Banks & Taxes: rules/suggestions?

[aco175]

I like the idea about having support people act on behalf of the PC's. Maybe some sort of investment guild, ar even just have several guilds available to the characters to invest in. Each guild takes the money and does things with it to help themselves and the characters. Characters can earn interest, equipment, and stock in a guild. This leaves the DM with ideas for adventures and lets this part of the game kind of take care of itself.

Just be careful with how often the party looses their money and how many times they are cheated, because no other party will opt into this after too many times.

Characters can also buy into merchant families. Maybe not just one guild, but a whole family of interests. You could have a struggling family become supported by the party and later they owe them. Payments can come in the guise of money, information, titles, jobs, all sorts of things.

 

[dvvega]

IMC I have an extremely simple taxation system (I think anyways) ...

I took the list of community types in the DMG and started at 0% for the biggest and increased by 5% for each community smaller.

This was the flat tax rate for everything in that community.

So for example a Metropolis would have no extra charges on purchases, neither would the shopkeeper try to cheat you on the sale value of your gear.

In a smaller place, however, items might be 10% dearer and they might be less willing to give you full price for something.

I also used this for the material costs of magic item feats and craft skills etc. At first players reacted a little badly, however they soon realised that it encouraged travel to larger cities to get good deals, and the odd on the way adventure and so forth.

It also increased the value of copper and silver since they would use the "chaff" monetary reward to pay for taxation margins.

As for banks, one of the religous institutions IMC is the bank. They offer a flat 5% conversion fee of money into notes and vice versa. A note issued in a church for 100gp would cost 105gp and be transferred to 95gp at the other end. However this loss of funds was countered by the magical protections set up on the notes (like a bar code) and you had a guaranteed exchange into money for the local area wherever you went.

If you invested money in the church in large quantities they offered 5 year terms to gain interest as well. And so forth.

D