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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8812174" data-attributes="member: 18">There's a huge problem with this, though.None of these examples expect to psychically intuit how much you're supposed to give. Rather it comes from cultural norms of a culture you're part of, and if you don't know them, people are helpful! Not vague nor likely to "rebuke" you.When you go to church, first off, in the UK, at least at Anglican churches, yeah nobody expects anyone but regular church-goers to give, so assuming your experience applies worldwide is pretty funny given you're criticising people for being insufficiently cosmopolitan. More importantly, you can see what other people give, and outside of Roman Catholics, it has absolutely no real relationship to their wealth. Some people are cheap, some people aren't, and people who are earn 10x what the next guy does don't usually give 10x as much (again, in RC churches this is different given you're supposed to tithe - i.e. give 10% - a fixed value I note). Anyway, you watch what others give, and it is easy for you to learn what's appropriate, if you're not outright told by a friend - it's part of assimilating into the culture of that church.US tipping culture specifically exists because the US refuses to pay staff properly. It's a specific US phenomenon. And guidebooks and the like explain it and give the expected values. You're not stopped by the TSA on entering the US and asked for a "guess a number" amount of money. Can you imagine? The TSA are bad enough as it is.Gift culture are not the same thing as this, and it seems like tangent to even bring them up. Again, only the least cosmopolitan and most ignorant members of those societies are going to be offended or "rebuke" foreigners who don't immediately "get" the need to give gifts (I'm sure there's no shortage of people like that, but it doesn't make them big or clever).There are dysfunctional and corrupt cultures where you are indeed expected to bribe everyone and yeah you don't know how much unless you have some local with you who knows the expected values, but that's not a good thing, and it harms the function of those cultures severely.This whole thing would be completely different if, instead of you being expected to "give at the door", you were ushered in, and perhaps taken aside and it explained that it's expect that you pay to help the upkeep of the society, and they like suggest some amount as appropriate (y'know, like a tithe!).Sure, but what he's really reacting to is an issue the FR has in a number of places.Societies are presented as just/reasonable and modern-Western-like (like the lack of sexism/racism, no caste structures, etc.), but they actually have laws that are so profoundly at odds with the "common law" sense of justice and right/wrong that is deeply built into most English-speaking cultures that it's absolutely shocking when that comes out.The problem is that Waterdeep is presented as basically "New York" or the like, "The Big City". But Waterdeep is actually more like Singapore. A bizarre fascist dictatorship (in this case the fascists are a council, but they're still a dictatorship) masquerading as a normal society, and with insane punishments and insane laws that you're just not going to see coming if you're from a country with an entirely different approach to justice and law-breaking.If societies like Waterdeep were presented better as what they are (and I'm Ed Greenwood or whoever did a good job in his own campaign), instead of this being dropped on Very Surprised players, who are used to the more typical common law approaches to justice of much of western Faerun, we'd have less of an issue.Myself, I remember noticing that Waterdeep had completely insane laws and was a fascist dictatorship (or whatever euphemism one prefers for that) when I was reading the boxed set, luckily before the PCs in my FR campaign ever went there, and I was able to present as deeply creepy and messed-up as it should be presented, so they didn't expecting resembling "justice" from the laws there.</blockquote>

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