middle men involved.)
    • Played straight early in Fallout 1, when you discover that Vault 15's water-purification chip is utterly inaccessible.
    • Also in Fallout 1, once you finish the water-purification chip quest, that's not the end.
  • Zeerust: Invoked. The surviving pre-apocalypse architecture and technology is highly reminiscent of '50s Pop Art: complete with muscle cars, vacuum tube computers, and tin-can robots. Background material establishes that America (and by extension, the world) never really moved beyond the 1950's in terms of values and aesthetics. The 60's revolution was either much less influential, only effected music, or both, and there was no 80's technological shift due to microelectronics never becoming widespread. As a result, even though the world "ended" in 2077, culturally, it had barely progressed at all.
"...But men do, through the roads they walk. And this road has reached its end."

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