Taxes, Taxes, Taxes players in a game?

A sales tax is a tax paid to a governing body for the sales of certain goods and services.

I thought of some city will have a sales tax, but other cities will not have a sales tax.

Some cities:
1)when a play purchases items, they have to pay a little fee.
2)when a play sells items, they must pay a little fee.

Update: This taxing is a bad idea.
So I change to like of strategic resources like a seaside village sells chape seafood and expensive metals. Something like that.
2) A player does the quest for a governor get a discount in that city.

Toll Road Tax
A player has to pay some of the roads to be able to pass through guards.



Do you think it is a good or bad idea to imply this RPG maker game? Any creative ideas would be nice. Thank you for posting.

Is there a point to it? Does it make the game more fun for the player or just more tedious and less fun?

If it just makes it less fun, it is generally not a good idea to put into a game. Unless you are deliberately ignoring the game aspect and just trying to create some sort of new-age games-as-art piece of digital art showcasing the trappings of taxation systems and capitalism or some such.

If you can find a way to make it fun or if you do a poll and find that most people legitimately believe it will be fun, sure, why not.

But if I had to vote on that poll for the idea as you've presented it here, I'd have to vote "not fun". All it does is make the player have to calculate the buy/sell cost of items manually if the tax is not automatically listed in the price and even if it is, they still then get faced with the choice of either grinding for more money or else backtracking to a tax-less shop, both of which are tedious and not fun. Same deal with toll roads, either grind or detour - unless you can fight the guards instead, but if fighting the guards ends up more rewarding (EXP/drops/etc) than paying out money then you might as well make them mandatory fights, because it's going to be the optimal route every time. And if it ends up less rewarding, well, it's just one more equally tedious option alongside gold-farming or detouring.

I think it has a potential of becoming an annoying mechanics. Well, it already is in a real world, lol.

I'm more interested in the purpose of including this mechanics. Since it's not really a fun thing to do in real life, what kind of fun or satisfying feeling and benefits player will get will need to be thought through. Maybe all the taxes goes to town development that will unlock certain features or more hidden items for sale? Becoming upright citizen to unlock sidequests? Maybe you will later have to defeat some evil overlord who do corruption? Is it tied into the main theme/mood/message of the game?(a capitalistic rpg?)

I play video games to escape real life, I don't want to be dealing with taxes when i'm trying to escape from reality. :/

I think it'd be interesting if the sales taxes had an impact on gameplay. Like if you did a quest for the city mayor, s/he would lower the tax rate, or there could be politician A who promises to lower taxes, while politician B would do something else that could benefit you and you have to choose whom to help get elected. I guess there might also be some strategic planning if cities have different tax rates, so you might want to buy all your potions from the low tax-rate city? In any case, I think it'd just have to very clear what the tax rates were in different cities, and to make it easier for the player, it's automatically calculated upon buying/selling goods and pre-tax prices are generally quite similar (otherwise you could just have different prices in different cities).

In real life, most roads have tolls to either pay for their construction and maintenance, and/or to ease congestion. If you're making a sort of city-management game, tolls might be a useful tool to help reduce congestion and get roads built. Paying a toll to guards to travel on a road (and then going on to a different city or fighting a monster, etc) is kinda similar to paying money to unlock something, which is pretty common in RPG games.

@Traverse, @kairi_key, @ VisitorsFromDreams, I agree with all of you tax calculations are not fun. I would not put this system in my game and thank you for letting me know. However, I thought of strategic like a mountain town sells cheap metals.

@SeaPhoenix, thank you for helping me. I like your idea on the discount system after doing a quest for a mayor and different cities have surplus and scarcity of particular items.

Well, I wouldn't worry whether taxes are a good idea or not. It's all about how you present it to the player.

For example when I go to city A, I see a potion for 30 gold. Fine, 30 gold is my starting point. Then another city, 45 gold. Well, do I buy them? Or not? Depends. Another city - potion for 20 gold. So I'll stockpile them here to make sure they're gonna last for a while.
I see flat prices, so I don't have to calculate anything and even though they are different in every city, I'm not really bothered whether it's due to extreme taxes or due to this evil mayor confiscating iron for his secret army, because he wants to make a coup d'état. It gives more room for story based things and if you make it posaible for the player to earn money due to handling economy well, it could be one way of generating income (after all, it's much more realistic to earn gold via merchandise than finding 40 gold inside the stomach of a bat - why in the world would a bat eat coins?) in the game.

I have a similar feature in place, but it's a static tax, meaning you always pay more for purchase than for sale. This prevents the player from grinding money out of the system.
the way around it, is player-crafted items (which you get by farming the materials and having a crafter in your party), and quests (which effectively drive the story forward)

Just why T.T

@Kupotepo But still, I'm not saying that it's totally bad. Even though it doesn't sound like a fun mechanics, there could still be a way to make interesting things out of it. Thinking of the purpose of such system simply help you to know how much you can integrate the idea to the game.

Since this topic is still going...

Actually, maybe the toll road tax is a way to pay for getting from town to town without having to deal with monster on the road? Maybe the monster are kinda tough to deal with so paying could be more convenient but player can still wander the off-toll-road track to fight monster for big levels and some items. Or paying toll road tax give you fast travel.

Another thing is probably how you introduce and present tax system. Imagine going to shop and all items having tax price shown to the player might be discouraging for the player, but if it shows the calculated net price and, maybe later, you have a skill to see a small window showing how much the real price and how much the tax is then it could ease the player in better since they already pay for tax from the start, but they simply found out there are taxes included later in the game.
At that point then you may actually involve in town's matter like go doing some sidequests in town to make it a safer place and help the town develop further and so the tax can get lower or something.

@Poryg, thank you for the advice. I am trying to be as realistic as possible. Now I learn some real things are bad for game design.

@gstv87, thank you for stopping by. That sound good idea.

@Kyuukon, the reason is it is a starting point of brainstorm and I agree that is boring for a player. Now I change to just a simple price for an item. I am lack experience for this, sorry for a noob question. Nice to meet you:smile: and thank you for stopping by.

@kairi_key, nice to meet you and that is why I like this website because many brains tend to get a better idea than my one brain.

If we're talking realistic; let's say you walked into a store to buy an 'energy drink' and saw the price as $2. Would you expect to walk to the till and suddenly be told to pay $2.25 due to taxes? I personally wouldn't. Maybe its a cultural thing, but where I live the price sticker is THE price; all taxes included. If the amount I'll be paying is actually $2.25, tell me before I pick up the item. Of course this is speaking from the perspective of a 'consumer' not a 'store manager'.

The way I see it; the only time taxes should be a big deal in a game is if those taxes are a critical part of the gameplay (such as running a store where you have to choose your own prices while factoring in taxes) or there's a way to influence them. Even then I'd expect all the calculations to be done for me. Maybe make the item prices green or red to indicate 'tax influence', but that's all I really need to know.

@ShadowHawkDragon, nice to see you and thank you for your input. I agree to make thing easy for players just charge them onetime and done.
I have an idea which a player can become a store worker. The player will get the percentages from how much the player sells. That would be an interesting idea. Don't you think?

@atoms and @Aesica, thank you for your inputs.

Do you mean in a game where the general game design goal is to explore towns, dungeons and beat all the bosses?

In those games, I think that would annoy a lot of players. I would rather just be able to buy and sell stuff at a fixed right rate and not worry about extra tax.

But this idea
2) A player does the quest for a governor get a discount in that city.

Could work. I can see that being a satisfying reward for players. But you'd have to balance it carefully so while there is still a decent enough reward to have the discount, it doesn't overdo it to the point the players can buy the most expensive stuff and be overpowered super easily from the discount, if that makes sense.

I honestly don't see the point in having a tax system. For QoL's sake, I just assume any state/local/regional/kingdomwide/whatever sales taxes are factored into the base cost of the item.

As to the fee on buying and selling, it usually just complicates things and feels bad for the player. If the player sees a 20G "sticker price", they are going to assume they can buy 50 of the item with the 1000G they have. But now they have to calculate the tax in, which screws up the round numbers and now they can only buy 44 of the item... it doesn't enhance the player's game experience in any way, but it does hurt it a little.

As far as "strategic resources" like a certain village selling one good on the cheap and another village selling a different good on the cheap - it sounds nice in theory, but in practice it's likely to either fall flat (if the differences are insignificant or the player is awash in money anyhow), or offer abuse cases (otherwise). Abuse cases such as buying 99 of an item in one place and selling them all in another place at a higher price than you bought it, offering an easy (but not very fun) way toward accumulating an infinite bank account. The same can be true with "discounts" for places where you're considered a hero.

• There are definitely ways to work this kind of mechanic into the fabric of general play - for example, some space exploration games use this kind of trade arbitrage as an incentive to get you to explore and move around the universe, and hazards along the way can make any trip unprofitable when your ship is blown up.
• But in an RPG, generally this kind of gameplay loop isn't conducive to the dynamics that RPGs want to offer (narrative to enjoy, new challenges to overcome, combat skills to play with, etc.), so it's best left out in favor of a more consistent and controlled economy of items that can enhance game balance and force the player to make interesting decisions about what to stock up on.

In short, I'd say leave it out of your game. And if you ever need to drive home the idea that a city is mercilessly taxing its people or that you're considered a local hero, do it with more concrete and specific mechanics (e.g. all of that one city's items cost 4x the normal price, and the characters comment about it, or the local people thank you for your service and give you an item as a gift the first time you talk to them) rather than a larger system like fees or discounts.

The only time players are likely to be okay with in game ''taxes" is if the game gives out money so freely that the player does not know what to do with it. For instance take Skyrim for example. In the base game money is never an object at all, so much so that I have a mod that raises buy prices and lowers sell prices, a mod that makes houses, horses and mercenaries 10x as expensive and a mod that makes you have to pay byweekly taxes on any housees or horses you own and I still have more money than I know what to do with by level 30 or so.

Personally I'd rather go the route of designing an in game economy that requires the player to think strategically upon what to buy and what not to from the offset. If the players funds are limited such systems as taxes are just going to feel like tacked on difficulty to make them grind. It can work in games where money is no object but even then it isn't a fun mechanic, just a gold sink to obscure just how broken the games economy already is so the player isn't running around with all the best available gear + 500,000 gold coins in their pockets by midgame or something.

@Wavelength, thank you for your suggestions. Many people agree that is a bad idea.
@Philosophus Vagus, thank you for contributes to discussion. Nice to meet you.

I know what your saying, I don't like it either when I have a ton of gold left over and nothing else to spend it on. But at the same time, I don't see taxes as a solution, I just see any game in that state as needing either more balancing with it's gold/money, or newer weapons, equipment and possible items. Taxes won't make it any better for me, sure it can be plugged in as the way to "balance" it out, but then I'd just think it's be way better to be balanced out without adding taxes to it.

Just the idea of taxing alone sounds bad to me, it doesn't sound fun nor anyway fitting in with other game mechanics in your typical rpg maker game. At least in my opinion. To me, the game can be balanced better just as well without it, and that result would be more fun too, at least I think it would.