What do Taxes look like?

[Quertus]

I thought about posting this in the 3e forum, as it is likely to have the best answers… but it's also the system where I arguably care *least* about the answer.

So, it's probably easy to Google an answer for many modern nations for tax rates (I believe I once heard roughly 50% as an estimate for socialist nations), population, and average income.

But what about a medieval nation (not unlike D&D)? Or a futuristic one (like Star Wars)? What kind of funds are we looking at here, per capita?

And where does that money go? How much would a nation save by not feeding an undead army? By not paying an undead army? By not needing infrastructure, like roads? By having "trustworthy" or even "perfect" accounting / efficiency? How much would it cost to increase their military? Their education? To upkeep droids?

And, of course, given my example questions, are there any *existing* systems which provide a good abstraction for handling such issues (in a transparent enough way to handle even radically different baseline assumptions, like "Borg collective")?

[False God]

I mean, ultimately you're asking a question that there is no clear answer to, that the lore (like Star Wars) simply ignored, and that could have many different effective answers depending on the size of the nation, the needs of the nation, the wants of the nation, and the attitude of the nation (oppressive, collective, laissez-faire, etc...).

Keep in mind that if you are googling for answers, sold percentile numbers are not likely representative of "income tax". They are representative of the taxes that people pay across the board. Food taxes, gas taxes, income taxes, goods and service taxes, so on. Income tax may be 25%, but the impact of the other taxes represent an effective average total tax of 50%.

There's a reason the budgets and tax codes of major nations can be hundreds if not thousands of pages long.

[Imbalance]

It's sorta this star...fish, with four legs, one of which is square...ish...

Oh...taxes...

That's going to be some form of tribute levied by the ruling class and collected by corrupt officials backed by extortionate thugs if in a medieval fantasy setting or directly siphoned credits in a futuristic one.

[Tanarii]

I generally use the Karameikos standard by default: 25% income tax & 5% sales tax. IIRC it's supposed to be assessed quarterly but I change that up depending on how fast the PCs have cash come in.

I've had a few games go off the rails over the years due to tax avoidance issues. Even had one where it resulted in the players ruling a criminal empire instead of delving into the underdark as planned. :smallamused:

Plus the 10% tithe of course. If someone wants to declare their PC an atheist in most worlds, that carries its own set of problems.

[Satinavian]

I thought about posting this in the 3e forum, as it is likely to have the best answers… but it's also the system where I arguably care *least* about the answer.

So, it's probably easy to Google an answer for many modern nations for tax rates (I believe I once heard roughly 50% as an estimate for socialist nations), population, and average income.

But what about a medieval nation (not unlike D&D)? Or a futuristic one (like Star Wars)? What kind of funds are we looking at here, per capita?

And where does that money go? How much would a nation save by not feeding an undead army? By not paying an undead army? By not needing infrastructure, like roads? By having "trustworthy" or even "perfect" accounting / efficiency? How much would it cost to increase their military? Their education? To upkeep droids?

A medieval "tax rate" would be far far lower. 10 to 20 percent are not far off. But at the same time far more of the average income would go to necessities of life like food because everything needs more work with medieval technologies. So even such a small tax rate can seem high and people might struggle with it.
At the same time, a feudal gouverment is eytremely cheap but does not provide a lot of things we expect from a modern gouvernment.

Considering those points, savings through magic in a feudal gouvernment would not actually make that much of a difference because feudal tax is so low in the first place. However applying magic to the tax base would make a ridiculous game-changing difference.

To illustrate :

assume 10 peasant families can feed themself and 2 non peasant families. Now you exchange the half of all non peasant jobs with maintenance-less undead and and you can now provide for 1 additional job for each 10 peasants. Nice, but not that much of a deal.

Now use magical green revolution instead and say that with magical fertilizer and magical farm equippment 1 peasant family can feed 5 non-peasant families (still far less than modern agriculture can.) Suddenly your non farm related economic capabilities are stronger by a factor of 25. That means, you can have 25 as many soldiers, scolars, builders, administrators etc. You will probably ditch feudalism and use proper bureaucrats and full-time soldiers instead, likely make schools for the whole population and do a lot of other stuff with all that power.

[Anonymouswizard]

But what about a medieval nation (not unlike D&D)? Or a futuristic one (like Star Wars)? What kind of funds are we looking at here, per capita?

For medieval or other period settings I tend to assume tax regulations miss mercenaries because the authorities are more concerned with taxing goods. Plus the people hiring adventurers are normally the ones paying them, they just pay thrir mercenaries a little bit less and count that as tax. Exact rates if they come up tend to be around 10% taxation, 10% donations to religious institutions.

For futuristic settings I assume electronic banking and payment, plus limited AI used to calculate and automatically pay owed tax. The reward values the players are given are post-tax, which ranges from 0-50% depending on the amount they earn and the local politics (and let's not go down that route). In my settings if you own a ship the cost of paying for maintanance per head tends to push you into higher tax brackets.

Automation, whether magical or technological, could or could not have a massive effect. It really depends on what you're automating and how much.


The only setting I know of that really bothers to mention taxation without it being a source of oppression is Lensman, and due to the politics and resources at play the levels are at maybe a couple of percent (I forget the exact figure as it's been a while since I read the book, the government still has enough of a surplus that they let unattached Lensman have the rightsa to rare mineral deposits they discover).

[The Random NPC]

I remember reading something that said medieval taxes weren't percentage-based. So if you were a blacksmith, your taxes would be like 10 swords, a barrel of nails, and 200 arrows per year. It also said many blacksmith's wives would learn the simple smithing to take care of the tax obligation.

[Beleriphon]

Depends. In D&D which is vaguely late medieval to early modern then taxes could be person (a head tax), per acre of land (property tax), per item (a sales tax), or just about anything else somebody could think of to extra money from the populace. It was probably collected in food/grain rather than coin since most farmers didn't deal in hard currency but they had food. And it wouldn't be a percentage, it would be a hard number of bushels or whatever. So if the farmer had a crappy yield this year they still owe Lord Takeyourstuff however many bushels of grain, regardless of their own subsistence needs. If Lord Takeyourstuff is a good lord he'll let it slide until next year because dead peasants don't pay taxes in the long run, if Lord Takeyourstuff is a bad lord well that's where Robin Hood comes in.

At higher levels taxes might be levied to a lord in days spent on campaign, which could be offset with coin or food.

For modern stuff taxes are as complex as modern taxes are. Star Wars the Trade Federation could be paying a 0.5% corporate tax rate to Naboo and they get pissed because it goes to 0.55%. Because the Trader Federation are jerks.

[Silly Name]

For feudal societies, you are unlikely to find data on income tax or the like because it didn't exist as we understand it.

For example, in feudal Europe one way the peasantry was "taxed" by their lords was through corvée, meaning they worked "for free" for a certain number of days a year. Another was giving the lord a percentage of what they produced (wheat, flour, etc), usually expressed as X tenths or twenties, or as a fixed number of goods to provide.

Nobles, on the other hand, could be "taxed" by being expected to provide a certain number of armed men, archers, knight and so on for the king's military campaigns. And, of course, they were also expected to fully provide for the king and his court whenever they visited (many feudal rulers didn't have a stable capital city).

And, of course, the actual method of taxation varies depending on period and place. Feudalism wasn't an unitary system that worked the same everywhere or that never changed. If you move to Renaissance Italy, coin circulated a lot more and there were even banks! So that changes how thing work and the way nobles and rich people are expected to contribute to the city.

[Telok]

Also the feudal periods in areas with economically significant trade saw a fair amount of tolls associated with bridges, roads, canals, gates, and docks. Essentially anywhere that bottlenecked you cound set a guard and collect a tax. What was taxed, who was taxed, and what it was used for all varied.

In some places it could be by horse/oxen/axle (merchants & wealthy) and the proceeds go mainly towards road/canal upkeep & keeping banditry down. A lord could give a ferry crossing to a vassal and require it to be defended, maintained to support & transport 100 horsemen at any time, and be a decent sized depot/fortification during wars, plus succor & support to anyone with a letter from the lord. A town could place a consumption tax at the gates based on how wealthy you looked plus assessing a "peace tax/bond" for weapons or armor.

Historically some places taxed based on building ground floor square footage or on the number of glass windows. Some places citizenry (even peasants, which means different things in different times & places) could be "taxed" with keeping arms & armor plus being part of a militia. The people governing often taxed what was nailed down in some fashon and "who pays" just worked it's way around in prices & trade. But access & permission could be taxed too. Letters or liscenses letting someone buy/sell particular goods, exempting them from tolls, or even just being allowed to pass through an area, were a thing to be bought/rewarded.

[Mastikator]

The way I run taxes in my game (scifi) is simply that whatever the players buy, they buy at 100% price. Whatever they sell they sell at 50% price. The difference represents taxes.

Edit- the reason I do it in this reductive way is that any extra amount of book keeping would not make the game more interesting, but it would drag it down. Pacing is just as important as verisimilitude.

[Telok]

The way I run taxes in my game (scifi) is simply that whatever the players buy, they buy at 100% price. Whatever they sell they sell at 50% price. The difference represents taxes.

Edit- the reason I do it in this reductive way is that any extra amount of book keeping would not make the game more interesting, but it would drag it down. Pacing is just as important as verisimilitude.

Reminds me, in one sci-fi game a pirate station had an "air tax". When a ship docked they paid a bunch of money to an account. People coming & going from the ship were tracked. A set amount per person per minute was subtracted from the account. If the account hit zero the cyber-slave "peace enforcement" guards got transmitted pictures of the offening ship's crew and started shooting to kill. Weirdly, despite how public and abusable the system was, the PCs never did anything but keep paying up.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The way I run taxes in my game (scifi) is simply that whatever the players buy, they buy at 100% price. Whatever they sell they sell at 50% price. The difference represents taxes.

Edit- the reason I do it in this reductive way is that any extra amount of book keeping would not make the game more interesting, but it would drag it down. Pacing is just as important as verisimilitude.

I have something similar for adventurers. Those fixed PHB prices? Those are widespread "adventurer pricing", run by the Adventurer's Guild (the organization that monitors and enforces adventuring laws). That's the prices they've guaranteed that they'll buy/sell those items to merchants at. This way, the extra goes as profit to the guild, and they cover any shortfalls. Other than that, adventurers don't get taxed much. Each nation handles its own taxes (on non-adventurers) differently--

Wyrmhold sets a levy on the clans and tribes that make it up every year; they extract that in coin or goods however they choose.

The Serpent Dominion has a more feudal take, with chains and hierarchies of payment.

Asai'ka has a temple tax, plus protection money to the Benevolent Organization.

Etc.

[Asisreo1]

I thought about posting this in the 3e forum, as it is likely to have the best answers… but it's also the system where I arguably care *least* about the answer.

So, it's probably easy to Google an answer for many modern nations for tax rates (I believe I once heard roughly 50% as an estimate for socialist nations), population, and average income.

But what about a medieval nation (not unlike D&D)? Or a futuristic one (like Star Wars)? What kind of funds are we looking at here, per capita?

And where does that money go? How much would a nation save by not feeding an undead army? By not paying an undead army? By not needing infrastructure, like roads? By having "trustworthy" or even "perfect" accounting / efficiency? How much would it cost to increase their military? Their education? To upkeep droids?

And, of course, given my example questions, are there any *existing* systems which provide a good abstraction for handling such issues (in a transparent enough way to handle even radically different baseline assumptions, like "Borg collective")?
If its futuristic, they'd be in the form of income taxes and sales taxes. There wouldn't be a tax collector every month, they'd just take things through the system.

If its medieval, taxes aren't money at all. It'd be the produce they create (well, assuming its a farming village or something). They'd tax a certain amount of pounds every season, or they'd tax a percent weight of all your produced agriculture (more consistent but less practical). In cities, there'd be tax collectors going business-to-business and door-to-door and also be fairly aggressive when it comes to having taxes paid on time or taking possessions (sorta like the IRS but more pissy).

[Pauly]

For medieval periods income taxes weren’t paid, the i frastructure and bookkeeping for it didn’t exist.

The major source of regular income were taxes in commerce. Fees to use roads, fees paid per unit of goods. It’s also the source of the term “robber baron” which refers to barons in the Holy Roman Empire who would set up toll booths at bottlenecks on nominally free roads.
Which is why smuggling was such an important way of life.

For emergencies a tax would be levied. For example each Duke pays 10,000 gold, each lord pays 1,000 gold and each Baron pays 100 gold. Squeezing the orange too much leads to Runnymeade, so kings were loathe to squeeze too much.
More common was obligatory service. Working classes would provide labour for civil purposes, and larger organizations/minor rulers would be levied for military manpower.
Kings could defray their expenses by visiting their subjects who by hospitality obligations would have to feed and maintain the the King’s entire retinue for the duration of the visit.

Wars were also a source of income. Looting enemy kingdoms of their goodies. Elizabeth I of England is remembered as “the Pirate Queen” in Spanish because this was her preferred method of filling her chancellory.

Generally speaking royalty in the middle ages were much less wealthy than commonly depicted in fiction and RPGs.

[Tanarii]

For medieval periods income taxes weren’t paid, the i frastructure and bookkeeping for it didn’t exist.Asset tax then. That seems like a natural extension of a property tax once towns with wealthy merchants started cropping up, extending it to all valuable assets, not just land.

[Pauly]

Asset tax then. That seems like a natural extension of a property tax once towns with wealthy merchants started cropping up, extending it to all valuable assets, not just land.

As I understand it, it was more a rank tax, which is also a de facto land tax. Your real estate i,e, the fixed immovable part of your estate, not the part that can be moved or hidden.

Merchants were taxed on the movement of goods, either by tolls or by duties.

[False God]

Asset tax then. That seems like a natural extension of a property tax once towns with wealthy merchants started cropping up, extending it to all valuable assets, not just land.

The infrastructure and bookkeeping still didn't exist. What is an "asset"? Who gets to define it? How granular is the system? Where are the documents kept? Who counts the assets? How often are assets counted? How do asset counters get from A to B?

There is a level of bureaucracy to taxation that simply didn't exist in the medieval time period.

Which is why so often taxes were seemingly random or punitive. How much was taken wasn't a matter of mathematical calculation based on a variety of closely analyzed variables, but on whims of lords or those tasked with taxation enforcement. This is made worse by the people of the land simply not understanding why they were being taxed. They often saw no benefit from it, only a loss of time, product and money. There was no book they could read to see if they were being taxed "properly", heck, they probably couldn't read.

There's a reason the peasantry revolted time and again. Unfair, random, punitive systems with poor enforcement and no clear rules are typically taken poorly to even by the most simple of folks. The taxes may seem reasonable or necessary from a top-down point of view, but the people in charge often had little knowledge and even less involvement with the taxation process. And said process was again, deeply flawed for a variety of logistical, social and economic reasons that weren't solved for hundreds of years.

[Bugbear]

Well, D&D is not not much of a feudal system...it's a lot more closer to 17th century America. Most citizens are 'freemen', there is no government social support system, no real law enforcement beyond a few miles of a city or town, lots of tree trade, lots of taverns, and so on.

There is noting like Income tax...simply put, few people have 'regular income' anyway. Plus people are very spread out and keeping track of people is nearly impossible.

Any tax, or any payment for anything, could often be payed in goods and services as there was little money (and the world does not have 100 trillion gold coins).

Most early taxes were for government services. These included issuing court papers, keeping records, arresting and punishing criminals, and issuing licenses. Some of that payed the offical, and the rest was for roads and schools.

The most common tax was the straight up Wealth Tax: if you had money you payed a tax on it. And the poll tax....if you wanted to vote, you had to pay the tax.

Import and export taxes are common, but only for high value items.

Most of the rest of the taxes were on individual things: A chimney tax to pay for a fire patrol for example. And things like the infamous Stamp Tax, a tax on any written document.

The vast, vast, vast majority of what we might call "public works" today were done by private individuals. A guy with money would build a bridge over a river.....and then charge a toll tax for anyone to use it. Eventually lots of local governments picked up this idea.

[MoiMagnus]

For ancient/medieval settings, there are three main ways to handle taxes that I know of:

(1) Time-base taxes. Everybody owns one month of work to the state per year, either of their own work (artisan), or as worker for public projects (or soldier at war). This is well adapted for centralised government, though taxes that do not rely on money can but the government in a tight situation in case of unexpected wars.

(2) Feudal taxes. The king taxes its vassals. Vassals tax their own vassals. Etc down to farmers. Taxes are more land-based, and are part of the vassal contract, and are quite similar to the tribute that one would give to a possible invader for them to not invade you. Taxes on trading and merchant are pretty arbitrary and variable (taxes on bridges or travel, etc) as wealth is still assumed to be generated by land, not by trading. Developed cities can locally have a more modern tax system.

(3) Specialised economy. This is mostly viable for city-states. The state itself is granting a service they have a quasi monopole of, and which is recognised and paid for around the world (like religion, or some unique luxuries or strategic resource).

Note that in a medieval fantastic universe, tax bureaucracy is made much easier if the tax collectors have access to circle of truth.

[Martin Greywolf]

Every time you see a tax comparision, be assured that things are left out of it. Sure, your income and property tax are such and such, but what about healthcare? It's something you need to buy no matter what, so universal healthcare state will tax you for it, while one without it will make you pay for it as if it was a product. You are still left with the same amount of money in the end, even if tax numbers do not match.

Now, for medieval taxes. Pretty much all of you are wrong on some if not all counts.

Who taxes you

Pretty much everyone. One village will usually pay taxes to the owner of their land, to the local church and to the nearest city with market rights. This assumes stable situation, and if that isn't true and several nobles claim they own the land, your village is in the wonderful position of paying their taxes several times - or having them taken if they refuse.

How often are taxes paid?

Depends on the industry. Farmers will be taxed at harvests, of which there are several during the year. Livestock will be taxed for religious holidays and before winter, lumber will be taxed by taking a share of the profits, as will mining. Trade is taxed through tolls, collected at toll stations (most often at bridges, towns and mountain passes), some of which may well be illegal, and if you want to sell your goods in a city, you will have to pay up more as well.

These are all standard taxes, in addition to those, everyone with jurisdiction (e.g. king, noble, church official) may well decide to levy a special tax for something like getting married, war breaking out or building a new castle or bridge.

What form do taxes have

Every kind of stable tax usually has a tradition of what is in it. Produce from farms, eggs, chickens, pies, portion of mined ore and so on are common - but so is cash. Property taxes especially are often paid in cash, and a lot of taxes in towns and cities are as well.

Trade taxes are either done in cash or by taking a portion of your goods, and sometimes by forcing you to sell a portion of your wares in the city itself.

Craftsmen taxes are paid mostly in cash, although you do see a provision of "the blacksmith will come to shoe my horses on these days of the year" in addition or instead of it. Special taxes for craftsmen are cash only if the craftsman's craft isn't useful to what you're doing - if you're building a castle, carpenters and masons will be taxed by coming to work on your castle.

Final taxation form to mention if the training and outfitting of troops - this can get very, very expensive, but at least you can use them as city guards when the folks in charge don't need them.

When not to demand special taxes

Good rulers tend to avoid the special taxes whenever they can - a carpenter is likely to work hell of a lot better if you're pying him for that castle he's building. That said, necessity or greed get the better of people all the time.

Mercenary taxes

Mercenaries often have homes and families and are paying taxes as part of that.

If they don't, they are almost free of first-hand taxation, although they will put their money into the local economy the fun way (via inns and houses of ill repute) none the less. What is taxed, in a sense, is theeir loot. Medieval soldier pay is kinda low - sure, you have free room and board, but still - and the expectation in offensive wars is that you will plunder and supplement your income. This also happens to motivate you to perform better in the whole stabbing of people area.

This plunder is, in organized armies and outfits, usually pooled together and everyone gets their share - and some of that share goes to the guys in charge, which makes it a kind of a tax, if you think about it.

So what is the total medieval tax rate?

Really, really depends, but about 30-50%. This is... pretty comparable to modern taxes, actually, with USA hovering slightly under 30% and France reaching almost 50% if we look at tax revenues vs GDP.

Problem is, once you start to pay one tax several times because both Ottomans and Habsburgs say your village belongs to them, that number kind of skyrockets.

Historical examples

Now for some medieval tax thingies. Square brackets containt my comments.

For every 100 settlements, they will most nobly outfit a soldier in full panoply of war.


Next they will pay tenth part from the gold mines, and from silver and other metals are compelled to pay eighth part.
[...]
It is our wish they are freed from paying property taxes and other tithes.



The stable tax for towns of Prešov, Sabinov and Veľký Šariš was 150 hrivnas of silver in three predetermined days as dictated by 1299 privileges. From 1347 onwards, the division of this sum was Prešov with 54 hrivnas, Veľký Šariš 53 and Sabinov 43.
[...]
This tax could be lowered or nullified if the economic situation in towns was bad, sometimes even for several years, and this tax could be kept inside the cities and used for construction of walls and other structures as well.
[There is a lot more info in this particular work, but I'd have to translate it and... I don't wanna, I just woke up, leave me alone]



[discussing building of a massive number of castles]
This relates to Béla’s strategy. Regardless of how it ideally would be carried out, it was difficult to build castles in the
east-central parts of the country simply because there were not many people to provide the pre-requisite taxes and labour
required for such projects; the distribution of castles in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Hungary could, to some extent,
represent which areas had a healthy population and economy after the war and subsequent famine. Fügedi noted the
distinction between the “enthusiasm” of nobles who were granted incentives to build castles, increasing their own power
vis-à-vis the monarch, and the ordinary populace whose frustration at bearing the labor and tax burden sometimes comes
through in the extant records (Fügedi 1986: 52–53).


In 1212 Andrew II confirmed the ownership of this property and designa-
ted its boundaries. The last part of the document states that the property contains a further
15 villages, which were not under his judicial authority. However, the monarch gave him
the right to the royal tax (tributum). Every household in these villages had to annually
pay him the so-called forest tax (pro tributo silve) in the form of one oko (about 54 litres)
of grain, two hens and five pieces of cloth. This was a specific payment collected from
the royal property in the furthest part of the County of Szabolcs near the river Tisza.



Tenths [a tax where they take one tenth of whatever it is they are taxing] shall not be taken in silver, but rather paid in wine and grain, and if the bishops were to protest, we shall not support them.

There is also Medieval Trade and Finance by M.M. Postan, but it has no proper summaries and it is a dense enough book to put me to sleep, so I shall spare you.

[Brother Oni]

The infrastructure and bookkeeping still didn't exist. What is an "asset"? Who gets to define it? How granular is the system? Where are the documents kept? Who counts the assets? How often are assets counted? How do asset counters get from A to B?

There is a level of bureaucracy to taxation that simply didn't exist in the medieval time period.

The earliest medieval era taxation record I know of, is the Domesday Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book) completed in 1086 in England. While ostensibly a census, the census was taken so that William I knew how much he could tax his new country; for example County Durham is missing from the Domesday book as it was the exclusive right of the Bishop of Durham to tax it.

Older forms of taxation exist, like the corvee (unpaid labour by peasants on the lord's land) and tithes, which date back to First Dynasty of Egypt (~3000 BC), book keeping existed to ensure who paid and who hadn't and receipts on papyrus and limestone flakes have been recovered and documented. This tax receipt has been dated to the 22nd July 98 BC (https://www.livescience.com/50115-ancient-tax-receipt-photos.html).

Off the top of my head, the taxation system was also well documented in the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (4th - 6th Century AD) - in fact, taxation was why Hua Mulan (of the Ballad and pop culture fame) went to war instead of her father (conscription to the state instead of paying taxes).

[Tanarii]

As I understand it, it was more a rank tax, which is also a de facto land tax. Your real estate i,e, the fixed immovable part of your estate, not the part that can be moved or hidden.

Merchants were taxed on the movement of goods, either by tolls or by duties.
Understood. I wasn't trying to be historical, but instead going with a logical extension in a way that it would affect PCs that make their fortunes by tomb robbing for ancient coins and treasures.

The hidden wealth thing hadn't occurred to me, but that'd certainly explain why "count up and value everything you own then tax a fraction of it" wasn't a very popular historical method.

Edit: regarding toll taxes on trade ... they're why everything was shipped. There is the classical trope that it was impossible to get ship building timber across Europe by land, despite plenty of canals in some areas in the later renaissance period.

Not to mention that D&D isn't really that medieval. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?626581-Why-is-D-amp-D-still-Medieval) :smallamused:

[KineticDiplomat]

This one of those ones where you can “just make it up”. If you want a scholarly answer, Seeing Like A State has several hundred pages on how a government assesses and implements metrics, taxation being a prime one, and The Great Leveler says a lot about how excess productivity gets routed around in a society.

So, why just make it up? Because despite the late medieval trappings, D&D land is not really designed to be a consistent economic and political world, its meant to hang adventures on. Even the gentlest poking is going to rip gaping holes in how society works, so you’re building a house on sand if you try to “realistically” say how this would work out. Quicksand.

That said, if you want a go anyhow: for a whole lot of human history, there wasn’t much in the way of excess productivity. The biological poverty line of calories was a chief concern. And woe be to the monarch even in the early Industrial Age who thought otherwise...

As a point of comparison, during the thirty years war it would take between 2-4 farms (I saw one estimate of that at 143 people) to keep one infantry soldier in a Swedish regiment. That is one guy with a uniform, a musket or pike, and nothing particularly exciting about him. The Romans, with functionally all of civilized Europe, North Africa, and a good chunk of the Middle East never got past half a million men - including auxiliaries- in their army and usually it was much smaller. By the time a farmer feeds himself and his family, the miner gets fed, the blacksmith gets fed and a bit of niceness, and on and on...the raw calories needed to equip and sustain a soldier represent a vast investment in an era of muscle powered agriculture. “Snap your finger and soldier” would be such a departure from this that it’d be an Outside Context Problem. Basically the only limit on how crucifyingly powerful it would be versus a renaissance strategic outlook is based on whatever limits you as the GM felt like imposing.

Then we get to the actual manner of taxation. As related to the above, how you tac changes as excess productivity changes. As that goes up, people have more to give and the practical cost of taking it from them - how much does your tax apparatus cost - goes down relative to the overall production in society. The upper limit for this that we seem to have reached in modern society is a psychological one. After around 50%, evasion by all means skyrockets even if it would be more economically rational to pay. There is something in our brains that outright rebels at that point. So for you, again, this becomes an OCP for medieval-trappings land. The level of productivity actually on the table is so vastly different from the world of farms and dukes that you can more or less say whatever you want.

[Cluedrew]

To Quertus: What are you planning on doing with this? I could try to repeat every semi-credible factoid about early taxes I've heard (most have already been said) but I don't really know where you are going with this so I don't know what to focus on or how to frame it.

Or even what ideas to make up and suggest because my gut is just telling me you aren't going to be playing an actual historically accurate game.

On Taxes in Kind: I believe the formal name for taxes paid in labour of your trade or the goods you produce is taxes in kind. This is the only one I remember that hasn't come up yet. Has anyone mentioned that ancient romans used broken pottery as receipts yet?

[SandyAndy]

So, this will have to be for a low-magic setting. But here are some facts about ancient and medieval tax systems.

Taxes weren't usually levied on individuals, but realms. The King would not tax the peasant farmers of the Barony of East Tiddlywinks. Rather, he would demand a certain amount of gold, military capability, and often grain from the Baron who would gather those things from around his realm.

Peasants would not usually pay monetary taxes. Most peasants never had any money, so they would pay something like 10% of the food from their harvest to the local lord and have the rest to themselves. For most of history, food production was so small that even a 10% tax on it was considered extreme. Malnutrition and starvation had to be balanced against the lord's need to maintain his forces and stronghold.

Lower class craftsmen would have produced a but of their own food but mostly bartered their work for what they needed. This also applied to taxes; instead of paying a certain measure of grain they might be expected to provide a certain amount of goods to their liege. For example, a potter might have to send a dozen clay pots to the castle every month and the blacksmith might have to spend one day a week shoeing the lord's horses.

Wealthier merchants and craftsmen would have different taxes. They would be freemen and so not obliged to pay tribute/taxes as a vassal. But they would have to pay property taxes. If they own a shop or a house then they would have to pay money for the privilege of occupying the lord's land.

Special taxes would often be levied in order to raise money for specific projects or to encourage certain behaviors. Maybe you need to pay a silver piece to cross a bridge. Or the Baron has levied a tax on crossbows or wagon wheels. Many medieval jurisdictions had taxes on windows. These are the kind of excises that lead to unrest because they feel targeted and often raise the levy higher than what can be afforded.

There were also privileges and taxes associated with class. Nobles obviously has special privileges and also special obligations. Scholars and clergy were often exempt from local taxes and obligations, owing their fealty to their school or church. Freemen/Yeomen had their own class as did peasants and serfs. Each of these classes had obligations to the other classes (called estates in the medieval world) and each had privileges afforded to them by the legal system.

This was more common in the ancient world but often a kind of pseudo-corporation would be hired to collect taxes. The government would take the highest bid and the corporation would keep any excess taxes they collected from the area assigned. This was less common in the medieval world where an overlord would collect his duties directly from the vassals.

Those are just some things to consider. If you just take one or two of those factors and use them to build your tax system then your world will feel pretty lived-in. A lot of them can also be used as plot hooks for adventures. I could do a whole other post on modern, pseudo-victorian, and futuristic taxation but it doesn't really fit with this post.

[jayem]

To Quertus: What are you planning on doing with this? I could try to repeat every semi-credible factoid about early taxes I've heard (most have already been said) but I don't really know where you are going with this so I don't know what to focus on or how to frame it.

Or even what ideas to make up and suggest because my gut is just telling me you aren't going to be playing an actual historically accurate game.

On Taxes in Kind: I believe the formal name for taxes paid in labour of your trade or the goods you produce is taxes in kind. This is the only one I remember that hasn't come up yet. Has anyone mentioned that ancient romans used broken pottery as receipts yet?

Somewhere in the messy boundary between taxes and rent, but each Virgate (30 Acre) had to provide 104 days of service (I'm not sure how that fits in the big picture). Interestingly IIUC Christmas and Easter are 'returned' ("Quitences"). These are accounted (in at least one case) as "Works".
There are also a lot of funny things, there are payments to not be Reeve, Court-Judges expenses are covered on the ground.
Custom payments include Hens and Eggs.

[farothel]

In medieval times the taxes of peasants were mostly in goods (a percentage of the harvest or a number of crafted items). That was paid to their lord.
I also remember they had an extra tax of 10% of their harvest to the church. I'm not sure what it's called in English.

If you want to have a tax system in a roleplay, check out Legends of the Five rings. There they have a full tax system in one of the books (can't immediately remember which one) which can probably be adapted to other systems.

[Faily]

I don't really care much for thinking about taxes in games. I play RPGs for escapism, not reminders of my daily life. :smalltongue:


Have had some encounters with it in gaming though. Briefly on adventures, and with managing a realm (using Pathfinder's Kingdom rules)... and in the latter case I just put it at the lowest rate possible and don't think too much about it again.

[Beleriphon]

Off the top of my head, the taxation system was also well documented in the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (4th - 6th Century AD) - in fact, taxation was why Hua Mulan (of the Ballad and pop culture fame) went to war instead of her father (conscription to the state instead of paying taxes).

That was fairly common in the medieval period of Europe as well. Pay some cash or provide men to go to war. Your choice.

[Beleriphon]

As a point of comparison, during the thirty years war it would take between 2-4 farms (I saw one estimate of that at 143 people) to keep one infantry soldier in a Swedish regiment. That is one guy with a uniform, a musket or pike, and nothing particularly exciting about him. The Romans, with functionally all of civilized Europe, North Africa, and a good chunk of the Middle East never got past half a million men - including auxiliaries- in their army and usually it was much smaller. By the time a farmer feeds himself and his family, the miner gets fed, the blacksmith gets fed and a bit of niceness, and on and on...the raw calories needed to equip and sustain a soldier represent a vast investment in an era of muscle powered agriculture. “Snap your finger and soldier” would be such a departure from this that it’d be an Outside Context Problem. Basically the only limit on how crucifyingly powerful it would be versus a renaissance strategic outlook is based on whatever limits you as the GM felt like imposing.

That's interesting. I never thought of that. A pre-industrial society, hell a pre-crop rotation society, can't have armies over a certain size because they can't feed everybody involved in equipping the army along with the soldiers.

I suppose that's why we can have such massive non-food related industries. It only realistically takes one person to run a gigantic grain farm when using modern equipment.


Then we get to the actual manner of taxation. As related to the above, how you tac changes as excess productivity changes. As that goes up, people have more to give and the practical cost of taking it from them - how much does your tax apparatus cost - goes down relative to the overall production in society. The upper limit for this that we seem to have reached in modern society is a psychological one. After around 50%, evasion by all means skyrockets even if it would be more economically rational to pay. There is something in our brains that outright rebels at that point. So for you, again, this becomes an OCP for medieval-trappings land. The level of productivity actually on the table is so vastly different from the world of farms and dukes that you can more or less say whatever you want.

I helps if in a medieval like setting you can just roll up and take what is owed. That's very much more of a loan shark vibe. I have a hard time imagining the IRS sending armed thugs and beating dollar bills out of somebody.

[jayem]

That's interesting. I never thought of that. A pre-industrial society, hell a pre-crop rotation society, can't have armies over a certain size because they can't feed everybody involved in equipping the army along with the soldiers.

I suppose that's why we can have such massive non-food rel
The other way was to time your wars for the seasons (I think there's an argument that Trojan war had elements of this).
Related there was an effective natural tax of 1/2 (going down to 1/4) of your crop being needed to plant next years crop.

(what slightly baffles me with that is given this just how relaxed they were about H&S, I know to some extent some of the costs are externalised)

[KineticDiplomat]

As an aside re: the IRS or other state based agency. Ultimately they can. They can seize your assets and jail or otherwise punish you via the state. States do it very politely and - in the west at least - with a legal process that we think of as fair, but ultimately they are the legitimate employers of coercive power. Occasionally someone tries to buck this and finds out there’s iron in there after all.

E.g. a major search engine company that will remain unnamed tried to tell France that they wouldn’t comply with certain regulations because they were supposedly technically impossible and morally wrong in the company’s eyes. France informed them that was fine, it was still the law, and every time a French citizen searched without those changes they would fine that company and start seizing assets based in France to pay those fines. Wouldn’t you know it, it wasn’t technically impossible or too morally onerous to make those changes after all...

[Brother Oni]

That was fairly common in the medieval period of Europe as well. Pay some cash or provide men to go to war. Your choice.

Except the organisation was completely different and there wasn't any choice in whether men or money was provided. Broadly speaking, the Northern Wei followed the draft service system (chaiyi fa).

At anything below the county level, state bureaucracy was terrible, so they left the organisation at the local level. Villages were subdivided into administrative blocks of 110 households called a li. A li was further subdivided into blocks of 10 households called jia, based on their tax bracket (high, middle or low). One jia, usually the richest, would be designated the administrative jia and each household would do a year's shift handling the admin duties required. The other 10 jia would take turns spending a year performing the levy labour, so collection of taxes, providing men, etc, but weren't otherwise required to pay taxes. On their 'off' years, a jia would have to pay taxes, but weren't obligated to perform service except for military conscription.

Of note is that the 'on duty' jia could render any sort of services as required by government, from the county level, all the way up to the imperial government; they were used for any and all roles required, such as doormen, guards, messengers, cooks, patrolmen, jailers, stable grooms, warehouse receiving men, canal watergate operators, and clerical assistants. This wasn't confined to the jia’s home region, but to wherever the government needed a vacancy filled.

A similar sort of system was in place for military conscription, with 2 able adult males from a jia being required to form a 'small guard unit'. Five of these small guard units formed a "large guard unit" and 5 large guard units formed a Superior Guard. These guard units typically performed militia duties (nightly patrols, stopping banditry, capturing rapists/murderers/arsonists, that sort of stuff), but all the other households not eligible for guard unit, were eligible for being called up as auxiliaries.

It's also important to note that the Northern Wei wasn't really a 'proper' Chinese dynasty (eg Han, Tang or Song) as those had a much different system for dealing with invading barbarians, which I can't get into on this board.

[Beleriphon]

As an aside re: the IRS or other state based agency. Ultimately they can. They can seize your assets and jail or otherwise punish you via the state. States do it very politely and - in the west at least - with a legal process that we think of as fair, but ultimately they are the legitimate employers of coercive power. Occasionally someone tries to buck this and finds out there’s iron in there after all.

Sure, but its not like its the first response of the government to just roll up and take your stuff.


E.g. a major search engine company that will remain unnamed tried to tell France that they wouldn’t comply with certain regulations because they were supposedly technically impossible and morally wrong in the company’s eyes. France informed them that was fine, it was still the law, and every time a French citizen searched without those changes they would fine that company and start seizing assets based in France to pay those fines. Wouldn’t you know it, it wasn’t technically impossible or too morally onerous to make those changes after all...

I'm still not clear on how they managed that since as far as I know such search engine company doesn't own any assets in France. It would be like the France deciding I owe them money, under whatever legal standard they have, and expecting to collect. I mean if I never go to France what are they going to do?

[snowblizz]

I'm still not clear on how they managed that since as far as I know such search engine company doesn't own any assets in France. It would be like the France deciding I owe them money, under whatever legal standard they have, and expecting to collect. I mean if I never go to France what are they going to do?
How do you make revenue when you provide a free service? You charge someone for it. In this case the privilege of better visibility. Who are going to be paying for that? Local companies because your whole spiel is you can provide a very accurate breakdown of a target customer. Where do local companies pay those fees? To a local bank, because that was more convenient than forcing them to make a international moneyorder (also these can easily be blocked). And hey presto, local asset that can be seized.

Furthermore if you want to talk to and sell to local companies you likely need a local branch because understanding a foreign culture is hard and you wanted to make the most money. Now there is another type of local asset that can be seized. And like this it goes on.

France may decide you owe the money, and you are right, if you never go there what can they do? However, your grand-tante just gave you a large legacy to inherit, that crux is you have to visit France to pick it up. And no, it will not be sent to you. This is the situation as it usually goes.

In other words, any international company doing business internationally will have a number of local assets because that's just more convenient if you aren't specifically looking to skirt local laws. And even then be prepared to find that "no monies for you" is going to be the end result.

[KineticDiplomat]

In this specific case, the company owns 3 local training hubs, an AI research center, and a 1,000 employee administrative office in France, and has contracts valued in the billions with French companies.

[Quertus]

Thanks to everyone for so many amazing posts! This is part of why I love the Playground so much.


To Quertus: What are you planning on doing with this? I could try to repeat every semi-credible factoid about early taxes I've heard (most have already been said) but I don't really know where you are going with this so I don't know what to focus on or how to frame it.

Not unlike difficult terrain, I realized that "taxes" was something that I… underutilized in my games. And I figured that there was a lot about how taxes were handled throughout history, and how they theoretically could be handled in various settings, that I simply didn't know.

Boy did I ever underestimate just how much I didn't know!

So, what I'm going to do with it… is be able to *do* things with it! It's like a whole new color I can paint with now.


It's also important to note that the Northern Wei wasn't really a 'proper' Chinese dynasty (eg Han, Tang or Song) as those had a much different system for dealing with invading barbarians, which I can't get into on this board.

I'm not gonna be able to sleep if I don't at least *ask* - *why* can't you discuss it here? Political? Religious? Sexual? More graphic than Vlad the Impaler?

I'm struggling to imagine what kind of tax would violate forum rules… or, rather, what *category* of forum rules could possibly be violated by discussing taxes.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I thought about posting this in the 3e forum, as it is likely to have the best answers… but it's also the system where I arguably care *least* about the answer.

So, it's probably easy to Google an answer for many modern nations for tax rates (I believe I once heard roughly 50% as an estimate for socialist nations), population, and average income.

But what about a medieval nation (not unlike D&D)? Or a futuristic one (like Star Wars)? What kind of funds are we looking at here, per capita?

And where does that money go? How much would a nation save by not feeding an undead army? By not paying an undead army? By not needing infrastructure, like roads? By having "trustworthy" or even "perfect" accounting / efficiency? How much would it cost to increase their military? Their education? To upkeep droids?

And, of course, given my example questions, are there any *existing* systems which provide a good abstraction for handling such issues (in a transparent enough way to handle even radically different baseline assumptions, like "Borg collective")?

Taxes are a substantially complicated subject [and can be further complicated in a D&D medieval world].

You might have different rates on a lot of things [IE: property, heads of livestock, capital gains, etc], and in a semi-feudal society like a D&D world some part of your taxes might be owed in things other than money.


In D&D games, I usually assume my players pay no taxes on adventuring spoils. The basic logic is that tax collectors had a hard enough time determining how much you owed on the other things they taxed [like counting windows in a house for example], adventuring spoils are incredibly liquid, and record-keeping isn't remotely at modern standards, therefore while the state/their liege would dearly like to tax them on their spoils, it would be essentially impossible to assess or enforce. [Not that they won't try of course, but things like generous donations of part of it to your liege can grease the gears enough to get them to try less hard.]
Other things are taxed if I feel like it and it's relevant.

In my Sci-Fi games, I usually assess an amount in taxes, usually informed by a percent of what they made in money and have in expensive items [like spaceships] but mostly made up by me on the spot. Developing a tax code isn't my job as a GM.



As a side note, in a game I play in, various characters have either had to pay taxes, or in my case, collect taxes and set tax rates, so that's been neat.

[Brother Oni]

So, what I'm going to do with it… is be able to *do* things with it! It's like a whole new color I can paint with now.

Here's a little titbit for you - because the administration for government service was done at the local level, the people calling up Father Hua would have been his neighbours or other people local to the area, and would have known that he had a dodgy knee and no sons, so they would have shuffled him off to a nice cushy, but still necessary job, like clerk or jailer.

Therefore unlike the original Disney version where Mulan was trying to save save her father out of filial piety, in the 'real world' version, Hua Mulan headed willingly into an active warzone because she wanted fight and kill people (and in the original Ballad, it's implied that she went with her parents' blessing as the Northern Wei were very much more gender equal than other Chinese dynasties who were more into feet binding their girls).


I'm not gonna be able to sleep if I don't at least *ask* - *why* can't you discuss it here? Political? Religious? Sexual? More graphic than Vlad the Impaler?

I'm struggling to imagine what kind of tax would violate forum rules… or, rather, what *category* of forum rules could possibly be violated by discussing taxes.

Military conscription for a 'proper' Chinese dynasty was different to that I've outlined above as their foreign policy for dealing with barbarians was different to drafting their own citizens as soldiers.

Unsurprisingly, discussing ancient Chinese dynasty foreign policy falls under the no-politics rule of the board.

[Nifft]

Taxes are for peasants and other people you can threaten with your knights.

PCs very quickly reach a level where that threat is not relevant, and thereafter the PCs tend to interact with nobles and local governments by giving gifts in trade for favors, rather than paying taxes.

Tolls and fees are still a thing, of course -- even the most violent gazebo-murdering hobo might hesitate to burn a bridge he hopes to cross again.

[GreatWyrmGold]

It depends. It depends on who's running the nation, how, how the nation's economy works, and perhaps most importantly, who is being taxed.

This blog post/essay by Bret Devereaux (https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers/) gives a decent rundown of how food and farmers (most of a premodern society's economic output and labor) interact with markets, money, and taxation; this one (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/31/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-ii-big-farms/) describes relationships between small farmers and large landowners (including nobility). Useful points for this question:

Taxation in coin (as opposed to whatever goods the taxee was producing, e.g. grain) was very rare in premodern societies, but it serves as a way to help money penetrate a society. If everyone in the kingdom trades with coin, as is standard for TRPG settings, taxes are probably being collected in coin. (When it comes to the economy, I'd suggest looking at the prosperous eras of the Roman Republic and/or Empire before medieval Europe, simply because that kind of heavily-monetized economy fits a lot better with the game's mechanics.)
Effective tax rates vary greatly. Medieval documents for serfs suggest that the lord might have taken 1/11th or 1/17th; standard taxation of freedmen is often given as 10-20%; tenant farmers working on a rich landowner's land might get half of what their labor produces; Spartan helots got less; etc. Societies often also had additional duties which aren't easily summarized in percentages of income; for instance, when a medieval army went to war, it conscripted levies from the peasantry and "foraged" food by robbing any peasants too close to the army. How the heck do you quantify the possibility of forced military service? Does having the king's soldiers ransack the village granary count as taxing the village?
If the setting involves a lot of active use of magic (clerics using create food and water to feed the urban poor, not murderhobos exploding goblins), things are probably going to change, so you need to keep that in mind.

Taxation in a sci-fi setting is probably going to be like modern taxation, except with more stuff being automatically logged and calculated. I spent a few months learning how to prepare individuals' tax returns for the current tax season, so let me tell you: Modern tax systems would be a lot simpler if people weren't so complicated.



Well, D&D is not not much of a feudal system...it's a lot more closer to 17th century America. Most citizens are 'freemen', there is no government social support system, no real law enforcement beyond a few miles of a city or town, lots of tree trade, lots of taverns, and so on.
There are some powerful kings that can hire adventurers despite having a surprisingly weak grasp on the land, an "untamed" wilderness to explore, plenty of sentient people in that wilderness who don't count for fairly arbitrary reasons...Yeah, this might be a better analogy than anything from the premodern world.



Taxes are for peasants and other people you can threaten with your knights.

PCs very quickly reach a level where that threat is not relevant, and thereafter the PCs tend to interact with nobles and local governments by giving gifts in trade for favors, rather than paying taxes.
I wouldn't be that absolutist; nobles could levee taxes on each other, for instance. That said, I don't imagine many nobles would try to collect taxes in a world like the ones a typical D&D game takes place in (and not just because virtually no official material suggests the PCs should be taxed). Adventurers roam with such freedom and wield such power that they're almost more like independent nation-states, which makes some sense when you remember that "I am the state" was almost literally true for the kings of many societies D&D draws loose inspiration from. Adventurers aren't subjects to be taxed, they're allied to be bartered with.

[VoxRationis]

In D&D games, I usually assume my players pay no taxes on adventuring spoils. The basic logic is that tax collectors had a hard enough time determining how much you owed on the other things they taxed [like counting windows in a house for example], adventuring spoils are incredibly liquid, and record-keeping isn't remotely at modern standards, therefore while the state/their liege would dearly like to tax them on their spoils, it would be essentially impossible to assess or enforce. [Not that they won't try of course, but things like generous donations of part of it to your liege can grease the gears enough to get them to try less hard.]
Other things are taxed if I feel like it and it's relevant.

I'm generally inclined to agree with this assessment. Unless there's a particularly well-organized bureaucracy at play, adventuring income is 1) too variable, 2) not usually derived from any particular jurisdiction, and 3) too portable (and thus easily hidden) for a local lord to hope to tax in any accurate way.

That said, if lords are expecting adventurers to run through, they can tax the likely expenses of such adventurers to no end and probably in ways which are so targeted as to avoid their normal constituents and thus reduce the likelihood that the peasantry will help the adventurers in tax evasion. Separate rooms at the inn could have a heavy added tax (because who else but adventurers rents four rooms for as many people?). Particular adventuring goods could be taxed, such as caltrops and arrows (of course, the army has a store of such things, but the army is a natural exception). If magic is common enough, a detect magic effect at the gate and a subsequent tax per outstanding magical effect could be levied.


Therefore unlike the original Disney version where Mulan was trying to save save her father out of filial piety, in the 'real world' version, Hua Mulan headed willingly into an active warzone because she wanted fight and kill people (and in the original Ballad, it's implied that she went with her parents' blessing as the Northern Wei were very much more gender equal than other Chinese dynasties who were more into feet binding their girls).

It's kind of odd for a Disney version of a story to be less in keeping with modern American values than the source material; we're not too big on filial piety, but we love us some volunteer military recruitment.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I'm generally inclined to agree with this assessment. Unless there's a particularly well-organized bureaucracy at play, adventuring income is 1) too variable, 2) not usually derived from any particular jurisdiction, and 3) too portable (and thus easily hidden) for a local lord to hope to tax in any accurate way.

That said, if lords are expecting adventurers to run through, they can tax the likely expenses of such adventurers to no end and probably in ways which are so targeted as to avoid their normal constituents and thus reduce the likelihood that the peasantry will help the adventurers in tax evasion. Separate rooms at the inn could have a heavy added tax (because who else but adventurers rents four rooms for as many people?). Particular adventuring goods could be taxed, such as caltrops and arrows (of course, the army has a store of such things, but the army is a natural exception). If magic is common enough, a detect magic effect at the gate and a subsequent tax per outstanding magical effect could be levied.


Of course. "Sin Taxes" in weapons and adventuring gear are probably the only way to get adventurers to pay their fair share towards the roads they're using in a D&D setting. That said, it's not ideal, because anything specifically targeting adventurers would be pretty easy to evade or be more damaging to legitimate businesses.


That said, it's also worth considering that some adventures can still be taxed. While most adventures my parties go on are decidedly illegal or at least covert, off the books, and on their own initiative, more legal adventurers operating as mercenaries clearing dungeons on contract from the local lords or guilds are leaving a paper trail, which means they can be taxed. They can certainly hide some of it away from the eyes of the tax collectors by underreporting their income, but they can't go in and come out and shrug and go "there was nothing there," and expect people to believe them while they spend wildly on new magic items.

[Satinavian]

Honestly, if you wanted to tax adventurers in some D&D economy (which is not remotely similar to a medieval one), you would just tax the magic mart. 90%+ of adventurers money ends up there and so does nearly all of the loot.

[VoxRationis]

That said, it's not ideal, because anything specifically targeting adventurers would be pretty easy to evade or be more damaging to legitimate businesses.

I don't know; as Satinavian suggests, there are some sectors that are disproportionately patronized by adventurers and some practices, as I suggested, that are unique enough to adventuring parties that they could be targeted with a clever enough tax routine. Aside from the inn example, consider gate tolls for carried weapons (above and beyond the normal gate tolls). Most people traveling through a city gate will be unarmed; some will have one weapon. Burghers may well have one or more weapons, but they will rarely need to travel with them. Adventurers will probably carry at least two per person, and often more (except for the casters, but it would be simple to call most foci weapons for tax purposes). Nobles and their retinues may well be armed, but they are noble and thus tax-immune and/or rich enough to pay without much difficulty. Various forms of licenses for weapons, magical implements, and whatnot can also be introduced. Certain services, like magical healing of injuries (as opposed to the curing of disease), will be highly skewed towards adventurers.

[Tanarii]

That said, if lords are expecting adventurers to run through, they can tax the likely expenses of such adventurers to no end and probably in ways which are so targeted as to avoid their normal constituents and thus reduce the likelihood that the peasantry will help the adventurers in tax evasion.

Just have tax collectors at the gate follow around any adventurers, who would stick out like a sore thumb. Note down anywhere they made purchases, and assume they merchants marked up their product to 1000% for those customers.p when reviewing the ledgers. Or just have the tax thugs get the list of purchases and collect the tax right away. :smallamused:

One visit from an adventuring party would be enough to fund the tax collector (plus thugs) that followed them for several years, so it's be well worth it.

[Willie the Duck]

Honestly, if you wanted to tax adventurers in some D&D economy (which is not remotely similar to a medieval one), you would just tax the magic mart. 90%+ of adventurers money ends up there and so does nearly all of the loot.

In game worlds where they exist, that works. In my groups, after a certain point most loot eventually ends up in strongholds, sailing ships, etc.

[Telok]

Just have tax collectors at the gate follow around any adventurers, who would stick out like a sore thumb. Note down anywhere they made purchases, and assume they merchants marked up their product to 1000% for those customers.p when reviewing the ledgers. Or just have the tax thugs get the list of purchases and collect the tax right away. :smallamused:

One visit from an adventuring party would be enough to fund the tax collector (plus thugs) that followed them for several years, so it's be well worth it.

I saw it as a magic tax once. At the gates (the city had rings/areas) there was a basic detect magic arch built in that made magic auras visible. Plus a wandering tax assessor group spamming detect magic. Once you paid the tax you got a arcane marked recipt from one of the tax mages. Get caught in the city with magic auras and without a recipt was 4x the tax.

As I recall it was 5gp per spell/misc. 25gp per armor level/plus, 50gp per weaponlevel/plus and per scroll, 100gp per wands/staves/rings. It was AD&D times so it wasn't like 12gp scrolls of cure light wounds, there were fairly strong protection scrolls anyone could use that were semi-common.

[Nifft]

I saw it as a magic tax once. At the gates (the city had rings/areas) there was a basic detect magic arch built in that made magic auras visible. Plus a wandering tax assessor group spamming detect magic. Once you paid the tax you got a arcane marked recipt from one of the tax mages. Get caught in the city with magic auras and without a recipt was 4x the tax.

I'm thinking about some images of Warhammer Fantasy armor with scripture-scrolls wax-sealed onto them.

Now I realize those were tax receipts, visible so the tax inspector can do his job and bugger off without needing to speak to you.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Taxes are for peasants and other people you can threaten with your knights.

PCs very quickly reach a level where that threat is not relevant, and thereafter the PCs tend to interact with nobles and local governments by giving gifts in trade for favors, rather than paying taxes.

PCs can also easily reach a point where they're not present in the region to be able to tax.

Tolls, tithes, and things like income or window taxes are one thing, but there's also duties - a merchant bringing in goods through a port might have to pay import duties on those goods, in addition to fees for use of the dock, hiring shoremen to load/unload and take the goods to their warehouse, a brewer may have to pay duties on the beer they produce, and so on - maybe in a particular area, a baker's dozen is because the 13th item goes to the state, rather than being a backup to avoid short measures.

And yes, that means you get smuggling and bootlegging to get around those duties. :smallsmile:

[Brother Oni]

It's kind of odd for a Disney version of a story to be less in keeping with modern American values than the source material; we're not too big on filial piety, but we love us some volunteer military recruitment.

Except that doing proper historical research by simply asking the experts is hard - far too hard for the average script writer. :smallsigh:

[The Random NPC]

Honestly, if you wanted to tax adventurers in some D&D economy (which is not remotely similar to a medieval one), you would just tax the magic mart. 90%+ of adventurers money ends up there and so does nearly all of the loot.

You'll probably want tax breaks to make sure it ends up there, the kind of money adventurers deal with can seriously screw up your economy if it isn't dealt with carefully.

[t209]

Here's a little titbit for you - because the administration for government service was done at the local level, the people calling up Father Hua would have been his neighbours or other people local to the area, and would have known that he had a dodgy knee and no sons, so they would have shuffled him off to a nice cushy, but still a necessary job, like clerk or jailer.

Well, I think Father Hua doesn't want to be in those positions since he walked up to the clerk without a cane to show that he's fit (also he was known as "The (Father Hua)", armor set, and a horse meant that either he's an officer or a renowed soldier who was granted land for services).
But as you said, but as a local garrison.

[Segev]

Supposedly - though I am not sure how true this is - one way taxes were once collected was that tax collectors were men who literally bought the right to do so. They'd go to a lord who had tax-right over his territory, and pay him a bulk sum (or promise him a set amount), and get a license to go out and take money from people in the area and call it "taxation." He got to keep whatever overage he made beyond what he promised (or everything, if he paid up front). How, exactly, this worked puzzles me enough that I doubt I either a) understand it correctly or b) heard it truthfully described, since I'm unclear how much authority he has to make demands and enforce them, nor what limits him if he has such authority.

The other thing, though, is that taxes were also "rent," essentially, in the classic feudal structure. Serfs worked the land they were assigned, and were permitted to keep the majority of the crops and such they produced, but their lords took some of it as their due. My understanding is that the percentages were low, because production was so low that serfs would starve if they were much higher. Some did, anyway. I think 10% was considered cruelly burdensome.

If you just want fictional reference, Disney's Robin Hood movie (with the talking animal characters) showed the "taxation" being little more than banditry performed by the law enforcement (i.e. the Sheriff of Nottingham). He'd see the peasants have money, and take it. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but it is fiction depicting a tyrant's rule.

If you want to tax adventuring and loot, though, that's probably best done via guild fees, entry fees (into cities), and the like. Cities often simply took a fee based on how many goods of whatever sort were being brought into town.

[Satinavian]

Supposedly - though I am not sure how true this is - one way taxes were once collected was that tax collectors were men who literally bought the right to do so. They'd go to a lord who had tax-right over his territory, and pay him a bulk sum (or promise him a set amount), and get a license to go out and take money from people in the area and call it "taxation." He got to keep whatever overage he made beyond what he promised (or everything, if he paid up front). How, exactly, this worked puzzles me enough that I doubt I either a) understand it correctly or b) heard it truthfully described, since I'm unclear how much authority he has to make demands and enforce them, nor what limits him if he has such authority.In many cases that works a bit like a loan with the taxes as interest. The ruler gets the money now and it is "repaid" over time. Another option would be that setting up and controlling tax collecting infrastructure does cost money as well and depending on where the tax is owned might better be outsourced. A third way this could happen is to provide a source of steady income to someone without actually giving them land. People sometimes had the need to do so. Last but not least is the fact that no one likes tax collectors and some rulers used this setup to shift all the complaints about taxation to someone else while still earning all the praise for taxes well-spent.
Technically the tax level in those cases was still the same. The tax collectors were meant to make a profit not by taking higher rates or arbitrarily seize stuff,, but by more effort to actually collecting what is due and preventing tax evasion. That is some really old concept : having tax collectors paid based on the taxes is supposed to prevent them from fraternizing with the peasants and misreporting for favors or just being lazy. It is kind of a commission system.

The other thing, though, is that taxes were also "rent," essentially, in the classic feudal structure. Serfs worked the land they were assigned, and were permitted to keep the majority of the crops and such they produced, but their lords took some of it as their due. My understanding is that the percentages were low, because production was so low that serfs would starve if they were much higher. Some did, anyway. I think 10% was considered cruelly burdensome.Yes, but of course it was far more complicate in praxis. For medieval Europe you have dozens of kinds of free, halffree and unfree landworkers, you have serfs that belong to regular free men and not to nobility, you have even free peasants belonging to unfree nobility. For pretty much everything you find a lot of exceptions so one can basically only talk about tendencies.
So while serfs were generally not free and didn't own their land, they also had exclusive, often hereditary right to work that particular land. And while they did pay some taxes and some rent for the land, they were excempts from some other taxes and other duties. For example, typically serfs were not subject to the draft into armies, that was more something free peasants would have to do.

If you just want fictional reference, Disney's Robin Hood movie (with the talking animal characters) showed the "taxation" being little more than banditry performed by the law enforcement (i.e. the Sheriff of Nottingham). He'd see the peasants have money, and take it. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but it is fiction depicting a tyrant's rule.The thing to keep in mind about most versions of Robin Hood is that the action is meant to show blatant power abuse by the Sheriff, so over the top that everyone gets it. I won't say something like that never happened, it sure did. But it was rare and not really acceptable even then. Aside from making the Sheriff a tyrant, it is also meant to show how the reign of John Lackland does not really work and is descending into lawless anarchy.

[Cluedrew]

The other tax story that came to mind is that the I have heard stories from pretty credible stories about the Roman emperors cracking down on over-taxing. On the whole the Roman empire seemed to use the "bidding for the tax collector position" system where the tax collector would promise a certain amount of money then try to collect more than that to earn a profit. Something like this happened on the provincial level as well where the provinces sent pack money to the capital. Anyways there is at least one case of a provincial governor (?) being removed because they sent back so much money that the emperor realised they were overtaxing.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Honestly, if you wanted to tax adventurers in some D&D economy (which is not remotely similar to a medieval one), you would just tax the magic mart. 90%+ of adventurers money ends up there and so does nearly all of the loot.


I don't know; as Satinavian suggests, there are some sectors that are disproportionately patronized by adventurers and some practices, as I suggested, that are unique enough to adventuring parties that they could be targeted with a clever enough tax routine. Aside from the inn example, consider gate tolls for carried weapons (above and beyond the normal gate tolls). Most people traveling through a city gate will be unarmed; some will have one weapon. Burghers may well have one or more weapons, but they will rarely need to travel with them. Adventurers will probably carry at least two per person, and often more (except for the casters, but it would be simple to call most foci weapons for tax purposes). Nobles and their retinues may well be armed, but they are noble and thus tax-immune and/or rich enough to pay without much difficulty. Various forms of licenses for weapons, magical implements, and whatnot can also be introduced. Certain services, like magical healing of injuries (as opposed to the curing of disease), will be highly skewed towards adventurers.

I don't actually think this works logically.

I don't think such stores could reliably remain in business keeping up a stock of items they exclusively sell to adventurers. Even if they work on commission and also deliver high value magic weapons/armor/etc. to nobles and other people, that's not a lot of deliveries a year and definitely not cause to keep a stock of ready-to-buy adventuring items unless they're also selling a decent turnover of more regular stuff.

Presumably, much like how a blacksmith typically made more horseshoes and shovels than swords and armor, I assume ye olde enchanter also primarily is delivering things like hoes of extra-earth-turning or nails of staying over spending all his time catering to a very small group of people who will buy something maybe once every few months.



And as far as gate taxes go, you also don't want to hit regular merchants too hard and starve your lands for trade.

[Tvtyrant]

Supposedly - though I am not sure how true this is - one way taxes were once collected was that tax collectors were men who literally bought the right to do so. They'd go to a lord who had tax-right over his territory, and pay him a bulk sum (or promise him a set amount), and get a license to go out and take money from people in the area and call it "taxation." He got to keep whatever overage he made beyond what he promised (or everything, if he paid up front). How, exactly, this worked puzzles me enough that I doubt I either a) understand it correctly or b) heard it truthfully described, since I'm unclear how much authority he has to make demands and enforce them, nor what limits him if he has such authority.

The other thing, though, is that taxes were also "rent," essentially, in the classic feudal structure. Serfs worked the land they were assigned, and were permitted to keep the majority of the crops and such they produced, but their lords took some of it as their due. My understanding is that the percentages were low, because production was so low that serfs would starve if they were much higher. Some did, anyway. I think 10% was considered cruelly burdensome.

If you just want fictional reference, Disney's Robin Hood movie (with the talking animal characters) showed the "taxation" being little more than banditry performed by the law enforcement (i.e. the Sheriff of Nottingham). He'd see the peasants have money, and take it. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but it is fiction depicting a tyrant's rule.

If you want to tax adventuring and loot, though, that's probably best done via guild fees, entry fees (into cities), and the like. Cities often simply took a fee based on how many goods of whatever sort were being brought into town.

Tax farmers were quite common into the Eighteenth Century. Government had to be quite small and decentralized due to communication issues, so a lot of utilities were sold out to companies. The King makes a tax on Salt, then sells the right to that tax because he can't keep track of the number of collectors it would take to tax salt, iron, candle wicks, etc. This had the side effect of massively over taxing everyone, slowing economic growth and requiring the King to habitually fix the issues caused by it.

How taxes would look it entirely dependent on setting. In an adventurer dominated setting where they are spelunking treasure dungeons I would assume the lords would charge fees for entrance to said treasure dungeons, not taxes on the way out. Weak parties paying to take a shot are going to net you more then trying to strong arm powerful adventurers coming out of the dungeons. Also monopolies on equipment sales to the adventurers as they go in.

[John Campbell]

I just have to mention that, any time I've seen taxes, tolls, dues, licenses, or the like come up in a game, the PCs have treated it as an encounter to be overcome, oftentimes going to great lengths and spending far more cash and effort to avoid it than it would have simply to pay up.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I just have to mention that, any time I've seen taxes, tolls, dues, licenses, or the like come up in a game, the PCs have treated it as an encounter to be overcome, oftentimes going to great lengths and spending far more cash and effort to avoid it than it would have simply to pay up.

Players are like engineers. We're willing to do a lot of work to get out of doing something that would be substantially easier to just do.

XKCD (https://xkcd.com/1566/)

[PhoenixPhyre]

I just have to mention that, any time I've seen taxes, tolls, dues, licenses, or the like come up in a game, the PCs have treated it as an encounter to be overcome, oftentimes going to great lengths and spending far more cash and effort to avoid it than it would have simply to pay up.

As I've heard it said, the D&D scale of threats (as seen by players) goes like

Threaten me with death? Facing a overpowering fight? Yawn. That's Tuesday.

Threaten one of my characters' loved ones? Meh.

Threaten to take my stuff? Threaten the party mascot [1]? YOU AND EVERYONE YOU EVER CARED ABOUT ARE GOING TO DIE, HORRIBLY, RIGHT NOW. And we will go through literal hell to stop you/get it back.

[1] I dunno about your parties, but my parties tend to adopt some random NPC as a party mascot. And then get super protective of them. Irrationally so.

[Satinavian]

I don't actually think this works logically.
I still don't see a problem with taking a cut from every magic item sale. It is not that you have so many enchanters/magic item traders that you need a huge bureaucracy for it. And you would probably want to keep an eye on magic item circulation and production anyway for other reasons. And it is not that such a tax would hurt magic item traders/crafters any more than taxation hurts other traders/crafters.

But i also don't see much of a problem with saying that "buy at full price, sell at half price" just covers paying taxes as well. Taxes are ultimately boring and D&D economies are irredeemably messed up and you don't want to look too closely at them.

In systems that have it, i also assume that "lifestyle costs" include all the corresponding taxes for living such a life.

[VoxRationis]

I don't actually think this works logically.

I don't think such stores could reliably remain in business keeping up a stock of items they exclusively sell to adventurers. Even if they work on commission and also deliver high value magic weapons/armor/etc. to nobles and other people, that's not a lot of deliveries a year and definitely not cause to keep a stock of ready-to-buy adventuring items unless they're also selling a decent turnover of more regular stuff.

Presumably, much like how a blacksmith typically made more horseshoes and shovels than swords and armor, I assume ye olde enchanter also primarily is delivering things like hoes of extra-earth-turning or nails of staying over spending all his time catering to a very small group of people who will buy something maybe once every few months.



And as far as gate taxes go, you also don't want to hit regular merchants too hard and starve your lands for trade.

You seem to be asserting that low-volume, high-value industries don't exist, which is untrue for every historical period. (Indeed, it is only with the industrial revolution that high-volume, low-value industries became the massively profitable enterprises they are today.) Your average blacksmith doesn't make any swords and armor and leaves those specialized skills to dedicated armorsmiths and swordsmiths who do make such things the majority of their business.

As for gate taxes, 1) they did exist historically, and 2) I was speaking about a weapons-at-gate tax, probably on an escalating scale, to target the highly unusual practice adventurers have of walking around with more weapons than a kitted-out Roman legionary. Your average merchant isn't going to try to enter a city carrying a dagger, halberd, crossbow, silver-coated sword, and mace.

[Talakeal]

But i also don't see much of a problem with saying that "buy at full price, sell at half price" just covers paying taxes as well. Taxes are ultimately boring and D&D economies are irredeemably messed up and you don't want to look too closely at them.

I tried that once.

My players response was to simply tell me that they should just kill the NPCs and take the items because it was more cost effective.

[Satinavian]

I don't have players that do that.

If I had, I would react to PCs trying to kill tax collectors by bringing down the full force of the gouvernment and kill their characters.

[Jay R]

What do medieval taxes look like? Quite often, they look like cows, or grain, or other foodstuffs. In 7th century Wessex, an estate of ten hides owed 10 vats of honey, 300 loaves, 12 ambers of Welsh ale, 30 ambers of clear ale, 2 full-grown cows or 10 wethers, 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, a full amber of butter, 5 salmon, 20 pounds in weight of fodder, and 100 eels.

We have an absurdly inflated notion of how much wealth in that period was in the form of money.

[Nifft]

I tried that once.

My players response was to simply tell me that they should just kill the NPCs and take the items because it was more cost effective.

One solution to that is the Amazon model.

You pay me now, I deliver your stuff later.

[John Campbell]

... and 100 eels.
Min oferglidendescip is ælful.


We have an absurdly inflated notion of how much wealth in that period was in the form of money.
As I understand it, England in particular had serious cash supply issues for many, many years because of the incredible amount of precious metal that left the island as Danegeld.

[Segev]

I just have to mention that, any time I've seen taxes, tolls, dues, licenses, or the like come up in a game, the PCs have treated it as an encounter to be overcome, oftentimes going to great lengths and spending far more cash and effort to avoid it than it would have simply to pay up.Oddly, in ToA, my party was scrupulous about paying the fees to the Flaming Fist, though they were ruthless about negotiating them down.


I tried that once.

My players response was to simply tell me that they should just kill the NPCs and take the items because it was more cost effective.

If that's their response, they should be treated like bandits everywhere their deeds are known. Also, remind them that others may take up the same attitude towards them, and simply beat them up to take their stuff.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Of course. "Sin Taxes" in weapons and adventuring gear are probably the only way to get adventurers to pay their fair share towards the roads they're using in a D&D setting. That said, it's not ideal, because anything specifically targeting adventurers would be pretty easy to evade or be more damaging to legitimate businesses.
Maybe that's why 10-foot poles are more expensive than ladders. Adventurers go through poles a lot faster than ladders, after all, and legitimate businesses usually have other tools to do anything they'd need a big stick for.



In game worlds where they exist, that works. In my groups, after a certain point most loot eventually ends up in strongholds, sailing ships, etc.
Once you start investing in land and mercantile ventures and whatnot, you're either part of the aristocracy (and therefore more likely to help the taxman exploit the peasantry than be targeted) or part of the "new rich" with assets that are very easy to tax (or seize if you don't pay up).



Supposedly - though I am not sure how true this is - one way taxes were once collected was that tax collectors were men who literally bought the right to do so. They'd go to a lord who had tax-right over his territory, and pay him a bulk sum (or promise him a set amount), and get a license to go out and take money from people in the area and call it "taxation." He got to keep whatever overage he made beyond what he promised (or everything, if he paid up front). How, exactly, this worked puzzles me enough that I doubt I either a) understand it correctly or b) heard it truthfully described, since I'm unclear how much authority he has to make demands and enforce them, nor what limits him if he has such authority.
That's how it worked for at least part of the Roman Republic's history. I'm pretty sure they were restricted to only charging legal taxes, rather than inventing tax codes on the spot.


The other thing, though, is that taxes were also "rent," essentially, in the classic feudal structure. Serfs worked the land they were assigned, and were permitted to keep the majority of the crops and such they produced, but their lords took some of it as their due. My understanding is that the percentages were low, because production was so low that serfs would starve if they were much higher. Some did, anyway. I think 10% was considered cruelly burdensome.
1/11th or 1/17th are common numbers for serfs. (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/31/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-ii-big-farms/) Though as that page also notes, serfs and other low-class farmers would sometimes work land belonging to large landholders (whoever that might be in a given society) in addition to working their own farms. As noted in the prior entry in the series, (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/) peasant farms tended to support more hands than could efficiently work the land they owned, so they looked for opportunities to use that excess labor elsewhere.



I don't actually think this works logically.

I don't think such stores could reliably remain in business keeping up a stock of items they exclusively sell to adventurers. Even if they work on commission and also deliver high value magic weapons/armor/etc. to nobles and other people, that's not a lot of deliveries a year and definitely not cause to keep a stock of ready-to-buy adventuring items unless they're also selling a decent turnover of more regular stuff.

Presumably, much like how a blacksmith typically made more horseshoes and shovels than swords and armor, I assume ye olde enchanter also primarily is delivering things like hoes of extra-earth-turning or nails of staying over spending all his time catering to a very small group of people who will buy something maybe once every few months.


And as far as gate taxes go, you also don't want to hit regular merchants too hard and starve your lands for trade.
First off, I'm not sure medieval-style lords would mind driving off merchants (https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers/) (I swear I'm going to find some reason to link to every post in that series today, even the rice one).

More relevantly, you're asserting the economic inviability of producing a small number of high-profit items, which a glance at basically any economy does not bear out. To pick an obvious example, ships are also extremely expensive and purchased only rarely and by a small segment of the population, but they're built and sold for profit. If it takes you a whole year to forge and enchant a magic sword, you just need to sell the sword for enough that the profit pays for at least a year's expenses.
Obviously, there wouldn't be a lot of artificers churning out expensive adventuring gear, but there could be some. (Unless magic items are rare artifacts from a bygone era, found rather than forged, which doesn't support any magic-mart model.)



We have an absurdly inflated notion of how much wealth in that period was in the form of money.
I disagree with the way you phrased this. People don't have any notion of how much wealth was in the form of money, they just project their understanding of the economy into prior eras due to lack of data. (Also, what period is "that period"?)
But yes, societies where most people regularly used money were rare. That said, that's a point that doesn't matter much for D&D-style games, because those worlds do have heavily-monetized societies. Any village the players come across will have an inn the players can pay money to sleep at, desperate villagers who pay for the PCs' aid with spare change, taciturn locals willing to open up for a cash bribe, etc. These things exist because cash economies are convenient for the players, of course, but they still exist, and treating the setting as if they didn't would be ridiculous.

[Max_Killjoy]

Is there a good place to look at how monetized vs not various historical economies were?

Not just "generic quasi-medieval-land", but actual regions of Europe, different time frames, Ancient and Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, different periods of Chinese history, etc?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Is there a good place to look at how monetized vs not various historical economies were?

Not just "generic quasi-medieval-land", but actual regions of Europe, different time frames, Ancient and Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, different periods of Chinese history, etc?
My attempts to find a good resource were immediately stifled by realizing that the word "monetization" has a bunch of other uses.

My understanding is that monetized economies are very rare, since money is only accepted if money is useful and money is only useful it money is accepted. It seems like monetized economies need to be started by a large central state which can produce both a supply of currency and a demand for it by paying its soldiers/officials in coin and demanding taxes in coin respectively. Rome at its heights were more monetized societies than most of its immediate predecessors, successors, and neighbors; I think China was similar. Not sure about Greece, but I imagine its urban centers were more monetized than its rural hinterlands.

Still, if anyone has any good sources for this kind of information, I'd be glad to hear it.

[t209]

Rome at its heights were more monetized societies than most of its immediate predecessors, successors, and neighbors
Until the Crisis of Third Century, which the entire tax system was revamped to Barter system.
Also the land after finishing duty as a soldier became upfront payment, more so in Alexios era.

[Chronic]

Also the feudal periods in areas with economically significant trade saw a fair amount of tolls associated with bridges, roads, canals, gates, and docks. Essentially anywhere that bottlenecked you cound set a guard and collect a tax. What was taxed, who was taxed, and what it was used for all varied.

In some places it could be by horse/oxen/axle (merchants & wealthy) and the proceeds go mainly towards road/canal upkeep & keeping banditry down. A lord could give a ferry crossing to a vassal and require it to be defended, maintained to support & transport 100 horsemen at any time, and be a decent sized depot/fortification during wars, plus succor & support to anyone with a letter from the lord. A town could place a consumption tax at the gates based on how wealthy you looked plus assessing a "peace tax/bond" for weapons or armor.

Historically some places taxed based on building ground floor square footage or on the number of glass windows. Some places citizenry (even peasants, which means different things in different times & places) could be "taxed" with keeping arms & armor plus being part of a militia. The people governing often taxed what was nailed down in some fashon and "who pays" just worked it's way around in prices & trade. But access & permission could be taxed too. Letters or liscenses letting someone buy/sell particular goods, exempting them from tolls, or even just being allowed to pass through an area, were a thing to be bought/rewarded.

This are very very good examples. I'll add to that that in medieval Era, the monopoly on a few first necessity product such as salt was an important source of revenue for state or local authorities and was as such an indirect way of taxation (funny story, the word salary actually comes from the Latin word for a salt ration, which was sometime used to pay workers).

A more modern means was a cut on every source of incomes (property, Industry, liberal profession etc) designed to replace older types of taxes and was usually either 5 or 10% of the global incomes of an household.

[Satinavian]

Is there a good place to look at how monetized vs not various historical economies were?

Not just "generic quasi-medieval-land", but actual regions of Europe, different time frames, Ancient and Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, different periods of Chinese history, etc?Not really.

As always, it is super complicated. The benefits of money are that it doesn't expire, is easy to move and store and its value can be judged without expert knowledge. All of these are nice and people did recognize those and generally did prefer coin. Coin acceptance was never a big hurdle compared to goods acceptance. Those are easily measurable chunks of precious metals after all, whereas you are only inclined to take goods if you have a use for them or know someone who has.

But when those benefits were not important, they were willing to use other things. Which means, money-less economies were often more local. The peasants did not produce coin. They produced grain and animals etc. They paid their taxes in those. The lord, getting his tax in stuff, not money and far more of that than his family will use is incentived to pay his retainers in stuff as well. That is where you get contracts that include half an oxen per year as part of renumeration for an architect.

At the same time, when value had to be moved far or people didn't trust each other that much or people wanted to be sure of its value, money was preferrably used. You will find that merchants used more money but the nobility handled ransom and other similar payments preferrably with money as well.

So it is less "how much of the economy is money based" and more "what kind of transaction is it".

As for getting real numbers, let's say that can be difficult. There are not really proper trade statistics for medieval times. You will have accounting of single medium sized institution like monasteries and maybe merchants. You will have treaties and laws. You might have court cases with some numbers and disagreements. But for the whole picture, guesswork will be involved a lot.

[snowblizz]

Is there a good place to look at how monetized vs not various historical economies were?

Not just "generic quasi-medieval-land", but actual regions of Europe, different time frames, Ancient and Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, different periods of Chinese history, etc?

There is a whole field of economics history dealing with it. Rondo Cameron, Fernand Braudel, Peter Spufford some of the authors who have opined on the subject that I read form the local library. In translation so I can't give names of the works that'd help you. The last one had a very good book about "money and power" or some such that had a lot to say about money in mediaeval Europe. Quite eye-opening.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Until the Crisis of Third Century, which the entire tax system was revamped to Barter system.
Also the land after finishing duty as a soldier became upfront payment, more so in Alexios era.
I'd question whether the third century counts as one of Rome's heights, but it took a while to collapse properly; it probably had some heights after that. My bad.



As always, it is super complicated. The benefits of money are that it doesn't expire, is easy to move and store and its value can be judged without expert knowledge. All of these are nice and people did recognize those and generally did prefer coin. Coin acceptance was never a big hurdle compared to goods acceptance. Those are easily measurable chunks of precious metals after all, whereas you are only inclined to take goods if you have a use for them or know someone who has.
I'm gonna need a citation for this claim, because it goes against everything I've heard on the subject.
First of all, several of the things you list as benefits are drawbacks under certain circumstances; it's a lot easier for roving bandits or "foraging" soldiers to take a stash of coins than a pile of farming tools or whatever, specifically because coins are easier to move and store (and more fungible). At the same time, while coins can be easily measured, they're only valuable if you can trade them for other goods, which can only happen if the people owning those goods considers coins valuable, which requires them to be able to trade them for still other goods. In short, money is only valuable if it's valuable, which only happens under certain economic conditions.

Yes, there are classes of people for whom money is always valuable. Nobles, merchants, perhaps some craftsmen. But they are an overwhelming minority of the population.

[jayem]

At the same time, while coins can be easily measured, they're only valuable if you can trade them for other goods, which can only happen if the people owning those goods considers coins valuable, which requires them to be able to trade them for still other goods. In short, money is only valuable if it's valuable, which only happens under certain economic conditions.

Until fairly recently, coins (in theory) had their actual value in terms of being a lump of metal. The coin aspect saved all the validation aspects. And even after then it was still 'backed' by the real thing. So to some extent the value is pre-existing. In England or China a pound sterling was worth exactly the same (wrt how much they valued 453g/373g of Silver). The same is of course also true of flour.

The theft swings both ways too, you can't hide your farming tools, you can't emigrate with your land.

Although then I think the definitions of what is monetary get messy. Which isn't going to help (especially when mixed with chronological/regional superiority).

[Nifft]

Until fairly recently, coins (in theory) had their actual value in terms of being a lump of metal. The coin aspect saved all the validation aspects. And even after then it was still 'backed' by the real thing. So to some extent the value is pre-existing. In England or China a pound sterling was worth exactly the same (wrt how much they valued 453g/373g of Silver). The same is of course also true of flour.

The theft swings both ways too, you can't hide your farming tools, you can't emigrate with your land.

Although then I think the definitions of what is monetary get messy. Which isn't going to help (especially when mixed with chronological/regional superiority).

When you look at the debt-scrip used in Mesopotamian cities ~5,000 years ago, the value wasn't in the material.

Precious metal coinage as currency is a more recent development.

[Calthropstu]

There are several different types of taxation methods, needs, uses. Too many to mention. But I can give you a few examples that I have built for games and have seen used.

Undead taxation:
Believe it or not, an undead ruler profits most by having a prosperous and happy living population. Instilling a death tax and then offering to waive the death tax in exchange for the body allows for perpetual targets for animate dead. The only needs at that point is weaponry and armor for the undead soldiers.

An undead ruling class can perpetuate itself and never need to increase. So they would make taxation things like weapons for their army and satisfaction of whatever predilictions they may have (blood for vampires, meat for ghouls etc.) Most of it can be supplied with zero gp cost. Merely make the smith guild give a certain number of weapons per year and you're good. This allows your population to live virtually tax free enabling a very healthy society.

Post Scarcity:
When a society invents reconstructive teleportation (see Star Trek) all objective taxations are meaningless. Instead, service taxation in the form of a set amount of military or civil services would be required. Even in a society where ecerything can be given to you with the push of a button, there are things that need to be done. Entertainment, government, teaching, scienctific advancement... these and more would still be needed.

Apocalyptic:
Civilization has fallen. The bandit king desires all. Rape and pillage everything. If the riffraff want to eat, they can grovel at your doorstep. Everything is taken from everyone. Each day, the bandit king decides who gets what. He sentences people to starvation if they don't produce. He gives attractive women more than their fair share in exchange for access to them. This dying wotld is his to command for he is the last of the strong. His desires are everything.

Sales tax:
Everyone pays an equal amount at time of sale of goods. Each purchase is taxed and tracked at a set valur. Business' books are tracked and audited regularly.

Income tax:
Everyone who earns money needs to give you some of it.

Interstellar Empires:
Once a civilization goes interstellar, there are only a few ways it can be sustained. Capitalism can't sustain itself at that point. Socialism will have a lot of trouble. The reason being is space travel requires MASSIVE resources. For example, building a single star destroyer would bankrupt the entirety of Earth. Even current intrastellar space exploration is prohibitively expensive for most nations.

It is impossible to do with modern models. So the only way it becomes possible is for full globalization of government followed by that government razing uninhabitable planets in their solar system, followed by using those resources to go to new planets to pretty much ransack for their resources. Eventually, planets will be designated for specific purposes. Taxation woild be high... possibly even 100%. But everyone would get what they needed. Basically a communistic society with 100% participation.

[Brother Oni]

Until fairly recently, coins (in theory) had their actual value in terms of being a lump of metal. The coin aspect saved all the validation aspects. And even after then it was still 'backed' by the real thing. So to some extent the value is pre-existing. In England or China a pound sterling was worth exactly the same (wrt how much they valued 453g/373g of Silver). The same is of course also true of flour.

There are also varying shenanigans for coinage involving the value of the raw material amount versus its fiat value.

In Japan, around about the start of the Edo period, they switched from a silver standard (coins being worth their weight in fine silver) to a fiat currency. They also took the opportunity to debase the coinage, so a monme was no longer ~80% fine silver, but ~20% fine silver.

Unfortunately, foreign traders wanted paying in fine silver, so goods that used to cost 100 monme, now effectively cost 400 monme. This tied in very nicely with the then desired goal of limiting external trade among other things.


China of the same approximately period did the same, although by a different method of only accepting payment in silver. All the western nations were on a gold standard though and rapidly went through all their silver stockpiles to keep up with the voracious demand for Chinese goods. The British found a way around the limitation (by selling opium to the Chinese people for silver), which sparked off the Opium Wars.

[jayem]

There are also varying shenanigans for coinage involving the value of the raw material amount versus its fiat value.
.
That sort of thing is why I had 'in theory', but that is an impressively extreme example.

One thing I did see that I thought was quite interesting (on Wiki) was the distinction between the 'Monetary as accounts' and 'Monetary as trade' aspects of Monetary systems. Which seems a useful distinction to keep in mind, especially for Taxation where both could be relevant.

So where medieval accounts tally up workings owed and received,or the Mesopotamian debt scrip* would be Monetary as accounts.
While the shekel (precious metal as currency, but not formalised as coinage, and also about 5000 years old) would be Monetary as trade

*Nifft do you have more specific info (I know some of the stuff they did)

[Nifft]

*Nifft do you have more specific info (I know some of the stuff they did)

My recommendation for this subject is https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Note that I am not saying Mesopotamia was special in this regard -- for at least 3k years, people built economies which were surprisingly modern in some regards, and the myth that the ancient economies were simple or "barter" based is simply false. I'm just using ancient Mesopotamia since it's got name-recognition value, and it's fairly easy to find scholarship around their economies.