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Message: <blockquote data-quote="taliesin15" data-source="post: 1940093" data-attributes="member: 22058">I don't recall medieval banks being a way to store wealth; more a place that had a lot of wealth that made more by loaning it out. Banking for the masses wasn't the norm. Paying interest on money in the bank was essentially your cut for your money's leaveraged wealth.Extrapolating out to a larger scale, you don't deposit money into a bank, you *buy* into the bank. Your money buys you shares of the bank's total capital. Realistically speaking, a banks' equity should be mostly non-cash and of the interest bearing form (meaning liens against property, stores, merchants, etc).Robbing the vault essentially takes the petty cash; the portion of capital that isn't earning its keep but needs to be kept around to handle the daily operations of the bank.*as far as medieval realism, yeah, this makes sense--however, I was, going into this thread, hoping to find a spread of different banking paradigms, some based on history (like yours) and some based on myth--someone just early mentions a Dragon's hoard (let's use Smaug's as a reference point)--seems to me that the historical medieval banking paradigm you outline here is one end of the extreme, the other being the Smaug-hoard, and that there's got to be a number of examples in betweenWait, do you mean a toll (pay this to enter the city) or a tax on sale?*sure, that, but originally I was more or less citing that little section in DMG 1.0 "Duties, Levies, Tolls and Taxes"--besides road tolls, bridge tolls, sales taxes and the like, that you are suggesting here, I think there's also notions duties and levies that function more or less like capital gains taxes, or like the value-added tax--adventurers are taxed not just when they sell the ten short swords, but anything they bring into the city in the first place gets taxed, and if they don't want to be taxed everytime for the armor they wear, they need to keep the receipts...etc.The flip side is the town will have to provide some value for the onerous tolls/taxes making it worthwhile. Realistically speaking if one town decides to stop charging fees for people with orc-loot, they get all the traffic from the orc killers and get a massive boost in the economy with a lot of supplemental taxes income (call it the taxation loss-leader). Or do you end up with a tent-town outside the real town to serve the people who don't want to pay the city fees? (Sounds like a great setup for the thieves guild)*just for grins, what I've done is have taxes for arms/loot deferred if adventurers bring proof to the Citadel that they have killed Orcs, etc.--IOW, for each pair of Orc-ears, taxes are deferred for each suit of armor and set of weapons*I've started reading the archived thread The Common Commoner, which has some relevance to this thread</blockquote>

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