Is tithing bad?

[Kelb_Panthera]

It depends on the setting and the assumptions. If, like most people around here, you assume inactive gods, church organizations based on modern religion, gods requiring a constant income of souls to survive, slavish adherence to the idea of WBL, modern regulated free market economics, free access to spellcasting, and other stuff... Then you get pages of arguments.

Some of these are the base assumptions of the default setting. If you want to talk about different settings you have to outline the differences.

The default is that the gods are -moderately- active in an indirect fashion. They -rarely- visit individuals amongst the faithful and sometimes send heralds to high clergy. They make their will known but try to avoid directly acting in the world because doing so leaves them vulnerable to attack by opposed gods and gods doing direct battle with one another woud ruin the wold they -all- need to generate mortal souls to fuel the great wheel.

Church organizations vary drastically from one god to the next and even within sects of individual gods if their following is large enough. You get everything from authoritarian, dogma focused types like the followers of St Cuthbert to hippy, nature-loving, live and let live types like ehlonna's faithful to blood-thirsty reavers with nothing but the belief they're doing their god's will as they slaughter like the cults of erythnull. To presume that all churches behave similarly in any regard other than trying to spread their faith as best they're able is to err.

The default setting doesn't require gods to have worshippers to live but they do require them to fuel their divine power (divine rank is determined by following by default) and to further their cause in the cosmos. Forgotten realms -does- require their gods to be worshipped to avoid going dormant or dying. Dragonlance gods divinity is completely unrelated to their following.

WBL is part of the game's balancing mechanics. Those mechanics aren't exactly smoothly operable and bug free but they do exist and, if you're not a primary spellcaster, the lack of appropriate wealth becomes more and more of a burden as your level increases unless the DM ignores CR altogether (something often advised, unfortunately) and carefully cherry-picks foes for his PC's to face. On the other hand, drowning in gear, monty-haul style, has the reverse effect of putting characters way ahead of where their level suggests their power should be. I can't tell you how many threads I've seen that amount to "Player is way too weak/strong compared to spellcaster ally/enemies presented," and it turns out the problem is the DM having discarded WBL without examining its purpose first.

Market forces don't care about laws. You can legislate methods of -trying- to control such forces and nudge them in a direction you want them to go but it's like trying to bottle a hurricane. Scarcity, supply, and demand will -always- interact in the ways they always have. In a pseudo-medieval setting, where the power of the various governments only extends as far as their agents can reach, the market forces are so overwhelmingly powerful that the best you can really hope for is to tax large-scale trade and that the black-market won't grow too powerful or restless to keep in the background.

Spellcasting and magic item trade are presumed to be freely available because they're covered in the abstraction of economy that is presented by settlement size and GP limits rather than a detailed economy system. Maybe you're just going to honest merchants, maybe you're going to the black-market, maybe you're going to magic-mart; your one stop magic shopping center. It doesn't really matter because if the players want a thing, they'll find a way to get the thing and nothing short of DM fiat and/or an utter failure to understand economics will stop them; maybe not even the latter of those.

Again, a DM is free to change any of these things but it'd be awfully helpful if they -say so- when asking for help in regards to such matters.
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On the OP's topic:

It's important to remember that there -is- a differene between tithing and taxation, even if the historic difference was largely academic rather than factual.

A tax is drawn by the government to fund the government. It is not, even in theory, voluntary. If you are a citizen of the state, you owe the state some form of support that it -must- have in order to serve its supposed purpose of protecting the populace from outside aggression and internal criminal activity. A fair and just government will levy that as a monetary tax that is not so onerous as to harm the citizenry. A more tyrannical government will levy taxes to feed boondogles and conscript citizens into service. Even a loose, weak, voluntary government will -ask- for voluntary donations so that it can operate, though those aren't a proper tax.

A tithe, on the other hand, is voluntary, by definition, and is intended to be a show of faith and virtue signal to others of your faith. It is not levied but requested because the church(es) need funding if they are to be influential beyond the simple (if potentially quite powerful) gratitude of their parish.

Historically, the state was subserviant to religion and while a tithe was nominally voluntary, the faithful were expected to pay tithes to the church to such an extent that it was sometimes (arguably often) coerced during the medieval period.

Because the states of a D&D world -aren't- typically beholden to a specific religion (outside of the odd theocracy), this important difference is important to remember.