Traits

Traits

Traits make their return in Fallout New Vegas, and while similar to perks, they have two major differences:  1. Traits are chosen at the very start of the game, during your character build.  Your character's traits will remain with you after finalizing your character build.  2. Traits have negative effects besides the benefits they can provide.  All traits have one rank, and you can either choose none, one or a maximum of two.  This section analyses all available traits and gives you some advice on which to pick.

BUILT TO DESTROY
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Positive effects: 3% chance for all weapons to deliver a critical hit.
Negative effects: 15% faster condition decay for all weapons.

This trait is best taken if you want to maximize your combat potential, and if you like to rely on luck.  The downside is a fairly big one:  All your weapons will last about 1/6th less long than they normally would, which brings a lot of costs along.  Should you pick this trait, be sure to quickly invest in your Repair skill early on.  I personally wouldn't recommend this trait.

FAST SHOT
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Positive effects: 20% firing rate with Guns and Energy Weapons.
Negative effects: -20% accuracy with Guns and Energy Weapons.

A typical specialisation trait, forcing you to choose between a faster firing rate at the cost of accuracy.  Its counterpart is the Trigger Discipline trait.

FOUR EYES
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Positive effects: 1 PER when wearing any type of glasses.
Negative effects: -1 PER when not wearing glasses.

To be honest, this one's quite awful.  It reduces your characters natural PER by 1 point, and increases the bonus you get from glasses by 1 point (making 2). This means that when taking perks, you'll actually need one ADDITIONAL point of Perception to be allowed to select the perk.  Friend of the Nigh, for example, will now require 7 PER instead of 6 PER.  This Trait is therefore garbage.

GOOD NATURED
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Positive effects: 5 points in Barter, Medicine, Repair, Science and Speech.
Negative effects: -5 points in Energy Weapons, Explosives, Guns, Melee Weapons and Unarmed.

A specialisation in skill sets, laying focus on negotiation skills and problem solving skills, while deteriorating weapon skills.  Depending on how you'd like to play the game early on, this can actually be a decent pick, but remember that it'll be  more difficult to eventually create a balanced all-round (nearly) maxed character build.

HEAVY HANDED
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Positive effects: Melee and unarmed attacks do more damage.
Negative effects: Melee and unarmed attacks do less critical damage.

Only important for characters who'll focus on being a melee and/or unarmed fighter, this trait increases the damage you do with each regular hit, but it reduces the damage that your critical hits do.  If you don't like to rely on luck all too much, this is a great trait to boost your melee/unarmed damage with.

KAMIKAZE
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Positive effects: Grants you a extra whopping of 10 Action Points.
Negative effects: -2 Damage Treshold.

Arguably one of the best traits, this increases your V.A.T.S. with 10 AP!  Since perks such as Grim Reaper's Sprint have been dumbed down, AP has become more important, and if you find that you're using V.A.T.S. quite often, you simply can't let this one slip away.  The -2 DT is neglectible, and a good armor will more than make up for it soon enough.

LOOSE CANNON
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Positive effects: 30% faster speed with throwing weapons.
Negative effects: -25% range with throwing weapons.

This allows you to throw faster, but also less far with throwing weapons.  It's one of those traits that makes you wonder how the development went: "Hmm, hey guys we only have 9 traits, shouldn't we, like, make 10?  Boss: "Yeah, ten's a nice number, what do you think?" Fat Joe: "Hey, um, why don't we, like, reduce the range of throwing weapons. Oh, and um .., we'll just increase the speed!" Boss: "Do it, the game's deadline is in two months."  It *can* have its uses, though.  If you like to use grenades and/or dynamite in small corridors, then range isn't a big issue, but throwing one faster could save your hide.

SMALL FRAME
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Positive effects: 1 AGL.
Negative effects: Your legs are more easily crippled.

Well, if you're a stats maximizer, this one's for you!  It does require you to be more careful around explosives, mines, grenades and the like.  You'll want to invest more money in Doctor Bags and Stimpaks than you'd normally would, but combined with a slight increase in your Medicine Skill, this can be a very decent trait.

TRIGGER DISCIPLINE
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Positive effects: -20% firing rate with Guns and Energy Weapons.
Negative effects: 20% accuracy with Guns and Energy Weapons.

The counterpart of the Fast Shot trait, this one reduces your firing rate for an increase in accuracy.  If you're not into brutal characters with machine guns and plasma rifles, but more a sniper kind of person, this could be a decent choice for you.

WILD WASTELAND
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Positive effects: Adds some (random) events and (unique) weapons.
Negative effects: Removes some (random) events and (unique) weapons.

This Perk makes the game more 'Wacky'.  A notable change appears to be the removal of the Gauss Rifle, being replaced by an Alien Blaster.  It's an attempt to 'add' replay value.