So, a lady/man dies in her home and she has no family to claim the home. My group of players wants to sell the house.
Should houses acquired in this way account for the treasure found by the party? I have never thought about this before!
Any advice on how I should handle this? The city the campaign is set in is :
Large City Lawful Neutral
GP limit: 40,000g Assets: ~37,000,000g
Population: ~18,000
Type: isolated
(it's Korvosa)
My thoughts: taxes are paid on houses so there is some way to keep track of ownership; it would be chaotic to sell a house that wasn't the party's to begin with
I'm hard pressed to believe thatt a LN city doesn't have laws on how to handle such a situation, and those laws wouldn't include "the adventurers nearest the home shall be able to lay claim and sell for their own profit"
Well, of course it's illegal. But probably with a few Bluff and Linguistics checks, one could create a forgery and sell the house. Those were my thoughts.
so...your PCs are squatting in a house and trying to take it as theirs by Decree of Finders Keepers?
I'm pretty sure the city would take possession of it and sell it for tax revenue or something. Worst case I'd imagine that a neighbor would take claim of it as the next closest person to the lady/man or they could buy it from the city etc.
Korvosa actually has some rules for this. The city repossesses the house if no family claims it. But it also says that depending on the area, houses take a long time to get repossessed, sometimes even years.
If the neighbor can just repossess the house, why can't adventurers? Would you think there's sort of a process for selling a house that the city needs to watch over? Or do people just sell houses like they sell stuff? If it takes years for the city to do something with the abandoned house, can adventurers get away with selling the house to someone?
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If they want to sell the house, I would just let them. Have them make some appraise checks and some diplomacy checks, and just give them some amount of coin for it and move on. That amount should include all the necessary taxes and so forth.
I would not role play it out, and I wouldn't give them enough money to make the endeavor worthwhile, and I would make it take a long time (in the background). You want to allow the action, but not incentivize it. My reason is that I don't associate Real Estate with Heroics.
I played a rogue whom had bribed a clerk to put in forged document that gave us legal ownership of a few abandon houses and business's.
For a couple of good deeds.
My PCs in the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP wanted to do the same thing, unfortunately for them, the AP took this into consideration... Korvosa, being a a strongly lawful neutral city, has many laws handling everything from prostitution to property transfers.
When the owner of a home passes, the home is transferred to the ownership of the city and kept in Escrow for 2 years to allow for heirs to lay claim. If a direct heir (filed with the city clerk in advance) lays claim, the property is immediately transferred to the heir once the appropriate taxes & fees are paid. For non-direct heirs, the property is held in Escrow for the full two years to allow for potential direct heirs to come forward.
I would say that this is probably a pretty good model for a lawful neutral city and what I would go with. Just my 2 cp though.
EDIT: Of course, it could still be pulled off, but it would be a bit more difficult and require more time and roleplaying - which isn't always a bad thing. My party later sold a boat that they "acquired" from some well connected bad guys, but they sold it in another city, so it was significantly simpler.
My PCs in the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP wanted to do the same thing, unfortunately for them, the AP took this into consideration... Korvosa, being a a strongly lawful neutral city, has many laws handling everything from prostitution to property transfers.
When the owner of a home passes, the home is transferred to the ownership of the city and kept in Escrow for 2 years to allow for heirs to lay claim. If a direct heir (filed with the city clerk in advance) lays claim, the property is immediately transferred to the heir once the appropriate taxes & fees are paid. For non-direct heirs, the property is held in Escrow for the full two years to allow for potential direct heirs to come forward.
I would say that this is probably a pretty good model for a lawful neutral city and what I would go with. Just my 2 cp though.
EDIT: Of course, it could still be pulled off, but it would be a bit more difficult and require more time and roleplaying - which isn't always a bad thing. My party later sold a boat that they "acquired" from some well connected bad guys, but they sold it in another city, so it was significantly simpler.
That's all true. But I guess if the party is still wanting to be illegal about it, there's probably ways around selling a house without letting the city be involved.
(tho, if I were the buyer, I'd want the city to be involved to make sure the purchase is legit! unless the house was SERIOUSLY discounted)
Also kinda depends upon how medeivel you have your world. As I recall. In real history, usually only the nobility were actually allowed to own any property. That was originally the definition of 'Landed Nobility.'
So whoever was living their probably did not own the property. It would be odd for any noble who did own it to not have someone (however distant) that would lay claim to all of the property. So really it would be a change of landlord if the noble died. But if the person living there died it would just be a change of renter.