How much gold does it take to open a store?

[Huldaerus]

How much gold does it take to open and run store of mundane items like clothes or jewellery? How much money should my player expend to buy a shipment? How much money per month he have to invest in the business?

Are there any rules to run business in 3.5/PF/3rd party that doesn't suck?

Thanks!

[OldTrees1]

I believe DMG II has business rules that only kinda suck. They might fit the bill and have mechanics to cover most of those questions.

[Troacctid]

The rules for this are in Dungeon Master's Guide II, starting on page 180. They don't suck IMO.

[legomaster00156]

There are Pathfinder rules for this in Ultimate Campaign.

[digiman619]

Here's (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/downtime) a link to the downtime rules, of which owning a shop is a part.

[Huldaerus]

Thank you so much guys.

[Fizban]

You could also run it as an Affiliation from PHB2, which is less running a shop and more founding a cartel. Or grab the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook to simply price the building itself, then staff it with standard hirelings.

As for shipments, that depends heavily on the type of shop and how many people it's serving. You don't actually need to concern yourself with it at all of course, owning a storefront simply guarantees your ability to roll Craft/Profession checks (otherwise the DM could easily rule that you've nowhere to practice your trade). For those few shops that do maintain inventory I'd just eyeball your starting loadout cost based on the price of the building itself, restocking and everything else being subsumed in the skill rolls. For PHB2 affilliations your costs are covered in the rules already.

[Cirrylius]

+1 to Ultimate Campaign. I found the 3.5 stuff to be hopelessly kludgy.

[Fizban]

I actually went ahead and finally read through the pathfinder stuff, as usual it had some good ideas but the implementation all seems to be backwards. Buildings are crazy cheap, give huge bonuses, and apparently can run themselves on free untrained staff without you (buildings make their earning checks automatically). Smaller buildings that should be expensive due to high quality materials (like a prison cell) remain cheap, while large "buildings" that are mostly empty space (like archery range or grazeland) are ludicrously expensive. And don't even get me started on their 800 sq ft patch of "farmland" that is worth 5 silver per day: that's how much a farmer with access to a whole farm makes, not one tiny little patch of ground.

Meanwhile a trained team of experts is expensive, gives half the bonus, and then cuts that bonus in half again if you don't give them a building, which again is worth more than they are. The modular system is a nice idea but massively encourages power gaming and essentially forces the DM to determine the makeup of your business: a Storage facility does add to your bonus, but it's less cost efficient then just adding more Bars, so the only reason you'd ever build one is because the DM said you had to for it to function at all. There's no balance between hiring and costs: if you want a bunch of private mercenaries then good news, because each unit of guards or soldiers actually makes the place more profitable instead of less.

So yeah, I can roll with the idea that a functioning business provides a check bonus (instead of just being required to make the check at all), and I like the idea of building an abstract team that automatically replaces members when needed and keeps itself running, but most of it falls apart once closely examined.

What's the main benefit to the pathfinder downtime stuff? Double your money: spend your downtime turning gold into capital which is worth twice as much, then use that capital to make magic (or other) items at what is effectively 25% gp cost instead of the usual 50%. You don't even need a magic shop, since the conversion rates let you instantly turn an equal value of Goods or Labor into Magic with no loss.

Edit: And for what it's worth, I went back over the DMG2 rules looking for what the big issue was that people had with it. Everything seems fine to me (resource costs are a little swingy but easily adjusted if you wish), some businesses are simply better or worse than others but that's wholly appropriate and it doesn't matter how good the business is if you don't have the skills to operate it, and it's simple enough to make up a new one if you've got an idea that's really not covered. Massive startup costs in larger cities essentially represent the fact that you have to buy out an existing business in order to claim enough market share to get started.

The main problem is the investment option: Dave's Shopping Shack 20 miles out in the woods only needs about 20,000gp in the bank and 2 years to grow before it reaches self-sustaining investment and just increases it's profit by 125gp every 3 months forever. This is easily fixed by removing the investment option, or at least postponed to later levels by being mindful of the cumulative penalty for failed profit checks and taking a hard stance on failed businesses (the profit check section says you can cover the losses out of pocket, but the failed business section says you can't, with no definition of the difference). The business events are also quite disconnected from the rest of the system and could cause some bad variance.

In the end my recommendation remains with Stronghold Builder's Guide for building your buildings, followed by either DMG2 if all you want is a business with profit margins, or PHB2 if you want to build an organization with regional clout.

[Troacctid]

What I like about the DMG2 rules is that it rewards having a character who is actually skilled in business. The best way to maximize your profit as a shopkeeper is to get a really high Profession (shopkeeper) check, which...well, makes a lot of sense.

[Fizban]

Indeed, DMG2 requires a DC 25 just to avoid loss, while PF is pure profit no matter how bad you are at it. Of course, DMG2 also generates far more income if you do have the skill: PF buildings are worth 10gp per month for every +5 they give, but once you crack that 25 on the DMG2 route even a low risk business is worth 5gp per point you exceeded 25, per month, and you can throw in your normal craft/profession checks too if desired. Oh a high risk business, like any shop? Ten times that.

Even then, well a +25 adjusted bonus taking 10 on a high risk business is still only making 500gp per month, 6000gp a year. Enough to catch an adventurers attention but not world breaking in the slightest given how few people will net that bonus, and how much they'll likely burn on displays of wealth and power rather than actual power.

[Cwymbran-San]

I believe, the buildings are so good in the Ultimate Campaign system because they are not so easy to come by.
A structure has to be built somewhere and the cost covers not only the construction but the cost of licensing or buying the land as well.

While nobody would object to your characters walking around offering jobs to the community they set up shop in, the higher-ups might object to erecting workshops and taverns without asking (and of course paying) for it.

And: PF is no pure profit, the event phase can make your upkeep go sky-high...speaking from painful experience.

Anyways, since we are not playing a "Tycoon"-Style simulation, at least my group can live with these little tradeoffs to real-life economy :-)

[Cirrylius]

since we are not playing a "Tycoon"-Style simulation, at least my group can live with these little tradeoffs to real-life economy :-)
Seconded, again. Most downtime stuff impinges on the D&D economy, a frail enough thing on its own. It's certainly free reign to bitch-slap WBL for a determined player, as given, so unless your players have really pressing need for money, I'd advise not letting them abuse the boundaries between "story holdings" and "economic holdings" and "round-by-round combat holdings" without at least token penalty; even Leadership penalizes you for getting too cavalier with your followers.

[Fizban]

I believe, the buildings are so good in the Ultimate Campaign system because they are not so easy to come by.
A structure has to be built somewhere and the cost covers not only the construction but the cost of licensing or buying the land as well.
There weren't any mentions of actual restrictions that I saw, as you say all the costs are included in the various types of captial used to set it up. And those costs are far, far less than what you pay in the other systems.

And: PF is no pure profit, the event phase can make your upkeep go sky-high...speaking from painful experience.
The event phase is highly variable and, just like random encounters, only happens as often as the DM says it does. If your DM is rolling the random bad stuff table every single day then it's always going to be a problem, but the section itself suggests that the DM might check only when you're in town, and specifies that only one player controlled building is hit. I would be interested to hear your tale of course, mechanical evaluation can only go so far.

Further investigation reveals, as I expected, that all the really bad stuff is in the building-specific events. Mostly either lose a large die of stuff with no way to mitigate it, or gain a tiny die of stuff that you probably don't need. And these are things you had to spend cash on. So as usual for random mishaps these are completely unbalanced, having one of these go off every week would play havoc with everything. And most of those mishaps seem to be things like "you lose [100gp worth of food] due to food shortages" which doesn't even make any sense. How am I losing goods when those goods should be demanding a higher price and have nothing to do with the actual business? Not making a good case for the system.

Of course, you can also seriously mitigate problems from the event tables by specializing and decentralizing. You pay more in managers when you're away but since only one player controlled building gets hit each time there's less chance it hits something important, while stockpiling only gold or a single type of resource means that any loss to a category you don't have is ignored. Still not making a good case.

DMG2 on the other hand only has one table. Many of the results have costs that might not make sense for a business (what farm has 2d6x100gp in goods a thief can steal?), but there are also results that give permanent bonuses. The worst things are banditry, burglary, monsters, and protection rackets, all of which can be dealt with or avoided by preparing proper defenses or stamping them out. It's also far easier to adjust: you could make low-risk businesses roll every other month to smooth out the risk curve, change the gp costs depending on what type of business it is, and so on.