Money has value in so much as people think it has value, and this belief is widely dependent on another belief of whether there is enough of a homogenized belief among other people you will come across to see it as valuable.
The description of the gold bar in the bank seems to indicate that tradition value might have been trimmed off the in ensuing cataclysm. It’s like in a war torn country, why would you trade something for paper money when the next person you come across might not give you his food when try to buy it off of him? The government that backs it is gone, the banks where you can store it and trade for some other financial services are gone, and most surviving people have been reduced to being focused on their immediate short term survival.
In face of the temporary loss of confidence of paper currency, there is an additional factor that money itself has lost value. For example, even if you give someone a gold bar for instance or a hundred thousand dollars in cash, they might not be willing to part with the few cans of food he has if it means an additional risk to his own life in going into a city for food again.
This should only be temporary though.[/quote]
The idea that currency would lose its value immediately following a disaster is a little excessive. We have an entire culture and ideology that is built around the dollar having value. It is an illusion - the dollar has no actual value, it is not tied to gold anymore, it is fabricated from nothing. Most people are going to maintain the illusion that it has value for some time past any particular government-collapsing disaster. Will there be corporations trading stock? No. But for people exchanging currency for food etc, there’s going to be enough persistence for that to remain reasonable. The entire population isn’t going to go from ‘I just paid my taxes last month, yesterday I stockpiled food and water using money’ to ‘today the bombs fell, so I am going to use my money to start a campfire because it obviously no longer has value.’
Because a) there is no reason to believe that the government isn’t alive and well. At least to the survivor, they have no reason to think that. And b) currency always has some value when there are people willing to take it in exchange for goods and services.
Over time the value of currency would decrease as resources become increasingly scarce, people to trade with decrease, and available money increases (grabbed from cash registers and banks where nobody was around to protect it), until eventually it is all but without value. But Cataclysm takes place over the days and weeks and months directly following the cataclysm, it’s not 200 years in the future like a lot of post-apoc games. It would be interesting if NPCs grew less and less interested in money over time(asking higher and higher prices for stuff), until eventually they just won’t accept it.
But this is about vending machines, really. They will not stop accepting coins anytime soon, regardless of economic collapse.
