One of the more interesting aspects of the Fallout 76 PvP system are bounties. If you kill a player who doesn’t agree to participate in PvP, the penalties are severe; a bounty is put on your head, prompting other players to start hunting you down for the reward. To make matters worse, that reward is actually taken from your own cache of Caps. However, what happens if you can’t afford to pay your Fallout 76 bounty?
The Fallout 76 Bounty and PvP System
If you kill another player who hasn’t opted in to PVP, you immediately get a Fallout 76 bounty. This singles you out on the map to all other players. If another player hunts you down and kills you, they get to claim a bounty which is automatically taken out of your Caps. At present, a lot of evidence for how this system works in practice is anecdotal. Only players who have pre-ordered the game have so far been able to play in the Beta, and the Beta has only been available for a few limited windows.
One question which may have been answered now is what happens if you don’t have enough Caps to fund your own bounty. A Reddit thread posted recently by u/TommyBoyTC refers to a mechanic which seems to have been unknown; “I was looting around a junkyard, and somehow I accidentally stole a player’s item in the process,” says the Redditor; “I discovered shortly after that there was a claimed workshop nearby so I think it had something to do with that… [and] ended up with a 30 Cap bounty, but I only had 5 Caps on me. When I was killed not after, I lost those 5 Caps as expected, but I also received an active effect that reduced PvP damage by 50% for 4 hours. It was called something like ‘debtor’s penalty.'”
This is certainly an interesting discovery. First of all, it suggests that there are other ways to get a bounty besides killing other players. Additionally, however, it also seems to answer the question of what happens if you can’t afford your bounty. It seems to be the case that you are punished with a lengthy debuff. It’s unknown if this will be exactly the same in the case of killing another player, though.