Our friend over at The Vault have recently compiled J.E. Sawyer's posts from Something Awful, where he elaborated upon the Legion, currency, bottle caps in the West and various other miscellanea. The background history for the reintroduction of the bottle cap is particularly interesting:<blockquote>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:
The attacks caused NCR citizens (and others who held NCR currency) to panic, resulting in a rush to reclaim the listed face value of currency from NCR's gold reserves. Inability to do this at several locations (especially near the periphery of NCR territory where reserves were normally low) caused a loss of faith in NCR's ability to back their currency.
Though NCR eventually stopped the BoS attacks, they decided to protect against future problems by switching to fiat currency. While this meant that BoS could no longer attack a) reserves or b) the source of production (all NCR bills are made in the Boneyard), some people felt more uneasy about their money not having any "real" (backed) value. This loss of confidence increased with NCR inflation, an ever-looming spectre of fiat currency.
Because the Hub links NCR with the Mojave Wasteland and beyond, the merchants there grew frustrated with NCR's handling of the currency crisis. They conspired to re-introduce the bottle cap as a water-backed currency that could "bridge the gap" between NCR and Legion territory. In the time leading up to the re-introduction, they did the footwork to position themselves properly. If some old-timer had a chest full of caps, they didn't care (in fact, they thought that was great, since the old-timers would enthusiastically embrace the return of the cap), but they did seek to control or destroy production facilities and truly large volumes of caps (e.g. Typhon's treasure) whenever possible.
(...)
Carrying enough bottle caps to do any trading would undercut cargo capacity significantly. :needs a literal wagonload of caps to buy a rifle and pair of pants. Plus by Fallout 2, seventy (?) ye ars before the game starts, California had abandoned caps and was minting gold coins.
And this is discussed in-game: BoS raided NCR's gold reserves until NCR could no longer generate gold coinage nor back their paper money. They abandoned the gold standard and established fiat currency, which is why its value is inflated over both caps and (especially) Legion coinage.
I mean caps are fine as a goofy video game currency, but in a world where states are minting their own money, trying to justify caps with any real world logic just exacerbates their absurdity. :jams his hand into a giant sack full of jagged, rusty metal disks anytime her wants to purchase anything.
The history of currency conflicts with your opinion. People use currency -- of any sort -- because they agree that it is a good store of value. When people no longer believe that a given currency is a good store of value, they stop using it and use something else instead. People will use the goofiest shit as currency.
People in eastern NCR and the Mojave Wasteland lost faith in the NCR government's a) ability to back the listed value of paper money and b) stability overall. If you're living in Bakersfield, staring at a piece of paper that says "redeemable for value in gold" and you have no faith in the government's ability or willingness to do that -- or if you see that the government has changed the currency to say that it is not able to be exchanged for a backed good -- you may very well listen to the strong consortium of local merchants offering to exchange that paper note for currency backed by water.
(...)
Side note: in the olden days when we planned to support post-Hoover play, I did want to introduce two new forms of currency in the event that the player supported an NCR or Legion victory: an NCR $500 bill with either President Kimball or Chief Hanlon on it, depending on the ending, and something commemorating the Courier on the back, also a Legion double aureus (worth 200 caps) commemorating the Courier on the back and conquered General Oliver on the front (in the style of Vercingetorix on Roman coins following Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul).</blockquote>He also offers some expanded background on the Legion:<blockquote>Edward Sallow created Caesar's Legion as an imitation of the Roman Legion, but without any of the Roman society that supported the Roman Legion.
I've written this before, but there are no optimates, no populares, no plebes, no equestrians, no patricians, no senate, no Rome. There's no right to private property (within the Legion itself). There's no civil law. There aren't even the ceremonial trappings of Roman society. Legates don't receive triumphs following a victory. No one in the Legion retires to a villa in Sedona. It's essentially a Roman legion with only the very top commander having any connection to the "source" culture, the rest being indoctrinated conscripts from cultures that were honestly less well-developed than anything in Gaul. Gauls are pretty sophisticated compared to the 80+ tribes. Gauls could read the Latin or Greek alphabets (Gallic language, obviously), had extensive permanent settlements, roads, calendars, mines, and a whole load of shit that groups like the Blackfoots never had.
What Caesar gave to those tribes was order, discipline, an end to internecine tribal violence (eventually), common language, and a common culture that was not rooted in any of their parent cultures. The price was extreme brutality, an enormous loss of life and individual culture, the complete dissolution of anything resembling a traditional family, and the indoctrination of fascist values.
Caesar's Legion isn't the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic. It isn't even the Roman Legion. It's a slave army with trappings of foreign-conscripted Roman legionaries during the late empire. All military, no civilian, and with none of the supporting civilian culture.
(...)
He says that when the Legion dominates NCR, it will be akin to the rise of the Roman Empire following the republic. The Legion will become, if not a "peace" force, a domestic army instead of a roving war band, and the NCR's corruption will be swept away along with the government.
Arcade isn't exaggerating when he suggests that Caesar views the Colorado River as his Rubicon. e: It's true that Caesar doesn't say anything explicitly about the role of women, but Caesar's view of women is different from most of the legionaries. As I wrote above, the Legion is at war, and he views the use of women for military purposes as a bad strategic choice when he could be using them to create more legionaries.
(...)
In Caesar's view, NCR's problems have to do with the corruption of its government and what he sees as inherent flaws in NCR's republican system. All of the strategies he uses to assemble the Legion and march on NCR are means to an end, not social end goals themselves.
Caesar sees NCR as Rome and his role in reforming it as Julius Caesar's role in reforming the republic (by turning it into a dictatorship). When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and returned to Rome, his legion didn't rape and enslave their way through the city. However, rape and enslavement were common in outer territories of the Roman Empire and were regularly used as tools of intimidation and labor.
When Arcade "jokes" that Caesar thinks that the Colorado River is the Rubicon, he's not far from the truth.</blockquote>Links to source posts are unfortunately buried in the articles themselves. Regardless, thank you, The Vault!
The attacks caused NCR citizens (and others who held NCR currency) to panic, resulting in a rush to reclaim the listed face value of currency from NCR's gold reserves. Inability to do this at several locations (especially near the periphery of NCR territory where reserves were normally low) caused a loss of faith in NCR's ability to back their currency.
Though NCR eventually stopped the BoS attacks, they decided to protect against future problems by switching to fiat currency. While this meant that BoS could no longer attack a) reserves or b) the source of production (all NCR bills are made in the Boneyard), some people felt more uneasy about their money not having any "real" (backed) value. This loss of confidence increased with NCR inflation, an ever-looming spectre of fiat currency.
Because the Hub links NCR with the Mojave Wasteland and beyond, the merchants there grew frustrated with NCR's handling of the currency crisis. They conspired to re-introduce the bottle cap as a water-backed currency that could "bridge the gap" between NCR and Legion territory. In the time leading up to the re-introduction, they did the footwork to position themselves properly. If some old-timer had a chest full of caps, they didn't care (in fact, they thought that was great, since the old-timers would enthusiastically embrace the return of the cap), but they did seek to control or destroy production facilities and truly large volumes of caps (e.g. Typhon's treasure) whenever possible.
(...)
Carrying enough bottle caps to do any trading would undercut cargo capacity significantly. :needs a literal wagonload of caps to buy a rifle and pair of pants. Plus by Fallout 2, seventy (?) ye ars before the game starts, California had abandoned caps and was minting gold coins.
And this is discussed in-game: BoS raided NCR's gold reserves until NCR could no longer generate gold coinage nor back their paper money. They abandoned the gold standard and established fiat currency, which is why its value is inflated over both caps and (especially) Legion coinage.
I mean caps are fine as a goofy video game currency, but in a world where states are minting their own money, trying to justify caps with any real world logic just exacerbates their absurdity. :jams his hand into a giant sack full of jagged, rusty metal disks anytime her wants to purchase anything.
The history of currency conflicts with your opinion. People use currency -- of any sort -- because they agree that it is a good store of value. When people no longer believe that a given currency is a good store of value, they stop using it and use something else instead. People will use the goofiest shit as currency.
People in eastern NCR and the Mojave Wasteland lost faith in the NCR government's a) ability to back the listed value of paper money and b) stability overall. If you're living in Bakersfield, staring at a piece of paper that says "redeemable for value in gold" and you have no faith in the government's ability or willingness to do that -- or if you see that the government has changed the currency to say that it is not able to be exchanged for a backed good -- you may very well listen to the strong consortium of local merchants offering to exchange that paper note for currency backed by water.
(...)
Side note: in the olden days when we planned to support post-Hoover play, I did want to introduce two new forms of currency in the event that the player supported an NCR or Legion victory: an NCR $500 bill with either President Kimball or Chief Hanlon on it, depending on the ending, and something commemorating the Courier on the back, also a Legion double aureus (worth 200 caps) commemorating the Courier on the back and conquered General Oliver on the front (in the style of Vercingetorix on Roman coins following Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul).</blockquote>He also offers some expanded background on the Legion:<blockquote>Edward Sallow created Caesar's Legion as an imitation of the Roman Legion, but without any of the Roman society that supported the Roman Legion.
I've written this before, but there are no optimates, no populares, no plebes, no equestrians, no patricians, no senate, no Rome. There's no right to private property (within the Legion itself). There's no civil law. There aren't even the ceremonial trappings of Roman society. Legates don't receive triumphs following a victory. No one in the Legion retires to a villa in Sedona. It's essentially a Roman legion with only the very top commander having any connection to the "source" culture, the rest being indoctrinated conscripts from cultures that were honestly less well-developed than anything in Gaul. Gauls are pretty sophisticated compared to the 80+ tribes. Gauls could read the Latin or Greek alphabets (Gallic language, obviously), had extensive permanent settlements, roads, calendars, mines, and a whole load of shit that groups like the Blackfoots never had.
What Caesar gave to those tribes was order, discipline, an end to internecine tribal violence (eventually), common language, and a common culture that was not rooted in any of their parent cultures. The price was extreme brutality, an enormous loss of life and individual culture, the complete dissolution of anything resembling a traditional family, and the indoctrination of fascist values.
Caesar's Legion isn't the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic. It isn't even the Roman Legion. It's a slave army with trappings of foreign-conscripted Roman legionaries during the late empire. All military, no civilian, and with none of the supporting civilian culture.
(...)
He says that when the Legion dominates NCR, it will be akin to the rise of the Roman Empire following the republic. The Legion will become, if not a "peace" force, a domestic army instead of a roving war band, and the NCR's corruption will be swept away along with the government.
Arcade isn't exaggerating when he suggests that Caesar views the Colorado River as his Rubicon. e: It's true that Caesar doesn't say anything explicitly about the role of women, but Caesar's view of women is different from most of the legionaries. As I wrote above, the Legion is at war, and he views the use of women for military purposes as a bad strategic choice when he could be using them to create more legionaries.
(...)
In Caesar's view, NCR's problems have to do with the corruption of its government and what he sees as inherent flaws in NCR's republican system. All of the strategies he uses to assemble the Legion and march on NCR are means to an end, not social end goals themselves.
Caesar sees NCR as Rome and his role in reforming it as Julius Caesar's role in reforming the republic (by turning it into a dictatorship). When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and returned to Rome, his legion didn't rape and enslave their way through the city. However, rape and enslavement were common in outer territories of the Roman Empire and were regularly used as tools of intimidation and labor.
When Arcade "jokes" that Caesar thinks that the Colorado River is the Rubicon, he's not far from the truth.</blockquote>Links to source posts are unfortunately buried in the articles themselves. Regardless, thank you, The Vault!
