Something brilliant happened in a Dungeon World game tonight:
The PCs offered to do a job for the local mayor in exchange for 10% of the government revenues for the next year.
The short term incentive is clear: we went out and took care of threats to the town. A ghost was bothering the town, so we took care of it. There are some pirates, and we'll deal with them, too.
What happens after that? What happens if this is extended? What occurs when other towns get murderhoboes of their own?
I'm headed to bed, but wanted to leave this here as food for thought for tomorrow.
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Also, Charles King who had the brilliant idea.
ReplyDeleteDid you clarify net or gross revenue? Because wow does that make a difference!
ReplyDeleteYou do realize that you just put a price on your head of about 5% of the government revenues for the next year.
ReplyDeleteCurious to see how long they're good with a "paramilitary spending" (or maybe "private defense contractors") line item in the yearly budget, and whether that 10% figure goes up or down in future budgets. Interesting plan!
ReplyDeleteWow.
ReplyDeleteDid they check any of their assumptions (like "this government has waste in its budget", or "important services can be privatized at a similar or lower cost") before writing you that blank check to confront them with the moral consequences of their actions?
Because if not, this may well be in the running for the most callously thoughtless and evil act I've seen portrayed at our game nights.
Raids -- we're taking your money and wrecking your stuff.
ReplyDeleteProtection racket -- we're taking your money instead of wrecking your stuff
Protection -- we're taking your money and driving off people who would wreck your stuff
Standing Army -- you're giving us money and we're driving off people who would wreck your stuff.
In the short term, we want to remove and eliminate any impediment to the towns tax base.
ReplyDeleteThat'll mean tax enforcement, removing threats, and expanding the tax base.
What's the worst that can happen?
In the long run, if we are good at this, then Empire becomes the goal. Recruiting other parties, telling other towns to pay ours, fighting wars if expansion.
ReplyDeleteIf we're good at it, it'll be a golden age. If we're bad at it, we will die next session. If we are evil - and I know my character is! - then we will have a dictatorship.
Oh wow. You have no clue the political axioms you're assuming.
ReplyDeleteYou might start thinking in advance about how to role play if you discover that lots and lots of people are dying because that 10% of the budget was actually doing something that your group can't replicate.
Sounds like your answer is "we'll cover up that fact with a Ponzi scheme, and hope that the game (and therefore the story) ends before the inevitable crash," which strikes me as narrative cowardice.
Tony Lower-Basch Yeah, baseline assumption is something like: townships in Dungeon World do not use tax revenues to provide for life sustaining services.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, it was established early that the main impediment to this town growing is dangers to on all sides that no one has been able to deal with. That is, there's an adventuring party sized whole in the local environment that we can exploit.
I'm not sure this is any more of a Ponzi scheme than any other empire.
"...do not use tax revenues to provide life sustaining services."
ReplyDeleteUh. What is tax revenue for, then, and where does life sustaining services come from?
Like, is taxation here the equivalent of protection money?
Kimberley Lam It wasn't specified, but that'd be my best guess. I didn't exactly see hospitals or major infrastructure.
ReplyDeleteSo, you're hired thugs in a gang war whose turf is threatened. Huh. Not the story I expected given the lead in.
ReplyDeleteMaybe! This is a mercantile town, wanting to expand but beset by damaging forces on multiple sides. If we're really really smart, we'll get everyone to agree that comerce is good.
ReplyDeleteI expect something a lot worse, should we revisit it.
Also: This is one possibility when a newbie MC starts a game in a bar, and makes the rails so obvious. We objected to the railroading.
Heh. This is the kind of set up where I showcase unintended harm and consequences to not digging into the fine details. And then I keep asking "So, are you okay with the cost now? How about now?"
ReplyDeleteSounds like you just became the town watch. Pretty sure other towns probably have them to.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what kinds of "life-sustaining services" a medieval town would theoretically provide that aren't covered by "we hired some thugs who might also have magical talent."
ReplyDeleteI feel like it's putting you unfairly on the spot to say this, but when you say roughly "It wasn't showcased, but in the absence of evidence one way or the other, my guess is that taxes are just being flushed down a hole to no purpose," that sounds to me like an assumption you walked in already holding.
ReplyDeleteThere's some danger, of course, that your assumptions will pave a path of least resistance for the MC (e.g., "sure, okay, I guess people are actually bags full of spiders, whatever you want.")
Brandes Stoddard: Let's suppose 10% of the taxes (the least crucial part) go to a 100GP tithe to a temple of a fertility goddess (who won't deal with the murderhoboes)... that increases the food of the village enough to sustain 125 extra people, and the town has already expanded to that food supply. The hoboes can buy enough food for one person to scrape by for 1GP.
ReplyDeleteSo if they plow the entire payment into helping people, their selfishness kills 25 people to start with, by being less efficient than the town was at using the money. If they actually spend the money, it is one death per GP.
But hey, maybe they can take over a second town, and take their money to save the folks in the first town. Of course, then they're killing 50 people in the second town, but there's always a third town...
But that's not what I would expect a mayor would do in that situation. Faced with a budgetary shortfall, which is common due to harvest variances, disasters, and the general unpredictability of the tax collection apparatus, lords and mayors would certainly be in the habit of increasing revenue (new taxes may be unpopular, but they aren't terribly surprising), selling something of real or imagined worth (land, titles, you name it), or just borrowing the money to kick the can down the road (it would be a strange mercantile town that had no moneylender).
ReplyDeleteThis also assumes the mayor's office receives no return on their payment to Our Heroes. (And yeah, if the mayor pays any large sum of money, gets nothing for it, and causes a famine in the process, the mayor should be removed from office and their nearest superior noble should tear up the contract.) The pirates that the mayor expects them to deal with are likely a meaningful drain on tax revenue. If the mayor gets a full year of active hero-ing out of these characters, we're fully shifting into a Conceits of Fantasy territory, but it's far from unreasonable to expect that the PCs are taking 10% of a pie that has grown by a lot more than 10%, compared to previous years.
Question is, I suppose: Do we actually increase revenues by 10%, or do we shift revenues by 10%?
ReplyDeleteThat is, if the local economy increased by 50%, great! But, if it does so by reducing other economies by as much or more, then we've still got a net drain.
Granted, pirates are -- by their nature -- drains on an economic system, and removing them is like taking the brakes off. Ideally, that'd be through recruitment, but in a simpler world it is at the point of a blade.
Also: We have a cleric (Tony, played by Zed) who can shift the sex of a person in a moment. Cured my dwarf of now-his gender dismorphia!
Regarding Assumptions:
ReplyDeleteDid I/we assume that the Taxes of this town were being thrown into a pit? I didn't, but I have some familiarity with the topic. Did we bring this subject up? No, I just asked for the 10%, the MC said yes and I did my best Billy Beane, "When they say 'Yes.' hang up the phone." impression.
Did we assume that as PC's our actions would be able I grow the town economy by more than cost we were charging? I certainly did, but again not a subject we actually brought up.
Did we consider the consequences that our taking 10% of Revenue from the Town's budget would kill anyone? No, and I imagine that if/when such a consequence would come up in play that some PCs wouldn't care (William Nichols's Evil Dwarf), some would care for moral reasons (Zed's Cleric), and some would care for different reasons (My Stalinist Salamander).
Did we assume the Mayor wouldn't agree to something they couldn't afford? Yes, yes I did.
Did we assume that we would be paid in Coin rather than in kind (i.e. Wheat)? Yes, yes we did. It was implied but not explicit that we'd be paid in Coin.
Regarding Government Spending:
Kimberley Lam Yes, taxes are protection money. The King's Army & Sheriffs protect you from invading armies and criminals, you pay taxes to pay for the Army and the Court's budgets (and the King's swanky Hat). No taxes, no Army, no protection from invasion or banditry. Taxes are protection money. This is how Warlords become Kings.
Brandes Stoddard There are a couple "Life Sustaining Services" that medieval town would provide in addition to contributing Tax to provide for the Lord/King's Army, first and foremost would be infrastructure. Things like grain mills, granaries, and bridges were some thing that were vital to town survival that no individual besides the Lord could afford (and he could only afford it because he collected the taxes.) I recommend E.P. Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, linked below.
oup.silverchair-cdn.com - oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/past/50/1/10.1093_past_50.1.76/1/76.pdf?Expires=1490317457&Signature=Mmn2uMm7HsQmp3BWumDw763c8P3T5i9KgzMMe6WxG1zWJLylDJzQfpQWiVT2o3HvpYmAusA0l-c~OGE3q1OSSkXNE62WLn6ajmTf10Z19QNkjPNr6uZ4H9RjrJQ~V9jGLnpGdGZrD8xv61TuyVghLmq3R471WRiiY2WC7M7L-YkWE7KOK0a9bln7RRK7xlNaiE-q7cJerhaDRdif1v1UjFlI8A0AAg9OVUYEGISykjH0E2cHdouPdXQCVI5Xqlb7hOrmAZj8H4CnTU6gDaDX3GuCYhtE3LjJA~88CMaaQuY1-RkTS2ahARO6yS8sFwhNqtar6DdCjsYVaSVOxpNirg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIUCZBIA4LVPAVW3Q
Did you assume they'd actually pay you and not just SAY they would pay you? (Yes, yes you did.) =D
ReplyDeleteOne way to look at this is an evil murderhobo shakedown of a town that could better spend the money elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to look at this is the time-tested battle between domestic spending and defense spending.
Is there no group of individuals in town who have the eggs to stand up and say, "10 percent?! We'll do it for 5 percent!" and then do it, cutting the PCs out of a job?
ReplyDeleteAnd traditionally, what will happen in this case is that the government will now have to levy 11% more taxes to be able to pay out 10% in additional defense spending without a shortfall. When the peasants riot--and they will--the nobility can just shrug and say, "Hey, take it up with those guys."
ReplyDelete(As a side note, my group would be the kind of group that would take the mayor's 10% and funnel it to the underground resistance so they could eventually take over and implement a Republic or some such. So that totally colours my perception of this situation.)
ReplyDeleteAdam Dray You're absolutely right, we did assume they'd pay us. But since they had to come to us instead of sending their own soldiers that's one of the safer assumptions we made. As to the potential to be underbid, sure that's a possibility but in play it was very clear we had the Mayor between a rock and a hard place.
ReplyDeleteThe inevitable Peasant uprising is a much more plausible problem than being underbid, but you're also assuming here that there is absolutely no wiggle room in the town budget, that they haven't saving and that they've only been taking in enough taxes to exactly cover government outlay, which isn't likely either. Which isn't to say the Town wont have to raise taxes, but that it might not be as painful as it could be.
Kimberley Lam Why fund a resistance? This whole scenario fatally undermines the legitimacy of the Mayor already. The PC's are providing the Town with protection, and establishing rule of law through violence. In lieu of a Divine Mandate of some kind or a Constitution that's sovereignty. The longer the PC's are the only viable defense for the Town the less legitimacy the Mayor will have and the more the Party will. Whether or not they can agree on what form of government they want to establish is another story.
We like to fund resistances because we're adventurers. We rarely stay long enough to run the show.
ReplyDeleteThis group would probably wind up dead within a couple weeks. More than likely the pirates would finish them off. They certainly should.
ReplyDelete