1 hour ago, DGLaderoute said:

S o a Crane samurai with an interest in gambling in, say, Ryoko Owari may very well end up borrowing money from commoners, who are themselves vassals to Scorpion lords.

Gambling is somewhat different than trade.

A samurai with gambling debts might turn to others for a loan, but he'll do so on his own initiative - not the potential lender's - unless someone with a ulterior motive who found out about these financial struggles intends to get leverage over him (a typical Scorpion ploy). Those he's indebted to due to gambling misfortune might extend credit, but that's not a loan. Regardless, this is not commerce unless the indebted samurai tries to offer some of his belongings to square his debts (and this will likely be construed as a gift or a favour in order not to suffer social stigma).

Trade samurai are involved in tends to be shrouded - it's looked down on, so certainly when it involves transactions between individuals (not treaties or large transactions) it's handled discretely and samurai pretend it was something else entirely. Gambling on the other hand carries no such stigma and can be done openly and publicly. Gambling debts can be acknowledged without shame. Welching on a bet is a major no-no, of course.

2 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

That's not a whole lot if you ask me, especially considering how the samurai can shoot himself in the foot for actually taking a loan. Heck, pissing off another lord over a dirty merchant and his handful of koku should be essentially a non-issue. After all, the samurai can spin a good story too, and then it is his word against a lowly merchant's and if your (or anyone's, really) lord rather believes a merchant then you should really think about your life because your problem is much greater than a wronged merchant.

Well, this is probably true in some cases, sure...some lords won't care. The trouble is, I get the sense you're looking for a one-size-fits-all answer and that's where things get more complicated. If a samurai takes money from a merchant who's a vassal to another lord, he is stealing from that lord. That's a crime. If the samurai in question doesn't get called to account for it and gets away with it...well, nothing's illegal if you don't get caught, right? But if the samurai DOES get "caught", whether because the lord chooses to believe the merchant anyway (which would be deeply insulting, of course, and could very well trigger a demand for a duel...but that doesn't mean it won't happen), or there are samurai witnesses who can testify, or some other reason, it becomes crime whose seriousness, and consequences, could be as dire as the lord is able to make stick. It's like anything else...sure, a samurai can walk around Rokugan taking stuff from commoners, but they are accepting a risk when they do that. They might get away with it essentially forever...or they might not, and could find themselves in varying amounts of trouble.

And, of course, there's the whole concept of Bushido to consider. A significant majority of Rokugani samurai would look at doing this as a violation of Compassion, and perhaps Honor, and even Courage, and therefore quite dishonorable. After all, what honorable samurai would lower themselves to ripping off commoners for cash? If the samurai's lord finds out about it, THEY might bring harsh judgment down on the offender, because it simply looks bad.

The bottom line is that we don't see anything in the canon that portrays samurai walking around Rokugan ransacking the commoners' stuff. There are reasons for that.

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Now imagine this Crane samurai explaining the situation to his lord. This kinda makes me think that loans are for "special" samurai but that doesn't lend a whole lot of viability to the concept.

Oh, I suspect most samurai in this situation will try to avoid letting their lord find out, because this is another "looks really bad" sort of thing. It's even more incentive to keep it all on the down-low. This may be a less-than-savory situation for a samurai getting a loan, but it's probably also not an uncommon one.

8 hours ago, DGLaderoute said:

The trouble is, I get the sense you're looking for a one-size-fits-all answer and that's where things get more complicated.

Nah, I'm just wondering why it isn't a thing instead of loan taking. Taking the merchant's money seems to be much simpler and straightforward with minimal possible consequences and many-many "if"s scattered along the way while loans are guaranteed bad ideas with obvious trappings and very dire consequences.

10 hours ago, DGLaderoute said:

Well, this is probably true in some cases, sure...some lords won't care. The trouble is, I get the sense you're looking for a one-size-fits-all answer and that's where things get more complicated. If a samurai takes money from a merchant who's a vassal to another lord, he is stealing from that lord. That's a crime. If the samurai in question doesn't get called to account for it and gets away with it...well, nothing's illegal if you don't get caught, right?

That's basically it. The Merchant themselves has next to no legal rights and hence anything you do to them isn't a problem. Inconveniencing their lord, by taking large chunks of money and/or bodily extremities from the merchants who keep the economy of their town running is the sort of thing that even a "I don't muddy my hands with trade" lord is going to be aware is a bad thing to allow to happen, and may object.

To me, it's the same logic as paying for a room in an inn whilst travelling. Yes, you can just demand the room.

But it's going to inconvenience a lot of people and some of that inconvenience might ultimately splash on someone higher up the social scale than you - the innkeeper's lord, their lord, the next (invited) guest who should have been in that room, whatever. A totally-not-a-commercial-payment "gift" in thanks for the innkeeper's family and the town magistrate's troubles in accomodating you at short notice sooths ruffled feathers and prevents that ever being an issue, since the inn can afford to replace the food and sake you consume, a merchant guest can be offered a bit of consideration to give up their room in favour of a hayloft or something to create a spare room, and no-one is significantly put out.

The same is true with loans. Yes, you can walk into a prosperous merchant's house in your lord's town and say "I'm taking all your money", and they have no legal answer other than "yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir."

But when tax day rolls around and the town magistrate says "where is your money?" They can answer honestly "My lord's samurai took it" which if this is a regular thing, results in tax revenues gettng messed up and the people running the province being noticably more short of money than they should be. Inconveniencing a merchant isn't a crime. Noticably inconveniencing your lord is.

Hence, a different approach is to take the money on a temporary basis, on the understanding that you will return it and not defraud your lord of their due tax revenues.

The problem comes with how much you actually take and how much you owe when you come to pay it back. After all, the value of a Koku varies between clan territories and on a yearly basis, and on a far more dramatic basis than currency variations in modern economics. Since - as noted in the original post - an organised cartel of local merchants basically controls the price of rice, and a Koku is nominally "the value of a defined chunk of rice", they can basically devalue or inflate the currency between the time you borrow the money and the time you pay it back (depending on whether the loan is recorded as an amount of coinage or an amount of rice).

Accepting interest payments is the one rogue bit here - whilst a merchant can make a pretty defensible argument for handing money over as a loan (unless you've got or get approval to take the money from your lord), charging interest on it is a different thing. That, by comparison, is only possible if the merchant thinks the lord and magistrate will back them because that is the classic "I'm charging money for nothing" which throughout history (occidental as well as oriental) has made moneylenders a socially and religiously villified profession.

8 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

Nah, I'm just wondering why it isn't a thing instead of loan taking. Taking the merchant's money seems to be much simpler and straightforward with minimal possible consequences and many-many "if"s scattered along the way while loans are guaranteed bad ideas with obvious trappings and very dire consequences.

Probably because, for the vast majority of clan samurai, there's really little reason to do either. Most samurai simply get to live a life relatively free of issues regarding money in just about any capacity. They don't have to pay rent, or buy food, or equip themselves, because their lord/the "system" provides all of that too them, often along with a small stipend or "allowance" for whatever miscellaneous expenses do come up. And if they're traveling away from their lord's jurisdiction--at least on official duties--they'd be given either funds to pay their expenses, or perhaps letters of credit or similar documents intended to allow the clans whose hospitality they enjoy to claim monies back (the Rokugani do love their paperwork.) Frankly, unless a given samurai has a specific need for money that's probably quite personal to them--say, a gambling problem or a drug addiction or something similar--it probably never even really occurs to them to go looking for money in the first place. Many of these same samurai would similarly see Bushido as a good reason to not make their first stop for solving any money problems that do come up just taking it from heimin. It's generally dishonorable, flying in the face of Compassion, Honor, and perhaps even Courage (rolling unarmed, unskilled peasants for their stuff isn't exactly the making of a glorious, heroic tale.)

Now, take a samurai with major gambling debts, an opium addiction that's expensive to feed, or who is a ronin with no lord providing for them, the situation becomes quite different. HERE I can see some resorting to loans (which, I acknowledge, could be dumb...it's often dumb in our real world, too.) Some may still be desperately hanging onto the Bushido tenets; others may, despite their circumstances, be sympathetic to the commoners, or simply not be stalwart enough to risk taking things that really don't belong to them. And some, yes, will happily walk up to a commoner and take all their stuff without a second thought, even through violence...they're just peasants, after all. That's all fine, as along as they get away with it. But if they do get caught, the consequences--especially if they're ronin--can be quite severe. Samurai lords really don't like being robbed and, yes, may very well take the word of a trusted retainer (who has been making good coin for them) over that of some samurai known to hang out in seedy gambling houses or opium dens or, far worse, is a ronin dog. Those samurai can easily end up dead.

So it's not really that I particularly disagree with you. I just think that, like most things in this society we try to portray as being as "real" as we can make it, there are going to be lots of reasons the people do the things they do, including often not making the best, or apparently most sensible decisions.

Heck, look at OUR real world for that!

6 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Accepting interest payments is the one rogue bit here - whilst a merchant can make a pretty defensible argument for handing money over as a loan (unless you've got or get approval to take the money from your lord), charging interest on it is a different thing. That, by comparison, is only possible if the merchant thinks the lord and magistrate will back them because that is the classic "I'm charging money for nothing" which throughout history (occidental as well as oriental) has made moneylenders a socially and religiously villified profession.

Yeah, for my part, I think interest would be viewed pretty dimly in most of Rokugan, bordering on what amounts to extortion. That's probably how I'd approach it in a game I was running. I'm not sure it has ever been mentioned in the canon, though, in either the old lore or the new.

23 minutes ago, DGLaderoute said:

I think interest would be viewed pretty dimly in most of Rokugan, bordering on what amounts to extortion.

It's viewed pretty negatively in most cultures. Uusury has historically been forbidden or officially disapproved of in Hindu, Bhuddist, Hebrew*, Christian, and Islamic religious texts.

23 minutes ago, DGLaderoute said:

I'm not sure it has ever been mentioned in the canon, though, in either the old lore or the new.

The old Imperial Archives included Debt as a disadvantage you could take, but that simply says "A character with the Debt disadvantage has taken out a loan from a creditor, who in turn has gained leverage over the character" - which doesn't explicitely say it's a loan with interest.

* The iconic stereotype image of the Jewish Moneylender (such as Shakespeare's Shylock) coming from the fact that the Torah forbids Jews from charging interest on loans to other Jews , rather than forbidding it in general.

7 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

But when tax day rolls around and the town magistrate says "where is your money?" They can answer honestly "My lord's samurai took it"

They could also say "A kappa took it!" and it would roughly hold the same amount of water. I mean, if this was a thing in Rokugan then greedy merchants would mess up tax all the time with the mysterious, untraceable samurai who appears in town from time to time to take the merchants' money.

1 hour ago, DGLaderoute said:

Now, take a samurai with major gambling debts, an opium addiction that's expensive to feed, or who is a ronin with no lord providing for them, the situation becomes quite different.

This is why I think loans in Rokugan should be for "special" samurai, but then those very same samurai would have the most inclination to go violent, like a ronin who doesn't care about pissing off the local lord because he moves on the very next day anyway, so this doesn't make much sense either.

I'm sure there was a CFS hook in an old 1E book where a samurai has been beaten up, but refuses to tell the (PC) magistrates what's going on. Turns out they'd borrowed money from a Yasuki and couldn't pay it back. I have no idea which book it's in, alas.

29 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

They could also say "A kappa took it!" and it would roughly hold the same amount of water. I mean, if this was a thing in Rokugan then greedy merchants would mess up tax all the time with the mysterious, untraceable samurai who appears in town from time to time to take the merchants' money.

And I'm sure they do - and I'm equally sure the local magistrate doesn't buy that either...

But I wasn't talking in that case about a random wandering samurai but one of your lord's samurai. There's a difference between the stance of a samurai getting offended and killing a peasant for refusing to turn over something the samurai needs (which is acceptable and only really causes trouble if the item in question belongs to another samurai), and for taking stuff but refusing to own up to the fact they've done it (by, for example, stamp their personal chop). The peasant saying " would my lord seal a reciept for taking it? " is a different issue.

The comment about gambling or opium is a fair one - because if a local samurai has a need to pay for something personal, shameful or actively illegal, it's not like they can go to their lord for the money, and whilst they can find a rich merchant and take their money, whilst the merchant's complaint of ' they took my money !' isn't going to result in any meaningful punishment from the lord since it's a minor offence at best, it is going to prompt the question ' what did you want the money for? ' which is a question they're not prepared to answer (and 'why did you kill them?' leads on to the same question unless you're going to start lying to your lord). Hence, agreeing to a loan, where the merchant doesn't ask why you want the money and doesn't tell anyone you borrowed causes the least trouble.

By comparison, if it's a ronin or a guest, then yes, you can claim the peasant offended you, but you've essentially walked into a lord's town, killed one of their vassals, taken their money, and left. That is, however you dress it up, an offence against the lord, and they or their magistrate are likely to want you to account for your actions; not least because one of a lord's duties is to protect their lands and its inhabitants and letting outsiders come in and rob and murder them unchallenged is clearly not doing that .

24 minutes ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

I'm sure there was a CFS hook in an old 1E book where a samurai has been beaten up, but refuses to tell the (PC) magistrates what's going on. Turns out they'd borrowed money from a Yasuki and couldn't pay it back. I have no idea which book it's in, alas.

Well, a samurai lending money to another samurai, whilst distasteful, is a different issue. Both occupy similar tiers of the Celestial Order.

32 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

The comment about gambling or opium is a fair one - because if a local samurai has a need to pay for something personal, shameful or actively illegal, it's not like they can go to their lord for the money, and whilst they can find a rich merchant and take their money, whilst the merchant's complaint of ' they took my money !' isn't going to result in any meaningful punishment from the lord since it's a minor offence at best, it is going to prompt the question ' what did you want the money for? '

This in turns prompts the question of why the lord is chewing on the samurai's butt over a whiny merchant's fairy tale that might or might not actually be true. Again, if your lord is bringing you - his loyal samurai vassal - out over a merchant then you have bigger problems than a few missing koku you happened to take and you might want to rethink your situation before your lord finds something more serious. At which point gambling and other "special samurai occupations" are problematic whether you are taking loans or not.

On 4/2/2019 at 11:30 AM, nameless ronin said:

Gambling is somewhat different than trade.

A samurai with gambling debts might turn to others for a loan, but he'll do so on his own initiative - not the potential lender's - unless someone with a ulterior motive who found out about these financial struggles intends to get leverage over him (a typical Scorpion ploy). Those he's indebted to due to gambling misfortune might extend credit, but that's not a loan. Regardless, this is not commerce unless the indebted samurai tries to offer some of his belongings to square his debts (and this will likely be construed as a gift or a favour in order not to suffer social stigma).

Trade samurai are involved in tends to be shrouded - it's looked down on, so certainly when it involves transactions between individuals (not treaties or large transactions) it's handled discretely and samurai pretend it was something else entirely. Gambling on the other hand carries no such stigma and can be done openly and publicly. Gambling debts can be acknowledged without shame. Welching on a bet is a major no-no, of course.

A Samurai with significant debt may find himself working for a crimelord part time... And then his honor score begins to drop...

• "We can forgive this debt... but you need to let me know when the harvest will be assessed for the taxes..."
• "The barkeep's brother needs to get hurt. badly so. Not killed."
• "I need to go to where your parents live; find an excuse to go. Add me to the travel papers as a guide."

On 4/2/2019 at 11:05 AM, AtoMaki said:

It is literally in the core rulebook (page 11):

This is why the merchant is totally shot if the samurai belongs to the same lord: he canonically can't do jack against the "theft".

Merchants are not (full) people tho.

A later book that goes into much more depth actually contradicts the core book. It still counts as a minor crime and the lord could still escalate it making it a terrible idea to kill merchants with out good reason. Plus killing a half-person is still seen as illegal. Also lords don't always side with their own samurai. Usually they do but not always.

Bit of threadomancy. but here's a good bit on coinage in japan