Actually, Fallout was only going to "simulate" GRUPS at its most base form.

The original design doc for Fallout even outright stated "just enough GURPS material to make the GURPSers happy. The game comes first."

GURPS inclusion in Fallout 1 was, and was always meant to be, entirely token.

[OFF THE CURRENT TOPIC]

S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and SKILLS system

It'd be great, imho, if player started with just 1 point in each Special stat and basic, very low amount of points in skills.

Special stats to be increasable with each level-up, Skills increasable only through Special stats.

Lets say, with each level-up player would get 2 (or more) points to assign in Specials. Assigning them would result in increasing of points in skills.

Example:

Player added 1 point in Intelligence and 1 point in Perception.

This resulted in increasing of Lockpick points by 3 (Intelligence) and by 5 (Perception), resulting in total increase of Lockpick skill by 8.

Increasing Strenght by 1 point would result in increasemant of Health, Weight Limit, Meele Damage output (directly and indirectly, through increase of Meele Weapons Skill by 5? or so) etc.

About the Currency: I think caps is perfect for F3 and its Capital Wasteland, (the Shivering Isles of that universe), where the craziest and silly things happen, as people spend all day in the middle of radiation, building cities around atomic bombs, raiders sleep with rotten bodies, aliens appear to cause high fuss, no agriculture, without society, with nothing .....

Now, if the Institute is how we're imagining, really need a new form of currency. Someone there spoke in credit cards. I think is a good one. The caps can be used by the poor bastards who live in the Wasteland.

I like too. Pokemon is like that and that's one of my favorite franchises (moreover, the Pokemon metagame is MUCH more complex and strategic than anything that Bethesda has done, just saying)

I never encountered Godzilla's footprint, the Tardis, a whale that fell from the sky, or a Star trek shuttle crash site in Fallout 3.

Fallout 1/2 however.......

As much as a non-bottle cap currency system would make more sense, I think Bethesda thinks that bottle caps are too rooted in Fallout's identity and will stick with caps and play it safe.

Even besides them, Fallout 3 didn't have stuff like talking animals or talking Venus fly traps.

the worst Fallout 3 had was..... those two emotionally disturbed people dressing up as super heroes, and those were the only two people doing that.

True, but I highly doubt Bethesda will include either of those factions in Fallout 4. NCR dollars is something I can see progressing in the western US (maybe in another Obsidian made Fallout game).

I don't understand why they would think so. Fallout 2 and Tactics didn't even have bottle caps (that I remember). It's time to move past that.

You're going to ignore the alien spaceship in the vanilla game or an entire DLC surrounding aliens?

There's a difference between goofy like Fallout 2 and the idiocy of the entire East coast.

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Seriously the residences need to be cleaned out. None of that BS of corpses, skeletons and general debris in all homes. They shouldn't even be living in those 200 year old residences. How are they even standing at this point?

Given how no one, not even the people who work for the NCR, and are NCR citizens, wanted to be payed in NCR dollars, because they were worthless, I doubt it.

NV basically [censored] over the whole idea of using NCR dollars/LEgion coins as being a good move for anyone.

No, not at all.

Its literally the exact same stuff m8.

Same way all those buildings in Fallout 1/2 in the ruins of places like LA still stood after 200 years........ plot device.

Depending on how much more influential the NCR becomes in the decades following the events of New Vegas, I think NCR currency CAN become more viable (provided the problem of inflation is resolved).

If the NCR were to stagnate on progress or even regress, then I would agree with that point.

Given how hard Obsidian pushed for the collapse of both the NCR and Legion in NV..... I doubt either will progress in canon.

To which I agree. Getting back on track a bit, I think it would take the emergence of an extremely large, organized, and influential power across the Fallout Universe in order to have a more organized form of currency thus replacing caps.

Seeing as a dominant faction that would unite much the wasteland is nowhere on the horizon, I expect Fallout to take the system of bottle caps to its grave.

The issue that a lot of people are failing to understand is that the United States no longer exists in its original sense. A small state in the U.S. is the size of a country elsewhere. Why would the Wastes be considered ONE country? It could very easily be multiple isolated settlements that have formed their own governments. Hell the Legion was stated to have swept across the East and absorbed all the separate settlements and tribes into its own. For all intensive purposes each state could very easily have adopted their own form of currency.

At AwesomePossum: I had typed out a long list comparing the different issues to show you that it wasn't the same thing, then I remembered it's been discussed to death with you by many other members here. Let's just leave it with differences of opinion.

This is very likely.

No large faction will come to control such a significant portion of the wastes for the same reason fantasy universes never develop gunpowder, even after thousands of years of stagnation at that level, and why basically every game set in or near a large empire/country finds some way to negate the empire/countries presence(be it civil war, or large scale invasion from another place of existence), because it is narratively boring.

That's a very good point, however a large powerful emergent faction will not be easily content with being simply a fraction of the size as the continental US. The idea of manifest destiny is present in both the NCR and Legion; both have lofty goals and both encompass "the wastes" in those goals.

IMO the IDEA of the United States and its united oneness still resonates in many Fallout factions and ultimately shape their larger goals.

The reach of the NCR which was the most successful shown faction thus far only got so far after 120 years (if I am remembering correctly). Unless we have a time skip of another 100+ years then we aren't going to run into this type of issue. The fact remains that bottle caps are an awful form of currency, especially if one is playing a stealth character. It makes zero sense that every isolated location of the wastes would adopt bottle caps. Fallout 2 and Tactics used different currency. New Vegas introduced new forms of currency as well.

Fallout 4 requires some changes and the way that homes, settlements, economy and stagnation is presented demonstrate this clear as day.

Tactics isn't canon, and ring pulls are basically the same thing as battlecops, except in a game that forgot the series is set in a wacked out version of what the 50's imagined the future would be..... which was bottle based, not can based. I am 99% certain that if they ever set a game in the Tactics areas again, its going to be bottlecaps, and ring pulls will be gone, because they are too "modern", which was an admitted problem of the game.

And yes, not EVERY area would use bottlecaps. Honest Hearts showed us that the primitive tribals of the areas the Legion now occupies didn't use them, but they are too primitive to have developed currency at all.

Oh I completely agree that it SHOULD be changed seeing as you excellently pointed out that multiple regions adopting the same currency would make little sense. I just think that Bethesda will not change it seeing as the large portion of their fan-base (particularly the younger generation) knows bottlecaps as THE currency seeing as they've probably only played the more recent Fallout installments.

All that being said; Bottlecaps will most likely be the currency, and the discussion of how brainless that is will persist.

If FO4 has areas that are more civilized and advanced, they need a different currency. I think in Van Buren they used bottle caps but every place in Van Buren was bad off, just trying to survive basically.

Check your information because you're wrong. Tactics is canon, just not in its entirety. The burned game is not canon. The point is that two games thus far have not used bottle caps and an additional game introduced alternatives.

That was their mistake. They decided to shoehorn everything from the originals into their game whether it made sense or not (and most of it did not). I do agree with you though. I'm saying they should fix their errors, but I would bet money they have no intentions of doing so. I also assume we will in some shape or form see BoS, Enclave, Super Mutants and Ghouls again as well.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/fallout-3/800771p1.html

Howard prefaced the demonstration by showing the amount of research and preproduction that went into Fallout 3, noting that Fallout was their target for tone and feel. He went on to comment, "Fallout 2 is also great, but it was a little too nod-nod-wink-wink in its jokes. Too many pop culture references, too much breaking of the fourth wall. The 'go ahead and kill me, I'll just reload and kill you' type of thing was a bit too far, and we prefer Fallout's still-funny, but toned-down humor in comparison." He also elaborated that Fallout 3 takes place thirty years after Fallout 2, but features a new protagonist in a new setting (Vault 101, a Vault underneath the ruins of Washington D.C.). He quickly added, "For our purposes, neither Fallout Tactics nor Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel happened."

It isn't canon, they hijacked the MWBoS's general existence, but nothing else about how they got there or what they did is canon until otherwise noted. It could be made canon later, to various degrees depending on how much they want to import from Tactics, but overall, the ONLY thing canon about it is that somehow, for some reason, a group of BoS went out to Chicago.

BoS-- definitely. It's basically a Fallout mandate at this point

Enclave-- Not so sure about this one. I'd like them to be portrayed like they were in NV as a distant but present remnant of society.

Super Mutants--I hope to heaven we will not see them but my gut tells me that we somehow will.

Ghouls-- Oh yeah. That's a given

I'd like to see The Insitute using their own form of currency, probably some advanced computer money running off of their own versions of Pipboys that they carry around with them.

I will always take variety over having things remain the same the entire time. A powerful warlord in the commonwealth area may set up his own currency in a attempt to greater exert control over the area, a well-off town may repaint pre-war money as their own money to better assert their independence or influence as a merchant power. Or maybe just plain 5.56 rounds will be a acceptable form of payment for some people, especially those wasteland survivalist types.

As absolutely fantastic as Fallout 3 is, it used too many elements from previous games in a attempt to court nostalgia for the old game resulting in all of their excellent lore for the rest of the east coast being sidelined. I'm sure they've learned from their many years developing TES that new lore is always good, having a holding pattern of the old is almost like introducing rot and decay into your fictional universe.

I suspect very little of past games will be in Fallout 4. Fallout 3 made sure to make it clear the Enclave, Meta-Humans, and BoS were heavily limited to the small area the C.W. covers.

People in The Pitt had never even heard of Meta-humans for instance, nor had the Meta-Humans spread even the like 80 miles from the C.W. to places like Point Lookout. Not to mention it was a fairly major point about the Meta-humans that they had basically run out of FEV, and were looking for more.

The Enclave got leveled.... for a second and third time, and Lyons doesn't seem to give a [censored] about expansion.