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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 3590925" data-attributes="member: 50322">Magical Medieval Society can get you started.I know nothing about Greyhawk.  In real life, taxes have historically been levied by the king, city, church, or major landowner extending services to the tax base, and the basis of the valuation varied.  The European church traditionally took one-tenth of the crop or other income of each parish family.  Mayan cities taxed farmers in their sphere of influence at the rate of one-third of the crop.  A European landholder with a keep would charge cash or crop rents to the farmers on his land, but his tax to the king might be limited to military service except in times of crisis, when a king might call a special one-time tax based on anything he pleased - a penny per person in the district, a 5% tax on the value of every pig, a sale tax for a set period, a road toll, anything. Rather than go through the complex process of assessing individual properties, the city of London used to tax buildings per window, which is why so many of its buildings were lightless, airless hovels.  In the 17th century, the city of Paris would charge per floor counting between the ground and the eaves, so now we have the mansard roof, which sets the eaves one floor below the usable top story.If you want your city to function it will have to have some public services and there will have to be some way to generate funds for these services.  Which services a city regards as essential and which methods of garnering those funds the population regards as reasonable vary a lot.  As in the examples of London and Paris above, tax evasion shapes the style of the city.  If you have a modern-style property tax, with property owners paying based on the market value of their houses, you'll need full-time tax assessors who are also real estate appraisers, tracking the market as it goes up and down, and land developers and speculators will be in a constant arms race to convince the assessors that their property is worth little and their customers that it's worth quite a lot.  You may or may not be able to find a hook in that, especially if you have con-minded players.Modern real estate appraisal (excuse me, the day job is in an appraiser's office so I know some basics) relies primarily on three approaches to value:  Cost, Sales Comparison, and Income.  The Cost Approach is based on how much it would cost to construct the building, which sounds simpler than it is but can be assumed to be simple in your game.  Land, materials, and labor would be the primary costs.  The Sales Comparison Approach involves comparing similar recent sales to the subject property; it's the only way to appraise vacant land in a city and is the most common way to value residences.  It's very important, in the Sales Comparison Approach, to find properties as similar as possible, as for every significant variation (size, location, physical features like flood plain, conditions of sale, property rights conveyed, amenities) an adjustment must be made and these are subjective.   The Income approach is based on the amount of income that a property could generate and is most suitable for rental properties, as it's trying to estimate the income generated by the property rather than by any business operated out of the property.  For simplicity, if your PCs ever go into agriculture or mining you might want to use the Income Approach for that, too.  The worth of the property under this approach is determined by selecting a capitalizaton rate (the higher the better) for the area/type of property and capitalizing the Annual Net Operating Income at that rate.  A property that generates a net income of $10,000 capitalized at 10% would be worth $100,000 under this system, which is very old.  The Romans used this method, calling it "so-many-years purchase."  The above example would be "ten-years-purchase" as it would "pay for itself" in 10 years.  Remember, don't drive yourself crazy with this. D&D economics doesn't make sense and will not make sense, and it's up to you to know where to draw the line worrying about it.  Suit the market to the kind of experience you want your PCs to have in their venture as property owners and give them fun things to do related to it.  If the sort of building they want is realistically out of their reach, place a "haunted house" on the market and make taming it into an adventure.  If you have someone who wants to design and decorate the building, build it in Sims or an architectural program, work out how many servants they need and where they all sleep, and is having fun with it, let 'em play.  If they want an HQ like the Baxter Building but don't want to think about maintenance, let them hire a competent steward and tell them they'll have to sink X GP per month into the place to keep it presentable, then let it run itself.</blockquote>

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