I have recently been alternating lots between F3 and FNV, and something I noticed when I started up each playthrough was that even though both of my characters were within 2 levels of each other and had max barter, my FNV character had 50 thousand more caps. I just wanted to post to ask, what do you think the value of a cap should be? Should it be rare like in F3 so that money has more value, or should it be plentiful like in FNV so that after a while it is possible to become extremely rich? (BTW objects in the Mojave are more expensive, with certain armors costing over 10 grand)

The reason for this is that in a role play game you might want to have a struggle for money to maintain the wasteland feel.

Since they're the only currency, for some reason, each one should be worth very very little. Therefore making all goods you need more caps.

But at the same time... bottlecaps aren't something I imagine you'd come by often.

And then events occur, such as

and market liquidity drops god knows how low, meaning that the cap would be basically worthless.

All in all, I don't think we can apply real economic systems to the cap, unless there were different caps that were worth more etc. It's not surprising the fallout world doesn't have a good market economy though really...

but simply, yes things should be more expensive and caps shouldn't be so easy to come by.