I may have created a monster

[cullynthedwarf]

Hello fellow gamers, and DMing types, I have a small question I hope some one can help me with.

One of my players (a bard) has decided in her off time she wants to develope a Salt Guild. In the town she is in, before her interference they were producing about four pounds of salt a year split over 5 competing houses, which roughly translates to about an ounce a month, with the most successful producing a full pound on its own over the course of the year. She pulled the 4 least successful together gave them each 40 gold for there experience and equipment, and has commissioned a guild hall for them. She gave what was left over to them as a resource to hire an assistant for each master.

What I have told her is, the 40 gold will translate +4\month to each house under the new guilds banner. The assistants will grant an additional 50% increase in production and the four small houses sharing there technique would grant a 25% increase due to efficiency.

Her goal ATM is to drive the 5th house to the brink of collapse and the offer to let them in the guild under her stewardship. She suspects it will take 6ish months, espially if she or some on her behalf robs the merchant you bought from 5th house.

Sooner or later the 37.5 a month or 450 a year is not going to satisfy, and she is going to want to expand. How far should I let this go?

[Metahuman1]

AS far as she wants to go. This is insane and it sounds like an AWESOME subplot for a game!


If the WBL get's too crazy, set up some kind of suitably nutty rival faction (Maybe a Pepper Guild.) and have them force her to reinvest large amounts of her profits to face them at a macro scale while she's off adventuring.

So you have the party and the main plot, and this back ground sub plot of the seasoning wars.

[Mutazoia]

AS far as she wants to go. This is insane and it sounds like an AWESOME subplot for a game!


If the WBL get's too crazy, set up some kind of suitably nutty rival faction (Maybe a Pepper Guild.) and have them force her to reinvest large amounts of her profits to face them at a macro scale while she's off adventuring.

So you have the party and the main plot, and this back ground sub plot of the seasoning wars.

Well, now that you basically have two companies working the same salt supply, you have a good set up for some hijinks. Unless she want's to quit adventuring and run the guild full time, there are going to be people trying to skim the profits, strikes that need to be settled, and definitely some covert (and overt) hostilities from the remaining salt manufacturer.

To see just how crazy this can all get, I suggest sitting down and watching the old movie "Support your Local Gunfighter"....


I mean, sure...it SOUNDS like a great deal, but she's considating a bunch of independent operations and then running off and she expects things to run perfectly? Not going to happen. Ego's will be bruised, people who use to be in charge will not take to being thrust into a subbordinate role all of a sudden, the person she leaves in charge of the operation better be a damned Paladin, or there's every chance that he/she is going to go power mad and wonder why they need to hand over a share of the profits to someone who isn't even there and/or doing any work....

Bascially, she should have to choose to either retire the character to run this operation full time, or keep adventuring and hope that she sees her share of the profits. She should not just be able to set this up, and then run off back to her adventuring career, and have her cut of the money show up regularly, if at all. It MIGHT work, if the party is making this town their permenant base of operations, and she can come back and check up on things at regular intervals, but other than that, she's made someone else rich but, realistically, she won't get much of a return, once they all skip town.

[cullynthedwarf]

The pick up is just before the fall harvest which is 5 months from now, so no one is going to be skimming until at least then.

As for the salt source she is using sea water to make sea salt.

The question is more how many times should I let her up garde this before telling her "enough"

If each master saltier is making 12 oz a year (before the equipment upgrade) how many masters should i allow her to ultimately get before a bigger guild house is needed?

The masters, I have told her, can only have one apprentice at a time. And takes two months to train them well enough to get the bonus to production.

This is all mundanely produced ATM but down the line who knows.

[Crake]

Where are you getting these production numbers from? Because 4 pounds a year is a pretty poor production rate. I'm fairly sure even in older times they were able to extract the salt from seawater at a better rate than that.

40gp is also hilariously cheap when it comes to buying out the guilds, though if you consider their production is 4lb a year, i guess that's also pretty hilarious, since salt is 1cp per ounce (as per the arms and equipment guide), and so 40gp would buy you 250lb of salt.

But seriously, look into the history of salt production, salt flats produce salt by the tonnes, not the pounds, 40gp would be entry level wholesale that the producers would sell to traders taking their salt to other cities to sell for markup. If you have a staff of say, 10 people manning the salt flats, each not requiring much training as the work would be mostly manual labour, cosing you 1sp each per day, or 1gp total, plus a trained hireling in the form of an accountant, plus an inventory manager, and finally a sales manager, that's another 9sp per day, that's 1.9gp per day, or almost 700gp per year just in labour costs alone. Round it up to 720gp yearly to include site maintainence and the occasional outsourced job requirement, to make that, you need to be making 4,500 pounds of salt just to break even, and that's not including taxes or tithes. If we apply a 10% goods and services tax, then that increases to 4,950 pounds of salt, just to break even.

Assuming they make 7,500 pounds of salt a year, that's 370gp of yearly income, along with maybe a few thousand gp in existing infrastructure and equipment (mostly the land), I wouldn't let the player buy a salt business for less than 2,500gp.

[shaikujin]

If you want to add an additional level of game play, you can use the rules for setting up Affiliations in DMG2/PHB2.

With monthly random rolls for trading, raiding, hiring escorts, sabotaging etc.



Otherwise, just wing it and use this as a mechanism to control WBL. Ie at level up, have them receive profits or fork out money for expenses/repairs to keep in line of WBL.

[cullynthedwarf]

Crake - actually your right, I had an older data base and the price in there is off. So I am going to need to re configure her out put.

However no salt flats are available at this time.

However the buy out price was to take over 4 separate small businesses and consolidate under one flag, The Bards. The total price was 500gp

[Sam K]

How much money do your players usually make by adventuring? Because no matter how I look at these numbers, it doesn't seem like it would get very significant compared to what you can make by stabbing goblins. Are you running a very low level, low wealth game? If not, I think you can safely allow your player to become a business tycoon in the salt industry without it disrupting your game too badly. If things DO go out of hand.... well, there's always wall of salt!

[Metahuman1]

Again, let it go were you think it should go.

And let other groups get involved that the party has to deal with, so that sub plots and side quests they care about grow organically from there actions IC. What she's done is ultimately not much different then commandeering a big, powerful Pirate Ship and using it to go sail around on. It's showing interest with the world. That should be rewarded.


And as a benefit, you can keep it from getting too out of hand by making her spend more and more money in escalating interactions with rivals and the like.

[ExLibrisMortis]

If it's going to be a continuing thing, you can simply assign a percentage of WBL-to-be-granted to the salt guild, and work out your production and staff numbers from there. If the purpose of the guild is to provide extra money, on top of WBL, you just have to decide how much; 10-20% extra is probably quite safe.

[Crake]

Crake - actually your right, I had an older data base and the price in there is off. So I am going to need to re configure her out put.

However no salt flats are available at this time.

However the buy out price was to take over 4 separate small businesses and consolidate under one flag, The Bards. The total price was 500gp

What process are they using to create salt then? With today's technology we have 3 methods available to harvest salt, one of which is just straight up mining it, the other being salt flats, or "solar evaporation" and the last being vacuum evaporation which seems rather complicated, and far more effort and engineering than salt flats.

[Elkad]

4 lbs a year? That's the salt intake of one person, for 2-3 months. Nevermind salting down a barrel of fish or something.

Tons is right.

[Jay R]

If it was that easy for her to get in the game, then it will be that easy for somebody else.

The result won't be a reduction to 2 salt guilds, but an expansion to ten or twenty.

It should still be profitable, but the competition will move in until the profits are down to a reasonable amount.

Then come the shenanigans. Guild Wars. Hiring wars. Direct attacks. Burning down guild houses. Threatening families.

Not to mention the four scheming ex-guild masters. At least one of them took her money planning to cheat or betray her, and the other four are chafing about their demotion.

There are great adventures coming up.

Ah, the joys of business.

[Goaty14]

Its makes for a good motivation for whatever quests you want to throw at her, or could just be the centerpoint of those quests

"Oh no! Demons from the lower planes are attacking the city! Even worse, they're attacking your Salt Guild!"

[NecroDancer]

I'll just link you to this campaign log

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tale_of_an_Industrious_Rogue,_Part_I

[Ellrin]

Where are you getting these production numbers from? Because 4 pounds a year is a pretty poor production rate. I'm fairly sure even in older times they were able to extract the salt from seawater at a better rate than that.

40gp is also hilariously cheap when it comes to buying out the guilds, though if you consider their production is 4lb a year, i guess that's also pretty hilarious, since salt is 1cp per ounce (as per the arms and equipment guide), and so 40gp would buy you 250lb of salt.

But seriously, look into the history of salt production, salt flats produce salt by the tonnes, not the pounds, 40gp would be entry level wholesale that the producers would sell to traders taking their salt to other cities to sell for markup. If you have a staff of say, 10 people manning the salt flats, each not requiring much training as the work would be mostly manual labour, cosing you 1sp each per day, or 1gp total, plus a trained hireling in the form of an accountant, plus an inventory manager, and finally a sales manager, that's another 9sp per day, that's 1.9gp per day, or almost 700gp per year just in labour costs alone. Round it up to 720gp yearly to include site maintainence and the occasional outsourced job requirement, to make that, you need to be making 4,500 pounds of salt just to break even, and that's not including taxes or tithes. If we apply a 10% goods and services tax, then that increases to 4,950 pounds of salt, just to break even.

Assuming they make 7,500 pounds of salt a year, that's 370gp of yearly income, along with maybe a few thousand gp in existing infrastructure and equipment (mostly the land), I wouldn't let the player buy a salt business for less than 2,500gp.

I've been looking up figures and making calculations for a bit and I'm not really sure how I'm contributing to this conversation anymore, but I figured I'd still make some kind of reply here.

According to the British Geological Survey, in 2012, global salt production was somewhere on the order of 276.5 million metric tonnes, or roughly 606.6 billion pounds. The global population in 2012 was roughly 7 billion, which puts, assuming all annually produced salt is used (probably a pretty significant assumption), average salt consumption (not necessarily literal) at just about 87 pounds per person. Since we can probably assume that a pretty significant proportion of annual production is consumed on an industrial scale, and that a significantly greater proportion of produced salt is wasted today than in a pre-industrial society, and even though there is probably a greater demand for salt on a domestic scale in any pre-refrigeration society, we can probably pretty safely reduce the expected per person consumption average to very roughly... say 50 pounds? If we take Crake's estimation of 14 people—10 laborers, 3 managers/accountants, and 1 owner—producing 7500 pounds of salt a year, that comes out to roughly 535.7 pounds produced per person in the business.

Meaning that ultimately that you'd need over 1 in 11 people globally to be involved in the salt production industry to keep up with demand. Even if we reduce our annual per person consumption estimates to 35 pounds, a mere 40% of real world production per person, you still need roughly 1 in 15 people involved in salt production.

So ultimately I think the amount of salt produced per person in a 14-man operation actually would have to be significantly higher than 7500 pounds per annum in a typical D&D world, which I suppose just lends further weight (heh) to Crake's position.

And I think I'm done thinking about salt for a while.

[Calthropstu]

AS far as she wants to go. This is insane and it sounds like an AWESOME subplot for a game!


If the WBL get's too crazy, set up some kind of suitably nutty rival faction (Maybe a Pepper Guild.) and have them force her to reinvest large amounts of her profits to face them at a macro scale while she's off adventuring.

So you have the party and the main plot, and this back ground sub plot of the seasoning wars.

If she wins that contest, would she become a... seasoned veteran?

[Fouredged Sword]

Your first bottleneck will likely be the above and bellow stream production segments. The forests around the city cannot support more than a set amount of logging and salt making requires too much fuel to support more than a set amount (set by the crown to prevent overlogging a critical resource) of salt makers. On top of that, only a set amount of salt is really needed by a city, even with trade involved. Once all the fish is salted, and other industrial uses of salt met, people don't actually NEED that much salt.

So to expand past a point would require negotiations with the crown to gain access to more inputs, then with traders to expand the trading network.

If I was DMing I would have this lead to the "historic" route and have the mono-product guild leader expand into a merchant network rather than just get bigger. It is great from a story perspective, lots of good adventure hooks clearing and organizing trade routes. Interesting characters traveling around also bring all sorts of interesting information to their leaders, lots of fun for finding new quests.

So let the salt guild grow, then have the crown put a halt to new growth. Then start negotiations with traders to bring in more fuel, but see, the route has these dangerous giants who make the road unsafe. Then, once fuel is coming in, the merchants who sell the salt start offering less per pound due to glut. See, they would love to sell at a better price, but a necromancer has strangled trade along the west coast see, the demand they can reach is smaller. If only someone did something about that nasty vampire necromancer.

See, the plotlines write themselves. As the merchant network grows, more and more people keep feeding quests back to the heroes.

[cullynthedwarf]

This is what I have decided, after review in my figures. The original bussiness owners were producing 1 golds worth of salt/ month. Since this is what I told her initially I must stick by this. However at the new price of 1cp/ oz this means the 4 smaller business are producing 6 pounds and 4 ounces a month or 75 pounds per year and the larger are producing 125oz or 7.8 pounds per month or 93 pounds and 12 ounces per year. The whole city that this is taking place in is producing less then 400pounds a year.

The small amount is deliberate. Most people are making small amounts my northern territory on an as need basis so the other 400 pounds gets shipped south ward right before the harvest.

Now the 4 small BUSINESSES have banded together under the Bard and have upgraded their equipment and now have a larger space to work out of that she had built for them. Each Master Saltier can now afford to take an assistant/apprentice. Which at the end of 2 months will grant the bonus I mentioned above (50%) and when the four businesses combine techniques they find that by using parts from each, they increase efficiency granting a second bonus (25%). At harvest time instead of the 400 pounds the city has produced in the past it will now have 603 lbs and 2 ozs to sell

And by the harvest next year the new guild will have a 2812 pounds and 8 ounces and the last non guildsalt maker will have then same 93 pounds and 12 ounce he has always had.

Now some of the suggestions you all have presented have been very good, and I will admitted to thinking along those lines my self, labor shortages, bandit attacks, some one skimming profits or even out right stealing product.

And thanks to memeber who pointed out my miscalculation. Though the PC won't earn any more money the volume of what she is producing hasn changed rather significantly.

[Crake]

This is what I have decided, after review in my figures. The original bussiness owners were producing 1 golds worth of salt/ month. Since this is what I told her initially I must stick by this. However at the new price of 1cp/ oz this means the 4 smaller business are producing 6 pounds and 4 ounces a month or 75 pounds per year and the larger are producing 125oz or 7.8 pounds per month or 93 pounds and 12 ounces per year. The whole city that this is taking place in is producing less then 400pounds a year.

The small amount is deliberate. Most people are making small amounts my northern territory on an as need basis so the other 400 pounds gets shipped south ward right before the harvest.

Now the 4 small BUSINESSES have banded together under the Bard and have upgraded their equipment and now have a larger space to work out of that she had built for them. Each Master Saltier can now afford to take an assistant/apprentice. Which at the end of 2 months will grant the bonus I mentioned above (50%) and when the four businesses combine techniques they find that by using parts from each, they increase efficiency granting a second bonus (25%). At harvest time instead of the 400 pounds the city has produced in the past it will now have 603 lbs and 2 ozs to sell

And by the harvest next year the new guild will have a 2812 pounds and 8 ounces and the last non guildsalt maker will have then same 93 pounds and 12 ounce he has always had.

Now some of the suggestions you all have presented have been very good, and I will admitted to thinking along those lines my self, labor shortages, bandit attacks, some one skimming profits or even out right stealing product.

And thanks to memeber who pointed out my miscalculation. Though the PC won't earn any more money the volume of what she is producing hasn changed rather significantly.

I cannot highlight the bolded part enough. 1 gold worth of salt per month? That's not a business, that's a hobby! Even if it was just 1 person creating that salt all on their own, a take 10 on a profession check with a measly 2 ranks (nothing compared to what a "master" should have in their profession check) gets you 6 gold a week, which is about 24 times the monetary income of that salt. I understand you gave her this number, but if you don't fix your incorrect base assumption quickly, the rest of the numbers will fall apart, and fast.

[Kayblis]

I believe you should give more information on how you run your games. There's a clear, heavy resource restriction by the way you talk, and that's not standard fo D&D, so it's important to point out just how much you're changing WBL and how low the player levels are.

Following WBL, a level 3 character should have around 2,700 gold. Even a level 1 character starts with around 125gp depending on class. By standard rules, a character can make a profit on a weekly basis with Profession rolls, which amount to a few gold pieces per week even to lv 1 laborers like commoner farmers and smiths on their own. This is the standard expected for NPCs. A business isn't some guy making horseshoes and farming tools in his backyard. The so-called business your bard is trying to make uniting FOUR houses has at least 4 families and I suppose some servants at their call, so even if none of them is skilled in the job, even if they're all level 1 commoners with no ranks in Profession(mining/saltmaking)[which is very very odd for a business], they'd still make about a hundred gold per week before expenses.

The thing is, no one's saying you're "GMing wrong" or anything, everyone has their style. But you need to explain your situation and how you usually play at your table before you ask "is 40 gold too much for a character?", because everyone is used to standard rules where every character has thousands of gold to spend in magic gear and such. To most people here, 40 gold is pocket change. You need to make it clear just how little gold you give your characters.

[Metahuman1]

If she wins that contest, would she become a... seasoned veteran?

Sure! right up till the condiment kingdom attacks. :smallamused:

[Zephonim]

I'll just link you to this campaign log

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tale_of_an_Industrious_Rogue,_Part_I

This was my first ****ing thought

[Mutazoia]

Sure! right up till the condiment kingdom attacks. :smallamused:

I'm sure that once the condiment kingdom's army manages to ketchup to them, the commander, Col. Mustard will relish the opportunity to turn them into PC mayonase.

[Metahuman1]

I'm sure that once the condiment kingdom's army manages to ketchup to them, the commander, Col. Mustard will relish the opportunity to turn them into PC mayonase.

Which will force them to go on a quest as they flee there ruined salt guild, to gain first an audience and then forge an alliance with the dessert empire, whom will aid them in achieving a truly sweet final victory!


Wow, these emotionally powerful epic story's and games just write themselves some times! XD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Calthropstu]

Which will force them to go on a quest as they flee there ruined salt guild, to gain first an audience and then forge an alliance with the dessert empire, whom will aid them in achieving a truly sweet final victory!


Wow, these emotionally powerful epic story's and games just write themselves some times! XD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And we can call this campaign "Brave Fencer Musashi"

[arkangel111]

Since we know there is an error in The calculation on prices why Dont you make that the first plot hook?
Perhaps the guild masters prices were factoring in the cut from the rogues guild (mob) and they just assumed the pc was aware that the mob takes their cut.
Or 3/4 the product is donated to a larger salt producer that had backing from the crown, if you want more political intrigue.
Or prices have plummeted do to a natural disaster that lengthens shipping times dramatically, perhaps forcing them through dangerous territory so the masters have to pay to guard their load.
It let's it seem like you always meant to have that lower price, for a reason without admitting that you were wrong to the player.

[ATHATH]

Tell me... Have you ever heard of the Tale of a Very Industrious Rogue?