What's an Adventurer's Profit Margin?

[Argothair]

A thought experiment for you:

Suppose you find a group of five well-balanced adventurers, each of which is Level 5 in a different class, and they all get along reasonably well, and nobody's persecuting them or trying to kill *them* in particular. They live in a medium-population kingdom that has a few cities and palaces, dozens of small villages, and a few abandoned ruins and dungeons, as well as hundreds of square miles of wilderness on a couple of the kingdom's borders. The kingdom is governed tolerably well -- the nobles mostly keep the peace and usually collect no more than the traditional tithes; the merchants are mostly happy to sell goods to anyone who has enough gold coin, and the peasants usually grow enough food to feed their families, even after paying their tithes. There are bands of roving monsters to be fought; sometimes the army goes on campaign against them, and sometimes (if you need a nimbler or more urgent response) the closest town will hire a party of adventurers as protection. There are a couple of Level 10 spellcasters in the kingdom who sometimes will pay good money for adventurers who can retrieve a magic item, and sometimes the royal family needs a princess rescued, or a guild needs protection for a convoy of gems and spices, or something like that. Sometimes the convoy gets attacked by highway robbers, and sometimes it doesn't.

Suppose your party of Level 5 adventurers is True Neutral, and they're really just trying to make as much money as possible for themselves without getting killed and without becoming felons. Like, your party won't stoop to assassination-for-hire, or kidnapping, or slavery, or plundering a totally innocent village -- but your party is perfectly happy to loot the corpses of monsters that are killed in combat, or to help themselves to whatever treasure they find in a dusty and abandoned mausoleum that may or may not be the final resting place of the Duke's fourth cousin. If a nice old man asks your party for a small favor like helping him pull up a bucket of water from the local well, your party will probably be happy to oblige, but if the nice old man wants help rescuing his granddaughter from a local tribe of kobolds, then you insist on payment up front. Your party occasionally makes an error in judgment and winds up fighting an enemy that has a chance of defeating them, but you usually try to pick on enemies that are "easy" or at most "medium" difficulty encounters -- you're interested in making a good living, but not at the cost of getting yourself killed.

How much money could this hypothetical adventuring party make over the course of a year? After adding up all of the revenue you earn by charging your patrons, collecting quest rewards, and looting monsters and crypts, and then after subtracting all of the money you spend on healing potions, rations, roadside taverns, and spell components...how much extra money would be left over? If you start out with 1,000 gp worth of gear and supplies, could you double that value to 2,000 gp by the end of the year? Could you triple it to 3,000 gp? What's an "average" annual rate of return?

I ask not because I think gold is the most important part of D&D, or because I think profiteering is the most fun way to play D&D, but because I think it sets a useful background against which more interesting adventurers should be comparing themselves. Like, let's say a "baseline" rate of profit is 50% per year. That gives some sense of how often Lawful Good adventurers can afford to help out the needy before they start going bankrupt. It also gives a sense of how wealthy a party of Neutral Evil adventurers (or NPC villains!) could get if they're willing to plunder the countryside for their own benefit, and how many resources the Evil party could afford to spend to protect their ill-gotten gains.

All comments welcome, but if all you have to say is "it depends on the campaign," then I'm going to hire a party of Evil adventurers to find you and tickle you until you can't breathe. I want to know how *you* would design *your* campaign world, and why.

[Kane0]

Well for the most standard-as-possible situation i'd use the usual 2gp per day of a skilled hire per person, multiplied by proficiency bonus per adventurer. Jobs that are judged as dangerous will usually want that money up front, and 'hazard pay' might double or triple that price. All this is negotiated of course, but it's a starting point.

So for your typical level 5 party of 5 they start at 30gp per day of work expecting medium challenges. Half that for easy days, double that for expecting hard challenges and triple for deadly. Travel and equipment are costs generally taken up by the adventurers, not the employer, but can be haggled over. Then loot is discussed.

So an adventurer will want to be spending as much time on the job of course, and looking for the most lucrative hauls because that's where the big bucks are. Unless you can get enough goodwill to get yourself a cushy 'noble bodyguard' job or something.

[Tiadoppler]

In 5e, a skilled craftsman turns 2.5 gp worth of goods into 5.0 gp worth of goods every work day. A proficient craftsman is worth 2.5 gp per day.

Assuming a craftsman works 5 out of 7 days a week, and has 52 weeks in the year, with some vacation or whatever, that craftsman will work 250 days a year, producing 625 gp of value.



If a single adventurer is making less than 625 gp per year, they'd be better off financially just using one of their tool proficiencies.

If a party of five is making less than 3125 gp per year in profit, they'd all be better off doing downtime crafting.



Are your adventurers in it for the money, or do they have a specific quest or urgent personal mission? Maybe they don't care that adventuring pays well.

How many Adventuring Days are in a year? If your campaign is a mega dungeon crawl, every day is an adventuring day. It might be expected that a level 1 character would either die in the first few weeks, or retire as a wealthy level 20 in a few months. My current campaign frequently goes a week between adventuring days, or 50 adventuring days per year. In less than a year, the party will likely find legendary items or valuable artifacts worth tens or hundreds of thousands of gold. If you play a long rest variant game in which a long rest takes a week, and an "adventuring day" might last a month or more, your players may only have 10 "Adventuring Days" a year, at most, and it may take decades of game time to become significantly profitable.

[Slipperychicken]

And how should we account for the tremendous and continuing risks involved?

And how should we deal with traveling time between adventuring days? In my old games we'd often gloss over weeks or even months of travel.

[Naanomi]

Standard adventuring is, to some degree, a get rich quick scheme... trading danger for big profit. I think, therefore, it is going to be almost impossible to set a ‘standard’ profit... some schlubs get pulled in fighting cultists and their demon masters for low profit their entire career; where some people end up clearing out Pharoh Moneybag’s Pyramid fairly early in their career

[strangebloke]

The answer is that the primary limit on how much such a group can make is mostly a function of how much work they can get. 5 level five adventurers are at least as valuable as 30-40 regular guards. I mean, they might not win in a straight fight against those guards, but they are way more useful for a wide variety of situations. They're super spec ops, and I'd wager they could easily make more than a 100 GP on a single day of normal work. Over the course of a year that's 30-40k.

The issue is that they're not going to be working much more than 5-6 days out of each month, because most of the time guards are going to be cheaper per combat power. Basically I anticipate that a lot of fifth level adventuring parties take itinerant positions as retainers for your local lord and earn a stable 30-35 GP a day.

--

Since you're talking about profit margin, you're talking about investing in an adventuring party. That's a separate question.

The issue is that the start-up overhead is huge, and so is the risk. Starting an adventuring party takes hundreds and hundreds of GP. The wizard needs an expensive education, the martials need 50-100 GP worth of gear, the monk has years of meditation and training. And they live a lot less efficiently than their peers, even when they're not working. They have to live in inns and eat from restaurants. The druid and ranger and guys with the outlander can live off of the land, but most probably don't.

Since the world is unfair and not every threat is a nice grouping of 3-5 goblins, it can be surmised that many many parties probably die at level 1.

The number of guys who have 500-1000 GP on hand to try and start an adventuring party from scratch are few. Even if the risk/reward works out in your favor (and it does) you probably can't afford that level of liability with their life's savings. Only powerful organizations and royalty can afford to fund the studies of adventurers.

So what you need is a joint investment firm to spread out the risk.

[Cespenar]

I'm not sure, but my recent experience in, say, the Out of the Abyss campaign was something like this:

The adventure took something like 4 to 6 months, I guess? And we ended up with around 5 to 10k worth of gold per head, IIRC.

So it's like a bandwidth of 10 to 30k a year? Let's say 20k.

Considering that that adventure had multiple "deadly++" encounters, we might as well divide it by a factor of 3 or 4. Let's go 4 for extra safety.

So around a profit of 5k per annum per person for default-level adventuring through an integral of levels 1-10.

I would see it more as a set gain (like a job) instead of a profit margin, since your experience affects your profit more than your capital.

[Armored Walrus]

It depends on the campaign.


(sorry I have a tickle fetish)


If I were going to run that campaign for that group, I'd run it as an Adventure of the Week type of campaign, giving them two or three job leads during each session and then asking them at the end of the session which one they intend to follow up on When Next We Meet our Heroes. It'd be a Scoobie Doo, or A-Team style campaign. I'd put a week of downtime between each session, and the adventures themselves would all be able to be completed in a single session. Knowing that this group will not take on any jobs that include hard or deadly encounters, every single job would consist of 6 to 8 medium encounters over a single 'adventuring day,' but I'd houserule that 'adventuring day' means that each session ends with a long rest, and they are able to just declare 2 short rests whenever they want it during the course of the session. However much in game time that involved, I wouldn't concern myself with.

Once or twice I would make a half-assed effort at character development, so they'd lose a session to distractions like jobs for family or old girlfriends. With a handful of assignments that involve travel, I'd say over the course of a year in-game, they'd be able to do, let's say 30 paying jobs. They're starting at level 5, thirty 'adventuring days' will get them to, what, level 13-15? Most of that time will be spent at tier 2. CR 5-10 hoards seem to pay around 3,500 gold on average, based on me just clicking a random generator a dozen or so times and doign zero math. So let's say 20 of those jobs pay 3,500 gold. (I'm assuming they use all magic items, and don't sell them, but those would absolutely increase their capital, and, therefore, their owners' equity in the enterprise, but let's assume medieval accountants haven't designed a system for magic item valuation, because it seems to me like you're mostly concerned with cash income, and I can't be bothered to find an average value for magic items in hoards) The final 10 jobs will pay out CR 11-16 hoard rates, so average of, looks like maybe 14,000 gold.

So we've got 20 jobs times 3,500 = 70,000 gold and 10 jobs times 14,000 = 140,000 gold for a grand total of 210,000 gold, or just under 40k per member. (plus umpteen magical items that probably multiply that by 100x) Plus stories to tell their granchildren, which, as we all know, are priceless. "When I was your age we had to walk uphill to fight our dragons."

[Caelic]

Downtime actions throw the calculation seriously out of whack.

For instance: let's assume that a rogue puts Expertise in a gaming set, and then spends his time gambling. Let's further assume he's reasonably optimized for this undertaking, with a 16 in Charisma and Wisdom.

His bonus for these checks is going to be +9, whereas the average difficulty check is a 16. On average, then, he is going to succeed on 2 of the 3 checks, netting himself a 50% profit. The problem is that the rules don't actually impose a limit on how much can be wagered while gambling, meaning the profits could get obscene quite quickly. Many DMs, of course, will impose a limit, but that limit will vary from table to table.

[Armored Walrus]

All comments welcome, but if all you have to say is "it depends on the campaign," then I'm going to hire a party of Evil adventurers to find you and tickle you until you can't breathe. I want to know how *you* would design *your* campaign world, and why.

Figure I'll try to help OP out, since so far the majority of posts are exactly what he wasn't looking for. :P

I'm curious, too. How would you run it? Let's share ideas, not pick apart OP's idea. You have a blank slate other than what OP proposed. What would you do with it? I showed you mine. Now show me yours.

[Tiadoppler]

When I DM, my group meets in person once a week, and talks/roleplays/does downtime in between sessions by email/text. Each in-person session is a continuous adventuring day, and it's unlikely that a long-rest will occur during that time. The in-game time between sessions could be a few hours, a day, or a month depending on what's happening in-game, but in general time in the campaign flows at roughly the same rate as time in real life.

I don't use standard loot tables. My campaign setting is only based loosely on a canon setting, and many magical items/spells are rare or non-existent. When I'm planning the encounters for an adventuring day, I roll a gp budget for Pieces of Significant Loot (to go alongside the xp budget). The GP budget is divided between a small number of interesting (frequently magical) items that enemies will be using (or, much more rarely, storing in a poorly locked box), and the remainder takes the form of coinage/precious metals/gemstones/art. If the party defeats enemies, they can find and take these items.

Generally, I'd assume that 5th level players would each earn about 300gp per adventuring day, but would likely expend 1/2 of that on consumable items, cost of living, services, etc. 7500ish gp in profit per year (including magical items found), but that's only if they stay at level 5 for the whole year.


The sticking point for calculating an adventurer's long-term wages is: they get more powerful very quickly. If adventurers adventure year-round, I would expect them to go from 5th level to at least 10th level over the course of that year. If, however, they're hiring out as caravan guards earning an honest wage, but not actually getting into big adventuring-day battles, they're earning NPC guard level wages rather than adventurer's loot.


If they're going from quest to quest as quickly as possible, they'll be gaining power quickly too. Their income will increase constantly as they are able to go from "taking a shortsword from a goblin" to "taking The Helm of Dragonkind from the Emperor of Stone."

[Armored Walrus]

The sticking point for calculating an adventurer's long-term wages is: they get more powerful very quickly. If adventurers adventure year-round, I would expect them to go from 5th level to at least 10th level over the course of that year. If, however, they're hiring out as caravan guards earning an honest wage, but not actually getting into big adventuring-day battles, they're earning NPC guard level wages rather than adventurer's loot.


If they're going from quest to quest as quickly as possible, they'll be gaining power quickly too. Their income will increase constantly as they are able to go from "taking a shortsword from a goblin" to "taking The Helm of Dragonkind from the Emperor of Stone."

Too many if's. This is a hypothetical campaign, not one you're going to run for real. You get to decide the answer to all those if's ;)

[Sindeloke]

I'm seeing some salary vs project problems here in income extrapolation. Adventurers are not 9-to-5 workers, in a society with worker protections that guarantee a two-day weekend and an 8-hour day. Even if we assume that's the norm for like... carpenters and jewelsmiths in the setting, it's still not how adventurers work. Adventurers have an incredibly spiky activity profile - as a couple people have mentioned, in the OP's scenario they're not going to get constant work, they're going to get a couple days' to a week of work every couple months.

That means that any single job not only needs to pay for its own equipment and intangibles, it also needs to pay for another 60 days of room and board once you get home. Adventurers with other marketable skills or some kind of guildhall home base obviously defray this a bit (of course a guildhall itself takes some of your cut), but it means that the gold-per-haul-per-day of any given adventure can't just be multiplied by 260 and assumed a yearly take.

[Armored Walrus]

I'm seeing some salary vs project problems here in income extrapolation. Adventurers are not 9-to-5 workers, in a society with worker protections that guarantee a two-day weekend and an 8-hour day. Even if we assume that's the norm for like... carpenters and jewelsmiths in the setting, it's still not how adventurers work. Adventurers have an incredibly spiky activity profile - as a couple people have mentioned, in the OP's scenario they're not going to get constant work, they're going to get a couple days' to a week of work every couple months.


They're going to get as much work as the DM gives them. Over whatever period of time the DM causes the work to happen. Are we all politicians on this board? Everyone's sidestepping an answer :P

[Coidzor]

Outlander is a big help here at low levels where you can't actually afford the 1 month of rations it might take to get from point A to point B. Literally saved our party 150 gp on the road from Waterdeep to our first adventure, from our first adventure to our second, and then back to Waterdeep to set the stage for our third adventure. Admittedly, the first 75 gp of that when we were traveling as broke 1st level characters was more impactful than when we were flush with cash and looking to invest in healing potions. And yes, it took our party of 5 characters about 2 months to make that round trip, along with the time in dungeons and time spent traveling between dungeons and nearby towns.

Most adventuring gear is pretty cheap and aside from rope and things that will get consumed, you don't really have to worry about replacing it for a good while, barring some effect that just destroys it.

The more expensive non-consumables, like hourglasses, spyglasses, and magnifying glasses are, for most purposes, nothing but frills. Then on the odd adventure where you do need them, it is very nice to have them.

Outfitting a 5th level Party to go to Chult from Waterdeep with a ridiculous amount of over-prepping cost about 2362 gold pieces.

500 gp of that was to replenish our supply of Potions of Healing which had taken a beating in the last dungeon. Another 525 gp of that was alchemist's fire, acid, and holy water.

Then 1015 of that was to get an Adamantine Maul and an Adamantine War Pick in case we needed to smash our way out of any temple traps or smash our way into stone vaults.

Of the remaining 322 gp, there were some things like making sure we had redundant shovels, crowbars, and grappling hooks and giving everyone Healer's Kits, mirrors, machetes, and the ability to carry half a week's worth of water on us. There was also a backup set of Thieves' tools and several sets of mundane craftsman's tools, such as Carpenter's and Smith's tools so that we'd have a bit more ability to manipulate the environment.

As part of the adventure, we were promised 5000 gp of wages and a share of any treasure hoards we found, with a reasonable expectation that the treasure hoards will out-value the 5K.

We currently have about 10,000 gp of wealth between us, not counting magical items that aren't potions of healing. Of that 10K, about 7.5K is still in liquid wealth, of which about 7000 gp is invested in our Revivify and Raise Dead diamond supply.

So even if there's no treasure, our real wealth will basically increase by 50%, and aside from the month's worth of rations we budgeted for sailing to and from Chult, we'll be able to use this gear on any other adventure, although we may liquidate the machetes if we don't find anything else to get up to in Chult and leave it behind for at least a good long while.

We've got about 10,000 gp between our gear and liquid wealth and currently have been an adventuring party for about 80 days in-world, having just arrived at our 3rd dungeon. That's about 125 gp per day of net income so far, altogether. It was about 222 gp per day of net profit upon completing our 2nd dungeon.

I would say that we've had some fairly unusually long travel times, though, partially because we decided to be miserly murderhobos and hoof it out on foot instead of buy overpriced horses, since traveling didn't cost us money, only delayed the time until we increased our money.

[Naanomi]

For instance: let's assume that a rogue puts Expertise in a gaming set
Point of clarity, you can’t have expertise in tools (except thief Tools as a rogue)

[Tiadoppler]

They're going to get as much work as the DM gives them. Over whatever period of time the DM causes the work to happen. Are we all politicians on this board? Everyone's sidestepping an answer :P

Yes, we are all politicians on this board.

My answer (from when I posted the description of my campaign) is 7500gp per year per person in profit after expenses for fifth level characters in general, at a specific rate of finding work.

The reason people are saying other things is that this is one of the cases in which the question, and examining the variables of the question, is a more interesting topic of conversation than simply stating a number.


In my campaigns, I would
> never set a "yearly salary" for an adventurer and try to use that to determine how much money my characters receive
> always base quest rewards on quest difficulty
> require days or weeks of "legwork" before a freelance mercenary organization (PC party) could find legitimate paying work
> occasionally throw curveballs at my players: just because a contract sounds like easy money, it may very well be difficult
> tempt the PCs into illegal but more lucrative and dangerous work
> tempt the PCs into going into debt or simply overspending
> create competitors for the PCs



We've got about 10,000 gp between our gear and liquid wealth and currently have been an adventuring party for about 80 days in-world, having just arrived at our 3rd dungeon. That's about 125 gp per day of net income so far, altogether. It was about 222 gp per day of net profit upon completing our 2nd dungeon.

My current 5th level party is at about that wealth level too, after around 4 months of adventuring together.

[Argothair]

Thank you, everyone, lots of really helpful answers! I appreciate it. :-D

[Hesh]

Partially charged wands of salt... Wait, wrong edition!

[Anonymouswizard]

Before or after beer and wenches? It makes a massive difference.

In all difference, it depends on the world, but the short answer is that a trip that takes one month should probably give at least as much as the PCs can expect to get in a year of steady employment before replacing consumables.

Making some calculations for a theoretical campaign, in going to base this on the cost of one day's fresh food, straight off the farm. I'm going to set this at five copper, assuming that for many people it's mostly vegetables. Our average country laborer might be earning up to a silver piece every day, with half of that going on clothes, fixing their home, and the occasional luxury. The local smith and similar artisans are likely making in the range of a few silver to a couple of gold a day, but also need to buy raw materials.

Now food is more expensive when it's been transported into cities, both the fact that not everything the merchants buy will make it to the city and that the merchant wants to make the profit. However, we can assume that a city dweller can get a day's worth of food for fifteen coppers at all bar the worst of times, therefore most unskilled city workers are likely pulling in about two silver a day.

Skilled workers get more, but the cost of equipment drives that down. A city guard might be worth three gold a day, but after being supplied with equipment, uniforms, a room, and food likely has no more than a silver of free cash a day. Maybe as much as five silver of paying for his own food and board. You'll have similar incomes for military personnel, but during wartime looting might be considered fair game.

Higher ranking members of organisations likely make more. City guard officers and skilled city artisans might easily have a gold in spending money a day, high ranking ones ten gold a day or more. Nobles might manage to bring in over a hundred gold a day from their land, but a lot of that is spent on maintaining their estates, likely leaving their spending money per day peer family member not that much higher than a high ranking guild member's.

Note that this setup assumes a silver based economy rather than a gold based one. 5th level PCs might have hundreds to thousands of gold of property, but they're still dealing with silver coins. If gold is the primary medium of exchange you might want to double or even quintuple most of the digits.

So let's assume that, before food and board PCs in a permanent context would make as much as a low ranking guard officer, so say 5gp/day (to make the maths relatively easy). Assuming a month is thirty days they can make one hundred and fifty gold, enough to buy a nice townhouse of they don't need to spend it on survival. Spending a month travelling and looting should bring in roughly twelve times that account, or 1800gp, enough to buy a nice village (okay, maybe a hamlet). If the chances of getting lucky are low they should likely be making at least two to three times that amount to justify it. Mundane supplies are probably not making much of a dent in that, so let's look at healing potions. If we assume one is used every other day than we need about fifteen 50gp healing potions, for 750gp. Our profit power person should be over 1700gp a person before new equipment, property investment, or wenches and mead. Or about 8500gp for our five man group.

Most adventurers probably retire after one successful expedition, maybe two or three. At that point you're either in wenches for the next few years or are investing your money so you'll be in wenches for life.

Of course that money can go quickly if you're not careful, why do you think must adventurers cone out of retirement a few months to years down the line?