Duck and Cover

Bullets are fine currency. I think most of you are forgetting the whole 'barter economy' thing.

Bottle caps are great. They're already established & an important part of the Fallout atmosphere. Plus, they're very '50s. What more could you want? Oh yeah, and they make sense as a currency too (given how common they are, how they're backed up by the hub, and their extremely light weight, and the possibility for them to be used in different denominations).

Kashluk wrote:Or bullets might be made of STEEL or GOLD. None of those would work either?

Gold is too rare and steel is much harder to make than lead. Plus lead makes more useful bullets. Heavy bullets=good, hence depleted uranium rounds. Making bullets out of other things so they'd be a more convenient currency is just... weird. Why not use coins at that point
Anyway, I think bottlecaps are fine for the games. They're good with the theme. I think whoever put ringpulls in FOT should be soundly beaten. However, if you want to be as realistic as possible, you won't use bottlecaps because they're too easily forged.

Just the opposite, in the resource short PA future of Fallout how are people going to easily forge bottlecaps? Even more so for ringpulls, though it was daft in FOT that there were no surviving canned drinks, only the ringpulls, and the nuka cola plant was a bottling factory.

As for bullets as currency that would work, similar to a gold standard, where the bullets were kept in an armoury (in a tightly controlled community like NCR) and people carried chits to say they were entitled to 1lb of 9mm etc. Or rather than the whole bullet, you'd use shell casings, collect your casings and those of your opponents and sell them to the local blacksmith who would reload them. For example for every 10 spent shell casing you'd get one new bullet, or a token which you could trade in town for anything.

Now the idea of bullets as a backing for a currency I like.

The idea sucks. I'm sure glad the devs aren't stupid enough to do it.

Franz_Schubert wrote:The idea sucks. I'm sure glad the devs aren't stupid enough to do it.

I concur (said in H*R's voice).

It would fuck up the whole ammo scarcity thing as well, not to mention the weight factor: if everyone has bullets as currency it'll be pretty easy to find ammo. If bullets have weight, as in the first 2 games, than you won't be able to carry much money, alternatively, if they're weightless like money was in the first 2 you'll be able to carry way to much ammo around. Also there are so many types of bullets and if they all were woth the same it would be a huge advantage for energy weapon characters (their ammo is worth much more than 10mm) but if they were worth different amounts it would defy the point of it being currency as you'd have to mix and match using different amounts of different bullets and thus it would be the same as bartering anything else.

They definitely need a currency which has no inherent value, like bottlecaps and coins, so that bartering isn't a hassle of trying to find different combinations that add up to a certain amount.

Don't try to fix what's not broken.

That's why it's ammo being used for backing paper money (hell, they could be used as backing for bottlecaps), not as money itself.

MORE BOTTLECAPS TO THE PEOPLE
(but NCRD is pretty good to)

Dear God, is this still going? Give it up!!!!!!!

Yeah, well currency can shift. NCR uses coins, the rest of the world uses caps or whatever.... Barter system...