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I'm a High Fantasy Tax Collector, So What? A CKII Tax Collector Quest

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[X] Tell him what you know

There's nothing stopping us from turning around and looking for the evidence before we widen the list of who we implicate. Moroever, I suspect bringing out Ophelia Oskaria is going to help us in this. We drove a line in the sand between who is a servant of Oskaria and who isn't if I understand that scene correctly. Julius isn't so stupid to assume his house is in order and he can trust everyone, and Agueda is pretty much the top investigator he can rely on to ferret out who's part of the conspiracy.

The only major reason I can think of to tell him we suspect the nobility by this point is if we're worried he trusts them and would therefore accidentally compromise our own efforts. And Julius' interlude establishes he doesn't and feels personally betrayed by a lot of the nobility. We do not need to give Julius the Bold the last straw that leads him to take bold and irreversible action against the nobility during the middle of a Crusade and preparations to survive a partition between hostile powers. Julius knows his nobles are rotten. He's going to assume some of them are conspiring against him. It's our job to make sure his assumptions become informed by facts. Not to fuel them.
 
[X] Tell him what you know
Thinking about things and the discussion, unless we can narrow things down besides "obviously the nobility is plotting against the kingdom" I don't really think we should say much(, while planning with outsiders to overthrow the king is out there, not as much when compared to most countries). With the state of the country virtually the whole of the nobility would be suspects thanks to the way the operate. So I am changing my vote.
 
Sirrocco said:
Hmmm...

So... just in case the rhetorical question is a trap...

On the one side, the vote talks about "suspicions". On the other, you're implying here that we're sure they're guilty. The question I asked was as to the King's attitude towards provable versus nonprovable - ie, "I want to get earliest warning, even if it's uncertain" vs "I am a very busy man, juggling a lot of plates, and dealing with a lot of liars. Don't tell me unless you have proof". The question you seem to be responding to is "how would he feel about traitors?"

So... no. That's not what I want to know. I want to know the answer to the question that I asked... or at least as much of it as Agueda himself knows and/or suspects.
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King Julius the Bold will listen to everything you have to say, whether it is grounded or groundless. Once he has heard what you and his other advisors say, he will make a decision - and never let it be said that King Julius the Bold was indecisive.
 
Okay. So, the cost of bringing up our suspicions is that we're basically calling out some of the major nobles in the country without adequate proof right in front of them. That politicizes the entire thing, and gives them an opportunity (and strong incentive) to undermine us, while we have relatively little to go on other than our rep. Conceivably we could pull this off, but it makes it a lot less likely that the really important bit ("hey, the other countries are going to invade) gets through.

Further, if we don't bring it up, there's a nontrivial chance that one or more of the traitor nobles decide (based on this and the Ophelia/Oskaria moment) that hey - maybe they want to be loyal after all, and quietly sweep their indiscretions under the rug. That's much less likely to happen if we're calling them out. Further, callign them out puts them in position to clean up the evidence of their wrongdoing before it can be found, and used to nail them to the wall.

I believe I was mistaken. Vote Change.

[x] Tell him what you know
 
[X] Tell him what you know
😅 I really should stop switching my vote....
But I failed to consider that the advisors themselves are suspect, meaning they could use our implications to undermine the whole thing to prevent any preparations from being ordered by the king.....

Edit: We are telling our suspicion with no evidence, and our audience may involve some of the very traitor nobles we need to be wary of.
 
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Themarineguy said:
[X] Tell him what you know
😅 I really should stop switching my vote....
But I failed to consider that the advisors themselves are suspect, meaning they could use our implications to undermine the whole thing to prevent any preparations from being ordered by the king.....

Edit: We are telling our suspicion with no evidence, and our audience may involve some of the very traitor nobles we need to be wary of.
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Nah, if anything it's a worse thing to decide to stick to a vote you've been convinced against. You've got nothing to worry about there.
 
Sirrocco said:
Okay. So, the cost of bringing up our suspicions is that we're basically calling out some of the major nobles in the country without adequate proof right in front of them. That politicizes the entire thing, and gives them an opportunity (and strong incentive) to undermine us, while we have relatively little to go on other than our rep. Conceivably we could pull this off, but it makes it a lot less likely that the really important bit ("hey, the other countries are going to invade) gets through.
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I don't believe we are going to be calling them out. All it sounds like to me is that we are informing the the King that some of the nobility are traitors without naming any names due to lack of proof. We aren't calling them out and they can't accuse ourselves of that due to the lack of names unless they want to imply that they might be involved in treason. Since we just letting him know to worry about traitors in the nobility, said traitors can't fairly complain about it as we aren't saying they are traitors, just that there are traitors.
huhYeahGoodPoint said:
they've also been turning the nobility inside the country away from sabotage and into outright treason.
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Honestly, I don't think this is a concern at all because I don't see your scenario happening as Agueda isn't foolish enough to name important nobles as traitors without evidence. All he will do is let the king know his certain suspicions that the foreigners have some support for their scheme within the Oskarian nobility to the point that some of our nobles are committing treason.

We also know that there are traitors and the King needs to know that this is the case. Our lack of proof isn't that we don't know that there is treason about, just that we don't have solid evidence to back it up.

Sirrocco said:
Further, if we don't bring it up, there's a nontrivial chance that one or more of the traitor nobles decide (based on this and the Ophelia/Oskaria moment) that hey - maybe they want to be loyal after all, and quietly sweep their indiscretions under the rug. That's much less likely to happen if we're calling them out. Further, callign them out puts them in position to clean up the evidence of their wrongdoing before it can be found, and used to nail them to the wall.
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I disagree with this. I feel letting the King know that there are traitors amongst the nobility in this matter is more valuable than a handful of the would be traitors deciding not to be traitors. Him being able to know about the treason and prepare for the treachery is more important than a minority of the traitors deciding not be traitors anymore.

I also feel that we have to let him know that there are traitors for us to be allowed to go hunting for traitors.
 
Oshha said:
I disagree with this. I feel letting the King know that there are traitors amongst the nobility in this matter is more valuable than a handful of the would be traitors deciding not to be traitors. Him being able to know about the treason and prepare for the treachery is more important than a minority of the traitors deciding not be traitors anymore.
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What are the chances that at least some of the advisors are in on the plan to partition of the country?
I think there is a non-zero chance of at least one noble among the advisors. Then there is the fact it might not just be the nobles.
 
One issue which I thought might be important to bring up:

If we make the decision to tell the king everything we suspect, and he goes off (justifiably or not) half-cocked against the nobles, who's to say that one of his first targets won't be the "obviously foreign" Countess Natalia, who has already had trouble with unrest in her demesne.

Just as we're trying to settle our extended family there.

As such:
[X] Tell him what you know.
 
[X] Tell him what you suspect

One thing to keep in mind is that Vivien was the one who told us we had an audience with the King. The implication being that she has spoken with the king about this - at least briefly. And she was the one that pointed us a the servant with the geas, so she has probably guessed at our suspicions towards the noble family. There's a good chance he's already directing suspicious eyes in that direction. More information about what exactly is going on is unlikely to make his moves on the matter worse.
 
We built our character with great stats and party to have populist revolutionary sympathies to deal with the country's problems. It has worked fairly well for us. But the king does not care how we collect taxes, only that we do so briefly imagine if we went instead on the path of the hypercompetent evil reactionary figure? Imagine a character that attempts to collect taxes and fix the country by coopting the corrupt church and higher nobles to working with them, uses the army or hires mercs to terrorize the commoners and lesser nobles into paying or repaying their taxes, exterminate lesser noble houses that refuse to pay and display their corpses for all to see what happens to who defy us, hire singers to sing ominous songs about the terrible fate of our foes, use their impressive skills to fix the regional economy, rely on the spirit of order instead of justice and make our nominal superiors into our puppets. Basically the Tywin Lannister approach.

Obviously, such a character would be quite evil and unpleasant to play as but could such an approach be an effective way to solve the country's problems? Perhaps such a character could have terrorized the lower classes and lesser nobles to paying their taxes to the crown and make themselves into a powerful figure or would they lack the power to pull off such a bloody approach or end up inciting popular revolution with their tyranny?
 
Hydroplatypus said:
One thing to keep in mind is that Vivien was the one who told us we had an audience with the King. The implication being that she has spoken with the king about this - at least briefly. And she was the one that pointed us a the servant with the geas, so she has probably guessed at our suspicions towards the noble family. There's a good chance he's already directing suspicious eyes in that direction. More information about what exactly is going on is unlikely to make his moves on the matter worse.
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I will just mention that I am very glad that Vivien is completely trustworthy and could never be involve in treason, because if that irrefutable absolute fact were somehow incorrect, then that would make me sad. Vivien best minister!
 
[X] Tell him what you know

Bide our time and do not fuel the speculation of a King with nothing left to lose and powered with spite and memories of a better time.
 
Basically, telling him what we suspect is high risk/high reward. He has advisors who are absolutely corrupt, and they get to weigh in after we have our say and before he makes a decision. Once he makes a decision on the matter, he's done. That is a very risky situation to be throwing unprovable accusations of treason into, especially when one or more of the advisors may well be on the treasonous side. Now, if we hit our diplomacy check on this, then the results could be quite good. If we crit our diplomacy check, they're likely to be excellent. That's the image that the "Tell him what you suspect" side is imagining will of course be the result. We're reasonably likely to be the only non-noble and the only non-human in the room. We don't know what the DC on this diplomacy check will be. It's likely to be at least reasonably high, given the circumstances, and could be quite high, depending on the abilities and allegiances of the advisors. If we fail, especially if we fail badly, it could go really very poorly indeed.

Informing our king of an eminently plausible and directly military plan by the neighbors of our fair country, none of whom will have official representation here, is going to be a much easier sell, and the decisions that come out of it are much more likely to be solidly beneficial, even if they don't have the same chance of massive crit bennies.

For me? I don't trust it. There are too many ways that pushing mere suspicions could go very, very wrong... and unlike what we've been doing elsewhere, once we set this ball rolling, our ability to adjust the thrust is going to be pretty limited.
 
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Now that I think of it, there's unlikely to be a lot of the king's advisors around. All the nobles went home in fear of the disease, right? And any advisors who are compromised will likely be nobles as well, both because they're the ones who would have the connections and power to become advisors in the first place, and because nobles have more weak points to leverage when turning them. Nobles have territories that can be expanded, debts that can be paid off, and connections/friendships with all kinds of people who could be turned and used to help turn said nobles.

So it's likely that none of the traitorous advisors are still in the capitol, since they all ran off to spread disease to their peasants.
 
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