How about food? Just... really vauge "food". Oregon Trail vague: you have x pounds of "food".

Or in your evil government scenario, in that same vein, food stamps. They've got intrinsic value, they can be easily exchanged...

I dunno, just throwing ideas out there.

How about knowledge.

You can trade what you know for goods. Each trader has specific interests.

This would be on top of and alongside an existing currency or barter system.

Basically, trader "A" likes to explore. Every place you find and tell him about in the conversation tree earns you a discount or freebies. Trader "B" likes to know about the types of enemies out there. Every new enemy type you tell him about nets you freebies. Etc.

Thoughts?

If you have access to modern firearms and ammo, even if the supply of ammo is limited, then why would you revert to something as crude as a muzzle loading gun? Collect casings and reload them. Primers are a bit of an issue, but working out a solution around that problem and reusing existing modern weapons would still be a more sensible solution than tooling up to build muzzle loaders from scratch. Self loading firearms might give you some issues, but a good modern bolt action rifle with a decent magazine setup would be miles ahead of any kind of muzzle loader. (If you have the resources to cast lead shot sized for a muzzle loader and build a new muzzle loading gun, then you have the resources to cast lead bullets and build tools to reload bullets... or just, you know, use the tools for reloading that already exist.)

Well, maybe I exaggerated with the muzzle loading thing

What I meant is a revolver can use significantly lower quality (different sizes) of ammo (jamming impossible, size does not need to ideally equal, in case of a broken ammo you just click again and move on to the next bullet in the barrel) therefore a production of ammo is realisticly possible. Making ammo for UZI or other machine gun would be impossible (ideal size required due to auto feeding, terrible consequence of low quality ammo, jamming is devastating). So, using the most modern guns seems improbable to me.

knowledge

It's a great idea, though I do not think it would realistically (or even semi-realistically work). Knowledge is cool insofar as it has zero weight, and it is immediately useful. But it has the disadvantage of being neither "accumulative" nor "returnable".

You don't like my selfmade coins (mussels, ammo), think the one I gave you is too light? No problem, hand it back, I'll give you another. You think one coin is not enough? Here's another, identical one.

With knowledge, assuming you do not suffer from dementia, there is no way of returning the trade good (short of killing you). Also, once you know something, gaining that knowledge again has no value to you, so you would not trade something physical for an information that you already know. On the other hand, you can always claim that you already knew that information, and it is hard (maybe impossible) to prove you wrong. Even a 5 year old already knows the "I only wanted to check that you know it, too" trick.

And then, in a game, players will inevitably share knowledge out of game, so the currency is worthless.

Unless... unless knowledge is something like "crafting plans" that you can use exactly once (or N times) and then the plan is somehow magically destroyed. That might actually work really well.

Unless... unless knowledge is something like "crafting plans" that you can use exactly once (or N times) and then the plan is somehow magically destroyed

This is exactly what i mean.

For example, you journey to zombieville. In your map a flag is set to say you explored it.

Later you meet and possibly befriend trader "joe". In his conversation tree, joe says "im planning a caravan to zombieville, but ive never been. if someone could tell me what its like there i'd be willing to give some free merchandise... hint hint". Doors open to a new dialogue tree option that can give a discount or a freebie. You'd only unlock that benefit for one use exactly then you'd need to find something else that interested joe, for example once he'd been to zombieland he might want to know if youve seen a place that has lots of lime deposits, or a place that has a large freshwater stream. Once you'd been there on the map, the dialogue option would open up.

There could be lots of these. Some traders would prefer information gathered by explorartion, others information gathered by combat etc to appeal to different players.

Actually entering information and knowledge and proving it any other way but automatically by key/value storage simply wouldnt work but as i see it this way would work very well...

braindigitalis, on 25 Sept 2015 - 07:44 AM, said:

knowledge

It's a great idea, though I do not think it would realistically (or even semi-realistically work). Knowledge is cool insofar as it has zero weight, and it is immediately useful. But it has the disadvantage of being neither "accumulative" nor "returnable".

Knowledge is a currency with an exponential inflation An extremelly poor storage of value medium (with each transaction scarcity decreases) also you can't exchange it (unless we use brain wipe, but even then you can cheat by writing it down ) Similarly love, friendship, revenge, flue can't be currrency since it multiplies for free.

Properties of money:

https://www.boundless.com/business/textbooks/boundless-business-textbook/the-functions-of-money-and-banking-21/money-as-a-tool-123/functions-of-money-568-3194/

EDIT: I hate the broken nested quotes :(

Knowledge is a currency with an exponential inflation

I think you misunderstand, in my original post I said that it should be used alongside, not exclusively as a currency. It would be a system of obtaining perks and freebies. Many other role-playing role-playing games already have mechanics like this and I think they work very well.

The fact that other people are able to give the same knowledge you're "trading" doesn't matter as it's "just a game" and the lives of the other people in the game world are generally irrelevant.

and the lives of the other people in the game world are generally irrelevant

How cruel! No one to fight for the rights of the virtual NPCs... :) Digital oppression I say :)

Since the topic of ammo has come up, I think that taking time, possibly in another thread (and possibly on another forum actually, not sure how well a detailed discussion on making ammo would go over here...) to talk about what it would take to make 'important things' in the kind of game scenario a given game might be using, such as making more ammo after civilization has pretty much ended.

So I would have to say that the hardest part about producing your own ammo is going to be your chemistry, not your physical dimensions. Making a bullet that is sized to a given firearm is really fairly trivial once you're set up for it, and even forming brass casings isn't that hard of a job, and it can all be done with just hand tools if you're really pressed for it. Reliable primers seem to be one of the tricky things, seeing as it isn't a well known technology even among people who deal with firearms.

I don't even own a gun, but I can make a moderately reliable basic black powder simply because I'm a history geek, and I know enough that I could probably cobble together nitrocellulose for a more modern product. (Oddly enough I learned about making that mostly from exploring early photography rather than weapons.) However making a reliable primer? That's rather tricky from what I can see. One of the biggest problems is that the stuff, by nature of its use, needs to be easy to set off, which in turn makes it rather tricky to produce due to how easily you can screw up and do unpleasant things like blowing your fingers off, or worse.

With a bit of googling it appears that lots of people seem to know a fair bit about the making of old black powder, far fewer know much about producing smokeless powder, and fewer still seem to have much to say about the subject of making primers or percussion caps. So that can make producing ammo a rather interesting problem, and could possibly cause tech to split in two directions. Some communities might fall back to using blackpowder in modern style cases with a weird revision on a flint lock and flash pan firing method, and other communities with better chemists producing modern smokeless powder with modern primer caps.

Thinking a little more about the problem and the risk of poor powder resulting in under velocity rounds is leading me toward the idea that a break barrel rifle might have a lot of value due to being able to quickly check that your barrels actually cleared before reloading.

To me, small details make a huge difference in game lore.

I'd love to see baseball cards as a currency in a game.
maybe some sort of discontinued brand or something idk.

i also like the idea of trading amounts of fuel and resources too.

it opens up a lot of choices and gameplay consideration for the player.
maybe you could have like some sort of container system for your currency a la zelda
where the larger containers allow your cap to increase but also the amount you have to carry.