Cigarettes as a de-facto currency?

Game Talk The Bunker
1

What’s the general consensus on using cigarettes as the main trading currency in the game?

Historically it seems when money loses it value or there is anarchy people end up using four things as currency, food, gold/silver, bullets, and cigarettes. Food would be too bulky to carry around as a currency, as well as that, there’s the problem of valuing it when there are a huge variety of types. Gold and silver would be too rare and heavy to be a realistic choice of currency, it will probably be used in the long term between communities but certainly not between individuals in the short and medium term. Bullets is one realistic choice, it’s common enough that everyone has it, and it has an actual purpose, however there are hundreds of types of bullets so coming up with a universal value would be impossible. However cigarettes are common, light weight, and universal, making them ideal for use a standard currency; in prisons for example cigarettes are often bought, sold, and even took as payment, even by non-smokers, they are effectively a currency in everything but name.

2

Bottlecaps.

3

Might as well use stamps :stuck_out_tongue:

4

[me=unback]counter stamp based currency with golem based one. [/me]

5

Makes a lot more sense than dealing in dollars and cents.

6

It worked in post-WW2 Germany as a second currency as well. Deutschmark was useless to GI’s and many of the farmers providing food so you could try and barter with cigarettes.

7

Narcotics could be the various currencies, since few people actually use them for their intended purposes (from what I know) and they’re difficult to manufacture (so few people could actually make their own drugs and it’d be impossible to counterfeit).

From Spoony’s Counter Monkey stories, he mentioned two post-apocalyptic stories; the currency in one was water, and the other was bullets.

8

[me=unback]counter stamp based currency with golem based one. [/me][/quote]

Terry is a legend :stuck_out_tongue:

9

i was actually thinking about mentioning that, but a bartering system makes the most sense just giving items diffrent values/worth or what some preppers like to do is just plain precious metals silver/gold/etc

10

Bartering is a lot more complicated to implement as the value of each item would change from npc to npc, although there is no reason we can’t do that. Not sure what the nicest interface would be, initially we could just show the raw value like currently but there would be no way to deal with excess so if the npc doesn’t have cheap things you want you might be on the bad end of a deal.

11

[quote=“Lost, post:7, topic:404”]Narcotics could be the various currencies, since few people actually use them for their intended purposes (from what I know) and they’re difficult to manufacture (so few people could actually make their own drugs and it’d be impossible to counterfeit).

From Spoony’s Counter Monkey stories, he mentioned two post-apocalyptic stories; the currency in one was water, and the other was bullets.[/quote]

Speech skill [LIE/BARTER] No, that’s not a mixture of flour and salt good sir. Now, hand me all of your bulleetz.
You could always get pure samples and cut them with bleach before reselling.
Cataclysm: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m a drug lord.

12

What about something original, like clay pots, statues and bowls ect. Maybe, before the apocalypse there was a great craze among people about making home clayware, advertised all over TV for cheap clay sculpting kits. Now they’re just sitting in houses, and come with excess amounts of clay. It would mean that currency would be made and fall out of existance again when it breaks, it wouldn’t be counterfeitable, and it would still require effort as you would need a generator, a kiln ect.

13

Too heavy. Thats the reason why currency was invented in the first place, so noone needs to carry around a few hundred pounds of cattle to barter for a sharpened stick.
Narcotics, cigarettes and medicine seem like a good idea. One could implement, as factions, ‘dealer rings’ and people who are against trading with addictive stuff - leading to moral choices… somehow… I’m not very creative.

There’s also the idea of water and bling bling as a trade good. Caves of Qud does it and it works quite well. Although, currently, clean water is so abundant with labs and also the combo of toilet + jerrycan + water purifier…

14

I’m all for something original, but you gotta remember it’s set round about circa 1990-2010(techwise, thereabouts anyway, excluding teleporters and mutagen. that’s not a definate date.) Say your entire neighbourhood was abadonned, think what you could loot from their houses.
Plastic bottles, carboys of cleaning fluids, cutlery, plates bowls etc. When you could just loot any of those why would you use a clay bowl? clay stuff is heavy as hell-- just think of a brick. There’s a case for artwork I suppose-- I’m sure there’s some town of survivors with rich people that would appreciate neo-apocalypto traditional carving and crafting skills. :stuck_out_tongue:

'this is a 1994 Andrew Anderson Vase. It is masterfully crafted. It is made of pewter and decorated with menacing spikes of Zombie Bone. On it is an image of Andrew Anderson and Zombies. Andrew Anderson is being Eaten by the Zombies. Andrew Anderson is attacking the Zombies with a broken Vase.'
Anyone for DF? :stuck_out_tongue:

More than anything people would want useful stuff and like people say gold/silver would become almost worthless-- heavy, too soft to do anything with… Maybe there could be an option for crafting advanced electronics with gold-plated stuff or silver wires. (really, silver is a pretty nice conductor, but again if the only use I can think of is electronics only some big faction/scientist town would buy them-- and not for much. Maybe a new gun and a good helping of ammo for a silver bar?)

Something like bullets or cigarettes would be a nice currency (both consumable and you can’t really counterfit them, unless you want to mix up your counterfit bullets with your real ones.) You’d have to increase the value to NPCs of them-- and that means if you want to buy bullets from em they’re gonna cost a lot (depending on how much cig currency you’ve managed to loot.)

then again, gunstores, LMOE shelters, Bunkers, basement armories in residential districts… More ammo than I’ll ever need.

Personally aside from bullets or smokes I’d recommend plastic bottles, canteens, jerrycans, knives etc. Humans can’t live without water, people will always need containers for it so bump the price up on those to indicate their relative importance. Knives and some other tools again would be pretty important for crafting and general survival, so would fetch a high price, as would some books.

I kinda feel like a heretic every time I use a book to start a fire. :X

15

Yeah, I underestimated the weight of lugging round 5 clay pots constantly.

16

The whole reason currency even exists in the first place is because a barter system doesn’t really work once you start getting into the details of such a system. Currency is light and universal, and an object’s value is based on the need of the individual. You can’t sell a chicken to a guy who doesn’t want it, or doesn’t have the ability or know how to take care of the chicken, or butcher it properly for the meat (Your clumsy butchering destroys the meat!), or a million different other variables. Currency, again, is simple (barring advanced economics, inflation, etc.), easy to carry, and in an economy, universally applicable.

This… is not meth.

17

Hmm… I kinda like the bartering system.

The fact that it’s inconsistent and inconvenient actually adds to the flavour and gameplay for me. I don’t want to feel like there’s an organised network of NPCs worldwide, who all use the same currency. The world has ended, and the cities are flooded with zombies! Ain’t nobody got time for organising that shit.

No. Bartering means that, unless you make a point of collecting valuables you aren’t likely to need, you’re often going to have to sell stuff you really need in order to get other stuff you really need. There’s no win-win transactions, and no making endless loot runs to garner a metric tonne of gp, bottle caps, monkey dicks, or whatever the currency happens to be.

If you need something from an NPC and have nothing you can swap for it… sucks to be you. Go get some decent shit together, and hope she’s still there when you come back.

18

My objection to a barter system more applied to real life than the game. Yeah, a currency wouldn’t be manageable in Postapocalyptia for various reasons.

19

For bartering to work, IMO:

  • NPCs with need based motivations – hungry NPC offers more for food, NPC sitting at a farm with lots of crops probably wouldn’t offer much for your food unless you have something special (like game meats if they suck at hunting and don’t have any domestic animals).
  • NPCs with quirks – hoarder NPC might want to get all your shiny baubles and trinkets (necklaces and such) and be willing to offer a decent amount for such things. Super cleanfreak NPC might want all of your bleach. Pyro NPC might be willing to part with foodstuffs in order to get ahold of your lighter and a few bottles of gasoline since they just ran out of both of these.

Basically, the NPCs will impart a personal value onto each item according to their wants/needs/other personality traits. Potentially an NPC that you have had good trade relations with in the past could give you better deals, or if they move in with some other faction maybe put in a good word for you when you come by to hock your wares. It would be a very cool and dynamic system, but also I feel is going to be a long-term goal starting from when NPCs become non-gamebreaking.

I really hope it happens though :slight_smile:

20

I prefer the bartering system we use now. As far as $ goes I’ve only looked at it as an abstraction, since trading things doesn’t actually give or take any money that would encumber you. How that works with other NPCs than the one you originally traded with is up in the air, but seeing as society just collapsed and things like bionics and automated turrets are everywhere, I don’t know if something like cigarettes would make as much sense. They’re not really as popular as they were in the 80s and early 90s, and to go with that there’s also the fact that society just collapsed as soon as you start the game, so people all over the world suddenly using Cigarettes or anything as a de facto currency is strange to me. Unless you and the starting NPC have been in the shelter for awhile, in which case the world still doesn’t seem so consolidated that a universal currency besides bartering would develop when everyone is probably just trying to survive more than anything.