I thought the game was set like a hundred years after Fallout 2. They're already using gold coins in Fallout 2, so why is bottle cap currency in Fallout 3. I never got that.

I'm not really sure why I assume the Wiki will have more info on this

Gold Coins is a luxury of having working railroads, organized society, and an area with gold mines. DC, on the other hand, is home to the Nuka Cola plant, and enough Nuka Cola for caps to be available, but scarce enough to not be undervalued, with enough settlements to be able to agree on a common medium of exchange.

For the reasons stated above, it's plausible. As a design decision, though, I think it was just because the first one used bottle caps, honestly. Just a choice they made to try and make it feel more Fallout.

An RPG demands a set currency, its a standard that most developers have left untouched, but other than that, IMO - if society was still in the condition shown in Fallout 3, there would be no common currency. As long as there is no autocratic government that spans across the multiple settlements, the wastelanders are still going to barter and trade for everything they need.

A wastelander in a situation like Fallout 3 would rarely find the trust to give up an item they could otherwise use in exchange for any "currency," unless it was absolutely guaranteed that they could use that currency to purchase what they would need in the next settlement, and the with the settlements varying in governmental rule from nonexistent Big Town to the dictatorship of the Republic of Dave to the Mayor/Sheriff of Megaton, a bottlecap or any other currency just couldn't prove worthwhile.

In other words, if I had some rags to cover my body and a tin can for food and water, I would not trade my tin can for anything that I can't immediately use to better my situation. I wouldn't trust "heres a bottlecap, you can trade it over at Caries JunkShoppe for something else" because, in reality, I might not be able to trust Carie and, if I followed Fallout 3's currency, I would end up with some rags and a bottlecap. As useful as a bottlecap is in a fancy restaurant as a makeshift soup spoon, i'd probably prefer the tin can in the Capital Wasteland.

I wonder if any of the Fallout 3 developers were British, as a common saying in London during the 1950s and early 1960s, during periods of poverty was "And just how am I going to pay for that, with bottle tops (caps)".

most paper money burnt after the bomb attacks?

Maybe the caravans started it because if the people knew they could spend it at the caravans it would catch on fast.

Don't know why they went from gold (FO2) to Bottle Caps in FO3 but if you stop to think it's a brilliant move.

When I was in College had a writing assignment the only stipulation is I had to describe something... anything you wanted just as long as the essay was a description. I was in my dorm room drinking a Coke... the old fashion kind... glass bottle and a cap you had to pry off with a church-key. I decided to describe the Coke bottle cap in detail. It took two pages to describe every little detail... the number of letters, the color of the writing, the number of crimps along the edge of the cap, etc., etc.

So... getting back to FO3 - bottle caps in a post nuclear scenario is perfect... very hard, if not impossible to counterfeit. As long as everyone uses them coupled with their scarcity makes them a "brilliant" method of exchange.


BTW - Got an "A" on my college essay.

;) heh, heh.

The only reason that makes any sense, is simply that Fallout 1 used them and it was shoved into FO3 for credibility sake... But IMO it had the opposite effect. In Fallout 1 the central town was called the Hub, and was the HQ for the Water Merchants. Caps were accessible, difficult to make without specialized equipment, and (possibly) backed by Water instead of Gold.

Fallout 2 was 80 years later and had abandoned the use of caps entirely (this was made very clear in the game). The real kicker, is that FO3 is set in DC, and not way out in the middle of nowhere. DC had banks, had a mint, had a thousand bank and corporate money vaults, had gold (and plausibly could have a few bottling companies ~which would be bad in this one instance)... So what other possible reason could there be for adopting bottle caps as the local currency? :shrug:

**Devil's advocate... and its dumb, but... On reflection, one thing springs to mind... Possibly the BOS that left the West Coast, brought caps with them just in case. :shrug:
(I don't know the departure dates from the Lyons part of the tale). Maybe this wouldn't work, but maybe if they thought that use of Caps may have spread Eastward in the years of their common use, maybe they thought that a bag of 10,000 of them might come in handy. :laugh:

If they didn't use Bottle Caps, what would they use?

Bottle Caps are relatively light. There is a relatively fixed amount with some increase to account for inflation.

Pre War money is probably too rare to support the "economy", Caps seems reasonable.

this

i just assumed that every town or city would have its own currency in a post nuclear warfare type situation

Because Septims are so damn hard to find early on.

I dunno...you would think that you could likely find cases and cases of quarters, Krugerrand , Gold Eagles, and Canadian Maple Leaf coins in DC.
In Fallout 3 (as it is), you find pre-war money all over the place. Bottle caps [IMO] make no more sense than using leaves or pobble beads.

I still think that the use of Bottle caps was simply because FO1 had them. Fallout 2 used gold dollars.

(Though there is a strange statment in the Wiki that says that Van Buren was to have used Bottle caps because the war between the BOS and NCR had made the gold dollar worthless... Question is, was it an actual gold dollar coin, or was it backed by NCR gold).

*Still, reverting to caps seems rather silly IMO (even if it was to have been officially that way in VB... I have never heard nor read about it before today)

Also, the technology needed to manufacture bottlecaps isn't available to most people in the post-apocalyptic world (maybe BoS)

i think a trading system would be good and original. For example;
> a 10mm pistol in 80% condition = value of 100,
> leather armor at 50% condition = value of 200

so i would trade two 10mm pistols for one leather armour

just a thort

wait wait wait, everyone is saying FO2 has coins. im not sure about this but isnt FO2 on the WEST coast? you gotta know something,



so it seems as if the west coast is alot more different than the east coast.

QUOTE: i think a trading system would be good and original. For example;
> a 10mm pistol in 80% condition = value of 100,
> leather armor at 50% condition = value of 200

so i would trade two 10mm pistols for one leather armour


There's a great story on why simple barter doesn't work well in a society, it's called "The Fisherman Who Needed a Knife". Basically, it's a story about a fisherman who loses his knife and needs a replacement (desperately, since he's all tangled up in fishing line), but all he has to trade is a fish. The knifemaker doesn't want a fish, he needs a new hat. The fisherman hops to the hatmaker, but he doesn't need a fish either, he needs a loaf of bread. So the fisherman has to hop to the baker, but he doesn't need a fish, he needs a new pot. And so on... the point is that any society where people exist interdependently (as opposed to pure subsistence, where everyone grows their own food, makes their own clothes, etc.) needs a working system of currency. Bottlecaps are portable, durable, and impossible to produce without specialized equipment.

So are pennies.

This. :tops:

You are forgetting that the mass majority of the money would be in vaults, and pre-war money is weathered, leaving bottle caps as something durable, and as said, hard to reproduce, and as a bonus, have a "security device" with the label on them.

I think everyone here is just looking a LITTLE to into this. Elaborate concepts aside, apart from NCR gold dollars in Fallout 2 bottlecaps is kind of a 'Fallout' thing. It seems a good amount of people when they think 'Fallout' and 'currency' they go 'OH! BOTTLECAPS!'. So I think it's just to add more of a Fallout feel to the game.

Hold on... what is the practical difference between any standard US coin and a bottle cap (other than coins stack fairly well). Sure paper money would be ruined, but the coins would be fine (especially those kept in a [bank] vault). US coins are labeled too, and harder to make (and harder period ~meaning more durable. :shrug:).

**I would put that a bottle cap press is more common than a coin minting press (and easier to make). If people are just going to assign value to tin caps in general, they could just as simply assign that value to any US coin (making them all worth the same, or making them worth their past or even just arbitrary values). Can it not be said that there is more minted money in DC than there are survivors to spend it?

i dont get why they dont use pre war money i have like at least 200 racked up in my guys megaton house bed tables and other places

I believe that NCR dollar coins were only backed by NCR gold, not actually gold themselves. I hear that the NCR money in New Vegas is the weakest of the denominations because the BOS destroyed NCR's gold reserves in one of their attacks in the war (or stole it). Supposedly this is the same reason that bottlecaps were going to return in Van Buren. Supposedly Legion currency is actual precious metals, making it very valuable, and the caravans (which travel from place to place frequently) back bottlecaps, thus making them valuable as some of the largest suppliers of equipment place value on caps and will trade goods for them.

It will be interesting to see if we can effect currency values in New Vegas with multiple forms of it floating around.