I know, but FO3 and FO:NV are a bit annoying because by the end I end up with a crap load of junk to sell and nobody to sell it to. And one gets used to taking whatever high value things one can get.

It's not really that big of a deal, but I wish they would figure out how to balance things a bit better.
DIdn't FO1 have a vendor that had unlimited caps? Or was that FO2.

Video games are, by nature, broken economies. Especially MMOs. Why?

Most modern video games, and all MMOs, have an unextinguishable supply of money.
Kill something and it drops money, it respawns, you kill it again, it drops money again.. etc.

A video game could be created without a broken economy, if the game did not respawn and all merchants had a finite amount of money that once it was gone, it was gone. However, this cannot be done in an MMO, for obvious reasons.

The difference though, is that a game like Skyrim, you're spending your money until you "beat" the game, then in theory you're done.. if not, well it makes sense for you to have more money than god, since you've saved the world, slayed dragons, etc. and are now wandering about being a weirdo.

In an MMO though, people play for years.. and what this does is it breaks the economy in a different way, I'll use City of Heroes as an example, since I played that one long enough to see the economy change:
When I started, 1 million influence (money) was a LOT. People would run costume contests (a staple of City of Heroes), and prizes would be from 100K to 1M. As of shortly before the shutdown announcement, money was.. uhm.. worth a lot less to us higher level people, we would routinely spend several hundred million influence to equip a character- and that's not even considering the extreme powergamers who would spend several billion.
The last costume contest I saw, I think the top prize was something like 500M influence.

The problem with this is, in MMOs the economy changes.. but the drop rates don't. So if I started playing WOW now that CoH is no more.. I would be going in to it after 8 years of economy frelling, so I would be super poor, by comparison.. Unless of course I was able to find some method of making money off the super wealthy high levels.

MMOs these days use what's called a 'gold sink' to try and prevent the economy from becoming too frelled by forcing high level players to spend lots of money on .. something, but those only work a small amount. Most MMO players, once they figure out how to make money in their MMO.. they contribute to the further breaking of the economy, even if not intentionally.

Have the vendor repair your items to full condition to give them more caps.

Also, regarding Dead Money (MAJOR, but VITAL spoiler!!)

MAKE SURE to bust the Casino when given the chance, IE, when it "comes online". DO NOT PROCEED until you do. Once you progress in the quest chain, you CANNOT come back to bust the Casino, and you will MISS OUT on the ENTIRE POINT of the DLC.

I CANNOT stress this enough. I typically ignore walkthroughs and the like, and have no qualms "missing" rare items and such in DLC content, but in this case, I went back and replayed over 10 hours of game just to make up for having made this mistake. BUST THE SIERRA MADRE. TRUST ME.

Very interesting question.

I have to admit that I play RPGs to break the economy.
After I'm filthy rich I normally stop playing the game altogether.

I stopped playing Skyrim when I hit the million septims with additional almost a thousand of refined Ebony Ingots in my house. The most valualbe metal (for those who don't know)
Oh and the jewelry...
That was fun.
But I couldn't play the game after that. Because all quest givers still treat you like an poor miserable bum. Especially the thieves guild.
I joined the thieves guild because I wanted to practice thievery as an art form. As kind of elitist thing, rich people do in their spare time when they can't drive a Ferrari (or ride a dragon)
But all of the thieves treated my like an poor idiot needing the money.

With my million septims I would have bought a private army of mercenaries.
Erradicated the Thalmor threat and established my rule in Skyrim while bribing the Imperium not to get involved.

I feel like classic RPGs intentionally had the economy as one of your phases of progression. At some point the economy is a huge burden, later it's an easier burden, and even later it's not a problem and your focus is elsewhere.

It does feel a bit antiquated though at this point (though I don't really mind). There are some other games I've enjoyed that simply have no economy. Use what you find, and that's it -- no shops, for example.

Another approach is that by, for example, Dungeon Crawl. You can find money, and you can buy stuff. However, you cannot sell things, and the game is relatively focused, so you rarely get all that rich, and in any event the number of shops is fairly limited and their stock is limited, so buying things from them is one of the ways to empower your character, but it's not at all certain that it will help you (depending what kind of character you're playing). Also there's no way to munchkin it, because you can't drag and sell loot, and if you were to play long enough to have simply FOUND enough gold you'd either have died (permanently) or won the game.

Online multiplayer games have more robust economies (EVE) but they tend to require vastly more time investment to get anywhere in the game. It's a trade most players wouldn't make in a single player game, where there's not enough drive to keep playing for as long periods.

Nice idea! You get an axe with axe stats at the weight of a dagger, but would the ability to use it come from the dagger (or short sword, I think) stat, or from the axe stat?

I will definitely have to try this.

You should be careful with this, as using a constant-effect item enchanted with a bound effect for that same slot (e.g. weapon replacing weapon, helm replacing helm) can cause crashes and even savegame corruption. Make a backup save beforehand, or use a long on-use enchantment instead. Bound spells have a pretty low cast cost, so you should be able to get a HUGE effect if you're using on-use with a high-quality item.

Thanks for the tip. I have had bad luck with save game corruption in games before, mainly Fallout 3 and NV. It certainly taught me to not rely on one save slot.

Ammo has no weight on normal mode, so I usually just bought that all out too, it was about the same as caps at that point.

I never did find a vendor with endless caps, they eventually restock, if you fast travel enough maybe you can get them to do it faster, sounds tedious, though.

The Jury-Rigging perk lets you use cheap-o armors to repair the nice crap. There's probably some exceptions I'm not remembering, but once you have nearly unlimited caps it's not an issue.

I use the ammo trick too. I will collect any ammo and sell the stuff that I don't use. For instance, I don't really use any flamers or missile launchers. I use that ammo as a "cap extension."

I don't remember seeing the jury-rigging perk. Do you recall the prerequisites?

90 Repair, so if you didn't train repair you wouldn't qualify for it. With how many books there now are with all the DLC, it shouldn't be any great investment anymore, though.

The current real world economy isn't really resistant to min/maxing, in fact even most general economic schools of thought aren't even theoretically that robust in resisting the kind of 'snowball' effect being discussed in this thread. Currency by its nature as 'stored' effort/action can be leveraged to gain advantage/profit, and as such creates a self perpetuation of growth (not to say such a cycle is guaranteed for any given individual of course but to mimic the "someone just takes what you've got" mechanic without it either being an MMO like EVE Online where there really are just other people doing it or a rather brutal random events generator. In any even the ability to save/load renders a lot of economics a bit less meaningful because the risk element becomes the "check if this works" element.

All that being said some games are clearly better at this than others, the best one I'm aware of is, as mentioned above, EVE Online but I get the sense you were perhaps looking more for a Pen & Paper style RPG than an MMO style one?
If that's the case the Amber system is quite good for this as the nature of it's setting and setup makes min/maxing far less meaningful, so while it'd arguable whether it's actually harder to do the effects of min/maxing are at least diminished.

0.02 FRN
Legion
I just decided to fist fight my way through the game then pretty much ignored the monetary systems entirely ;)
Punching out Deathclaws and Behemots is pretty satisfying to me.