Fallout: New Vegas

- Lockpick, science, and medical are excellent all-purpose skills. Survival and barter are a waste of skill points (Although note that if you want to play a diplomatic character, Barter and Speech are used a lot in dialogue).

- Take the educated perk at level 4 for lots more skill points (52 by the time you hit level 30).

- Your Strength, Endurance, and Intelligence should not be too low, and your Charisma should not be too high. Don't put points in Survival. Beyond that, there is literally no way to fuck up your character. Do whatever feels right. I should mention, though, some perks are not very good. Anything that deals with experience, radiation, or dialogue options isn't worth it.

- Speech is amazing in Vegas and has the most conversation options associated with it. Repair is also a pretty solid choice, and I would advise at least getting it to 50 for weapon repair kits.

- All of the weapon skills are viable from my experience, though unarmed might be the easiest.

- Pick a combat style and go all in. Whether it's Melee, Unarmed, Guns, Energy Weapons, or Explosives, pick one, and pick out perks that support it and work well with it. It doesn't hurt to be putting points into a secondary weapon type, but focus your combat perks on whatever you intend to be best at.

- If you go Unarmed, don't neglect Melee as a skill, it's required for some key perks (and vice versa).

- Oh, and if you start with 7 Luck you'll be able to basically ignore money from about 1/3rd of the way into the game onwards. Just play Blackjack. Lots and lots of Blackjack.

Repair

On the note of repair. It may be, depending on your play style, worth it to boost it to 85 to take the perk which lets you repair weapons and armor with anything considered "similar" to it. This means repairing vault armor with vault suits of cloth or power armor with anything vaguely metallic.

Works on weapons too obviously, letting you repair rare weapon types with much more common and often purchasable weapons. And since you'll have a minimum of 85 repair you'll be getting damage bonuses and everything lasts longer.

Granted if you're going to jack up endurance and strength, this doesn't apply so much.