Thursday, December 15, 2022

Taxation

On page 90 of the original DMG, Gygax spent more than half a page going over the use of taxes to bilk the player characters of their income.  I've always appreciated that page ... not for its fleecing opportunities, but because its a rare glimpse into the campaign world as a functional society.  This was unusual even at the time ... later on, as D&D morphed into the player-minion that it's become, guidelines such as these vanished entirely.

In some manner, I've included taxes, fees, tolls and tariffs in my game world ... but recent work on the wiki has expanded the possibility of how these things can be incorporated.

The coin symbol table I proposed a week ago included a dead link for "taxation."  That's been removed and replaced with "socage," as well as 13 new links for additional kinds of taxes added to the player's world.  And it must be said that whatever players might think about encumbrance, I think we can be certain they like the idea of taxes being introduced into D&D a lot less.

But ... as the page shown argues, the value of taxes in the game is not as Gygax conceived, but rather as an enticement for players to buy land, clear forests, build up properties, achieve local status and set themselves up as landlords.  The players are naturally rich, and taxes FAVOUR the rich.  Taxes do not exist to make the rich poorer, as Gygax foolishly imagined, but to make rich people richer.  We have plenty of evidence of that.

In this regard, taxes are a great opportunity for building game adventures.  We can start with taxes as a plot device, such as was done in the Blues Brothers, pushing the players to take extreme actions to raise enough money quickly, in order to save an orphanage ... or whatever they can be induced to care about.  In a grander sense, however, there are opportunities for players to increase their reputations by paying the taxes of other people.  There's always a noble family down on their luck, who need a mere 40,000 gold pieces to save their family's reputation.  There's always hundreds of ordinary land owners who have to get through the season somehow, who would be tremendously grateful to the party for coming forward and being generous.

Remember that one of the reasons murder hobos like Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and others were looked upon graciously by a rural population is because these crooks were generous with the wealth they stole.  They poured out money to all sorts of people, who were then willing to lie copiously to ensure these murderers got away scot-free.  The murder-hobo players can take a lesson from this.  Not only does it help with narrow escapes, it builds up fame and opportunities in other ways ... developing an army, for example, as was done by numerous rebels in the 15th and 16th centuries.

DMs, of course, often hate this sort of thing.  DMs hate it when the party is rightfully popular, or if the party cares less about greed and more about invulnerability.  DMs count on NPCs to tattle-tale on parties ... it sucks when the NPCs are tattling on the good guys.  So if you're a player trying this gambit, count on the DM pretending that Jesse James' notariety was never "a thing."

If you a DM, however, keep in mind how much fun this can be for the players.  And how much fun they can have building their own tax farms and paying corporations, giving them something more to fight for than just another dungeon.

There's one other possibility as well:  taxes are a good way to pull at a decent player's heartstrings.  True, if your players are the sort to slaughter all the orc children as well as their parents, because "no one gets out alive," you won't get far with this ... but many of the rules associated with pre-17th century taxation is grisly to say the least.  Bad year on the farm?  Too bad.  Still taking all your food.  And making you a slave for ten years.  And selling your ass to someone who'll make you work on a plantation in the tropics until you die of diptheria.  Tough luck.  Don't worry, we'll sell your children too.  Into prostitution.  Because we can.

When this becomes the players ... when the players see that their actions perpetrate this kind of system ... the discomfort is rather consuming.  Nor is it a matter of losing money they don't take from their own people, because they'd rather not charge taxes if it means making their tenants destitute.  It's the other nobles coming forward and challenging the party for NOT being cruel, vicious bastards, encouraging the party's tenants to talk about their wonderful overlords, reminding other peasants what shit heels the other overlords are.  This kind of thing starts a national crisis.  Next thing you know, all the peasants will rise up.  Then where will the rich be?

Some games don't have room for this kind of "adventure."  Mine certainly does.  I rather enjoy forcing the players to confront the question of what's more important to them ... defending a status quo they hate, or risking a national crisis that they'll be responsible for starting.

Decisions, decisions ...

8 comments:

  1. When I converted your trade system to my game, I tied various kinds of taxes to the number of banks and markets in a given region. I have found it to work fairly well.

    My players also have quite the love/hate relationship with taxes; taxes are their major source of income, but they hate the tax collectors. Gives a lot of room to work with..

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  2. I love it.

    They can either bitch about taxes or find a way to make the system serve them.

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  3. Splendid work lately, Alexis. I'm visiting the wiki several times a day, and gobbling up all changes.

    I'm glad you're addressing this specific topic. Taxes happen to be on my mind: I recently made a script to calculate the total income of the barony my players are in, accounting for the baron's vineyards, wheat fields, tariffs on certain imports that enter the kingdom in this area, and what I now know to be "socage." It calculates vineyards -> grape yield -> barrels of wine, multiplies the result by my trade tables' entry for the nearest market's price for a barrel of wine, subtracts off the cost of labor ... and so on.

    However, with your latest series -- and as I transition my mapping to 6milers instead of too-damn-laborious 2milers -- I've been thinking about how to incorporate coin symbols into such calculations. The script was an experiment for this one barony, and I'd have to do lots of bespoke calculations for each region to which I adapted it -- plus I've no friggin' idea yet how I'd script the *expenses* side of the barony's balance sheet in an equally logical way.

    All of which is to say, I'm definitely looking forward to discussion on the Tao about tax/income potential based directly on coins (and maybe local references?). My players are due a big gift from this baron and it'll probably be land.

    Have you tried using your trade tables in any kind of revenue calculations before? Even if you threw it out, I'm curious to know what has/hasn't worked.

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  4. Oh, one more thing... In October or so, I had a small success -- with money in general, not taxation, but it seems relevant.

    In the first or second session of this campaign, the broke-ass PCs were most bothered by having to pay a couple silver a head to enter a city's gates.

    Several IRL months and some fifteen sessions later, they re-entered the same city. As they paid the fee, the fighter turned to the ranger and said, "Remember when that used to be a lot of money?"

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  5. Maxwell,

    The trade system simply isn't viable for that purpose. It was meant to produce prices, not an economy, and deliberately overlooked details that would have been necessary if an economy had been the goal.

    Just now, I'm too interested in writing descriptions for things rather than in finding their application. I prefer to leave that to the players. But I may change my mind in years to come.

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  6. Very good post. I'd hazard to guess few DMs (and fewer players) see taxes as an opportunity for adventure.

    Been studying the history of "vagrancy" the last couple days (given the prevalence of the local homeless population recently) and the results have been interesting, to say the least. Even more so when you start considering how the LAWS AGAINST vagrancy (which existed in England since the 14th century) would definitely apply to your average band of PCs. Yet another reason and opportunity for adventure.

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  7. Maxwell, regarding the players finding they'd become wealthier. Your Monday comment was eaten until just this evening, weirdly. I think something's coming apart with blogger.

    You've hit on a HUGE feature of role-playing games that gets grossly overlooked. Players get stronger. They get wealthier. Of course they bitch early on, about everything, because they're players. The company and many DMs see player bitching as a bug. It's not. The privilege to bitch, the right to bitch, is a fundamental characteristic in human nature. It isn't evidence that the game's broken, it's evidence that the players CARE.

    Unfortunately, by treating it as "the game's broken," the reason to complain is designed out of existence, giving the players less reason to care ... and the game becomes a wretched, boring thing.

    Well done You, making your players put up with it, until they realised that things change.

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