I would think the ashlanders, being nomads and natives and generally not involved in house politics, would be except from the tax.

edit: and if only there was a way that they could take the tax worth of personal possessions and then, once you have enough money to pay of your excess debt, you could go and turn it in for your armor, weapons, ect.
if only...

edit again: I just remembered that in MCA the companions have a sort of equipment cost calculator, with their starting equipment being 0, so that if you remove all their equipment they leave or something. so I don't think it's impossible...

I think that a certain amount of time 'off the grid' and dropped charges assuming you are dead is a good idea, 3 months perhaps?... but as long as you have been seen by anybody whilst in a city then you won't be presumed dead.

@IGSC: sorry I missed your post about the charges being too low, does everyone agree that an average of 1000 per month at level 10 and 5000 per month at level 50 is too low? double it? triple it? Also the speechcraft skill wll definitely be a factor when conversing with the T.C. as will race, disposition and faction.

Thieves guild interaction will be included too. What do we have on that so far?

1) Thieves wont refuse service for the reason that you owe taxes, ever... they will still refuse for vanilla reasons and anything included by other mods.
2) Some form of tax cheat, remove your debt for a price, but that won't be available everytime otherwise that would be unfair.

maybe when you finish a quest for the faction of the town you belong to you could get a "tax exemption slip" for helping improve the town, but low tax towns, like hla oad, don't have any quests so you can't get a slip unless you move.

also maybe the tax equation could be proportional to the difficulty slider if that's possible

I think ISGC has this right, but with this additional thought. In a way, they ARE involved. The temple denotes them, the great houses act as if they didn't exist, and the imperials are baffled by them. But how do you uproot a bunch of nomads who are usually found in an area most won't go? And assuming you did, how many are there really? Then add that MW is somewhat resisting imperial rule, yet most locals trace their blood back to these unknown nomads. Even if you DID find a way to tax them, it would mean uprooting them by force, with deaths on both sides.. and fighting an unknown foe. And if word got out, MW would completely revolt. At this time, it's already swaying this way.. feed that fire and your dead.

EDIT:

on the thought of the thieves guild, tax exemption frequency should maybe be based on rank. They would protect higher ranks more after all.

I forgot about the minimumprofit variable. That could be used to pay off debt with armour etc. Drop a nice piece of armour into the TC's inventory and he won't tax you for a good few months. I like it. I will reset his inventory after a variable amount of time every so often too, after all, tax collectors tend to disappear sometimes

The thieves guild service will be available to anyone, but cost and frequency of availability will depend HUGELY on whether you are in the thieves guild or not and your rank.

Also, guys and girls, I think this officially is no longer a potential WIP but an actual WIP Damn, that means I'm gonna have to go and make it now

:hehe:

A comment about paying with gear though. Be careful not to unbalance the taxing with this. There is some really $_$ gear, even in an unmodded game. This should be mostly money based. It would seem odd if the equipment becomes the main currency.

So it's possible!
I was thinking that it would be a sort of loan thing
like, I'll give you my dragon scale helmet for 300 gold worth of tax credit and when I return with 350 gold (interest), after paying off my remaining debt, I can get my helmet back.
or something like that, but that's more of a loan system...

actually yea, about the above post. you could *bribe* an official with armor for months of exemption, but once you bribe them they only last a week or so before they are figured out and fired, and maybe the replacement TC would be tougher to bribe, making the armor worth less if you succeed in bribing them. (with a standard TC in all towns so that you can;t just take advantage of one and then move to another.)

I haven't tested this yet, but I don't think that the item would neccessarily need to remove it's full value from the tax. Just 50%, maybe? You can always come and claim it back then by taking it from the TC's inventory and replacing it with items or gold of the FULL value... if you are at level 50 and your tax is 15000 per month then it will take 2 glass longswords to pay it off... you won't be able to do that forever...

Anyway, you this is why you are all welcome to be my official testers to help check out how balanced it is!

Another question, what are your opinions on Solstheim and Mournhold? Just a standard TC in each or something special?

sounds great!
for mounrhold I think it should be similar, but be the highest tax rate (do we know what the bonus will be yet?)
as for bloodmoon, I don't think you would have one, unless you build raven rock, but with that I would think (as the factor) you would get part of the monthly tax.

I was actually thinking about those two areas. I don't think bloodmoon area would have one. At the very least not right away. When ever you speak to NPC's it's "a horrid place" and no one wants to be there. After you help build Ravenloft, then a tax collector would almost be an exploit for while you are in other towns. Yet it is an imperial area and needs something.. unless you say "too new to have one" or something. hmm..

As for mornhold, I think there would be a high tax for there, but a break or even exemption in the taxes there if you've completed both MQs. After all, it's a very religious city, and as the incarnate with no one like the goddess to stand in your way, they'd like you there.


EDIT:

I've got it! With bloodmoon, you can convince the tax collector when he appears that he shouldn't tax you. After all, without you, there'd be no town. But this occurs as an option only when you speak to him the first time (in that red choice text maybe) and only works if you have X skill in speechcraft. Don't have enough that first time? Too bad. He becomes a stickler after that cuz the town is new and his boss is watching him carefully.

All great suggestions!

I think that I'm going to go with a tax collector *only* in fort frostmoth in solstheim, for now at least and high tax in mournhold. So are we saying the Nerevarine shouldn't get taxed in Mournhold?

I think you should only get tax exemption after you beat the mournhold MQ, not just the vvardenfell one

Agreed. Until you beat the mornhold MQ, the godess makes your life really awful. She'd make sure her subjects never gave you that bonus.. but once dead well..

Agreed

OK, it's 4.30am here, I'm on English time so I'm going to bed . This will be continued about 13 hours from now, I'll reply to everything when I get back. Goodnight!

good night!
this looks like it's turning out to be an awesome mod
and I'm not just saying that because I'm contributing to it

Been a couple of days. Has this begun yet?

Hey, didn't read the whole thread, but here's some ideas:

Rather than doing taxes by level, why not simply have the player receive a letter once a month asking him to visit the C&E Office and report his belongings so that tax can be calculated based on the gold worth of his valuables? Skipping a month would give you a 100 gold bounty per day you don't visit (This could be added to your taxes and removed when you pay them). It wouldn't be hard to check what the player's clothing costs in dialogue, so that, speechcraft, mercantile, disposition, the amount of gold in your inventory, etc. could all be put into one nice big formula to calculate taxes. There would be options for "Report all" "Report half" "Report 1/4" and "Intimidate."

Report all would mean 10% of the total cost of the total amount of gold in the player's inventory, the value of currently worn clothing, and a further percentage based on past reports--not so that it continually increases, but if you had lesser equipment equipped, the amount of tax you'd pay would still be around the same. After all, only honest characters are going to use this, so we don't really need to check their inventory... If MWSE scripting was involved, we could get the value of his entire inventory.

Report half would be 5% of the total costs/gold and a further amount if it's less than what the player had paid before. (This requires a speechcraft, mercantile, and disposition check. Moderate difficulty.)

Report 1/4 would be 2.5%. (This requires a speechcraft, mercantile, and disposition check. Very hard difficulty.)

Intimidate would check the C&E worker's disposition, strength, current health, your strength, value of equipped items, your level, and your speechcraft in some kind of nifty formula that returned neat percentages. These percentages would be used to call dialogue returns that would say if your intimidation worked or not--intimidate would effectively remove your taxes. (for a time, based on the percentage returned, after which you would receive a bounty equal to 100+(tax amount owed) gold. If it failed, however, you would receive a bounty equal to the amount of taxes owed. (Paying your taxes off at that point would remove the bounty.)

Other ideas: Gold taken from you would be added to a chest in the C&E office of your home town. Thus, a thief could break in and steal it back. If the player doesn't have the money on him, they could request items, doable through companion share on a dummy NPC--the result of minimum profit would be the amount of gold added to the chest. With MWSE, we could simply put the items in the chest, but without it the scripting is unfortunately impossible.

edit: From reading more in the thread, I like the idea of honest merchants not trading with you if you're a known tax evader.

I had an idea!
for tax evasion, perhaps you would need to carry "citizenship papers"
this way, we could have the thieves guild sell "counterfeit papers"; with out of date papers (meaning they get stamped every time you go to the office) you get the bounty/service refusal, but perhaps if you have counterfeit papers you could (depending on speech craft, maybe) still trade with the merchants.

edit: punctuation.

@Maholix: Yes, this has begun

@Dirk Zephyrs: I like the idea of the player being taxed according to the value of their belongings, but, even with MWSE there is nothing stopping the player from just dumping all of their gear off in their house, or, even dumping it in a pile right next tax collector, who would be oblivious to the those 27 sets of daedric armour which you just placed on the floor next to him, and getting charged around 2 gold. I could get the script to calculate the value of the players inventory at the start of each day, I suppose, ( I haven't ever written a MWSE script before but I'm sure I could pick it up if there is a little tutorial somewhere or a list of functions ) but I am hesitant to use MWSE as not everyone runs it. I run MGE myself but what do you gus think about MWSE? I could always include an alternate esp :shrug:

Hmm, I'm still a fan of one tax collector per city wandering around but I wasn't planning on building an office for each of them (plus, probably to many conflicts). I don't think the player should have to return to the C&E every time either when there would be a tax collector in each other city 'for the other residents'.

Thoughts?

Edit: Counterfeit papers, like the sound of that though I'm not sure how I would include it.

just trying to fit the thieves guild into a role they're more likely to play
as for mwse, there are a good amount of players that use it
I myself am not exactly sure if I use it or not, I have downloaded it, but I'm not sure as to if I did it correctly.
I have all the components so if a mod comes that I want that needs it I will look into the installation process more.
but that's beside the point, doing two .esp's seems like a lot of extra work, and (although there are a great many people that use MWSE) there is still plenty of others who don't. if you are willing to put the work in to make two esp.s, then I'm sure it would be greatly appreciated, but for now I think you should stick to conventional methods. But you may want to look into the functions MWSE has a bit, it could open up some possibilities and it never hurts to learn .

Hmm, just been looking throught entries for 'tax' in the CS and there a few more instances of tax collectors than I first thought. Maybe I will integrate a some NPCs into a bit of storyline/give them tax collector dialogue.

If you are interested in taking a peek, click 'edit' in the CS, then 'find text' then search 'tax' in the dialogue tab.

Well, almost everyone uses MGE these days. Morrowind's graphic engine is now 8 years old, so many people use MGE to compensate for it. I don't think people will object to a MWSE-dependent mod.



I'm with you; don't add an office. It would be more realistic but it would mean LOTS of conflicts with city expansion/redesign and shop mods out there.

I don't think that's entirely true
I for one don't have a computer that can handle MGE,
I think a lot of people play morrowind on old computers or non-gaming computers that can only take vanilla with a certain amount of adjustment.
I mean, if you look at the MGE screen shot thread, it's generally the same 10 or so people (though I do tend to stay away from that thread, it just makes me depressed )

Running MGE doesn't mean you need to use distant land, reflections, shaders, or anything. I've never had luck with getting MWSE to run by itself, so I always use MGE simply because it contains MWSE. While having distant land and pretty reflections is a bonus, my computer isn't capable of drawing much further than the default view distance.

Anyways...

Um, I think it may be possible to check via MWSE the value of the player's inventory every time he sleeps (or better yet, changes cells, so we can have the script stop running while in menus)... You could just take the average of that or the highest value, whichever you like. Let me dig up my list of MWSE functions... If I still have it.
http://mwse.wikispaces.com/functions?responseToken=8697f3e8bdd6ac7bf91215e7b3289814

Functions you'd need for that'd be xGetInventory, xGetValue, xNextStack.

There you go.

The only reason I suggested having the thing work off of what you have equipped is because doing it by level is kind of a lame cop-out (In my opinion). And my characters tend to be poor by level 25 because they spend all their money on training rather than going out and adventuring.

Other things: The thieves guild should sell counterfeit tax papers or do something. Maybe you can even hire them to steal back your stuff? I think that the counterfeit papers should be much the same as how they deal with bounties, except you have to take the papers to a tax collector and he'd clear your owed taxes or something. Of course, there should be a small chance of discovery. Possibly skill dependent?

I further think that a C&E Office wouldn't be too hard to do, since you could just plug a door in the walls of the fort and make a simple one-room deal. Sure, it's lazy, but it seems more real when each city has their own tax office. Then again, I struggle with modmaking because I'm absolutely terrible at cellcrafting... If scripting and dialogue were all I'd need in a mod, I'd be in heaven, so I understand if you don't want to do this.

Likewise I only use MGE for the MWSE, if anything, standalone MWSE seemed to crash more for me :shrug:

My skills also tend to lean towards the dialogue and scripting departments but I might be willing to put a room in a wall in some of the bigger cities actually, 4 walls and a desk sorta thing. I'm going to look into the MWSE thing, would you mind if I bugged you with a few PMs about it if need be?