>But what about his TAX policy?
Except, actually, though. What about his tax policy? How do you deal with nitty gritty things like taxes, citizen loyalty, and supply chains in TTRPGs without just writing it off?
Tax Policies And Supply Chains
>But what about his TAX policy?
Except, actually, though. What about his tax policy? How do you deal with nitty gritty things like taxes, citizen loyalty, and supply chains in TTRPGs without just writing it off?
Why would I do any of that?
>TTRPGs
It could be a consideration in an autistic kingdom management board game, but TTRPG? Completely out of the scope of the game
>b-but
No butts, it's just pointless trivia in an RPG session at best, GM being moronic worldbuilder at worst
/thread
>Type of game based mostly in medieval fantasy
>Refuses to world-build based off the thing that caused half of the conflict in the middle-ages
What a waste of trips.
>[Baseless claim]
>[moronic follow up that has nothing to do with anything]
[Contrarian disappointment to finish up shitty bump of a dead, useless thread]
I'm gonna bet there is a bot script that just checks the php table and assembles the posts along the "formula"
So you're saying that the vast majority of TTRPG isn't medieval fantasy?
And you're following that up by claiming that taxes were not a major source of peasant revolt during that time period.
Does it hurt being profoundly moronic, or are you just numb?
Well many late game RPGs are about running your own fiefdom or barony, even kingdom.
Which means taxes or lowering the age of consent and flying into a homicidal rage anytime someone mentions roads.
In that case it's up to the player though.
I also suspect it's largely hypothetical and only a tiny minority of groups have ever even tried such a thing, but that's not the point.
name one game.
AD&D
FPBP, if OP ran games he'd know nobody cares about this shit.
Nobody cares about that and I can tell you don’t actually play games.
Fpbp
Managing the ledger of the player owned tavern
Because you are a Chad and desire to make a compelling work of fiction that is a cut above the goyslop that passes for modern fantasy.
We're talking about playing games, not writing novels.
Mostly this. Unless it’s relevant don’t include it. Now if your game involves a lot of traveling you might include tolls and duties if you carry a ton of shit everywhere, but even that is best left in the background beyond “you know this kingdom charges very high duties with provinces charging duties between each other” and just telling your players “the guy says you owe him 50 gold for all the shit you have.
>taxes,
When PCs have a base or home I deal with that. Occasionally there are surprise taxes, but only if it's to establish a point about the area they are in.
>citizen loyalty,
If I am doing an adventure where rebellion and civil war are on the line, I deal with that
>and supply chains
Every GM should have a rough idea of where different things come from within their setting, knowing 99% of the time the PCs don't care.
I'm only tracking any of this shit if somebody is playing an accountant, lawyer, or politician of some kind. In fairness I've played court intrigue games where these factors have come up before- Players were the King's Council, ruling while he was locked in stasis with a BBEG. Each player had complete control over one policy position of the Kingdom, but they had assigned goals that required multiple specific policy directives. This was a potentially competitive system, as whoever's policy goals were met would receive additional experience that nobody else got. As a result, all five members of the council in theory had the ability to cooperate perfectly to do what was best for the kingdom, but in practice they had personal incentives to shape the kingdom's policy in different distinct ways depending on their character. Additionally, I WAS keeping track of the actual policies being proposed and discussed the various ways the kingdom changed as a result of these policies. Civilian upheaval, Noble upheaval, Religious Upheaval, and Miltiary Upheaval were all resources that could be exploited to instigate a policy shift, but they came with negative roleplaying consequences that occasionally spilled into court.
>How do you deal with nitty gritty things like taxes, citizen loyalty, and supply chains in TTRPGs without just writing it off?
local plot is about civil unrest because of taxes. Maybe some greed demon is involved. Or some bad guy group fricks with the supply chain and local populace suffers for it, leading to your partys call to adventure
Why wouldn't I write it off? We're not playing a geopolitical strategy game.
If it comes up (say if we're in an army or something), I'll figure it out.
spell negus.
historically you tax labour. pesants will work your fields as taxes and the product is your profit. you could levy aditional fees on services like milling or you could operate ferries or sawmills too i guess. if your goal is to tax travellers a flat tariff at what ammounts to a gatehouse would be the way to go, that way you can exempt regulars. a yearly passage fee perhaps?
GURRM has such an incredibly punchable face. It's like his nose was made to be broken.
I play games set in the real world but with monsters or whatever. Someone asks me a dumb question I just tell them to fricking google it.
Taxation is just banditry mandated by the nobility.
> Taxation is just banditry mandated by the nobility.
No, that’s backward. Banditry is just taxation not backed by the aristocracy.
Nobody who has actually been robbed has ever uttered this statement.
I agree, taxation is theft. We should only pay for the services that we use and those who do not pay will face the consequences of oh no I've invented taxes.
>The bandits have begun.. paving new roads?
>bandits create more roads to rob more caravans travelling along them
diabolical.
With broad strokes that don't preclude finer strokes if players examine it closely.
The annoying thing about this, is if grrm had been around to write a letter to Tolkien about the tax policy, then Tolkien would've had an answer.
It's not something Tolkien wouldn't have thought about, just not that interesting or relevant to bring up.
people on /tg/ treat games like writing boards for there own personal multimedia franchises and players like market testing instead of actual fricking games
>pic related
Why?
Yeah, that's one of the biggest problems of this board rn.
>people on /tg/ treat games like writing boards for there own personal multimedia franchises and players like market testing instead of actual fricking games
I will confess to this. That said, I do this mainly because, for all it's faults and much shit/schizo-posting, Ganker anons are HONEST, which is a rarity on other platforms. There is little or no sugarcoating . If it's shit, it's shit. You don't get that with the sycophants on reddit or category fanatics on twitter.
This thread is already shit, so uh source?
frick yourself race traitor
And there goes my human disguise
>little white wiener
ha
Punctuation was not the artist's strong suit.
I can still tell you're mixed though just from your post.
>Except, actually, though. What about his tax policy? How do you deal with nitty gritty things like taxes, citizen loyalty, and supply chains in TTRPGs without just writing it off?
I've actually done a significant amount of research on medieval tax policy. For the most part nobles taxed peasants "in kind" which means that instead of a percentile tax like we are familiar with now, the lord and the peasant family got together and arranged what they believed to be an appropriate amount. Like to bushels of wheat, three chickens and a hog. But then added that to the books, and that's what the tax was every year.
This led to a lot of disputes, between Lords and peasants. Anytime there was a lean year or famine, every family had to renegotiate what they were going to give to their lord as taxes. Lord's also wanted more of the action when peasant families increased the size of their land or increasing their productivity, which depending on the area could be very difficult as the peasants would naturally resist any attempt to increase their taxes, especially if they had been paying the same taxes for multiple years or generations.
There where a large number of peasant revolts and the century after the Black Death. Mostly because when everyone died, suddenly the peasants had way more power in negotiating with taxes were. Then is population's recover, our begin slowly shifting back towards the lords. Peasants remembered taxes when they're at their all-time low in the post. Black death period as " The way it's always been, for as long as anyone can remember" because while some lords had access to written records pretty much, no peasants did.
And also needs to weird situation where peasants are especially hostile to Church held lands. Because if you are trying to dodge taxes with the Lord, then you can maybe work something out. Maybe they don't have the best records and you can argue about it. But if you owe your taxes to a monastery, they always had great records.
This is also the reason why there are constantly pushes for standardized weights and measures. Especially from the peasantry.
There were all sorts of shenanigans where a local lord who is getting paid in bushels of wheat, always has a bushel that is twice the size of what everyone else uses.
Never read anything from this guy, did he answer shit like those in his franchise?
You can trace a rough idea of what each kings tax policies were and there's a general cause and effect between the state of the peasantry and lavish spendings
No. It's what makes the quote so great.
That's exactly the sort of pretentious ass battery that you would expect from the author.
Only vaguely. GRRM's worldbuilding is just as overrated as his writing.
I think he probably has/had an idea of it based on the characters leadership styles, but it's no more fleshed out in the books than anyone else does.
I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure the quote, when taken on it's own, was pretty misleading to the meaning, though. I can't remember/find context to back that up, though.
Here's the full quote:
>Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
FFS, it was an epic, not a god damned history lesson you fat piece of shit. And for what it's worth, Tolkien already explored what happened after and decided it was shite that no one would want to read about. So stawman 1 gurmtheworm 0.
How fricking bad does your reading comprehension have to be to have the quote in front of you and still fail to understand it so completely? How the frick do you read that and think he's saying, "Acktually Tolkien wrote his book wrong I am very smart"?
I'm baffled that anyone who has presumably read LotR can be so flummoxed by a short paragraph.
>Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper
I struggle to think of an example that demonstrates this in the story. Possibly in the epilogue, but that's obviously going to be brief and shallow.
>king being a singular good man is a problem
>ramsay having 20 good men is not
This is actually the core issue. Martin is fat, whereas Tolkien is not. To appease the fat man, you must present all things in excess. (Hence the whole 'seven kingdoms' idea. One is simply not enough). Tolkien does not understand the Way of the Fat, and unintentionally slighted Martin, dooming himself to the ire of the bespectacled brown water man for eternity.
It's mentioned vaguely, or you're able to infer it. At one point a character, the dwarf, does become a fairly important public servant, and he does some shit to get his city in better shape. Nothing to write home about, though. Discworld does a better job of this sort of thing.
GRR Martin is very broad strokes in general. I'm convinced he just gets his reputation as a detailed and/or well-researched writer from the fact that he's very verbose, very readable, and basically babby's first Fantasy. To anyone with a passing familiarity with history it's all just very... normal. He just takes from Medieval history without thinking too much about it, but also doesn't include too many of the old, bad tropes like plate crippling a man's fighting ability to the point where you wonder why people even wear it. If you're familiar with history you start noticing things like how the world is far too big to be as unified as it's presented, how the world's strange seasonal cycle barely rings through into the setting itself, how the heraldry if the noble houses is far too simple (especially with how many there should logically be), or how the names for some things are rooted in Earth history and would be called something else in a Fantasy setting.
Martin was "realistic" at a time when no-one bothered, and I guess that reputation just followed him forever.
One day people will read Malazan and then they'll understand true autistic worldbuilding. I still unironically like ASOIAF though.
>If you're familiar with history you start noticing things
Or, and here's my favorite, how technology and civilization is progression much, much more slowly than it should be.
No, because he doesn't think any book should be a tax policy guide, only morons too dumb to understand this out of context quote think that
oblig
Justly and fairly
Gurm was making a legit point about how he loves LOTR but wanted a more realpolitik fantasy story and the autistic fricks actually thought he wanted to know about Aragorn's tax policy. Never change, neckbeards.
So that aside, I tend to dislike heavy crunch, but economic conditions are a great way to create or at least flavor entire adventures. EG imagine if the players are in a Western game and gold is found outside their hometown. Imagine all the prospectors that would show up. And then there'd be businesses following them. And seedy people like pimps, con-artists, claim jumpers, and so on so crime would shoot up. And what happens when prospectors start trespassing on the local ranches and the Indian reservation?
>Gurm was making a legit point
Lol no he wasn't. He was just talking out his fat ass.
He's a shit writer. His only contribution to the genre was having characters without plot armor. And he couldn't even stick with that. There's legit nothing work reading after his second book.
>Lol no he wasn't. He was just talking out his fat ass.
>He's a shit writer. His only contribution to the genre was having characters without plot armor. And he couldn't even stick with that. There's legit nothing work reading after his second book.
Pretty much. His complaints are just him setting up a straw man, that happened to knock him on his lazy arse when he tilted against it.
Is it just me or does GRRM look like Redd Fox? Stealing his look?
I hate this fat old bastard and what he's done to the fantasy genre.
I unironically utilized tax policy in a game I run.
does the party have gold as a liquid asset?
1d10 of it is taken away in taxes traveling into the city state.
However.... loot is not taxed. So masterwork weapons are the preferred method of wealth transfer. Encouraging the use of trade goods when possible. And they can also just commit tax evasion.
>Family heirloom sword is a way of getting around estate taxes
You are now aware why so many people are willing to buy 10k$ watches.
Reminds me of a telephone conversation I once overheard in the train. Which wasn't heard, because despite sitting at the other end of the carriage I could hear it clearly. It was this young, low class brick layer dressed like a clown. I know he was a brick layer because he mentioned it to his friend on the phone. I know he just wants to smoke weed when he's off work, because he also told his friend on the phone. He also announced he was picking up his new gold ring. And despite the display of almost stereotypical behavior, he was at least right about the ring. Gold retains its value, he said. It's good to have gold.
>randomized taxes based on how much you carry
Completely moronic system, I hope the government doing that is led by an inbred dynasty of corrupt barbarians so the moronation is at least consistent.
It models how much in bribes the guards and so on are taking that day. While 1d10 gold has too much swing, I could see something like a 2dN or 3dN providing a reasonable distribution to model just how much corruption the players run into while they pay their taxes. The PCs are foreigners with little reputation so of course city officials will bilk them for as much as they think they can get.
Allow me to rephrase. I run a hex-crawl so I procedural generate city-states.
Each city state has it's own taxes that is collects separately. The tax rate of the city is determined by a 1d10 and stays such. So an average city-state will collect 5% of the party's gold when they enter the city's walls. Heavy leeway once they pay the fee.
It's a mix of taxes and customs. It allows me to give players a surcharge to enter a place where they can buy magic items and have access to whatever material they might need, and not run the 1% risk of an adult dragon finding them again.
Also the party can just use skill checks to avoid taxes. In fact the cities sometimes have the local low-ranking paladins specifically guard tax-collectors for that exact reason(but only rarely, mostly done by the ones running the local hegemony).
Yes. In fact I directly based it off of the tax evasion of the 1715 treasure fleet.
You can wealth tax valuables. It's disgusting but they do it.
where is the book old man?
As an autistic eternal GM, I make thw world I want then justify it after the fact. The real issue comes from games where pcs play as lords like Pendragon, ASOIAF, or even l5r. I try to make the math make sense, but I'm neither a historian or accountant so all my ideas are still just poorly researched rubish. It's like when there's a might stat and a wealth stat for a lord, so you can have an overly mighty army but poor economy. It makes no sense in a literal sense, so you have to justify it by over spending on the military in lore but not mechnically
Obviously you turn it into quests with tangible rewards, benefits and possible consequences.
mention them when relevant to a story. they can be relevant. people like tax assessors and the like probably exist and can make good fodder for a plot, mostly because theyre often the reason something needs to be investigated.
Tolkien could have written an entire book on the nitty gritty details if he really wanted to. He didn't because he was a decent writer that knew that stuff is boring to all reasonable people.
Incoming ships declare the value of their cargo at port, and pay tax based on that. Any person or entity (including the state) reserves the right to purchase the entire cargo according to the declared price.
For unknown reasons, the king has a highly detailed wooden carving of a hand extending its middle finger on his mantlepiece.
PCs aren't likely to pay conventional taxes because they aren't likely to have a residence. They can still pay things like sales taxes or tolls to cross bridges or enter cities.
it's hilarious that his off-hand comment about taxes has caused so much seething for so long
The main taxes I put in my games are tolls. For example when they go to a new town there is usually a toll to enter unless they’re residents. Or a bridge toll, highway toll etc. I’m sure there is gst too in a lot of kingdoms but because I’m not a moron I assume it’s paid by the business instead of the customer.
If I were to include taxes at all, it would just be for how they impact individuals or localized groups as a plot device to a power dynamic between ruler and citizens. The nuances of tax code serve virtually no function that would improve the player experience unless you wanted to turn the game from a TTRPG into a homebrewed 4X game.
People omit this but the context it gives is important:
>Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
GRRM isn't just saying that every medieval fantasy should have details on taxes. He's saying that Tolkien merely says that Aragorn is a good ruler, without actually taking the time to describe what about Aragorn's rule was good. It doesn't actually tell you much about anything he did after the story ended, which is fine because that's the end of the story by then. But objectively it's kind of a copout answer the equivalent of saying "they lived happily ever after."
It's still a dumb thing to complain about. It's like when scifi nerds try to explain why scifi shit does things with real science, and all it does is expose they know very little about what they're talking about.
Well yeah, the entire story of this world basically ends after Aragorn becomes king. Tolkien likely didn't care to elaborate on what kind of things Aragorn did as king because that is not what his story was about. GRRM is looking at Tolkien's work decades after the fact and craving for more, but unfortunately Tolkien had no interest in continuing this story.
Tolkien knew when to stop and GURRM can't even finish.
It basically ends after Aragorn's son becomes king. We actually have a lot of details about what happened after Sauron was defeated, not 'pages and pages', but a lot. Yes he killed orcs, but it was more of a reactive affair, he didn't scour the mountains looking for orc babies in their cribs.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "the story", if you mean "the story of the ring" (i.e. "The Lord of the Rings") then it basically ends with "Well, I'm back", but if you mean the story of Middle Earth then it basically ends at a some nebulous point in Eldarion's reign, as humans begin to invent their own evils and forget the lessons of the past.
He's describing how his approach writing differs from Tolkien's, not lecturing on what Tolkien "ought" to have done. He knows full well that LoTR wouldn't have benefited from another appendix on Aragorn's tax policy, and isn't suggesting there should have been one. He's saying he didn't want to write a story like that because he did want to address those issues of policy and governance.
Whether he achieved that is beside the point - I waded through the first book and didn't care to carry on. Just learn to read a fricking quote properly and understand that the context is a writer being interviewed about his own work, not a critic lecturing on why LotR is bad and wrong.
Because you fat fricking hack, pages and pages of Aragorn ruling would have been dull as ditch water and no one wanted to read that after all that had happened for three books.
Imagine a movie where a mild mannered accountant gets caught up in some crazy conspiracy, makes new friends, gets betrayed, goes on to take down the bad guy in an epic duel, saves the world, then spends the last 30 mins of the film in his office doing his regular job. That's what gurmtheworm is wanting. Fricking morons.
>He's saying that Tolkien merely says that Aragorn is a good ruler, without actually taking the time to describe what about Aragorn's rule was good.
Because it's the end of the book and that shit isn't important. You don't spell out your entire national plan in the epilogue. It's an asinine point. At this point in the series we know enough about the world and who he is were we don't need to know pointless details. You're confusing minutia for world building like an absolute poser homosexual.
>He's saying that Tolkien merely says that Aragorn is a good ruler, without actually taking the time to describe what about Aragorn's rule was good
he did though, just without fixating on shit as inane as taxes. He frees the slaves of mordor, and gives them land to settle as their own, he gives faramir a promotion, expands the realm into arnor and made peace with the haradrim, shit like that. It's not super-detailed of course, but it gives you enough of an impression of his competence and general character as a leader that you don't need anymore to realize he's at least decent at his job.
Why does this fat old man trigger this entire fricking website so hard?
Ganker in particular had a meltdown the moment his involvement in Elden Ring was revealed
Because it’s le contrarian coolness to hate le popular thing, and Ganker is full of impatient, entitled, arrogant asshats who think their voices matter. They devour games like fat people devour food, so they’re metaphorically obese themselves.
Gamers deserve nothing but contempt for shitting up the hobby that can be said to be proto-simulation technologies. Had the automobile been released today, it would be declared “too dangerous”. This sort of catering is fricked.
>Why do people all scream moron when I enter a room?
It's been twelve years since the last book for SOIAF, he's fat and old, and will very likely die before finishing the the last two books. As much as people hate on him, they do want to know how the story ends.
Then add in all the side projects he does that make it look like he's not even working on it.
Then there's the immensely popular TV series that crashed and burned once it passed where the books left off, and the worry that the lame last season is where the books are headed.
And on top of all that, he's kinda full of himself, which isn't helped when quotes like the OP are taken out of context and making him looks like he thinks he's better than Tolkien.
>And on top of all that, he's kinda full of himself
Are you projecting ?
well he's sure not working on the next book in the series at the moment
Why is he deliberately not working on the books? Is he concerned because the TV show ending actually ended up being close to what he intended, does he simply not want to spend his twilight years shackled to his typewriter, or what?
>Why is he deliberately not working on the books?
Because he doesn't have to. He made his money already.
>Why is he deliberately not working on the books?
Because he doesn't want to.
He feels like he's written himself into a corner and like many people is avoiding work that seems hard and kinda self-embarrassing.
I also suspect he's a little bored with it by now; before ASOIAF, he mostly wrote short fiction and for TV shows. The handful of novels he wrote were all standalones, and mostly pretty short. Note that he wrote a grand total of 3 Dunk and Egg stories; we've been waiting on the She-Wolves of Winterfell for, what, 15 years?
As someone else pointed out, he has no incentive to get over it. He's rich as frick. For every fan yelling at him to just fricking finish it, there's 10 who just love the TV show (and maybe the books). Plus, anything new he writes will also sell like a motherfricker.
As I've always said (well, for about 10 years), the books will be finished after he dies and his wife sells the notes to someone. I just hope it's Daniel Abraham and not Brandon fricking Sanderson.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the ending reddit shat themselves in tardrage about was based on his notes and he can't figure out something better.
>mild discussion about the second most popular Fantasy writer on a Manchurian biological weapon research logbook where a lot of people play Fantasy RPG's
>triggered
If this word hadn't already entered the public lexicon completely devalued, I'd say this nonsense did a good job of achieving exactly that.
The thing with G.R.R. Martin is that he has a big reputation, and he's fairly brash with his opinions, and both are kind of unwarranted. He's not a bad writer, at least as far as aSoIaF is concerned. His earlier work isn't very good, and only regained the attention of the public eye due to Game of Thrones. But a lot of people seem to think his work has some special quality beyond being punchy, readable Fantasy pulp. It doesn't. He's not terribly smart, insightful, well researched, or revolutionary. He's good at writing in a way that makes you want to flip the page, or get to the next chapter to see what the other characters are up to. He's good at making the reader guess at the future of the work and wanting to see what's going to happen next. More often than not in the sense of who will bite the dust.
And that's better than the vast majority of fiction writers. Though, considering he's been writing professionally since 1970, it's somewhat telling he's really only known for one series. He's found his niche, and that's this one series.
Might have something to do with not finishing his damn book
The Game Master has to have some kind of mental model for how these things work. Then they can be mostly hand waved, excepting those times when player action collides with them or they drive the situation.
I treat taxes in my game like a surprise gift.
As my adventurers find a hamlet or city that appeals to them I like to have them pay taxes and then, depending on the setting strengthen or add a wall around the town, a fountain in the center that has healing water, ballistae, and better guard armor and training.
Then if the city is corrupt the armor becomes the pc’s armor and weaponry.
If the city is based the guards actually do their job.
Each time the adventurers come back the guards regale the pcs about the bandits that were stopped, the highwaymen that had been put away.
To make it more apparent as we get to the end of a campaign I actively see if the bbeg’s armies have been successfully repelled as they attack the home base city while the pc’s are away.
This assumes of course that the pc’s have a home base in a city.
That obviously doesn’t work in a high seas adventure.
Well. Let me tell you about a little game called Adventurer Conqueror King, which actually DOES deal with taxes, domain morale, supply and demand, agricultural investments, and so much more. The author is a bit of an autist who worked out the economic engine and built a lot of the game from it. It's even got a class called the Venturer! As a consequence, it's also a system with un-broken crafting.
I dont do that but if I would, firstly I would take advise from DM book what are the average incomes for each feudal class.
Then I would make every unexplored dungeon property of a king or a duke and would tax treasure 20%.
I would make every farmer pay 10% as raz plus one day/month working at nobles farmstead.
I would make a Guild of Tax collectors, hiring thugs, fighters and paladins of certain oaths to collect.
I would make official magic inatitution, each arcane caster pays 15% of the income there.
I would make goblinoids legal to enslave.
>Then I would make every unexplored dungeon property of a king or a duke and would tax treasure 20%.
That's incredibly generous, tax on discovered treasure is normally like 90%.
Being a tax collector is essentially being an enforcer. The king dictates that X amount of taxes must be collected from a specific area. Tax collectors bid for the amount of time that they need to collect that amount with the lowest bidder winning and are allowed to keep any surplus that they collect during that time as their payment. So, say that the king has said that 5,000 gold coins must be collected from a particular city, and your group of tax collectors have said that you're able to do it in three weeks, winning you the bid. After three weeks, you have managed to collect 8,000 gold coins. 5,000 go to the king and 3,000 are yours to keep.
The Romans would straight up auction off tax rights. Some rich dude buys the right to collect tax, so the state is paid instantly and the guy can then go and collect his tax.
kind of sounds like a tax lien, except instead of waiting for the dude to fail to pay his taxes, you auction off the right to collect them right off the bat.