What Tolls?

This mod has you pay a toll to enter a walled city. You can do so by speaking to the toll guard close to the city entrance. After a brief conversation, and an appropriate payment, he will get up and open the gate for you.

The player has a three in-game hour grace period to spend outside the city walls before the gates will be locked and another toll payment is due, should the player want to re-enter the city. The player will always be able to exit the city. This grace period resets every time you enter or exit a city through the gate.

Each toll guard is unique and a few of them have some unique dialogue too, for immersion purposes!
If you are a thane in the hold the city you're trying to enter belongs to, you can enter for free! This is a perpetual perk, and not a one-off thing like guards turning a blind eye to your crimes.



I felt tolls are a very interesting mechanic to separate the large hubs, the walled cities, from the overworld. In there, you can sell gear, buy gear, train your skills, spend the night, pick up quests and hand in quests. Gating entry to these areas with a small payment forces the player to consider if it's worth it to go in there or stick to the wilds. It forces a degree of planning during an adventure, boosting immersion. I hope it spices up the early game, at least, and adds a potentially new source of reflecting character growth during the playthrough.
To counterbalance the cost of payment, I made an optional plugin that adds high level loot with a small chance of spawning to vendors. This stuff will be very expensive, of course. I wanted to add an extra reason for the player to enter cities: high level loot is potentially inside, you just need to pay the cost up front! Not all cities have the same toll costs. This is reflected in the total potential items spawned in the optional vendor plugin, as well as the worldbuilding vanilla tries to set up.
Because Fast travel is not easily disabled for specific locations, fast travelling to a city allows you to get in without paying the toll. This mod is meant for people who do not fast travel. Getting arrested also bypasses the toll, but you're getting arrested. 


Despite the details, and the added flavour through dialogue, this mod is as simple as it gets. You talk to the guard, he lets you in, and you leave when you're done. The mod works with quests that have repeated stages and update by trigger boxes and a single timer, the three-hour grace period. There's zero polling involved. Failsafes have been implemented to prevent the player from getting locked out. These come in the form of hand-placed trigger boxes, which have zero collision with objects and thus this mod should be compatible with all city mods that don't clutter the city entrances.
The toll costs come in three tiers: high, medium, and low. These are all set by global values. This means any plugin, console command, or script can change these on the fly! If you're running a mod like True Medieval Economy, which decreases gold values, these toll costs will be very easy to change to fit the new balance. 
The mod is set up so that any normal method of entering or exiting the city is taken care of. The player should always be able to leave the city even after the expiration of the grace period, and the mod should then reset itself when approaching the city gate. The only way to break the mod is to break the game. At least, that's my intention. If it turns out I've missed a method of entry or exiting, please inform me!

This mod adds tolls using its own separate system. Interference with vanilla quests, like the civil war, and the riften opening quest, has been minimized and removed. By doing so, however, this mod adds a few vanilla scripts to the main city gates, as well as locking them and any other side entrances. Any mods that also edit city gates, for that reason, need to be loaded above SimpleTolls.esp in your load order. They might even need a patch, but I don't recall any mods that drastically change the position of main city gates.
City mods that add walls to the minor cities, such as Falkreath, would obviously need a unique guard, quest, and dialogue for that city to also have toll functionality. A city-mod specific patch would need to be made. My solution to that is just to accept that minor cities won't have tolls since they're irrelevant to the economic stability of the region!
You can install this mod on an existing save!
Simple Tolls is strictly incompatible with open cities, and needs a patch. I do not use Open Cities, nor do I plan to; anyone is welcome to make a patch and either upload it themselves, or send it to me so I can add it to the mod page.



LE Version