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As per today's OOC Chat - a player raised that they thought it was weird that the everyday guild member can see their guild account balances. NOTE: everyday guild members cannot see the guild payments (ie, cash flow).

Some players felt this was good for accountability, the prevention of embezzlement, etc.
Other players felt this information just seemed unlikely for guild members to ICly have access to.

What do you think? Please vote and comment below.

I don't think that the average person should be able to. However, I do think that any established Guild Member should be able to RPA looking into the accounts and checking them for foul-play. As a GL, being forced to supply an IC note to any Withdrawals or Payments to non-guilded members seems thematic, and would allow concerned players to track the spending in an IC manner.

Personally I think limiting the account viewing to a few individuals could actually lead to more RP about it, ironically. At that point, you'd be able to appoint an accountant or something like that. Might open up a few more roles in combat-primary guilds that wouldn't normally have those roles open!

And yeah, LGD makes a good point. The RPA option to investigate should be there, I just agree that the guildfunds should be closed off to most people, if only to create more meaningful and interesting scenarios.

I feel like seeing my guild balance is a GL accountability thing. Real clubs have treasurers who report on money to all members, sometimes even the government. The account balance is a simple fill-in for all of that structure. If account reporting wasn't happening, it should be suspicious, but it'd be dumb to make GLs manually write yearly financial reports. I feel guild reporting is like tithes - we're not forced to pay them ICly or track them, but they're happening in the background.

If we remove account balances, we lose the IC trigger for folk to know when something is up to RP about. I bet the only time this sort of thing is an issue is if a GL gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar. It'd just make it a hard and unfun work to bring guild money management accountability in.

From a purely OOC perspective I do find it annoying that all guild members have access to this information.

Frequently, people take it upon themselves to make comments like "the treasury is almost at cap, you should be doing more stuff!". When in reality the Physicians' account hasn't overflowed in a very long time, and I've been working very hard to ensure the money has places to go by building new rooms, buying new members' uniforms, and commissioning stuff from merchants. It's hurtful to imply I'm not actively managing the guild, but I think it's an honest misconception brought about by players being able to see the total guild balance and thinking that's the whole story.

As for embezzlement, most guilds have two GLs who can keep each other accountable. The other GL is the best person to run a plot as a response to embezzlement, anyway, since they would hold the most power within the guild. Maybe it could even lead to a gambit!

I've got to say I agree with not being able to see the guild bank account. It's not up to the lower members of a guild to decide how money is spent from the guild and it's actually been brought up a number of times in multiple guilds I've been apart of that "hey we're like at the cap, so instead of waste money. Give me money, or you need to find something to spend it on." The GL's ensure we don't hit the cap by doing things like LonelyNeptune said. Another fact of the matter is, I cannot ask any accountant in my company where I work currently, "How much cash do we have in the bank?" Why? Because it's none of my business. The ones who need to know are the accountants and the high level members of management. Accountants are vNPCs and the high level members of management are the GL1 and GL2. If your guild has a GL1 and GL2, then it's the GL1's job to make sure GL2 isn't embezzling and it's the GL2's job to make sure the GL1 isn't embezzling. This is not a Page, Acolyte, Orderly, Journeymen, Cadet, or Apprentice Bard job. I would name the Brotherhood but I've never been a member. This is a member of management's job to deal with. And this is coming from someone who hasn't been a Guildleader. I don't feel I should have that information at my fingertips for no reason.

If we remove account balances, we lose the IC trigger for folk to know when something is up to RP about. I bet the only time this sort of thing is an issue is if a GL gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar. It'd just make it a hard and unfun work to bring guild money management accountability in.

Here's difficulties:

- This often doesn't get RPed about, it gets OOCly commented on at meetings, on the forums, over other OOC venues. So it is not leading to RP (it could, but it doesn't), it's leading to OOC griefing. This requires people to sometimes validate, rectify, or explain their IC choices in the OOC sphere, which I don't think personally is fair or desirable.

- The people who can see the balances cannot see payouts (IE things money is being spent on), therefore they do not have a full scope of available information. They therefore make assumptions IC and OOC (please see point #1) based on only half the information.

- Staff have said on more than one occasion that Guild funds can be used by GLs as they see fit, so what is there to be 'caught' doing? I'm not even sure arguably ICly we have a proper thematic concept of embezzlement. So I'm not sure within the rules or within theme Guildleader are indeed actually accountable to Guild members about what they use the Guild funds on. Perhaps this requires qualification from staff.

- The only times I've seen people make off arguably 'improperly' with large sums of money they were outed as mages. Which at that point them being 'caught' doesn't effectively do anything. Which, I'd argue a way to do that is to have Merchant Blacklisting or some power of the Reeves and/or Seneschal or someone able to freeze people's accounts/bank access. That would actually stop 'bad things' more than people just being able to watch it happening.

- Non-coded functional Guilds do not have this same restriction or requirement.

- Whether or not something would be 'fun' is relative. Needing to have a Guild accountant of some kind would arguably produce more roleplay than it all happening virtually. I'd argue the less we hand-wave things, the more RP we create.