Strength is a measure of your raw physical power. It affects how much you can carry, the power of all melee attacks, and your effectiveness with many heavy weapons.

“Strength’ll tell you how easily a cowboy totes his saddle, and those bigger firearms, or how much help he’s gonna be for ya in a saloon brawl.”

Strength has a more important role in New Vegas than it previously had. If you played Fallout 1 or 2, you’ll remember that weapons in those games also had a minimum Strength requirement. So too, for New Vegas. Strength also increases your melee damage, carrying capacity, and gives a bonus to your Melee Weapons skill. Possibly the most important thing Strength does is it effectively limits what weapons you can use. If you don’t have enough Strength to use a weapon, your aim will wobble, and you’ll have a laughable to hit rate in VATS. For melee weapons, it may slow down your rate of attack. Now, as far as unarmed, melee, and explosives are concerned this is only so much of a handicap. Most of the time you don’t need a great deal of accuracy with, say, a Fat Man. The increased spread hurts, but with an explosive weapon or a Minigun, some inherent inaccuracy is built into the weapon anyways. With a Sniper Rifle, however, accuracy is a much greater concern, and considering that higher damage weapons give a much better damage return over high Damage Threshold than lower damage weapons, you’re going to want to use the bigger, badder guns.

Put five **** points into Strength. The Implant will raise your Strength to six, which is all you’ll need for most of the game. Once you complete the “Old World Blues” DLC, you can pick the Reinforced Spine perk and raise your Strength up to eight. This is enough to use pretty much any weapon in the game, and it allows you to dispense with Weapon Handling entirely. If for some reason you need more Strength… well, there’s always Power Armor.