Characters Owning and Running Businesses

[Ignatius]

Hey - just a quick question to see if anyone knows of any materials published by Wizards or custom rules about how to handle characters that might through various means, end up controlling a business that can operate without being hands on.

I know in 3e you rolled 1d8 or something and that is the gold you got by performing your occupation, but is there any set formulas that anyone has seen on running an entire business?

Thanks in advance.

[Sir_Mopalot]

There's definitely nothing from Wizards on this, and frankly besides the broken rules in (I believe it's the 3.5 DMG2), there really aren't any rules for hands-off businesses in fantasy games. I've hunted for rules on it before, but haven't had any luck.

[Oracle_Hunter]

There are no Official Rules, no. Why do you want to know? Perhaps we can work something out.

* * * *

Personally, I treat businesses in D&D as an exercise in continual reinvestment. If the PCs have business managers, they're going to be rolling the proceeds back into expanding the business. If the business is exceptionally profitable (major merchant company, some sort of magitek factory) then the PCs could have some spare coin as well, but hardly enough to purchase the sort of magic items they'd be looking for at the point.

This is not to say the PCs shouldn't see any reward from their investment. For one, they're going to have increased prestige wherever the business operates. Perhaps their merchant company provides them with fancy lodgings when the roll into town, or the local lord will be happier to meet with "the owners of Fabulous Merchant Co." than "bloody sellswords looking for a favor."

[Tvtyrant]

There is a fairly simple way of dealing with business in D&D: Stock! Basically you divide the original business into a bunch of shares and then appoint someone to run it while you adventure. Each adventurer has so many shares whose value goes up over time; say you have 6 adventurers and you divide the company into 60 stock (600 would be better but whatever). The stock start out worth 1/6 the original inlay of the group (say 100,000). So you have 10 tokens each worth $1600 each. Overall your stock starts out worth 16,000. Without further inlay the stock grows at a certain percentile per level in worth, such as 10%.

So you make roughly 1600 the first level, 1760 the second, 1930 the third, etc. At any time you can sell your stock to get money for equipment, or you can maintain the stock and even buy up the other members of the parties. As stated by Oracle_Hunter you get advantages for being an owner such as prestige and with a big enough company a spy network, and eventually you get a return. You might want to ramp up the amount your stock rises to match or beat WBL, but basically this is the simple system.

[Seb Wiers]

Hârnmaster covers this in a detailed and fairly generic way. Its a d100 system, but the parts not pertaining to skill use would fit right in (perhaps accounting for differences in the setting- Hârn is much more like real medeval Europe than most D&D settings).
http://www.lythia.com/download-manager.php?id=76

[Tvtyrant]

Okay, based on my earlier idea you can make it more random like a stock market by rolling a d6:

1.10% losses! The Fates have turned on you!
2.5% losses! Business is down this quarter!
3.0% anything! We broke even!
4.5% gains! Business is up this quarter!
5.10% gains! The Fates smile upon you!
6.Massive gains! Roll another d6 to see what percentage in gain the company made.

[Doug Lampert]

Personally, I treat businesses in D&D as an exercise in continual reinvestment. If the PCs have business managers, they're going to be rolling the proceeds back into expanding the business. If the business is exceptionally profitable (major merchant company, some sort of magitek factory) then the PCs could have some spare coin as well, but hardly enough to purchase the sort of magic items they'd be looking for at the point.

Several of my PCs just invested 10,000 GP each for a share in one allied NPC's business. The NPC would logically have tried to raise money from them (she had a really good oportunity, and really needed the money to ransom some relatives who she can ransom under the cover of acquiring managers for the business).

I did point out the obvious to the players. Each level they go up increases their total wealth by 30% or so, every five levels is up by 400%, five levels isn't unreasonable for an in game adventuring year.

What do you think a legitimate business can hope to do that will come CLOSE to giving the 400% annual RoI of adventuring gear and creative looting?

The business they invested in has a lot of potential for profit, if everything goes well it just MIGHT pay off the initial investment in as little as 2-3 years while also growing the capital investment's value.... This is SPECTACULARLY GOOD by any reasonable standard! Far more likely it will become an adventure hook when someone else realises how much money is at stake and tries to muscle in. (Hint: muscling in on high paragon characters is probably a poor plan. But this won't stop everyone.)

By the time 2-3 years have passed in game time the campaign will probably be over with the PCs either dead or apotheosized while standing over Lolth's bleeding remains. And I get the distinct impression I have more down-time than most DMs... Seriously, at that point they're going to CARE that a business manager offers them their first significant dividends?

The only way to extract an actual profit prior to campaign's end would be to sell the share once it's clear that the business will succeed (assuming it does succeed).

PCs get so much money from adventuring that no reasonable business can compete. It's perfectly reasonable as an abstraction to say "you get nothing much from the business" other than a homebase and source of rumors and plots, by the time an business can pay off the payoff is irrelevant.

[evirus]

PCs get so much money from adventuring that no reasonable business can compete. It's perfectly reasonable as an abstraction to say "you get nothing much from the business" other than a homebase and source of rumors and plots, by the time an business can pay off the payoff is irrelevant.

I agree. Owning something may be fun, but if they want to profit money wise, they are better off investing in themselves and going after more treasure.

The only way was to create items and sell them to other adventuers for profit, but you can't do that with the the create item ritual anymore (well you can, but not for profit).

The main issue being that most "investments" are long term and set to pay off years later, an adventurer may not be alive tomorow. So he needs short term gains or will likely be loosing out on survivability/power (since he invested his money instead of getting a new weapn/armor).

[Sipex]

If you're doing this for the fun of the PC try to hawk it as the PC leaves someone to run the business while the PC manages from afar.

This means they make business decisions if possible but even better, they're given the chance to act as the CEO of their shop. Essentially, going around, making connections, forming trade deals, these sorts of things. Maybe your PC sells clothing? During their travels they meet a guy who sells wool in bulk, the PC can strike up a deal with him to get wool from him for a cheaper price than he's currently getting at the moment from another dealer.

Stuff like that.

[Tvtyrant]

Actually if they are in long distance trade 300-400% interest wasn't unheard of for rare goods like diamonds and porcelain in the middle ages/early modern period (says my Mercantilism in the 14th Century book on economics). Say you have a bunch of resurrect diamonds and bring them to a nation that just own a war you have a chance of getting 1000% interest on the whole lot.

At that point it wouldn't be you buying a business so much as actively participating in it as fighting merchants.

[Doug Lampert]

Actually if they are in long distance trade 300-400% interest wasn't unheard of for rare goods like diamonds and porcelain in the middle ages/early modern period (says my Mercantilism in the 14th Century book on economics). Say you have a bunch of resurrect diamonds and bring them to a nation that just own a war you have a chance of getting 1000% interest on the whole lot.

At that point it wouldn't be you buying a business so much as actively participating in it as fighting merchants.

Sure, and in the same period IIRC Sir Francis Drake returned over 100,000% to investors on his trip arround the world, because creative looting pays really really well.

In D&D land they have teleport circles to anyplace with a few thousand gold and a serious demand. Poof! Trade! Fairly safe and secure for anything valueable enough to pay the fairly nominal cost of a circle to circle teleport and where both the supplier and the demand are reasonably well known.

Presumaby the ~500% markup on common magic items is because finding the supplier is hard, and finding the demand is hard.

The historical 400% RoI was on ships which took a year or more per voyage and where 1/3rd losses of shipping was considered VERY GOOD. 2/3rds losses was still acceptable. As you point out with your fighting merchants coment, that kind of RoI on something that risky is really adventuring pay by another name.

DougL

[Ignatius]

Hey guys - thanks for all of the advice.

I have managed to negotiate my way into majority ownership of a boat and am looking at starting a merchant network in the area.

My DM has done up a list of supply/demand for the port cities that we have access to so between sessions on our campaign chat over at the starting tavern we can work out how the business increases.

This exercise - in our case anyway - is purely to create the merchant network - not looking for any spending money from it.

I do like the stock market option though for increasing the value of the company and being able to purchase new ships etc...

[Doug Lampert]

Hey guys - thanks for all of the advice.

I have managed to negotiate my way into majority ownership of a boat and am looking at starting a merchant network in the area.

My DM has done up a list of supply/demand for the port cities that we have access to so between sessions on our campaign chat over at the starting tavern we can work out how the business increases.

This exercise - in our case anyway - is purely to create the merchant network - not looking for any spending money from it.

I do like the stock market option though for increasing the value of the company and being able to purchase new ships etc...
Building a company for the fun of it and with no expectation of a cash return is fine. It provides your DM with hooks and you with a very limited support structure and an accomplishment OTHER than looting and killing and your characters with an additional connection to the world, all of these are seriously good things.

But selling stock to strangers is harder than you might think.

AFAIK limited liability corporations and limited liability joint partnerships only date back to the 19th century. They'd be fairly anacronistic in D&D land. Thus D&D land is almost certainly unlimited liability. Limited liability is both a serious anacronism, and something magic and monsters would actively discourage, you WANT the owners to take personal responsibility in D&D land.

But it is MUCH harder to sell stock in an unlimited liability enviroment.

Note: The difference is that limited liability stockholders are NOT individually responsible for the company's debts. Unlimited liability partnerships or joint stock corporations: If the company goes bankrupt creditors can sue individual stockholders to recover their funds. This means that buying even one share in an unlimited liability partnership potentially exposes your personal property and welfare to the entire debt of the company. To buy even one share you have to be willing to at least potentially trust the comany managers with everything you own.

Makes it harder to find investors, especially small investors, grandma is a LOT more likely to keep the cash under the matress than in the stock market if she knows that buying stock means directly risking her children's inheritance, her pension money, and the house she and her husband paid off fifty years ago and that she needs to live in.

[Mando Knight]

The hyper-easy method: sub in the business for a treasure parcel, and have the profits gained depend on how much they're working on it. If they do really well while still adventuring, you can even give it to them as a "bonus" parcel... that is, wealth in addition to what the game assumes they'd normally get from adventuring.

Using that as a groundwork, you can more easily create a system to provide players with a reasonable amount of gold for running a business in addition to adventuring.

[Analytica]

I believe Power of Faerun has detailed 3.5 rules and materials for this.

EDIT: Oh, 4.0. Skill challenges every other month or so to see how well things go?

[Leolo]

What about the risk of it? I think that there should be the risk to loose the money and even more than this.

[Hoggmaster]

Is this a thread for Bankers and Barristers ....:smallwink:

I, personally, would find the tedium of running a business boring in a 4e game. The minutiae of payrolls, taxes, inventory, supply, etc. "Give me a sharp axe and a row of orc necks ..."

In my game I am running, my PCs want to start a university... they go out and collect the materials (texts, scholars, et al.). NPCs run the university.

[Whybird]

Yeah, I think the main benefits that the players should get from running a business should not be that they get a certain amount of money every so often: it's that they become political players. Suppose their business of smithing swords becomes so successful that they're the sole suppliers to the kingdom: they're then able to stop (well, not stop, but affect the course of) civil wars by refusing to supply one side with weapons. The financial side can just be abstracted as "the money that your business is making is being spent on expanding the business; it's too tied up in assets for you to effectively turn into gold pieces".

[Dalek-K]

I tell my players that they are adventurers and don't have time to worry about a Business. The only reason a player would want to have a business is so that they can have an extra flow of cash >.>

If it was something like a taxidermy office where the adventurers went off to bring back exotic pelts then I could understand the roleplaying aspect but most of the players I've ran into just want the cash. Then the business takes away from time in the game (complaining, asking about it, upgrading shop) and if only one thought to have a shop then the other party members tend to get pissy that they don't have the extra cash too....

All hel can break lose after that -_-;;;

[Leolo]

I don't like systems where such businesses are just a way to make money. Because business is something with personal risk, in a fantasy world maybe more than in our world.

So the system should include the chance of loosing all - plus having a lot of debts.

And as less you have time to check your investment as higher is the chance that you will loose your money.

Obviously business with those preconditions, and as an adventurer is a very risky thing and i don't think many players would try it.

[oxybe]

once adventurers hit level 3, most common/mundane gear should be pocket change. even the more initially expensive stuff shouldn't be a problem.

heck the new guy (well not-so-new guy, he's been with us for quite some time now... he's just the latest addition to our gaming group) in our pathfinder game joked that we've found enough rapiers that we could've made a throne out of them instead of devaluing the market for masterwork rapiers.

yeah, we've been wading through rogues lately.

either way, this is why i have no problems with PCs starting a "0-profit" business: the comparatively minor change pays for their living expenses, everyday needs, repairs, taxes, etc... while the money they make from adventuring and selling spoils can be used for gear/extraneous expenses.

plus, it can be used to create hooks by introducing regular customers, other merchants, government officials, etc... that interact with the PCs was they tend the shops.

[Dalek-K]

0-profit... Good idea, I'll have to remember that the next time.

And create a "mini-game" of chance dealing with the stock market... Some weird dice rolls meaning X this and Y that... Wait... Isn't that how the real one works?

I just don't see an adventurer who is about to face down a dragon giving a second thought to a business... I mean... I'm just sure as the party's Fighter is slashing through dragon skin and bone while being covered in valuable blood that he or she will stop to think "Hmm I wonder if I paid the taxes on my business last month....". While on adventures even while out of combat your sole focus should be the mission/side quests/quirky things to make the day fun that you are on. If not then you aren't giving it your all.

[oxybe]

my characters tend to focus on the task at hand but during downtime need something to do...

then again, they don't live a constant string of adventures. there is generally a few weeks or even months between profitable adventures can be had. we're currently in a city campaign so most of our characters have jobs.

-my PC is a magewright under the employ of the guy who thought him
-one PC is a musician
-an ex-PC works at a tavern
-one PC is a mortician
-one PC used to be the servant of his old character (who died)
-one PC works for one of the local law-enforcement groups
-etc...

we all have jobs of sort, but we don't actually roll profession checks or whatnot... the money made from that at level 9 is barely pocket change compared to what we get from adventuring. so we apply some handwavium and there you go.

[connorpistol]

in a campaign I'm playing, my character (a cat folk monk) is part of the league of boot and trail. and that puts him in amazing position to sell stuff to travelers. to run a business, you always need something that puts you above the average hobo 1st. level commoner running the dirt farm. mostly, just tell your DM that you are doing a job to pay for all your expenses and he should give you an estimate of how much profit you get depending on the idea and conditions of the town. that is... if you don't want to roll your profession skill


but if you want EXP while you are doing nothing else, and you can look like you aren't ready to fight some one... go start sitting in a sketchy tavern. a new group of adventurers will eventually come around and form a group in the tavern and you can help fight the enemies they fight in the bar.


I would know... I do it...

:smallwink:

[Yakk]

I've been thinking about this.

First, you can treat gold invested as a kind of "XP" system for the enterprise. The "level" of the business can then be derived from the gold invested.

An easy way to do this in 4e would be to use the price of a magic item. A 360 gp enterprise is then a level 1 enterprise. A 1800 gp enterpriseis level 6, a 9000 gp enterprise is level 11, etc.

At the rate at which PCs gain treasure, the "natural" growth and shrinking and profits of an enterprise isn't going to make a huge impact. However, instead of treating an enterprise as a way to make money, we can treat it as a way to do things, influence the world, and generate adventure hooks.

It isn't practical to make money via "safe" investments at the rate at which PCs gain wealth: but you can leverage money, then do ridiculously dangerous things using the investment to make even more money.

We can break down how enterprises interact with the world and the PCs into a few different things.

1) Capabilities. Having an enterprise can give the PCs things that they can do.

2) Complications. Sometimes, the enterprise needs rescuing. Adventure hook ho!

3) Opportunities. Sometimes, the business can have optional things that would have lots of benefit, if only there where some hardy adventurers around to exploit the issue.

4) Investments. You can throw money at the business to help it grow.

5) Divestment. Sometimes, the PCs have a business that is worth lots, and they want to spend that money on treasure.

---

I used enterprise rather than business, because the idea would be to make a framework that would work with a wizard building a tower containing a school, a cleric building a cathedral, a fighter building a keep and maintaining an army to hold territory, or a rogue engaged in an airship trading venture.

We could steal a page from Reign and give such enterprises a bunch of properties, sort of like PC skills or defences, that grow with enterprise level. While a mercenary company or castle might have much higher military strength than a trading enterprise, the trading enterprise is going to have guards -- and a level 20 trading enterprise that runs caravans to the city of brass is probably going to have more military strength than a level 5 mercenary company.

We can then model the abilities of the enterprise as checks against DCs, and things happening to it as attacks against the enterprise's Defences.

Player skill checks can even be folded in: in an enterprise-scale scene, players may be able to use skills to influence how the enterprise develops. This can help lower level enterprises "catch up" to PCs, and make higher level enterprises a challenge to keep on track.

[Alejandro]

4E doesn't handle the idea of PCs having extra sources of income well. The game's numbers are built around fairly strict control of all income the PCs get (treasure) and if a PC establishes other ways to earn money, the math breaks.

I had a PC wizard that wanted to sell his ritual casting services in towns for extra money and what the market would bear, but the GM basically said if I did, then they would lower the treasure we found so that the numbers ended up the same.

Since that means there's no change in reward no matter what you do, my wizard just sat around instead.

[Yakk]

Your DM is a fool for a few reasons.

First, if you double the cash income of a given PC over a given level (which is a lot), you'd barely notice the increase in their magical equipment they could afford.

If you double all treasure that the PC gets, you'll end up with characters that are a fraction of a level more competent than PCs with less treasure.

If you multiply the treasure that PCs get by 5 -- 5 times as much gold, items that are worth 5x as much -- they end up with items that are half-a-tier higher in quality. That provides +1 to hit, +1 to all defences (+2 to AC for heavy armor wearers), +2 or so to damage, an extra ~3-7 damage on crits. And a few additonal minor boosts.

That is worth at most a character level's worth of power.

So if your party ends up 5 times richer than it should, your DMs encounter budget is off by at most 1 level. This is well within natural character power variance.

4e has a treasure system that works, but it also has a robust treasure system that can handle significant swings in the wealth of PCs without breaking down.

Only if you start giving treasure from a tier above, or don't give any magical treasure or item crafting for an entire tier, or start approaching that, does the 4e economy go pear shaped. Before that, heavy armor wearers run into problems, where light armor wearers start pulling ahead AC-wise, which sucks for defenders.

A mere factor of 2, however, is just noise.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

EDIT: Oh, 4.0. Skill challenges every other month or so to see how well things go?
That was my first thought too, with each failure perhaps necessitating a roll on a Random Events table. Just stuff like "your business somehow managed to tick off an underworld boss", or "you sold someone a faulty potion without realizing it, PR problem!", or "an idol you sold awakened bad stuff in the city". Basically, plot hooks!