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I grant you that gold is pretty and can be formed into jewelry, but who in the Mojave has the skill or opportunity to do it?
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Apr 21, 2020 12:16
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It's safe to assume that there are plenty of people in services that we don't see. There are no tailor characters in FNV AFAIK, but it's clear that major towns should have someone making clothes, right? Vegas has a guy whose only job is to make signs and he isn't starving. They also have fancy high society inhabitants as well as guests. It's safe to assume that there are fancy tailors as well as jewelers in New Vegas.
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Apr 21, 2020 12:21
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bony tony posted:The gold bars are worth a lot of caps, but why? Is there really such a hankerin' for gold in the post-apocalypse? Their money is backed by water, not gold. Actually the NCR's paper money used to be backed by gold, but near the end of the NCR-Brotherhood War the Brotherhood managed to irradiate the NCR's entire gold supply. This forced them to switch to backing it with water which is why it is worth about 40% of its' face value in caps by the time of New Vegas. The whole its' rare, shiny, and easily reduced into smaller, easy to carry parts thing probably help too. Plus there is the fact that the Post-Post-Apocalyptic society of the NCR is trying to emulate parts of the Old World and how it functioned as well. (Without fully knowing/caring about how that whole democracy stuff was just a ever thinning coat of paint by the time of the Great War)
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Apr 21, 2020 12:24
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Legion economy is also backed by gold. you know, by literally being gold (and silver).
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Apr 21, 2020 15:44
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ilitarist posted:A little known fact is that people didn't care about gold before the second half of 19 century. Before that, even the elites were in constant danger of dying of decease, hunger and war and thus didn't care about some shiny metals. A little known fact is that your fact is trash.
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Apr 21, 2020 15:46
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King Tut was famously anti-gold which is why he was covered in it after his death, as an insult
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Apr 21, 2020 16:06
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The people of England certainly didn't care about gold, they didn't even lock it up when it was stored in Lindisfarne! It's anyones guess as to what the Vikings wanted. We see the word "geld" pop up a lot, but we have yet to understand why the Vikings were obsessed with castrating livestock.
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Apr 21, 2020 16:10
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The Spanish Conquistadors were famously just super-enthusiastic for geology, and often encouraged local populations to take up the hobby wherever they went. UED Special Ops posted:Actually the NCR's paper money used to be backed by gold, but near the end of the NCR-Brotherhood War the Brotherhood managed to irradiate the NCR's entire gold supply. This forced them to switch to backing it with water which is why it is worth about 40% of its' face value in caps by the time of New Vegas. The whole its' rare, shiny, and easily reduced into smaller, easy to carry parts thing probably help too. Plus there is the fact that the Post-Post-Apocalyptic society of the NCR is trying to emulate parts of the Old World and how it functioned as well. (Without fully knowing/caring about how that whole democracy stuff was just a ever thinning coat of paint by the time of the Great War) Minor quibble, but NCR money isn't backed by water, bottle caps are by the Hub water traders (Which is why they have a fixed value). NCR paper money is a fiat currency, and inflation is the reason its lost so much value.
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Apr 21, 2020 16:32
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Minor quibble, but NCR money isn't backed by water, bottle caps are by the Hub water traders (Which is why they have a fixed value). NCR paper money is a fiat currency, and inflation is the reason its lost so much value. Yeah - I don't think that irradiating the gold reserves would make much change to the value of the gold. You can't move the stuff, sure, but it's still there. I think this is how it actually works in the real world. Anyway, https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1252619974113472513?s=19 Be sure you help sort out the water problems for the farmers, gotta keep that corn!
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Apr 21, 2020 16:40
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LashLightning posted:Yeah - I don't think that irradiating the gold reserves would make much change to the value of the gold. You can't move the stuff, sure, but it's still there. I think this is how it actually works in the real world. Modern gold reserves don't (usually) have to move since they're effectively there to act as collateral—if you're a country taking out a big loan, big banks or other countries know you're good to pay it back since you've got all this gold lying around that they can take if you default. For traditional gold-backed currencies, however, each paper dollar is pegged to a small amount of gold, for which which you can legally exchange your paper money at any given time:  (Check the text along the bottom of this gold-backed dollar from the '20s. It's basically an IOU) For the NCR, the problem with their gold reserves becoming irradiated is that the gold loses all of its effective value as a currency—nobody is going to want to exchange their dollar bills for gold no one* will accept. So with no gold backing their dollars, the NCR just threw up their hands and said "alright, it's fiat now, ramp up the presses," and the value swiftly tanked for obvious reasons. *Well, maybe ghouls or super mutants
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Apr 21, 2020 16:56
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LashLightning posted:Yeah - I don't think that irradiating the gold reserves would make much change to the value of the gold. You can't move the stuff, sure, but it's still there. I think this is how it actually works in the real world. Always screw over the vault 34 dwellers in favor of the sharecroppers. And I agree with your statements that we don't see the whole world and that there are artisans and such that could use gold for stuff. The White Glove Society need to get their Eyes Wide Shut fuckmasks from somewhere, after all.
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Apr 21, 2020 17:15
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I love New Vegas loreposting. 
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Apr 21, 2020 17:49
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UED Special Ops posted:Actually the NCR's paper money used to be backed by gold, but near the end of the NCR-Brotherhood War the Brotherhood managed to irradiate the NCR's entire gold supply. This forced them to switch to backing it with water which is why it is worth about 40% of its' face value in caps by the time of New Vegas. The whole its' rare, shiny, and easily reduced into smaller, easy to carry parts thing probably help too. Plus there is the fact that the Post-Post-Apocalyptic society of the NCR is trying to emulate parts of the Old World and how it functioned as well. (Without fully knowing/caring about how that whole democracy stuff was just a ever thinning coat of paint by the time of the Great War) The Brotherhood was led by Goldfinger?
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Apr 21, 2020 18:10
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double nine posted:The Brotherhood was led by Goldfinger? I can think of way worse ska bands to lead tbh.
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Apr 21, 2020 18:25
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I just finished a playthrough of New Vegas. What a god-tier game. Honestly, I think I dumped something close to 150 hours into it and I just couldn’t get enough. I’ve been looking at picking up Fallout 76 Wastelanders but I’m honestly just not too sure what the reception is. But, I don’t think anything can top NV.
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Apr 21, 2020 18:34
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The one and only quest-altering mod I've ever installed in New Vegas (aside from jsawyer and a couple of very straight-forward bug fixes) was one that let you save both the sharecropper farms and the vault 34 residents. Because as much as I love ever other horrible aspect of Vault 34, that choice was bullshit. Hell, it was bullshit that the vault residents were still alive in the first place, given that every other indication in the Vault suggests that the poo poo went down there a LONG time ago. You're The Courier. If you can move nations with your actions, you drat well ought to be able to solve a water routing issue. (I saved the Vault Dwellers on my first playthrough, despite knowing the massive long-term ramifications it could have for millions of others (I did the Vault 22 questline first). I'm too soft.)
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Apr 21, 2020 18:49
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The currency of the wasteland has actually followed pretty consistent historic parallels in the non-Bethesda games. You start out with a gift economy (everyone provides for their community and others with the expectation that they'll be helped out later) then you probably try barter, but barter requires a coincidence of wants. If you want beer but the brewer doesn't want anything you own, you're poo poo outta luck. Mesopotamia initially had clay tokens representing items stored somewhere else so you could just trade those tokens and then the bearer would claim the items or animals later. What the government can then do is make stockpiles of something inherently valuable and set tokens at a specific value of what's inside; the shekel was actually a unit of weight, so a 1 shekel coin was literally worth 1 shekel of grain if you turned it in at the warehouse. These tokens are now money because they have an inherent value even if they aren't immediately usable by themselves, and they get traded. Bottle caps are money on the West Coast because they're backed by the Hub's water mechants: you can bring a cap to them and they will give you 1 cap worth of water. The lack of surviving machinery to make new ones also makes counterfeiting extremely difficult, which keeps the value consistent. As for precious metals and jewels, they acquire value because they're aesthetically pleasing and their weight and purity lets you easily determine value. They don't need to be backed by anything because the coins or ingots have value in themselves, because everyone generally accepts that they have value. Once a society can leave behind basing value purely off needs and survival goods like water and food, it can assign value to aesthetically pleasing but functionally decorative materials. The NCR, Caesar's Legion, and the Mojave are all in this state where most people are no longer struggling daily just to stay alive and can value things like precious metals again, so the Legion mints silver and gold coins. The NCR's issuance of paper money (and presumably coins made of cheap metals) also follows the historic reasons, even if it's also partially imitating the Old World: gold and silver are heavy as poo poo. If you issue pieces of paper that say "You can turn this in at the government for this much gold", you can now fit enough money to buy a house in your pocket. It's a stable society where people can afford to not worry about just having food and water, so they can afford to give value to gold and in turn trust that the bills they're passing around have worth. It also makes it safer to travel with loads of money because you now look like everyone else instead of having a wagon train full of gold coins. Fiat money is where it gets tricky. Now you're in money that has no inherent value (or very little) of its own and isn't backed by anything tangible except trust that your government is remaining stable. The US could leave the gold standard because everyone trusted that the government wasn't going anywhere and their money would retain its value for the rest of their lives, so the world continues to trade literal pieces of paper as if it's valuable. If you become afraid that your government is on the rocks and you might be having trouble just getting food, that money starts becoming worthless. So the Brotherhood irradiates the NCR's gold supply, making it impossible for anyone but a few mutated human species to safely touch. Not only do they have to switch to fiat currency, concerns about how the war with the Brotherhood (and eventually the Legion) is going creates a lack of trust in the stability of the NCR and a corresponding lower value than money that's backed by water or made of gold and silver. It's not worthless, just of depreciated value. This is where the Bethesda games have yet another problem with their worldbuilding. The Capital Wasteland and Commonwealth really are places where people outside of a few small settlements are struggling daily to survive. Since bottle caps in the east aren't actually backed by anything, there's no reason anyone should be trading them except "It's Fallout! It's got, uh, 1950s robots and bottle caps for money!" chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 19:26
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Chris is from Vault 34 and he's just balding prematurely. It seems there's been waves of migration from the Vault following the Boomers busting the door open. The Ghouls and the radiation leak seems like a more recent event, probably caused by Chris abandoning the vault and none of the gun nuts still living there knowing how to fix a broken reactor
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Apr 21, 2020 19:30
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Arcsquad12 posted:Chris is from Vault 34 and he's just balding prematurely. It seems there's been waves of migration from the Vault following the Boomers busting the door open. The Ghouls and the radiation leak seems like a more recent event, probably caused by Chris abandoning the vault and none of the gun nuts still living there knowing how to fix a broken reactor True enough. I guess when I said 'long', I more meant 'long enough that a family trapped in a small room of some sort are still alive' becomes an implausibly feeling thing. How much food and (non-irradiated) water could they have to have kept them going for presumably weeks or even months? That's all. Could easily be wrong! Just felt kind of thin compared to most of NV's writing generally having more substance to why/how things happen in the Mojave. It felt...very FO3, honestly, which feels bad to say, because I don't want to insult anyone working on NV with something like that.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:57
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chitoryu12 posted:A Good Post Gold coinage is also subject to clipping, filing, and sweating (shaking a pile of coins to make them release some gold dust and melting it together), since the coins are valuable in themselves. That's one of the reasons why people stopped using precious metals for currency in the first place. Really, if you ally with the Legion and bring back all the gold bars from the Sierra Madre, you're devaluing their currency by bringing in a lot more gold into the economy. Modchat: I like the one where you can actually make counterfeit caps in the shack, even though you're committing fraud and possibly treason.
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Apr 21, 2020 20:04
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How far off is the NCR from RADcoin?
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Apr 21, 2020 20:11
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The whole "NCR gold stash was irradiated" thing is very weird to me. Irradiated does not mean radioactive. Almost all canned/processed food you eat now is irradiated, because it turns out this is a great way to kill bacteria; but the food does not become radioactive by virtue of having gamma rays shot through it. Neutron capture is a thing, but that would suggest that the Brotherhood had either a) detonated a nuclear bomb right on top of the gold pile, which would sort of make the irradiation irrelevant because it's all been blown up, or b) ran a nuclear reactor with the NCR's gold inside of it for a very, very long time. Even in the event of neutron capture, there are no stable isotopes of gold except the one, and all the others have short half lives. Some decay into non-gold elements, mostly platinum & iridium, but again, to make an appreciable fraction of a gold reserve do this would be... difficult.
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Apr 21, 2020 21:21
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side_burned posted:I will never understand people who try to get all the gold bricks out of Dead Money. What do you need to gold for when you can turn pre-war clothing and cigarettes into hundreds of weapon repair kits? The point of bringing out the gold is that the game is structured to make you leave them behind, but allows you to try. It's a challenge to be met.
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Apr 21, 2020 21:35
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aniviron posted:The whole "NCR gold stash was irradiated" thing is very weird to me. Irradiated does not mean radioactive. Almost all canned/processed food you eat now is irradiated, because it turns out this is a great way to kill bacteria; but the food does not become radioactive by virtue of having gamma rays shot through it. Look if you're gonna start nitpicking irradiating a gold stash you're gonna blow your top when you hear about ghouls
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Apr 21, 2020 21:37
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NCR gold, after a visit from the Brotherhood: I'M WAKIN UP
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Apr 21, 2020 21:45
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Internet Wizard posted:Look if you're gonna start nitpicking irradiating a gold stash you're gonna blow your top when you hear about ghouls They probably took some of the barrels you see dotted around the landscape, scooped out some green slime, and smeared it all over the gold. That's how you irradiate, Fallout style.
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Apr 21, 2020 21:59
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Internet Wizard posted:Look if you're gonna start nitpicking irradiating a gold stash you're gonna blow your top when you hear about ghouls That's a fair criticism; it just strikes me as a weirdly specific way to eliminate the NCR's gold reserves when there are much more straightforward ways to do it. Ghouls, mutants, etc., are a contrivance that couldn't really be done any other way though.
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Apr 21, 2020 23:00
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When I was playing for the first time I tried to loot all gold bars and become encumbered. I dies so many times trying to walk to the exit (I didn't knew/cared about the tricks that made you carry them) only after like 20 tries I just decided to drop them all and managed to escape the first time. Then the ending hit me like a ton of bricks. Like, tears in my eye kinda bricks because I was going through some tough stuff in my life and the message was too close to home. Goddamn, what a game 
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Apr 21, 2020 23:19
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So I decided to try and find the source for what exactly the Brotherhood did to the NCR's gold reserves, and while I couldn't find the exact information I was looking for hilariously the Fallout wiki actually sent me back to this very thread with a few of rope kid's posts:rope kid posted:It happened during the BoS-NCR war. I believe Alice McLafferty mentions it, but I'm not positive. She doesn't detail the events in this much detail, but here they are:
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Apr 21, 2020 23:32
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"It's letting go" is up there with "War Never Changes" and "Old World Blues" as being the most poignant lines associated with Fallout. That or you could get more people quoting Joshua Graham and not realizing it. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 23:32
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i immediately realised the gold bars were too heavy to carry but was thrilled by the several thousand rounds of ammunition i'd just looted so it was okaniviron posted:b) ran a nuclear reactor with the NCR's gold inside of it for a very, very long time. they did this. it was a really harrowing siege but they kept that reactor running, by god
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Apr 21, 2020 23:34
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I just grab a couple. That's more cash than I'll ever really need anyway.aniviron posted:That's a fair criticism; it just strikes me as a weirdly specific way to eliminate the NCR's gold reserves when there are much more straightforward ways to do it. Ghouls, mutants, etc., are a contrivance that couldn't really be done any other way though. I think the point is the clear nod to Goldfinger. The Brotherhood pulls off a literal Bond villain scheme, and that leads you to question their moral standing.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:13
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Neither here nor there but the original Falliut 3 / Van Buren had a rogue faction of Brotherhood folks driven insane by stealth boy usage, they’re the ones who did all the BoS guerrilla warfare. That particular bit of VB ended up split into Elijah’s crusade in Dead Money and the Nightkin’s plight at the ski lodge
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Apr 22, 2020 00:49
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Basic Chunnel posted:Neither here nor there but the original Falliut 3 / Van Buren had a rogue faction of Brotherhood folks driven insane by stealth boy usage, they’re the ones who did all the BoS guerrilla warfare. That particular bit of VB ended up split into Elijah’s crusade in Dead Money and the Nightkin’s plight at the ski lodge That's cool to know, also loved Elijah as a character.
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Apr 22, 2020 01:05
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Acebuckeye13 posted:So I decided to try and find the source for what exactly the Brotherhood did to the NCR's gold reserves, and while I couldn't find the exact information I was looking for hilariously the Fallout wiki actually sent me back to this very thread with a few of rope kid's posts: This is the other important part of the economy that I briefly touched on: money is about trust. Even in the earliest forms when it's backed by water or grain, you need to trust that you can go to the government warehouses and turn in all of your currency for the face value of that water or grain. If Sumer wasn't able to maintain its grain warehouses to back their coins, they would have immediately lost most or all of their value. The currency in the Mojave is thus valued based on what's most trustworthy. Legion coinage is the most valuable because in a society that still values precious metals, gold and silver coins are awesome and the Legion's territory is safe for traders to operate in; even if the Legion is destroyed, their coins will still have value on their metal content. Bottlecaps are second because they're backed by a water resource far away, so they have value as long as you can trust that the Hub water supplies are good but there's no real way to immediately convert all your caps 1:1 for Hub water because of the distances involved. NCR dollars are the lowest because they're a fiat currency issued by a government that's going through some poo poo, and the Legion threat especially causes concerns about the NCR's stability that leads to people leaving the dollars for caps that are backed by something tangible. Minus any game conceits like distances and population limits, the economy of the Mojave actually makes a lot of sense from a worldbuilding perspective.
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Apr 22, 2020 01:47
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Yeah, there was clearly a ton of thought into how the Mojave actually works, and when you step back it's wild how impressive and immersive it is. (Which seems to be a staple of rope kid's games, since the Pillars series also features lots of in-depth worldbuilding).
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Apr 22, 2020 02:05
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I remember reading somewhere* that part of what makes fiat currency work is taxation. The state makes its fiat currency valuable by not only instituting taxation, but also by demanding that said tax is paid using its own fiat currency. That way there's an inherent incentive to exchanging goods and/or labour for the currency, which entrenches it as an essential part of the economy and as a result legitimizes it - despite the currency itself having no inherent value as a commodity or even as an IOU. * I think it was David Graeber's "Debt - The First 5000 Years"
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Apr 22, 2020 02:21
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chitoryu12 posted:Bottlecaps are second because they're backed by a water resource far away, so they have value as long as you can trust that the Hub water supplies are good but there's no real way to immediately convert all your caps 1:1 for Hub water because of the distances involved. One would think that would mean that the actual valuation of the cap goes down as the distance to The Hub increases, which would've been an interesting idea to see implemented in a post-apocalyptic video game.
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Apr 22, 2020 05:02
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I wouldn't think so. When USD was gold-backed the value of the dollar didn't change based on proximity to Fort Knox. Anyway, I don't actually remember anyone in the game saying that the BoS made NCR's gold radioactive, but that they attacked a reserve and stole a shitload of it.
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Apr 22, 2020 05:16
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Maybe not but people don't drink gold. And having to travel to trade your caps for drinking water seems like there'd be some snags in the system.
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Apr 22, 2020 05:23
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