Fantasy world and taxes?

I had a very unexpected "adventure/campaign" present itself due to tax issues. The group had collectively located and built up a private community in a "frontier" area. Then due to a hook I came up with I mentioned that the nearest Kingdom was making strong efforts to "annex" the part of the Frontier they were in. The players would have nothing to do with it. Why? Taxes. They did not want to have to pay taxes to anyone. So they supported every group that was resisting this Kingdom, all the way from the Kobolds up to the Giants and everything in between.

They pulled off assassinations on military leaders and then even on nobles within the Kingdom, they even started supported any and all political opposition that cropped up due to how costly this "annexation" was turning out to be.

They ended up spending what would have paid for about 300 years of their taxation, but "BY THE GODS!! WE WILL PAY NO TAXES!!"
 

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The groups I've been in have used pretty much all of the above. Most break down rather quickly. If the model is at all 'realistic' it stops being worth thinking about by around level 3. If it is based on loot taken from a 'dungeon', how do the tax men know how much you got that way if you are travelling from place to place constantly? As for tithes, if the world is typically polythiestic, shouldn't you be giving to all the temples of the various gods you've prayed to recently?

In the long run, we found that encouraging the heroes to be heroes was the best way to get them to spend their money. (Alms for the poor!) That, and quirks. (It's amazing how much a 'dandy' character will spend on clothes, and a gourmand will spend on food!)
 

I'm inclined to think that medieval taxes would have been limited by the ability to manage the data.

Basically, we can do income taxes and sales taxes nowadays because everybody is required to report and track that. The accounting processes are robust enough to query how much you should pay and track that you paid it.

i suspect if you go back far enough in time, the processes and technology would have made it too cumbersome for such ideas to exist and therefore, simpler things to tax would have been defined.

A tax agency is going to prefer taxes on things that are easy to track and hard to be missed. Income taxes are easy to dodge in a primitive society, because everybody will lie about what they earned, and once the money is spent, it's hard to prove. Whereas property is sitting right there.

Things that don't move or change hands much (like actual land) would be good things to tax. It's not so cumbersome to have a list of all properties, their owners and their size and thus their value to be taxed. The taxman then just rides around to each area and checks off who pays and who doesn't which then earns them a personal visit.

ports and gateways are a good spot to tax incoming goods (tarrifs). If you're bringing in a barrel or more of anything, odds are good it's to sell it. So, it gets taxed when it arrives because its pretty easy to inspect the cargo and look at the tax sheet and charge a fee.

Governmental services are likely to be taxed, because as you use it, the money is routed straight to the government. So getting certain permits, using certain resources (like Imperial Portals). Roads might be taxable, if it really is a major road that actually solves a transit problem. odds are good, the locals will avoid the toll booth (getting on and off and the right spots or just using back roads). But the real value of major roads is for visitors (caravans) in using a more secured, better built road.

Citizenship might be taxable. It might be expected that each man have to pay X amount (maybe by trade). it stands to reason that each person be required to register with where they live (thus being on a list, so they can be verified to have paid the tax). This concept seems within the technology level, both the Bible refers to tracking of people (the reason Joseph and Mary traveled to Bethlehem) and in 1000AD or so, part of the big scare was the Domesday book, which was a big census undertaken for the purposes of taxes.

it would also stand to reason, if each citizen is registered to a town, that in order for them to relocate, they would need papers authorizing them (consider that if serfs are pseudo-property, the owner is transferring an asset). the request for such travel papers could be taxed.

You might also consider the organized crime "Protection" model. The king demands 1000GP from each lord for taxes each year. The Lords hit up their people with whatever excuse they want, to extract at least 1000GP from them (probably more, to cover their own annual expenses). This may or may not be levied as specific taxes, or just weekly protection payments from shop keepers. Thus shop keepers are motivated to make a certain minimum each week, so as to ensure they can pay their protection money.
 

Citizenship might be taxable...

This is what I did, only it was enforced jointly by the imperial pantheon of "The Five Gods." Even then, the players balked, and said no way that all the people complied. Normally, I'd have even bought their arguments. But in this case, the hidden "6th God" had been reincarnated for centuries as the emporer, and his subordinates in the church had instituted "geases" to enforce this (and other key desired) behavior, when one freely took the citizenship oath.

BTW, about 3/4 of the way through the campaign, when war and attrition and experience had put two PC in control of a central hubs mage guild and church, and they had the bard dig around in the archives for help during a siege, and this all came out, along with all the nefarious things the empire had done to keep it going--oh, it was priceless. It started to appear to them that maybe they were caught helping the bad guys against the worse guys. But by the time we finished, and everything came out, those same players agreed that it had been necessary.

Oh, and if that seems too mean--well, it was the players who gave me the idea, when the intersection of what they collectively said they wanted in the campaign pointed to some such setup. For the next campaign, cleaning up the mess, they did vote for a much more Wild West style of government. :D

Back to the main topic, I like to think that the nature of taxes in the world says something about its nature. If that nature happens to be hidden, so much the better ...
 

[MENTION=8835]Janx[/MENTION]

You make excellent points. There's just one thing that makes me wonder:
Why not tax magical items? That would be a goods tax that would fit into a medieval model. It would be interesting if you had pay tarrifs for magical items. How come I never figured this out before? ;)
 

[MENTION=8835]Janx[/MENTION]

You make excellent points. There's just one thing that makes me wonder:
Why not tax magical items? That would be a goods tax that would fit into a medieval model. It would be interesting if you had pay tarrifs for magical items. How come I never figured this out before? ;)

Unlike land, which is generally considered immobile and has a history of being well tracked on who owns it, items are a bit more nebulous.

With magic items, you have to know I have them to tax them. The logistics to track that gets a bit more complex. Yes, a wizard could be involved to hold person on me, scan me with detect magic. But I could also hide/disguise some of my gear, or otherwise avoid it. When would you tax it? What happens if I discover a new sword next week in the dungeon? If you only check on specific days, I'll be making sure to "find" that new sword after the check.

tracking individual items increases the amount of data that has to be handled. Maintaining a list of people and a list of property ownership seems well within the means of bookkeeping for the period. tracking item ownership scales the data significantly. And since items are more likely to change hands, that's more documentation. And all of it is on paper.

Envision the work to maintain your character's inventory on paper, but for potentially every NPC. And then ponder just how the government would get such information reliably.

Ultimately, I see government taxing things at chokepoints. Seaports, gates at mountain passes and land ownership. Because those are places that are relatively hard to avoid, and easy for the tax man to do an assessment without a lot of special work.
 

IIRC, kings and nobles back in the day could throw on special taxes for about anything they chose, if they needed cash in a hurry... and you'd think that news getting out that a group of PCs hit the mother lode in a dungeon somewhere would spark the avarice of every noble within 100 miles. Back in 1E days, I just used training costs to go up in levels as shorthand for upkeep and taxes (since it was rather ridiculous that someone would charge umpteen thousand gp for a week's training or so)... it wasn't perfect, but it saved a lot of annoying bookkeeping...
 

with my model of probable taxation methods (not based on historical fact, but extrapolation of how much my year of Accounting sucked, my background in database applications, and my vague recollection of tax history), I'm avoiding taxing PCs directly, unless they do something specific. This keeps things simple, until they do something complicated.

Thus, I have no recurring tax management (level training or equipment taxes) to deal with. But if the PCs should come into ownership of the land, I simply look at how much the land should generate in revenue, and apply a tax to it and declare they need to pay that each year.

If the PCs should sail into port with their boat full of loot, once again, time to pay the tax man.

If the PCs should need to use a portal or major highway, time to pay the usage tax.

Otherwise, they go on their merry way, oblivious to the tax system I haven't fully defined.
 

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