Care and feeding of followers

[Eisfalken]

If I were to have a character with both Landlord and Leadership (long story short, they're acting more like a "background" resource such as a safe resting place, storage for loot, place to do custom-made stuff, etc.; cohort is basically acting in that function as well), what would be the most effective way to pay for feeding everyone? I'm looking at this from the top-down: Leadership Score 25 (163 followers plus cohort), and Landlord funds of 800,000 gp for a stronghold.

I've been racking my brain trying to get the math on some things to work out. Businesses from DMG2 seem to fail miserably as a way to really provide anything for followers (and only barely do anything useful for individual PCs anyway), and regular old Craft/Profession income checks don't seem to do the trick, either. The only way that seems both cost and labor efficient is controlling one or more stronghold income sources ala SBG (and without the need for taking ridiculous options for skill/profit checks). If I could make the DMG2 farm business rules work, that'd be neat, because it would seem to actually better fit a more plausible narrative, the traditional landed noble who has farmers working his lands which he gains profit from.

Generally I'm trying to avoid shipbuilding (I know it is lucrative, but at some point a DM with a functional brain will start wondering who could possibly have all this money to buy these big, expensive ships, a question that has already come up among us before), and tricking my way into income with the ladders-to-poles thing isn't feasible (we've already brought that one up and it got quashed super-immediately once the DM realized what we were thinking). I'm looking for something a little more... plausible, I guess, something that fits the narrative a little better. I'd have loved to have made the farm business thing in DMG2 work, but apparently I can't get the math to work in my favor, and regular skill checks for income didn't do any better either.

So if anyone here can help get a skill or profit check to work better, I'm all ears. Otherwise, I guess we'll just fall back on the stronghold income source and call it a day.

[TheYell]

The population supported by medieval economy is very hotly debated by historians. The best figures are only estimates. Dont be surprised that a game fails to come up with a workable model like a SimCity.

I suggest you consider the 163 followers to be serfs beholden to the lord for their labor and its fruits, and consider the balance of that stronghold income due from rents and fees. For instance you may have a grove of oaks that feed herds of pigs and be paid with pork. if somebody else operates a mill you get one eigth of the flour and raise fish in the millpond. You may charge rent for grazing land and the right to burn charcoal and lime in your forests. your 163 may be a fraction of a larger community that farms, hunts, fishes, builds ships, holds market days, mills, cobbles and spins and pays you a cut of everything as the lord. its just that fraction has a special claim on you for justice and protection in return for service.

[Basileus]

Well... If they live at your keep, just treat the situation like you're an innkeeper. Give them Common lodging and Common meals each day (3sp). The meals will cost you 0.3 gps per follower each day, but since you would likely build the rooms in your keep for them to stay in, you don't have to pay lodging cost. And really, inn meals are pricey, so you'd probably only pay the cost of the food, or maybe 0.1-0.2 gps/day.

Essentially, they're costing 1 gp each week with decent inn food. A third of that if you're willing to give them poor-quality food.

[Necroticplague]

According to the rules, you can go without food for three days, and water for 1 day, without any penalty. An end result is that you need to eat a pound of food every three days, and drink a gallon of fluids every day. The food easy, because food is relatively cheap. Unskilled labor makes 1 SP a day. A pound of bread costs 4 CP, so an unskilled laborer can keep themselves fed. The water is a bit trickier, both because you need it every day, and because potables seem to be more expensive. I'm not sure if it can actually be done via unskilled labor. However, assuming that the labor instead has some modicum of skill (just one rank in a profession), than this too, becomes trivial. Taking 10 for the profession check, that gets you 5.5 GP a week (or 55 SP, to put it another way). This is 7 days, so after the cost for food, you're out 1.2 SP for bread (rounding amount of times eaten up to three, of course). Over this same time period, they will need to drink 7 times. A gallon of ale is 2 SP, so that's 14 SP down for a week of working. Thus, a person who eats and drinks the exact minimum, using the default Profession rules, taking 10, can easily afford to live with 39.8 SP left over as profit (or, more realistically, to eat something better than two loaves of bread every three days), as long as they have at least one rank in their profession skill. So the most effective way to pay for everything is to make sure everyone has some modicum of crafting or professional ability, then simply trade with others.

Of course, if you don't wanna make sure everybody's skilled labor (or charitable enough to help those that aren't), then one could deal with unskilled laborers being able to feed themselves, but not drink, by using Wondrous Architecture based on a Decanter of Endless Water plus some rudimentary plumbing to make water a free public good. Start up cost of 4500+(whatever to set up pipes) might set you back a bit in the short term, but long-term not having to buy potables might make up for it*.

quick napkin math: Since each person uses up .2 GP in pootables per day, your 164 people from Leadsership uses 32.8 GP in potables every day. So this Wondrous Architecture would pay for itself after 138 days, or about 5 months in.

[Gildedragon]

Shipbuilding; so you have a coastal keep?
Set some of the people to farming and whatnot (profession farmer check; use that "gold" to "buy" meals) and set some to fishing (ditto)
If no one will buy your ships: build an armada
But rich merchants always buy ships. Ships are a type of expensive thing that gets lost and damaged often.
Rich coastal states also love themselves ships; how fast they can build a ship is usually what limits the capacity of their naval force
Ditto for Mercenary companies

You will want string coastal defenses if you do this though.

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Train your commoners into experts or adepts or magewrights and become a crafting town and use the (un)dead to till the soil

[Segev]

A better place to calculate a "living wage" in terms of costs to keep followers would be examining hireling costs/day. In theory, followers should be CHEAPER (since they are personally loyal to you, rather than simply working for what they can get), so hireling costs/day are a good upper bound on what it should cost to keep them fed and sheltered.

[Requiem_Jeer]

I will point out that your followers have their own wealth, and that 2nd level or higher followers can afford everlasting rations and everfull mugs with their npc wealth.

This was very important when I accidentally backstoried myself into a leadership score above sixty because of all the special modifiers in Powers of Faerun that I didn't know we were using (and, incidentally, I'd never even heard of that book before then). I had well over five hundred 1st level followers, and I didn't bring a single one to the place we were pseudo-conquering.

[Morcleon]

You can also create automatic reset magic traps of create food and water, which will get rid of your feeding needs for 7500 gp. Another one of prestidigitation can serve as the flavorings for another 250 gp.

[Fuzzy McCoy]

For potable water, it's really really hard to beat a decanter of endless water. One of those on full blast will produce 432,000 gallons of water a day. Consider the average American uses something like 400 gallons a day (including all agriculture), you're set for water. You can even install plumbing and have the cleanest castle! For food, a magic item that casts magnificent mansion twice per day feeds 168 people a nine-course banquet twice per day, and provides lodging. It costs about 40k.

Alternately, calling* several djinn could do it, since they can provide permanent non-living vegetable matter. Things like flour/dried beans/tomato sauce certainly fall under that description, and then all you need is a small garden for things like lettuce and celery. This also has the benefit of being slightly more versatile, since wood and its exotic subtypes also fall into non-living veggie matter.



*They have to be called with gate, planar binding, planar ally. Summoning doesn't work, since the food would disappear when the djinn does.

[Daishain]

The best advice in such cases would be to start by taking the sections regarding economics and burn them for the trash that they are. Any attempt to to create a working NPC economy of any real size based upon the abstracted rules in question is doomed to failure. No offense to the platform, but this i one thing the game never came anywhere near to getting right.

My suggestion? Instead of trying to figure out the prices of everything, work up reasonable abstracts and build from there. And here's a hint, if magic is the only means by which you can support everyone, your numbers are off somewhere. Magic might make certain things easier, but societies come together just fine without.

For example, it is a reasonably accepted rule of thumb that in such early societies, approximately 50% of any given self sustaining population is involved in agriculture. Another, related, rule of thumb is that a square mile of fertile land can support 175 people if properly worked. So, if we were to assume that your stronghold plays host to 500 souls, including your followers and all support staff (your leadership score determines personally devoted followers, not the max number of people associated with your lands), then about 250 of the whole are farmers or family members of said farmers, and the same are busy working close to three square miles of farmland.

[Ruethgar]

If you are really wanting to emphasize this character as a background leader resource, then I would suggest he take at least one level of Commander at 6th for Leadership bonus feat and Extra Followers 6th level feat. That will double your followers. You can take a look at the Commoner Hanbook

You could also look at my outline on property(http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?386800-Property-in-D-amp-D) which has some assumptions that may be inaccurate, but a few decent overall builds for the followers. It also has some money breakdown. Cityscape has rules for taxes and tithe, then you assume take 10 on profession and craft for each follower and work out their expenses. No commoner should be an untrained worker unless you use children.

[D.M.Hentchel]

So pg 130 of the DMG has costs of upkeep. The prices are mounthly with Common Living costing 45 gp and Poor Living costing 12 gp. A 1st level commoner with a 12 in Wis, 4 ranks, and Skill Focus would be making 9 gold weekly or 36 gold monthly. Meaning each 1st level follower would be able to donate 24 gp per month (a little more if your months aren't 28 days). By virtue of NPC gear value they could also afford a masterwork tool (28 gp). Further they could afford a +2 skill booster item (32 gp). You could even go so far to argue that because the profession skill is being used to provide the needs of upkeep not just the gold for it that the gold from the profession skill is at twice value (by virtue of not "selling" your work) which would push it up to 38 gp per month. You could even get factotum followers using Cunning Knowledge on each weekly check boosting it to 40 gp per month.

It gets better with higher levels followers and more expenisve custom items.