How do you handle players wanting to start a business / their own city ? [Archive]

Vahnavoi

2022-08-23, 06:44 AM

Roughly how this would run under Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules:

- businesses and investments not personally attended by player characters operate on yearly basis. This basically covers your entire line of questioning about game balance: if your campaign isn't lasting for years and years of game time, player characters won't get any noticeable benefit from them. If you're feeling merciful, you can divide the sums gained by twelve and hand the benefits out on monthly basis

- such businesses and investments can be divided into categories based on how risky they are. For example, safe investments have growth rate of -1% to +2% (1d4-2), standard investments have growth rate of -3% to +5% (1d8-4), risky investments have growth rate of -19% to +20% (d20-10) and gambles have growth rate of -49% to +50% (d100-50). Each business also has a chance to go bankrupt ; 1% chance for safe, 5% for standard, 10% for risky and 25% for a gamble. If the business or investment goes belly up, all wealth tied to it is lost.

- hiring an accountant adds +1d6 to the growth rate of a business or investment. A certain number of accountants are required for the effect to take, based on size of the business or investment. One accountant per 50 personnel is a good enough estimate. Accountants require a monthly wage.

- depending of type and scope of business, the player characters may have to hire a bunch of retainers - henchmen are just the tip of the iceberg. LotFP has a list, freely available on their home site.

- obviously retainers have to be paid and these add up to serious quantities. Failure to pay, being stingy etc. mistreatment of retainers lowers their morale; incidents such a retainers dying in service cause morale checks, with those failing the check leaving the service of player characters.

- normal retainers do not gain experience and are by default 0th or 1st level non-player characters. Some exception may happen, such as sergeants, captains or scholars, who are hired at set level. Leveled characters take their share (full, half, etc. depending on station) of treasure.

- henchmen in particular can be at most one character level below their master's. Should a henchman equal or exceed their master's level, they will set off to do their own thing.

- henchmen take half share of treasure and 10% to 20% of experience earned. If you are using challenge ratings, you should factor them in when calculating effective party level of the player character group. The point being that each character gets less loot and XP for the same effort when henchmen are in use.

Overall: starting a business or beginning investing takes a lot of money, and will take a lot of time to pay back.

If your players want to be personally involved in the business, lets look at d20 SRD and take some idras from there.

- profit for a day of any mundane business is a Profession skill check (d20+modifiers). A character gets their check result's worth of silver pieces for the effort. Unskilled labor (no Profession skill) nets one silver piece per day.

- alternatively, players can use Craft skills to make items. Convert value of any item to silver pieces; players can make three times their Craft skill check's result of items per day. For very expensive items, this of course means many days are required before product is finished. These items can then be sold for some % of profit (see above regarding business and investments).

- alternatively, look at the list of wages for retainers. Player characters can get the same amount if they are capable of doing the stated work. Wages are paid either per day or per month, depending on profession.

- deduct living expenses for food, lodging, services used etc.

I'll write a few more detailed examples later.

On another note, I suggest you play Princess Maker 2. I'm reasonably sure the English version can be played for free online, a modernized version is available on Steam. Reason being, it gives an idea of how to organize gameplay around making decisions on a week-by-week or month-by-month basis, with occasional tactical level adventuring in-between. 15-minute-workday is not a problem for a game heavy on business. On the contrary, using more than 15 real time minutes for each game day probably means you're spending too much attention on detail. Days should blaze by fast when not on adventure.

Asmotherion

2022-08-23, 08:03 AM

There's two options here really:

A) Create a threat that would either personally affect them and that community, and force them to keep adventuring. This can be the kind of World Ending threat, or even a local pleague that needs to have it's cure found.

B) Embrace the fact; Sometimes players want to play a Medieval Simulator and not an Epic Adventure. This can also be as fun or even more fun, as long as everyone is on board.

Easy e

2022-08-23, 09:25 AM

Just make running a business realistic, and they will not want to do it.

As a small-business owner myself, if you made it real enough; no one would want to RP it.

:)

Quertus

2022-08-23, 10:44 AM

- such businesses and investments can be divided into categories based on how risky they are. For example, safe investments have growth rate of -1% to +2% (1d4-2), standard investments have growth rate of -3% to +5% (1d8-4), risky investments have growth rate of -19% to +20% (d20-10) and gambles have growth rate of -49% to +50% (d100-50). Each business also has a chance to go bankrupt ; 1% chance for safe, 5% for standard, 10% for risky and 25% for a gamble. If the business or investment goes belly up, all wealth tied to it is lost.

So (to make the math easy) I decide to corner the market on lemonade, and open up 100 lemonades stands across the city. Because I let my idiot cousin handle the details (nepotism for the win!), each business cost me a 100 gold investment.

Since “lemonades” is a pretty safe investment, during the first year, I get 25x([1,2,3,4]-2)% RoI, or 25x2=50% RoI, or 50 gold profits total.

However, one business went belly up, costing me 100 gold to replace it.

Net value of owning 100 businesses? -50 (negative fifty) gold.

Yeah, only idiots run businesses in LotFP. Just like in real life. The only way to earn money is through looting the dead, starting wars, and killing things.

So… unless you do the world building to support “businesses are how people lose money”, I’d have to say, don’t do that.

But what should you do?

I know for a fact that at least one of my player will want to start is own business, or rule is own domain.
And the others will probably love the idea and want to follow.

I would be glad to know if :

1. You have any guideline to avoid a situation where this kind of things becomes game breaking ? (aka they suddenly have a little army or henchmen that can go dungeonning in their place and/or they make too much money).

2. You can share any rules/systems/homebrew/experiences that can make my life easier to handle this sort of things.

I'm not planning to let this be the center of the campaign. But what if they really like it and genuinely wants to continu improving it ?
IMO it would be dumb as a DM to "crush" them by making their business just "POOF" into bankruptcy or their village undergo raids after raids after raids.
But then, how to combine their pursuit of the evil Necromancer and their passion for capitalism ?
(Of course the Necromancer, if left unchecked, would cause problems for them =p)

Well, Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, opens spell component shops in pretty much every world he can. And, as a rule, just like in LotFR or real life, they operate at a loss, because Quertus has an absolutely terrible business model. So Quertus adventures to pay to “keep the lights on” at his businesses. :smallwink:

But this isn’t exactly typical of what players want out of the experience. So, the first thing you should ask is, “what do you want?”.

Let’s look at a few answers in the context of your #1 concern, breaking the game.

“I want to make money”. Huh. Well, even if you happen to be running a system where money directly equates to Character power (like 3e D&D, or… <cricket> <cricket>), a more *sane* expected RoI on a “safe” business might look like, say, 10% yearly. Given that, by 3e RAW, he could easily power level from 1-20 in a month, I don’t think that getting an extra 10% of his starting funds 11 months after he hits epic is going to break anything.

“I want political influence.” Yes, Quertus owning a rundown spell component shop opens so many more doors than being an epic Wizard with better understanding of the universe than the gods. I see how this could be a problem.

“I want inside information and access.” Maybe your player wants to be running the business that outfits the BBEG’s Legions of Doom with Dragonhide armor, to know where it’s being shipped. Or maybe they want to sabotage the Empire’s speeder bikes. This sounds like it makes the campaign rather than breaks it to me.

Yeah, I’m not seeing a problem here.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-23, 11:28 AM

Thrudd

2022-08-23, 12:17 PM

For a game with rules that are really focused on adventuring, make this a "downtime" activity. You'd do something like: treat each month that they spend in town as one "turn" for the business. Come up with a random table to decide if their business did well and made a profit, broke even, or lost money for each month, and have them roll a relevant skill or ability that can modify the outcome of the profits roll- if they don't invest a character resource like a skill into something that can be useful for running a business, then whether that business succeeds or fails should really be up to luck more than anything. If they are off adventuring and hire people to run the business while they're away, obviously they don't get to roll to modify the profits. Boiling it down to a couple dice rolls and brief narration lets you avoid having to really think about the world's economy in great detail, which is a huge pain unless you just love doing that sort of thing.

Everyday, mundane businesses should never make as much money as can be made via adventuring, in a system like D&D, for example. So whatever business they create should be giving them chump change relative to the dungeon haul.

"Adventurer, Conqueror, King" has rules for this sort of thing, generally, in the "Campaigns" section. It might give you some good ideas how to manage it, although the assumptions of the game system might be different than the one you want to run. It proposes how to run a fantasy world economy, and lets the players rule or hire groups of people that they can send off on treasure hunting and other missions - they don't go on those missions themselves, you roll on a table to see what happens. There's rules for being a ruler of a town or a domain, rules for starting merchant ventures and trading goods with people, collecting taxes from your people, for running criminal organizations and having your gang do heists and crimes, for wizards to build laboratories and research new spells and build their own dungeons...all kinds of stuff. It is abstracted to a level that you don't get into the gritty details of each thing, they say what they're doing during their downtime and you roll on tables to see what happens and how much money they make, whether some of their people get killed on missions, if a wizard's experiment gives them a new spell or blows up in their face, etc.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-23, 01:28 PM

A more fleshed out example:

A group of four wants to buy a ship to get from place to place and also to earn some money on the side. A merchant cog, requiring a crew of 20 and capable of carrying 150 tons of cargo, costs 15,000 silver pieces. Sailors are assumed to live on their ship and receive a monthly wage - if the four want the ship to be fully autonomous, this means hiring a ship captain, a navigator and a mate in addition to seventeen crew. The captain's wage is 250 sp, the first mate's 126 sp, the navigator's 100 sp, and the crew members 63 sp each, for a monthly total of 1,547 sp and a yearly total of 18,564 sp. Rations for each person can be assumed to cost 5 copper (=half a silver) per day per person, for a yearly total of 24 sp x 365 sp x ½ sp = 4,380 sp.

So, the upfront cost of getting the merchant ship outfitted for a year is 15,000 + 18,564 + 4,380 = 37,944 sp. The cost of keeping all these people hired & fed for additional years is 18,564 + 4,380 = 22,944 sp.

In order to reap profits, the investment into the cargo must be significantly more than that. Like, if we want to be on the absolute safest side, at least a hundred times that, or roughly 2,300,000 silver pieces. To give some perspective, a full suit of armor costs 1,500 sp, a rifled wheellock musket costs 560 sp, a barrel of gunpowder costs 150 sp, a lance costs 30 sp, a rapier costs 15 sp and a warhorse costs 500 sp - I'll call this a cuirassier kit for convenience. The total kit costs 2,755 sp. So we're talking about moving around enough equipment to supply 835 cuirassiers.

A brand new character has 3d6 x 10 sp. Needless to say, our group of four is not scratching 2,300,000 sp, or even the more modest 37,944 sp, at the outset.

Let's calculate what they need to do to get there.

First of the group, a fighter, becomes a castle guard. Second of the group, a magic-user, becomes the castle's alchemist. Third of the group, a cleric, becomes a physician. Fourth of the group, a thief specialist becomes a spy. The first three negotiate a live-in arrangement so they don't have to worry about where they sleep or what they eat, while the fourth vows to only sleep in the cheapest inns (½ to 1 sp a night), eat the cheapest food (1/5 sp a day) and drink the cheapest wine (1/5 sp to½ sp a day) so they'll only lose ~2 sp to daily life, or ~ 60 sp per month.

The fighter thus gets 63 sp a month, the magic-user gets 187 sp a month, the cleric gets 210 sp a month and the specialist gets 200 sp - 60 sp = 140 sp a month. Presuming no other costs, this means as a group they net 600 sp a month, or 7,200 sp a year.

To just get their ship, crew and food, the group will be working for 5 years, 3 months and 7 days. The 2,300,000 sp on top is quite unfeasible to reach this way, as it would take 319 and a half years. The group really needs to, and probably wants to, get moving after spending over five years working and raising funds.

So, what do they need to do, in a year, before they're out of money? 2,300,000 sp divided by four is 575,000 sp. At rate of 1 experience point per silver piece of recovered treasure, that's the amount of wealth one might expect from a 12th level fighter, a 12th level cleric, an 11th level magic user and a 13th level specialist.

The point here being that I've had multiple groups do the equivalent of the initial fundraising and outfitting a ship, but I've never had a group go from there to a lucrative, self-sufficient business without some serious exploration and risk-taking. Serious business with serious profits in it takes serious money to start and to run. Consider it takes from 1,500 to 3,000 experience points, and hence that many silver pieces in value of recovered treasure, to go from level 1 to level 2. What the group is getting from a year of fundraising is what they could reasonably expect to get from a successful adventure or two. Maybe they won't have as high a chance of dying, but they're also only getting money, not experience and not any of the fancier loot.

sktarq

2022-08-23, 04:12 PM

Firstly. Do you want to avoid the scenario?
if so.

help out during the character build to set long term goals/personalities that discourage this. This is by far the best way to do this my opinion.

make it the least interesting option.

do what you can to make the personal bonds between the characters and the player such that they will have to ALL settle down and run this business/fief together or none will. This will help control that one merchant-prince-wizing-in-the-making or whatever from sidelining the game. And honestly this is the real key of it. it either has to be a downtime sideline or a team effort. And honestly it can be a quite cool activity to keep people engaged while the wizard is making magic items/researching spells etc.

Now some people just like doing this anyway. They will want to build characters that also want this quite often. Or they just see how to fix more things with a good model to get other people to solve problems for them (get me more money, defeat that BBEG etc) via moving other people to do the work than personally swinging their blade at something...it is that special kind of lazy.

Several games/editions have at least partial rules for this kind of thing. Official D&D alone has plenty in the early editions like BECMI, various splats that had sections on it (like the stronghold builders guide etc the founding fief section in I think PHBII IIRC), and even Birthright. Grab and adapt what works well into your story. And many other games have whole sections. YMMV of course but you are not short of options.

And if your players decide that is what they want to do....roll with it. Business challenges are legion, threats to supply chains or distribution networks, doing favors to those with regulatory power, clearing monsters so refugees can settle farm your cash crops...the list goes on. You can also lure the party with rewards that help their business more than them. An orb of storms (with an on/off switch) may not really power up the party on the battlefield but it also brings rain which can be a huge boon if they settle in a dry region and want to have farm minions (hell place it in the upper part of a nearby valley-let it create a river-and irrigate if it doesn't have an on/off switch) and thus can drive players to explore the dungeon of whatever if you say that such a reward exists at the bottom of it.

As for people not wanting a small business simulator ... EVE...EVE Online...let alone the multitude of business sims (which is scary vast if you get access to the german market-the train simulators alone yeesh or farm sims)

And as for setting up a fief (especially a March where they carve a new piece of a nation out of wilderness/humanoid region (much easier to get permission for) there are TON of various adventure hooks. Threat clearance being the obvious start but also helping out potential neighbors so they will help/trade, trying court cases that need investigation, intrigue, etc on top of all the business ones (as most proto fiefs have a food/production, general store distributors, royal resource extraction, etc type businesses attached)

Also do the rules say that the party will collect followers/cohorts/etc....But honestly they are too much to keep track of or will not survive the basic background threats the party faces? Great a Seneshal, Foreman, local Baron etc are all great roles to dump them in.

Now all of these have large upfront costs. And honestly dungeon delving, dragon horde raiding etc for these start up costs is a great motivator. It is the people who want just enough to buy a nice vineyard, buy the missus a couple decent dresses, and live a modest life (unless they farm cabbages which is the trope of will return in emergencies) that are harder to deal with at the table.

Quertus

2022-08-23, 04:17 PM

@Quertus:

A hundred lemonade stands for 100 gold pieces each can be treated either as a hundred individual properties, or for ease of book keeping, a single 10,000 gold piece property.

If you are treating them individually as safe businesses, then there's roughly 37% chance at least one lemonade stand will completely fail, losing that 100 gold, with others growing at 1% rate on average, netting you 1 gold each in profit. So, likely, you might end up with a hundred 101 gold properties, for total of 100 gold pieces in profits to skim off the top, or ninety-nine 101 gold piece properties, for a net loss of one gold piece. A full spread would be simple but time consuming to make, so I won't do it.

If you are treating them as a lump investment, then after a year there's 24.75% chance for 200 gold pieces of growth, 24.75% for 100 gold piece growth, 24.75% chance for no growth, 24.75% for 100 gold pieces of loss, and 1% chance you lose all 10,000 gold pieces of value.

Sigh. My example was intentionally 100 different businesses, to make the math easy to show the average RoI under that system.

However, “average” can mean mean, mode, or median. So that can cause some confusion. And I cheated to keep the math easy by letting the business that went under *also* return a profit. Sigh.

So, imagine this scenario instead: I’m the demigod of fertility. X years ago, I had a million and one kids. This year, a million of them all decided to open identical lemonade stands, all with an initial investment cost of Y of my money, each.

The million-and-first child (precious brat) instead decides to write a paper summarizing the financial endeavors of my offspring.

If he’s merely mathy, he’ll write about how, through this venture, his (half) siblings lost approximately 5,000Y of my funds (depending a little on how Arangee is feeling in those million sets of rolls).

If the precocious brat is good at applying what the numbers show, he’ll conclude that businesses are only for really dumb gamblers, or those who want to lose money.

Because, of those million lemonade stands, on average,
10,000 went under [-10,000y]
247,500 lost .01y [-2,475y]
247,500 broke even
247,500 earned .01y [+2,475y]
247,500 earned .02y [+4,950y]

4,950y+2,475y-2,475y-10,000y
4,950y-10,000y
= -5,050y

So, again, running a business in LotFP is for those who are bad at math, or those who want to lose money, and the world building should reflect that.

NichG

2022-08-23, 04:55 PM

In my last campaign, the players had a ship and went port to port. For the most part, if they sank their gold into the appropriate cargo and went to a port at least a week distant, they could reliably get a +10% return. If they went with contraband or other risky stuff, picked ports specifically for the money and not because they happened to need to go there for adventure, etc, they could get that up to a +40% return. That's amazingly good for the real world, but because it was maybe 2-4 sessions in between payouts, and based on the pacing of the campaign as a whole, it wasn't such a big deal. Yes they could turn 10000gp into 12000gp, but they had to go 3 sessions without what that 10kgp would have purchased to do it, which starts to sound like much less of a good deal.

So I think in the end, its all about time. If your campaign is such that the players can say 'we wait 10 years for our investments to mature' and nothing would reasonably happen in the mean time, well, its going to be a big effect. If your campaign is such that there's regularly stuff to do that can't just be avoided without consequence to the investment - even if you did something like 1 session = 1 month of time and used realistic rates of return on investments like 10% per year - its just not going to matter so much. Especially if the business or the city has extra gold sinks available to it. It becomes sort of a game of 'how much opportunity cost can we shoulder now to get more money later', which isn't the healthiest minigame for an RPG (because it tends to lead completionist players to commit to having nothing for most of the game so they can get something really good just as the game is ending...) but its not a disaster either if people enjoy it.

One thing that could mess things up is if the players get control of an existing heavily-invested-in resource (like, they inherit rulership of a city). Because in that case, there's a huge difference in the wealth available between the decision 'keep the city running' versus the decision 'gut it for everything of value and let it fall to pieces'. The robber baron thing will absolutely generate a ton of wealth in an instant, and generally far more wealth than you'd ever see running it properly, because the illiquid parts of that city represent say a century worth of growth and investment by others. So maybe be careful with that and have there be some oversight if fate is just handing over the keys to the castle, unless you want to run a game about the players being CEOs who buy and hollow out parts of the world. Which you could do!

Another design thing you could do would be to have effectively two currencies, which are convertible but not quickly. So for example the party loot uses the coin of the realm, whereas the assets and profits of the business or city are in the form of goods, deeds to property, etc. If the market for those things is relatively small, then trying to cash them out quickly could mean getting only 10% of their full value, whereas cashing out slowly might take years. So then the players have the option of converting 100kgp of business assets into 10kgp of cash now, 100kgp in a year's time, or letting the business grow further and getting 120kgp in two years, etc.

Edit: Anyhow, that's just on whether or not it will wreck a game. How to actually do it so it's fun depends on how interested the players are in it, but I'd say the basic recipe would be that it has some baseline return for time and money invested, and there are both direct adventures that can be done to improve the return as well as adventures enabled by the ancillary resources associated with the property and pattern of upgrades the players opt to purchase. So e.g. if they have a city, they get an extra decision to mobilize the city's scouts each month, which could return adventuring locations of interest to them, highlight possible threats in advance, etc. They might be able to boost the taxes this year by 10% if they manage to convince a skilled druid to come help with fertility problems on the east side farms, or get something like 'free spellcasting services up to Lv3 spells' instead if they do a favor and help the Mage Guild entrench their power in the city against hedge-mage competitors (or, they could help the hedge mages instead and ...)

Anyhow, like that.

Vodahim

2022-08-23, 06:40 PM

LibraryOgre

2022-08-23, 06:49 PM

I have some rules for starting a business, and I'd be inclined to raid the old Rules Cyclopedia (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17171/DD-Rules-Cyclopedia-Basic?affiliate_id=315505) or Birthright (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16938/Birthright-Campaign-Setting-2e?affiliate_id=315505) for domain rules... generating income via taxes and so on.

NichG

2022-08-23, 07:16 PM

First of all I love you guys. Never thought I would see such details for a business plan for lemonade stands XD

Secondly, if only one of them wants to do is business, I'll play it with him outside of the table.
If it's something that they all know about, they'll be kept informed and some plots could be about it, but nothing major.
If they ALL wants to do it, well, I won't just tell them no. (I hated it when I had cool idesa and my former DM shut them down everytime).
But I'm a scaredy cat when it comes to balancing things on the go and I don't have time to make a whole functionning system on my own right now.

Thus my concerns.

Thanks a lot for the reference and explanations for businesses. Now, directly from a failed project (and campaign) of mine :
What if they clear a bandit's lair that happen to be on the king's territory. And they ask, from their level 3, if they can turned it into a fort and a market place for the realm ?

Obviously the king surely have better candidates for this than total nobodies. But let's say that, since they greatly help the kingdom while his armies where occupied in the north, he give them a chance ?

(If you want to do some maths for this too, I'll gladly read more about construction cost and everything).

PS : I think I'll go with the flow for the nexts sessions, and if it fails, just try something else.
And make this clear from the beginning.

Well in that case, the king can negotiate as follows:

- One PC must accept a low-end noble title and swear fealty. That PC will be responsible for the duties associated with being a land-owner in that kingdom.
- The crown will provide resources to help construct that fort and market in the form of a loan for quite a large amount of GP - hundreds of thousands, lets say. Costs of things will be in the 10s of thousands of GP though, so without this loan it'll be hard for a Lv3 party to actually do what is needed for this job. The loan isn't optional - this is how the king gets them on the hook to develop the territory for sake of the kingdom, not just as their own base.
- Until that initial loan of resources has been repaid, the PCs are forbidden from directly cashing out from the tax flows and rents. That income must either go to repay the crown or be reinvested into the project, and a certain minimum each year must go towards repaying the loan. Once the loan is repaid, the crown will just take a fixed levy each year. This isn't a percentage though, meaning that if the land doesn't manage to hit that level of prosperity the PCs owe it personally, but if its over then the PCs can become filthy rich off of it.
- The PCs are however free to use their role as landlords in order to extract labor, favors, etc from their tenants on their behalf, though they cannot represent those things as being part of the king's tax. If it pisses people off to be charged extra, they take the bad PR for that, not the king. So the degree to which the PCs can get things out of this channel will depend on how good they are asking for things people have in excess already - discounts on work yes, 'gimme your money' probably not so good.
- There is a cap on how much extra material goods the PCs are permitted to directly extort from their tenants outside of taxes for their own personal gain, which is set at something like 5000gp per year. However, the PCs are encouraged to be creative with this - someone handing over a suit of full plate will count against this total, but someone forwarding a business opportunity to the PCs instead of someone else will not. Things like spellcasting services, foods that get consumed, hosting guests, performing military service, etc don't count against it. Basically again 'I want you to be using your resources, not cashing them out'. If the PCs raise in noble rank, that cap can also be increased.
- Likewise, there is a cap on the size of the standing army they are allowed to construct from their tenants, which is based on their noble rank. Essentially 'you can have troops, but you can't have enough troops to be a threat to the kingdom'. Nurturing a local adventurers' guild or playing host to a bunch of mercenaries however doesn't count towards this cap.

Vodahim

2022-08-23, 07:33 PM

Well in that case, the king can negotiate as follows:

- One PC must accept a low-end noble title and swear fealty. That PC will be responsible for the duties associated with being a land-owner in that kingdom.
- The crown will provide resources to help construct that fort and market in the form of a loan for quite a large amount of GP - hundreds of thousands, lets say. Costs of things will be in the 10s of thousands of GP though, so without this loan it'll be hard for a Lv3 party to actually do what is needed for this job. The loan isn't optional - this is how the king gets them on the hook to develop the territory for sake of the kingdom, not just as their own base.
- Until that initial loan of resources has been repaid, the PCs are forbidden from directly cashing out from the tax flows and rents. That income must either go to repay the crown or be reinvested into the project, and a certain minimum each year must go towards repaying the loan. Once the loan is repaid, the crown will just take a fixed levy each year. This isn't a percentage though, meaning that if the land doesn't manage to hit that level of prosperity the PCs owe it personally, but if its over then the PCs can become filthy rich off of it.
- The PCs are however free to use their role as landlords in order to extract labor, favors, etc from their tenants on their behalf, though they cannot represent those things as being part of the king's tax. If it pisses people off to be charged extra, they take the bad PR for that, not the king. So the degree to which the PCs can get things out of this channel will depend on how good they are asking for things people have in excess already - discounts on work yes, 'gimme your money' probably not so good.
- There is a cap on how much extra material goods the PCs are permitted to directly extort from their tenants outside of taxes for their own personal gain, which is set at something like 5000gp per year. However, the PCs are encouraged to be creative with this - someone handing over a suit of full plate will count against this total, but someone forwarding a business opportunity to the PCs instead of someone else will not. Things like spellcasting services, foods that get consumed, hosting guests, performing military service, etc don't count against it. Basically again 'I want you to be using your resources, not cashing them out'. If the PCs raise in noble rank, that cap can also be increased.
- Likewise, there is a cap on the size of the standing army they are allowed to construct from their tenants, which is based on their noble rank. Essentially 'you can have troops, but you can't have enough troops to be a threat to the kingdom'. Nurturing a local adventurers' guild or playing host to a bunch of mercenaries however doesn't count towards this cap.

This is gold.
I should have come with something like this (I didn't...)
There is a lot to add (for my convenience) but it's such a solid base !

The cap of 5.000g for extortion, it is a real law or just something added to minimize potential abuses ?

All in all, I guess that I just need to think less and enjoy more.

For the rules, I'll need more time once again. But thanks a lot for the links !

NichG

2022-08-23, 07:41 PM

This is gold.
I should have come with something like this (I didn't...)
There is a lot to add (for my convenience) but it's such a solid base !

The cap of 5.000g for extortion, it is a real law or just something added to minimize potential abuses ?

All in all, I guess that I just need to think less and enjoy more.

For the rules, I'll need more time once again. But thanks a lot for the links !

It's not based on any particular real law, but it seemed to me the kind of thing that a king might do when there's some question as to the attitudes of a new noble line. For old lines, there will be existing feudal contracts the king can't really mess with too much, but for a new line they could put in clauses which later can be removed in exchange for favors to the crown, or if the new nobles don't play the game correctly its an excuse to step in without seeming like a tyrant.

In terms of more realistic feudalism, there would be a question of the original ownership of the title to that land before brigands took it over, and that could lead to messy claims and old contracts applying and stuff like that. So its not like this is an ironclad thing. But given that pushing any kind of ancestral contract would also probably be an argument that the PCs can't actually be the ones holding that title in the first place, it seems like a safe move.

False God

2022-08-23, 07:57 PM

This generally calls for a change in the entire approach to the game, or the understanding that this will be run with simple rolls on the side.

Unless the party is down for this kind of thing, I generally discourage it. The player can retire their character to run a shop, run a town, rule a city, whatever. We might encounter them later at which point the player can play that character as an NPC who has become part of the game.

If the party is up for it, then great! The focus of the game shifts from going out and wandering around in the woods all day to more intermittent campaigns and adventures. Downtime and downtime activates become a larger portion of the game and it takes on a more social and role-play, rather than combat-heavy experience. PCs buy homes, invest in the town/shop, settle down, raise families, build kingdoms and empires, seek out ways to prolong their lives or peacefully pass on.

But it's NOT something you can have both ways. You cannot have half the party wanting to dungeon crawl while the other half wants to run a store. And as DM, it's your job to get players to understand that 1: it just doesn't work, and B: you're not gonna do it, so they need to make the collective group decision on how they want the game to go.

Vodahim

2022-08-23, 08:03 PM

In terms of more realistic feudalism, there would be a question of the original ownership of the title to that land before brigands took it over, and that could lead to messy claims and old contracts applying and stuff like that. So its not like this is an ironclad thing. But given that pushing any kind of ancestral contract would also probably be an argument that the PCs can't actually be the ones holding that title in the first place, it seems like a safe move.

Well, if the original ownership didn't take any actions against the brigands, my king would rules that he lose the right to claim it as his own.

Worst case scenario : nothing more happen.
Best case scenario : the guy had an agreement with the brigands and now he is in big troubles since the mastermind behind it needed the place in his plan to overthrow the king. Now the PCs have a new ennemy !

False God - Good point.
I definitively should do that.

NichG

2022-08-23, 08:57 PM

Well, if the original ownership didn't take any actions against the brigands, my king would rules that he lose the right to claim it as his own.

Worst case scenario : nothing more happen.
Best case scenario : the guy had an agreement with the brigands and now he is in big troubles since the mastermind behind it needed the place in his plan to overthrow the king. Now the PCs have a new ennemy !

False God - Good point.
I definitively should do that.

I mean, if you want to go all Crusader Kings on the thing, it could be as complicated as:

The particular bit of land corresponds to a city holding under the family of a particular count, who is under a duke, who is under the king. The brigands killed the mayor and the count, and technically the person who stands to inherit the county title is over running a different barony on the other side of the kingdom. So the king appoints the PC the new mayor, but technically the PC is a vassal of that count. While that count title should lie within the duke's fiefdom, because of the inheritance the count is actually the vassal of a different duke under the king. So now the PC is a mayor answering to one boss who has never lived there and just inherited that title of boss by chance, and also has another guy breathing down their neck saying 'you should be my vassal, not his', while meanwhile the king is relying on the PCs to be a poison pill to keep that duke in line and...

Anyhow, it can get complex without any overt malfeasance, but only go there if that's the kind of thing you want to be spending uptime on :)

Pauly

2022-08-23, 11:08 PM

I havenÂ’t done it in a D&D type setting, except the Rat on a Stick module from Tunnels and Trolls many years ago. RoaS is very much a comedy vehicle, not a serious business model.

I have run a cyberpunk bounty hunting campaign based on a Cowboy Bebop ethos, where the cost of upkeep, maintenance, repair, and paying for things they broke was more or less break even with the rewards they got from bounty hunting.

Based on those experiences:
1) Risk -v- reward is a big part of the decision making.
2) DonÂ’t feel afraid about stiffing the players if they make too much money. Part of the enjoyment is overcoming the obstacles, not accumulating GPs marked on a piece of paper. Cowboy Bebop had situations where payers welched on payments, the cost of breakages ruined the profit margin, situations where they preferred to set the bounty feee rather than collect on the coin.
3) Make routine tasks automatic. Make them deal with the exciting parts of the job and automate the boring stuff.
4) Dealing with government red tape and catch 22s can be fun if you manage it correctly. It provided a major challenge in the first Ghostbusters movie.
5) DonÂ’t make them deal with the same challenges over and over. If theyÂ’re running a ship, they can deal with pirates on one voyage, a storm on the next, dangerous cargo after that and so on.
6) Unlike the Bebop crew, they do need a few big wins every now and then.

Edit to add: I would only run a business theme where it is the main focus of the campaign and all players are invested in it.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-24, 06:54 AM

@Quertus: I see what you're doing with the math now. Changing the example scenario, indeed, even the initial example scenario are superfluous for the calculation you're making. The mean growth rate for unaccounted safe investments is -0.505%; the median, however, is 0, with 74.25% chance the investment will retain or grow its value. Add an accountant (+d10 instead of +d6, I misremembered) and the mean growth rate becomes 0.7%, with median being 5.5%.

For standard investments with an accountant, the mean is 0.038%, with median being also 5.5%.

I also forgot investment dice can explode in a positive direction, but that's too much of a headache to calculate. In any case, those pull both the mean and the median up some. A nominally growing investment can still end up losing money due to costs of running business (including paying the accountant), but that's another thing. The real point here is that you didn't establish running a business is a fool's errand, because even by simple standards of LotFP, you aren't describing a fully fleshed put business seriously trying to make money (due to lacking an accountant, etc.), just lots of money thrown at a slew of trifle endeavors (left in care of a non-professional, ie. your idiot cousin). I reiterate, the investment rules are for things the player characters aren't personally taking care of - business they might own, but do not really run. The player characters presumably continue to pursue other efforts, which can cover for costs of running the investment staff or bring more money to it even when it's not growing. On the flipside, non-player characters who are involved in a business full time should not be presumed to use the same rules. That's why I included additional rules suggestions for if the players want to actually work for money.

An unaccounted safe investment isn't a get rich quick scheme, nor is it meant to be. Rather, it's a way to put your excess money somewhere when you're going away for a year and want most of it to still be there when you get back. (There are alternatives, such as buying land or other property, but then we'll have to talk about taxes and other charming things. )

Satinavian

2022-08-24, 07:25 AM

An unaccounted safe investment isn't a get rich quick scheme, nor is it meant to be. Rather, it's a way to put your excess money somewhere when you're going away for a year and want most of it to still be there when you get back. (There are alternatives, such as buying land or other property, but then we'll have to talk about taxes and other charming things. )
Honestly, investment rules where "investing your money" is a generally bad move compared to burying it somewhere are bad rules.

I get that many authors don't want PCs to earn money except through adventuring and whatever else the system is about. But that is not a reason to publish such rules.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-24, 07:34 AM

You think your money will be safer buried somewhere? :smallamused:

Satinavian

2022-08-24, 08:00 AM

Generally yes.

Of course a Gm could always decide that someone stumbles over it anyway and takes it, but at that point it starts to become pretty much impossible to actually keep your money which will pretty soon lead to disinterest in getting money in the first place.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-24, 01:46 PM

Getting players disinterested in money (and especially hoarding money) is what a lot of game masters dream of doing. :smalltongue:

More seriously: a buried treasure can be found, by accident or on purpose. A natural disaster can ruin the cache or render it inaccessible. A human might build a house on it or an animal could make a nest on it. It might lose value due to inflation or other economic events. It might also gain value for such reason. On an abstract mathematical level, this would be modeled by giving some % chance the treasure will be lost in some period or time, or fluctuate in value by some %. You know, the exact same kind of rules I'm pitching for investments. Arguably buried treasure or placing valuables in a bank's safebox is exactly what a "safe investment" is.

Furthermore, giving absolute safety in perpetuity to unused wealth is completely pointless if characters themselves are perishable. You know what's being bad at math? Worrying about 1% chance of losing your money in a year while going into lethal combat where you have at least 1% chance to die in the next five minutes.

Quertus

2022-08-25, 11:17 AM

For standard investments with an accountant, the mean is 0.038%,

So, so long as you are paying your accountants less than 0.038% of your initial investment per year, businesses with accountants might actually, on average, turn a profit?

My base point was, “don’t make rules that amount to ‘businesses lose money’, as the portion of the LotFP rules I specifically quoted amounted to”.

And 0.038% annual expected RoI (38¢ per $1,000 invested) (minus accountants fees, which may be greater than that) isn’t terribly encouraging, either, IMO.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-25, 11:51 AM

And your base point didn't even quote all the rules I quoted, so it failed, and continues to fail. The mean is neither the median nor the mode - in actual play, with small number of investments, safe and standard investments are more likely to retain or grow in value than to lose it. You have to own a truly astounding amount of investments to experience the mean. Riskier investments, meanwhile, are explicitly gambling with your money. All this happens in a wider context, as already discussed in posts above. Why are you crying over not winning big in a year when there's a significant chance you will lose your life in your other exploits? :smalltongue:

NichG

2022-08-25, 12:05 PM

The mean establishes things about the setting, and those things basically paint a picture of a world in which civilization as an organizing principle essentially wouldn't work. That conclusion isn't going to be desirable for many if not most campaigns.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-25, 12:22 PM

LibraryOgre

2022-08-25, 12:26 PM

In working up Hacktrade (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2018/03/hacktrade.html), I went with investments defaulting to about a 90% return... invest 100 gold, get back 90 gold... but this assumes more or less investing blindly. If you do the work and make good investments, you do a lot better.

NichG

2022-08-25, 12:40 PM

I already covered that. Drawing such world-building conclusions was hasty and remains so because it's reliant on false generalization. The world at large doesn't consists solely of rich vagrants who dump their money in hands of others while they themselves go off to do something else, their local conditions aren't a model for global conditions.

If blind investment doesn't average a significant profit, then that basically means that on average human collective activity is less productive (especially counting opportunity costs) than individual activity. In the real world, its actually very hard to consistently beat 'just invest blindly in an average over the entire market' for periods longer than 5 years or so. Essentially what you're 'gambling' on is that people collectively utilizing resources where they're most needed will have some margin over each person only doing what they can do with the resources they have at hand. So if the average behavior of the market tends downwards, it basically says that organizing as a civilization is less efficient than everyone just independently doing their own thing.

McGarnagle

2022-08-26, 02:16 AM

Expanding on the excellent royal patronage suggestion, once the loan has been made, and the character's are in the king's service, this is a great opportunity to inject some courtly intrigue in the campaign, if you and your players are willing. For example, the king may convene a month-long Winter Court that culminates in the Great Yuletide Feast, and all the nobles in the land are required to attend. If this is when the king raises knights, that would give the PCs extra incentive to attend, if they were to be knighted. The more established members of the court will no doubt take this time to size up the newcomers, and there would be a lot of chances to develop allies, rivals, and enemies (or frenemies) at court. NPCs favorably disposed towards the PCs might give a few pointers to give them a better chance at having their first Winter Court be a success, rivals and enemies will want the PCs to fall on their faces. One key encounter per in-game week would give you the chance to introduce a few important NPCs and certain key members of their retinues and see where the chips land.

For spring and summer, being in the king's service might mean being called into the field for military campaigns. If you have a necromancer you want to introduce, an invasion of an undead horde that requires all the king's nobles to band together in order to repel them would be one way to get that rolling. The necromancer could target the PCs directly (we'll strike them where they're weakest) or they may keep their heads when others balk at the sight of having their fallen comrades be raised to fight against them. There may be a subset of nobles including the PCs that keep their cool in the battle, and this is another way to establish allies and rivals, as those who kept their heads rise in the king's esteem while those who didn't fall out of favor for a time.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-26, 04:10 AM

Misereor

2022-08-26, 05:50 AM

1. You have any guideline to avoid a situation where this kind of things becomes game breaking ? (aka they suddenly have a little army or henchmen that can go dungeonning in their place and/or they make too much money).

As a GM you can either prepare adventures or a grand strategy game, but most likely you won't have time for both, so you may have to change the pacing

Luckily, running a significant business or a fief is a full time job, and often more than that.
Let them feel the consequences of abandoning their responsibilities for long stretches of time.

Possible scenarios:

The church of X doesn't like the way the players are doing things.
Neglecting festivals. Rendering too few tithes. Not persecuting evildoers enough. Being too nice to the rival church.
Potted plants have been disappearing. Obviously someone is planning to summon a greater demon. Why haven't you done anything?

Competing fiefs/businesses don't like the player's plans to gain at their expense.
Creating new trade opportunities. Rerouting a river. Exterminating the orc tribe that is containing the Owl Bears. Killing the sacred Owl Bears for their pelts.

Civil strife.
The original population doesn't like immigrants from X, as there is a long history of wars and feuding between them.
Kids from neighbourhood A have been harassing people from neighbourhood B. Those who should have stopped it didn't, and then someone fell off a roof and died.
If the PC's are very powerful, people working for the players may have been taking advantage. Noone has dared protest, since they believed it was with the players' blessing.

Absent players are tempting to thieves.
Someone is cutting down their forests to harvest the lumber. Stealing the inventory of their business. Extorting their subjects/customers.
That someone may well be the very individuals they hired to run things for them while they are gone.

Little things that can easily be dealth with if action is taken immediately.
The players will have to find some way of handling their various responsibilities or watch it all go to hell.
Maybe they will love it and you can change the focus of the campaign and still have the occasional adventuring romp, or maybe they will get tired of it and focus on adventuring and forget their plans of empire. Using this method, you can easily move in either direction.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-26, 11:03 AM

Just make running a business realistic, and they will not want to do it.
As a small-business owner myself, if you made it real enough; no one would want to RP it.
:) This. + many.

A group of four wants to buy a ship to get from place to place and also to earn some money on the side. First, commandeer a ship whilst adventuring. (A good example is the Sea Ghost in the Saltmarsh adventure). There is ample historical precedent from the age of sail: I have this ship because I won it in battle. :smallbiggrin:
File off the serial numbers, purchase a new figurehead, etc.
Second, your most excellent post about crew, food, etc follows from there.
Third: either monthly or quarterly, there's a roll with 2d6: how is business going provided that you feed the crew and pay their wages?
If result is 6-8, break even. (you make what it takes to buy and sell stuff, and fund the crew as above).
If the result is 3-5 lost 10% (basically, the cost is the already calculated monthly cost times 1.1) how do you cover that loss? RP opportunity!
If the result is 2, lose 20%.
If result is 9-11, earn 10% profit, if the result is 12, earn 20% profit.
Optionally: to make it a bit more risky / uncertain, there is "add or subtract a modifier of 1" based on whichever variable comes up from time to time:
- Weather (a 2d6 roll, high good low bad, 6-8 no change)
- Making or losing new contacts ((a 2d6 roll, high good low bad, 6-8 no change) )
- Finding or losing markets (a 2d6 roll, high good low bad, 6-8 no change)
- Shrinkage or Business Boom: ((a 2d6 roll, high good low bad, 6-8 no change) )
{this is either "the Captain + Crew Steals from you" or "the Captain + Crew makes a fantastic deal"}

And the adventurers can keep on adventuring. Check in with captain periodically.
If they are losing their shirts, sell the ship and press on.

We did something quite similar to this when I was GM for an Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, but I used d100s instead of 2d6.
The party was doing well until there was a random encounter at sea that resulted in their ship sinking during battle, so they were out of business and had to find other ways to make money.

NichG

2022-08-26, 11:22 AM

@NichG: And that would be a fine conclusion to make, if the rules I pitched were a full summation of global collective efforts, but they aren't. If I'm running LotFP and want to know the status of global setting economy, I can, say, just open a history book and look how well they were doing in Germany during the 30 Years' War (etc.). Any disperancy between that and the game rules can be considered a result of the particular local situation of the player characters.

But, to move the discussion along, I'll entertain the conclusion anyway. Historically, I'm fairly sure you can find eras when the economy was close to zero-sum or shrinking - eras when civilization, in fact, wasn't worth it, with kingdoms falling and people going off their own way. This leads to a follow-up question: what would be a proper mean of growth for things like:

1) war-torn early modern Europe?
2) a fantasy setting caught in millenium-long faux-medieval or faux-renessaince stasis?
3) an elven kingdom where the ageless population is in slow decline due to below-replacement population growth?
4) Hyperborean sword and sorcery setting where civilization is weak and unmanly, all states are doomed to fall and the true vital condition of humanity is barbarianism?
5) last alliance of free people of the West preparing a desperate war effort against the orc-hordes of an evil Necromancer?
6) a fresh colonization effort on a recently-found continent a la Europeans coming to Americas?
7) period of active expansion under a premodern empire (Rome, China, Mongolia, Mali, pick your poison)?
8) peacetime (?) under such empire close to its apex, before decline?
9) period of decline or falling apart of such an empire?
10) Emperor Tippy-style highly concentrated magic merchant empire / other Utopian magitech city-state?

Adjusting the formula to get whatever mean is trivial , so what means do you think would fit?

Well sure, recessions do exist. But they have setting consequences which may be undesirable, and if you don't actually represent those setting consequences consistently but just want to discourage the PCs from being involved in business then you're going to get into a game of whack-a-mole where they will just find a non-rules-based way to 'invest' to avoid the obvious disadvantageous mechanic. So this idea that 'investment should be a bad idea (but only if you have the label PC, and somehow the rest of the economy gets along fine)' is what makes those rules a bad suggestion. To put it another way, adventuring is investment - you're buying magical weapons and armor and travel supplies and what-not that a normal person wouldn't need, because of the expectation that you can use them to extract more wealth and power than it cost you to acquire them in the first place. So if you fundamentally undermine the idea that investing anything is worthwhile, you also kill the motivation for (voluntary) adventuring.

Anyhow, my rough model for economics is something like: as long as something needs to be built, rebuilt, or shifted from one area to another, there should be the potential for sustained growth of investments on average. Losses come from shocks, surprises, consequences of forced-growth strategies, etc - basically, much more often from the market being pushed out of equilibrium than because a state of loss is the equilibrium. Sustained and consistent losses for long enough periods such that they represent the equilibrium market behavior would basically imply to me that the particular country or empire is in a process of collapse or dissolution. If there's no value to be had in anyone else sweeping in and claiming that void we're looking at post-apocalyptic economics.

1) Businesses centered around resource extraction, construction, military engineering, mercenary work, etc should grow in this environment. Local businesses should shrink, but then would need to be rebuilt after war passes from the area. If someone invested in, say, a mercenary company in this era I'd guess something like a 30% return over 3 years with a 10% chance of total loss of investment, which comes to around 5.7% per year (non-compounding). Loaning wealth to a country fighting a difficult war would be the sort of investment where the risk would depend on how much leverage you have to force them to prioritize paying you over the other stuff that's going on, so that's hard to turn into an 'average'. But that could be pretty lucrative if you do it through the head of a religion who can levy threats like excommunication or granting war claims.

2) There should be constant and fairly stable low-grade opportunity here as some things crumble and other things have to be expanded to replace them, even if the society as a whole doesn't advance. A few percent at most maybe, but very low variance. You're basically paying to empower things to take over and refurbish other parts of the existing economic infrastructure that are in a state of decay - invest in a town to replace the mill they just lost in a recent fire, and in return get a bit of the town's excess economic production for the next ten years. Sure someone else may have had that deal with them in the past, but old deals expire creating room for new ones.

3) Bringing in immortals does complicate things, since its less likely for there to be the churn of 'so and so who did this died, so now there's an opportunity to build the thing that will replace them'. This could be negative growth or just a fraction of a percentage positive growth if the elven economy is entirely insular. If the elves trade with the outside world though, you could easily have positive growth of investments both through the fact that those relationships can grow and change, but also because if there are any sorts of goods that require elven-only techniques to make, there's a natural increasing scarcity of those goods meaning that they may well appreciate in value at least up to a point. The thing to watch out for there is if the goods aren't Giffen goods (whose demand increases with price), you could hit thresholds where elven crafts become too expensive for the value they provide people and demand collapses.

4) Massive growth potential here actually, but probably 'investment' isn't really a thing that is accessible as just something you can do. But someone who 'invests' in forming a band of raiders, cult, tribe, etc will probably see 1000% per year or better returns so long as they avoid getting wiped out. But since 'avoiding getting wiped out' is not really something you can escape as an individual need either... So massive average growth rate if you 'invest', but a 6% chance each year you just get killed; or, if you don't invest, you lose all your material goods and are forced to relocate on a yearly basis anyhow (if you aren't enslaved or otherwise 'invested' by force into someone else's venture), but only have a 4% chance each year that you just get killed.

5) Sounds like lots of economic activity! ~5-10% per year stable growth for the time being. The, uh, 'market' might crash in a year, but if it does you have other problems.

6) Maybe ~5-15% per year average growth, high variance. Strong disequilibrium, so there may be much higher payouts if you're willing to take returns in a form other than cash. For example, in some cases this sort of effort was stimulated by land grants, so if you invest the cost of moving your household, you get free land as a guaranteed initial return. That land might stay cheap for a full generation, but ultimately getting in on the ground floor of that has a pretty high return once civilization in the new place starts to become dense. You'd be pretty locked in though...

7) Maybe ~5-15% per year average growth, medium variance, but might be restricted or tiered by social rank whether you actually would have the right to get in on this growth. Probably could still make 5% through camp follower like ventures.

8) Maybe 3-6% per year.

9) This would be sustained negative, maybe a few percent per year.

10) 'What even is money?'.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-26, 03:48 PM

Well sure, recessions do exist. But they have setting consequences which may be undesirable, and if you don't actually represent those setting consequences consistently but just want to discourage the PCs from being involved in business then you're going to get into a game of whack-a-mole where they will just find a non-rules-based way to 'invest' to avoid the obvious disadvantageous mechanic. So this idea that 'investment should be a bad idea (but only if you have the label PC, and somehow the rest of the economy gets along fine)' is what makes those rules a bad suggestion. To put it another way, adventuring is investment - you're buying magical weapons and armor and travel supplies and what-not that a normal person wouldn't need, because of the expectation that you can use them to extract more wealth and power than it cost you to acquire them in the first place. So if you fundamentally undermine the idea that investing anything is worthwhile, you also kill the motivation for (voluntary) adventuring.

You seem to have missed the obvious what you yourself wrote. Players trying to find ways to gain money via means that don't use the investment rules is fine, it is literally what the entire rest of the game is about. If giving your money to bunch of NPCs and living off the interest not working in your favor motivates you to do the other stuff, that's mission accomplished from game design perspective.

This said, there's a few assumptions you're making that I've observed to not really hold for games for which I've used these kinds of rules for. The first is that the investment rules work particularly badly for the player characters - that's a comparative statement and whether it's true depends on state of the rest of the economy which, again, you're not supposed to derive from the same rules. Treating player characters as special is, heh, nothing special, even in LotFP they are explicitly a cut above. Indeed, if the previous paragraph holds true and investments working badly motivates players to do the other stuff, that's a functional explanation for why these characters are doing the exceptional nonsense (rather than someone else).

Lastly, more particular to LotFP than the rest: that expectation of fortune and glory? It's not based on anything rational, because typical players in a LotFP game just don't know how likely they are to actually beat the odds and win. Indeed, even as the game master, crunching the numbers of the entire rest of the ruleset plus scenario materials to derive the mean growth for player character wealth, as we just did for the abstract investment rules, is de facto impossible.

New players who don't know (or don't understand) this take the promise of fortune and glory on good faith and sometimes, succeed because of that, pushing through failure due to their belief that eventually, victory will be theirs (the poor fools).

Old players who do know and understand this willingly gamble lives of their characters, because an interesting death is better than a boring one - because it is that death awaits them whatever they do. These players will put all their money in the risky investments for the laughs, before hanging their accountant from a lamp post and setting their corpse on fire. They are thrill seekers acting on impulse - the kind of person the word "adventurer" is actually used for in real life. :smallamused:

Anyways, sorry for the digression. Your opinions on the economics of various sample settings are well-appreciated, I hope they find use in games of those reading this thread.

NichG

2022-08-26, 05:52 PM

You seem to have missed the obvious what you yourself wrote. Players trying to find ways to gain money via means that don't use the investment rules is fine, it is literally what the entire rest of the game is about. If giving your money to bunch of NPCs and living off the interest not working in your favor motivates you to do the other stuff, that's mission accomplished from game design perspective.

I meant more like 'investment without using the investment rules'. Like 'That herb store that we use for our alchemy stuff, I'm going to talk to the proprietor and see if a bit of financial support would help them expand, but I'll do it as a loan with collateral'. Basically IME the thing that happens when you have a player who is interested in something and a rule which primarily exists to make that thing undesirable (rather than a rule which exists to positively incentivize something else more, or a rule which exists to represent something) is to basically try to do exactly the same thing but in a way that doesn't 'trigger' using that particular bit of rules-text to evaluate what happens. That's the 'whack-a-mole' issue I mentioned. "I'm not investing in a business, I'm buying gear for a fellow adventuring group in exchange for a loot share, and just going along with them as an observer to make sure they don't short change me on the loot." or "Oh, the rules say I can only sell my discoveries for 50% of market value at shops? That must mean that there are people who would be very happy to get 75% of market value for their stuff, so if I can't sell, I'm definitely going to exploit this to see what I can buy at 25% off" and so on...

Thrawn4

2022-08-26, 07:50 PM

It's an excellent opportunity for role-playing!

I have handled this issue with a different approach:
It was a dwarf-campaign in a dwarfen city. Not a group of warrior/mage pro-adventurers, but regular people with a penchant for adventuring. Everybody had a proper job (hunter, mechanic, and some other craft... maybe a miner...). Of course they wanted to see how their business went, so I provided them with a short scene before each adventure.

Things like
- a rich customer wants a difficult task done on short notice (very high risk, medium reward)
- somebody new in the business asked for some tips (giving honest tips would increase the competition but also their reputation)
- a challenging task that required a personal touch (investigate preferences)
- a friends becomes sick/needs help (abandon store for a while to improve relationship?)
- lots of broken tools make the job harder (find out something is wrong: sabotage, a curse, poor quality)
- a rich customer asks for an almost impossible job (understand your limits)
- a snotty customer complains about everything (do you stay polite or is your pride more important?)
- an inexperienced customer doesn't know how value the item is they want to sell to you (do you take advantage?)

The thing is, you can just re-skin these challenges according to the PC's job. Doesn't really matter if your customer is a rich noblewoman or a weird mage. If you mix it up and give them different challenges at the same time, they might not even find out that you start to recycle after a while. Each succesful challenge provides you with a guideline of how succesful their business is and whether other things are more important to them.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-27, 03:17 AM

@NichG: I get what you mean but your specific examples are still just playing rest of the game. Even in LotFP's relatively simple framework, there genuinely are other, less abstract game rules for doing things like outfitting a party of retainers to do your dirty work or buying stuff cheaply from the countryside to sell it in the city for profit.

If one simple, abstract rule not working in a player's favor motivates them to spend more time and effort to detail their approach using more complex, detailed rules, that's not a flaw. It's mission accomplished.

Kol Korran

2022-08-27, 04:49 AM

I know for a fact that at least one of my player will want to start is own business, or rule is own domain.
And the others will probably love the idea and want to follow.

I would be glad to know if :

1. You have any guideline to avoid a situation where this kind of things becomes game breaking ? (aka they suddenly have a little army or henchmen that can go dungeonning in their place and/or they make too much money).

2. You can share any rules/systems/homebrew/experiences that can make my life easier to handle this sort of things.

I'm not planning to let this be the center of the campaign. But what if they really like it and genuinely wants to continu improving it ?
IMO it would be dumb as a DM to "crush" them by making their business just "POOF" into bankruptcy or their village undergo raids after raids after raids.
But then, how to combine their pursuit of the evil Necromancer and their passion for capitalism ?
(Of course the Necromancer, if left unchecked, would cause problems for them =p)

Once, a long time ago, I tried finding a ruling/ inventing rules/ asking a lot of questions on forums/ going way overboard trying to accomodate to such sudden changes, which are not supported by the rules or system.

Today? Frankly?
I tell them something on the following lines: "This systme is about heroic fantasy/ space scum and villainy/ other such and such" (whatever the system is about) "It is NOT intended to run a business/ become rulers. This was apparent by the system, and session 0." (i hope you did run a session 0. Adjusting and confirming expectations is crucial). I am NOT going to invest time in this, unless it is something very much in the background, and mostly narrative details. If this is REALLY important to you, then I guess either you, or we as a group, need to play a different game."

The player knew the game he was getting into, right? What the game is about? And what it is not about? Play the game you set to play, and that the system supports. Don't spend too much precious energy on something as distruptive as this.

Vodahim

2022-08-28, 10:07 PM

Thrawn4, McGarnagle, Misereor - thanks a lot for those excellent pieces of advice !

Kol Korran - I had this problem the first time that I DMed.
After some research, it was the general advice for many situations. I still want to give this a try if it comes to it, but I'll be clear with them that it could just not work.
(We didn't start so we didn't had a session 0 yet. But we'll do one).

Beleriphon

2022-08-31, 04:21 PM

I'm a bit late to the party. But Acquisitions Incorporated has pretty decent rules for business. Yes, the whole thing is structured as though the business is actually Dunder-Mifflin, but the rules do work even if you aren't going for D&D: The Office.

gbaji

2022-08-31, 08:48 PM

I usually just hand wave businesses, wealth, costs, etc that occur outside of actual gameplay. There's an assumption that between adventures, player characters are gainfully employed in some fashion relative to their various skills, and such employment is sufficient to allow them to live well enough, but not fabulously (again dependent on how powerful/skilled they are). If they want to take their wealth earned via adventuring and sink it into an investment, business, or whatever, they can, and I'll just kinda estimate based on what they invested that they'll earn a return that gives them some relative standard of living in return (you can afford to live in a nice apartment, or a house, or a manor, different levels of luxury, whatever).

What I don't do or allow is players using investments as a money pump to generate funds to make their own characters more powerful in some way (other than perhaps socially since they're now pillars of community, part of the local economy, moving in higher circles, etc, which itself can be used as future plot hooks). We're playing an adventure based game. You get more powerful, skilled, etc, by... wait for it... adventuring. It helps that my group plays in a game system (somewhat heavily modified RuneQuest3 rules) that doesn't really allow for much in the way of wealth being used to go down to the local magic shop and buy anything likely to be more powerful than what you probably already have (less so typically) if you are already even a semi-successful adventurer. If you're wealthy enough to start a business or significantly invest, you probably already have far nicer magic items and whatnot then are available to be purchased anywhere.

So such investments are really just about a character choosing to use that last big score to settle down doing something that can reasonably ensure a relatively comfortable retirement or something. Maybe in 20 years of game time, come to me and ask if your character's children can start with maybe a few additional items that are useful (and reasonably obtainable via money) for a starting character, and I'll allow it. Of course, you could also hand them the handful of much more powerful and useful items you already own too, right? I have no issue with that. Again, the game system I play in regularly is primarily skills and magic advancement based, so items, while nice and certainly a bonus, in no way automatically make you much more powerful.

Obviously, if you play in a game system (or campaign even) where converting money into magic items, spells, training, whatever is a more powerful route to improving character, this can be more problematic. Honestly though, in most game systems I've played, it's generally far faster to gain character power via the risk of putting your life on the line going out on an adventure than putting some cash into an investment. And more fun for the whole table to play out too. My recommendation would be to clamp that down as much as the game system allows, and really encourage players to have their characters do whatever form of adventuring that the game is focused on (and presumably why you're playing anyway), and leave the economics stuff in the background.

I already live in a world where I have to figure out how much money I earn, how much I have to pay for bills, how much I pay in taxes, what my mortgage looks like, my 401k, investment portfolio, 529 accounts for the kiddies college, etc. I really don't want to spend my play time doing any of that. I want my players spending their time figuring out how they're going to get around/through the bbeg's guards to get to his power circle to complete the ritual of power circle breakage, so they can use the magic weapon of bbeg killing that they previously obtained by passing the trials of difficult-trial-passing so they can destroy him once and for all, save the world, rescue the princess, save the whales, or whatever, rather than what the fiduciary benefits of investing in pork bellies this season are.

But that's just me.

Satinavian

2022-09-01, 12:46 AM

Old players who do know and understand this willingly gamble lives of their characters, because an interesting death is better than a boring one - because it is that death awaits them whatever they do. These players will put all their money in the risky investments for the laughs, before hanging their accountant from a lamp post and setting their corpse on fire. They are thrill seekers acting on impulse - the kind of person the word "adventurer" is actually used for in real life. :smallamused:
As already said, not everyone is a gambler or interested in the thrill of risky investments.

What the investment rules really do is providing a casino : On average you lose but you could experience a win and you could always feel the thrill of risk. But are casinos even fun ? Only for some people, most are not interested at all.

Experience has little to do with this. Which is why most old players won't suddenly start to gamble for fun either.

Getting players disinterested in money (and especially hoarding money) is what a lot of game masters dream of doing. :smalltongue:

More seriously: a buried treasure can be found, by accident or on purpose. A natural disaster can ruin the cache or render it inaccessible. A human might build a house on it or an animal could make a nest on it. It might lose value due to inflation or other economic events. It might also gain value for such reason. On an abstract mathematical level, this would be modeled by giving some % chance the treasure will be lost in some period or time, or fluctuate in value by some %. You know, the exact same kind of rules I'm pitching for investments. Arguably buried treasure or placing valuables in a bank's safebox is exactly what a "safe investment" is.
If you can't invest money and can't safe money for later when you need it, that basically only leaves wasting it friviously and fast. If that is the case, why would you ever adventure for money ? Old treasures in ruins and stuff is basically useless in this configuration when you can neither keep it nor get anything with long term benefit/consequences.
Far better to settle down with a normal job that can support your life in the long term.

Vahnavoi

2022-09-01, 05:47 AM

As already said, not everyone is a gambler or interested in the thrill of risky investments.

What the investment rules really do is providing a casino : On average you lose but you could experience a win and you could always feel the thrill of risk. But are casinos even fun ? Only for some people, most are not interested at all.

This doesn't establish any particular need to change the investment rules because, as repeatedly pointed out, they are not the entire scope of the game. Cautious players do have other options - including working a mundane profession.

Also... Casinos are, to my understanding, a much bigger business than tabletop roleplaying games. Casual gambling, even more so - once we start talking about playing for toy money versus real money, gambling in form of games of chance is ubiquitous to the point majority of people have done it since childhood. Indeed, one of the better arguments for having gambling elements like dice and betting on die rolls as core roleplaying game mechanics, is the overall popularity and familiarity of such mechanics. I am perfectly willing to proclaim most people are in fact capable of having fun gambling with toy money, and the people who can't are killjoys who you wouldn't want in a game meant for fun anyway. :smalltongue:

Experience has little to do with this. Which is why most old players won't suddenly start to gamble for fun either.

I heavily disagree. Even doing the calculation we did to see what the mean of investment schemes is, requires specific knowledge and specific experience. Even majority of players with risk-averse temperament do not do the calculation, they do not draw any far-reaching conclusion about the mean, because the appeal of a safe scheme to them is that it's least likely to lose them money compared to other options available.

Furthermore, as I've repeatedly pointed out, the result of the calculation is weighed in context and contrast to the rest of the game. These are influenced by game rules and the prevailing metagame. People are not, however, rules automatons - most people don't adapt to rules by reading them thoroughly and doing mathematical analysis (and as noted earlier, doing such analysis can be impossible even for those inclined to do it), they adapt to them by experiencing them. The effect is strong enough that which rolls they get during a game will shape their expectations of how a mechanic works (in a way that makes sense in a quasi-Bayesian scheme and not at all in classical frequentist scheme)(this is also at the root for various biases and fallacies humans have about probability, such as Gambler's fallacy).

That's why I prefaced my comment about new and old players by saying it's more particular to LotFP than the rest. Suddenness is a red herring - I've seen the change happen in the middle of a session, but how fast or slow it happens for "most people" is besides the point. The actual point is the mindset is learned behaviour, adaptation to the rules and atmosphere of the game. The reverse is just as true - paranoid risk-averse players who show up at my tables also tend to have gained their mindset from some prior game, just not the one they came to play.

If you can't invest money and can't safe money for later when you need it, that basically only leaves wasting it friviously and fast. If that is the case, why would you ever adventure for money ? Old treasures in ruins and stuff is basically useless in this conficuration when you can neither keep it nor get anything with long term benefit/consequences.
Far better to settle down with a normal job that can support your life in the long term.

So?

The reason I dug into your "buried treasure" comment was that you were complaining about how bad the investment rules were in comparison, but nowhere did you establish a reason for burying treasure to be better. The other post of mine you quoted made the same point of adventuring, but it also did it of profit motivations in general. You say it's "far better" to settle down with a normal job after I already described a mindset where an interesting death is better than a boring one. You go back to harping on rational profit motives after I pointed out there's no need to assume one is in sight anywhere.

In real life, "adventurous" (read: impulsive risk-takers) people frequently act in ways that are a net negative to both themselves and their society. We glorify the few who win big due to survivor bias, but the idea that their actions would have a positive mean (average) effect on the world is not established anywhere. Ditto for burying treasure in the ground or hiding cash in a mattress, these are things economists routinely advice against. Various investment schemes and markets are pretty much pyramid hoaxes and only capable of giving returns due to massive exploitation of natural resources. Indeed, if you did average human economic growth with the total chance of everything going down the drain due to natural disaster or just inevitable march of entropy, it would not surprise me if the projected future mean for human growth is zero or negative. For purposes of a game, it would not be difficult or even exotic to go from there to the notion that all human endeavors have been a mistake, you would have been better off not even being born, and the only problem is that of suicide, as in, how to kill yourself in a way that flips off the unjust Heavens in the most extreme way possible. :smalltongue:

gbaji

2022-09-01, 03:57 PM

Imagine a gaming session where the players show up, characters ready to go, dice in hand. The GM tells them to role a single die. They do. He consults a table and tells them how well they did in his adventure, what the outcome was (rescued the hostages, slew the dragon, failed epically, whatever), then divvies out coin, items, and experience to the player characters and tells them "that was fun. See you all next week?"

How well would that session go? That's why most people play RPGs for reasons other then seeing what outcome they get just by rolling dice.

You can include gambling activities in an RPG, but IMO, they should not be a major focus of play. Same deal if investments and whatnot are treated just like a gambling game, complete with rolling dice. RPGs should mostly resolve outcomes based on decisions made by the players, with the dice modifying those outcomes somewhat (well, except for occasional exceptional situations). Treat investments and world building by players the same way. Arbitrate as a GM based on decisions made by the player, with dice rolling modifying those outcomes (but again, good/bad choices being the primary determinant). Yes, this means forcing players to think about things and make decisions. That's kinda the whole point.

Vahnavoi

2022-09-02, 03:47 AM

Satinavian

2022-09-02, 04:05 AM

This doesn't establish any particular need to change the investment rules because, as repeatedly pointed out, they are not the entire scope of the game. Cautious players do have other options - including working a mundane profession."It is not really what the game is about" is not an excuse to include bad rules. It would be an excuse to not include rules for this topic or to include ones far more abstract and light than the rest of the system.

I am perfectly willing to proclaim most people are in fact capable of having fun gambling with toy money, and the people who can't are killjoys who you wouldn't want in a game meant for fun anyway. :smalltongue:I would certainly argue against the most. Based on how trivially easy it is to gamble with toy money and how many poeple never do so. And calling people killjoys probably really helps.

I heavily disagree. Even doing the calculation we did to see what the mean of investment schemes is, requires specific knowledge and specific experience. Even majority of players with risk-averse temperament do not do the calculation, they do not draw any far-reaching conclusion about the mean, because the appeal of a safe scheme to them is that it's least likely to lose them money compared to other options available.What ? "Specific knowledge" ? That is utterly basic math everyone who finished school should be able to do in their sleep. I mean, we are not demanding people being able to correctly calculate and usefully apply the variance. That would be something people might forget in their later life if they don't need it. We are not doing conditional possibilities either which is something some people do have difficulties with. We are talking about something as trivial as a mean. I certainly have not played with anyone in the last 2 decades of whom i would think they could instantly do it.

In fact, looking back two and a half decades when i still was in school and our pretty inexperienced RPG grup stumbled about investment rules not much different from those, every single player instantly calculated the odds and the mean loss and profit and no one ever used them.

Vahnavoi

2022-09-02, 07:17 AM

"It is not really what the game is about" is not an excuse to include bad rules. It would be an excuse to not include rules for this topic or to include ones far more abstract and light than the rest of the system.

The investment rules pitched here are transparently in the category of lighter and more abstract rules than the rest of the system. That's why NichG's arguments about how they discourage investing in favor of doing something else couldn't convince me that they are bad rules. As far our discussion goes, near the very beginning I already pointed out that the psychological effect you claim these rules have on players is something a game master can desire to inflict on them. For that reason alone, your line of argument cannot simultaneously be correct and establish that this kind of rules should never be included.

I would certainly argue against the most. Based on how trivially easy it is to gamble with toy money and how many poeple never do so. And calling people killjoys probably really helps.

We're talking of a type of people who are either incapable or unwilling to deal with a casual game of Poker. If calling them what they are keeps them well away from LotFP, that does help preserve both their sanity and mine. :smalltongue:

What ? "Specific knowledge" ? That is utterly basic math everyone who finished school should be able to do in their sleep.

Sure, they taught probability, weighed averages and basics of statistics on 8th or 9th grade. "This topic is taught in schools" is not a great counter-argument to "this is a learned behaviour". I game often enough with players who would be too young to have even had those courses yet. And when talking about adults, adults often regress one or two age categories when doing something "for fun". Maybe they could do the math in their sleep if they were motivated to do so, but they aren't, because of the rest of the game. My argument isn't just about what it takes to calculate the mean. It's about the context the calculation is made in.

So maybe you and your friends reacted differently way back when to a similar abstract rule. This tells me next to nothing since I don't know anything else about what kind of a game you were playing, or under what kind of metagame. I don't have a good reason to think your group's behaviour generalises to my pool of players, or anyone else's.

Quertus

2022-09-02, 08:22 AM

adults often regress one or two age categories when doing something "for fun

So maybe you and your friends reacted differently way back when to a similar abstract rule. This tells me next to nothing since I don't know anything else about what kind of a game you were playing, or under what kind of metagame. I don't have a good reason to think your group's behaviour generalises to my pool of players, or anyone else's.

Sure. Thus my statement that these rules are only for those too dumb to understand the rules and the math (or who want to lose money, or to gamble… very… slowly). Whether you believe that adults will carefully analyze rules before using them, or will regress to childhood and blindly follow authority, or that they will actually engage their brains at the table, that statement still holds. Whether you believe that children are too dumb (ignorant) to know the requisite math (which is fair - very few who have not been taught such math yet are likely to calculate or Intuit the truth), that statement still holds.

Now, you can try to sell the idea that it’s good design to include trap options that reward those with system mastery sufficient to realize not to use them… but I doubt you’ll get much traction on doing so here in the Playground. You even lose my support in that regard if you don’t have good options to take instead (the “Druid” to this math’s “Monk”).

But my big question is, does the world building match the system math that “investment is a fool’s game”?

NichG

2022-09-02, 08:35 AM

The investment rules pitched here are transparently in the category of lighter and more abstract rules than the rest of the system. That's why NichG's arguments about how they discourage investing in favor of doing something else couldn't convince me that they are bad rules. As far our discussion goes, near the very beginning I already pointed out that the psychological effect you claim these rules have on players is something a game master can desire to inflict on them. For that reason alone, your line of argument cannot simultaneously be correct and establish that this kind of rules should never be included.

To be precise, my argument is that these rules would encourage players to still invest, but to do so in ways that would avoid the rules being invoked to resolve the outcome of the investment.

That is to say, they're rules that discourage themselves from being used by the table once their contents are publically made known.

I take the perspective that writing down a rule (versus just keeping a resolution framework in mind) is specifically something for the purpose of giving the ability to determine (either in a prediction sense or a decision sense) how a given situation will be resolved to the players. That is, a rule defines a known entry in a matrix of states versus actions one could take. If you create a trap option that is never used but it's also trivial to recognize that it's a trap and completely possible to just never invoke it then there's very little point to that rule.

Xuc Xac

2022-09-02, 11:07 PM

I know for a fact that at least one of my player will want to start is own business, or rule is own domain.
And the others will probably love the idea and want to follow.

I would be glad to know if :

1. You have any guideline to avoid a situation where this kind of things becomes game breaking ? (aka they suddenly have a little army or henchmen that can go dungeonning in their place and/or they make too much money).

As an old gamer, the idea that this would be game breaking is baffling to me. Every edition of D&D before 3rd assumed that you would build some sort of domain and raise an army by mid-levels. Fighters would build a castle, become a lord, and recruit an army. When bandits or monsters threaten their domain, they send a squad of knights to deal with it for them. They only go out adventuring on their own for particularly important or interesting quests. Clerics would build a new temple and attract pilgrims and acolytes. Wizards would set up a tower or laboratory of some kind and attract apprentices. Thieves could set up a thieves' guild and start their own mafia crime family. When your character level is in the double digits, you're expected to be doing politics and battlefield strategy for the wars your kingdom is involved in. Your minions are the ones that go out and do stuff like "kill the young dragon that keeps eating the villagers' cows" or "capture the pirates that have been hitting our merchant ships".

Having a small army was the default expectation. This is why fighters weren't so overshadowed by wizards in earlier editions. Sure the wizard can cast a fireball to do 10d6 damage a couple of times, but the fighter can say "Archers, ready! Loose!" and unleash dozens of arrows every round.

From a story perspective, having the PCs set up a business or castle or temple or whatever is a perfect antidote to murderhoboism. They have roots in the community and have to do business with the people. They can't just murder-loot their way through a town and move on. They have a vested interest in protecting their location from any threats. You don't need an NPC to bribe them or hire them to save the town from bandits. They'll be the community leaders who want to get rid of the bandits themselves. It's a built-in motivation to be a local hero.

GloatingSwine

2022-09-03, 06:04 AM

As an old gamer, the idea that this would be game breaking is baffling to me. Every edition of D&D before 3rd assumed that you would build some sort of domain and raise an army by mid-levels. Fighters would build a castle, become a lord, and recruit an army. When bandits or monsters threaten their domain, they send a squad of knights to deal with it for them. They only go out adventuring on their own for particularly important or interesting quests. Clerics would build a new temple and attract pilgrims and acolytes. Wizards would set up a tower or laboratory of some kind and attract apprentices. Thieves could set up a thieves' guild and start their own mafia crime family. When your character level is in the double digits, you're expected to be doing politics and battlefield strategy for the wars your kingdom is involved in. Your minions are the ones that go out and do stuff like "kill the young dragon that keeps eating the villagers' cows" or "capture the pirates that have been hitting our merchant ships".

In 2nd where that stuff was true when you became a 14th level Druid you were the boss of all of the druids in the world...

Vodahim

2022-09-03, 01:39 PM

As an old gamer, the idea that this would be game breaking is baffling to me.

It was my mistake, and it baffles me that I was so scared about it too.

I start TTRPG with WFRP 2e then DD3.5 and I never open a previous edition.
I always was a player (we had our forever DM) and we NEVER had a single business. Even when we were appointed as precepters for the prince, we embrace the adventuring life with all our might.
Retrieving artifacts, snatching McGuffin from the evil lord, putting an end on the orcisch invasion, stopping the resurection of ancient gods were full time jobs. And, I'll speak only for myself here, I never feel the need to have underlings or anyhting. I just enjoyed being in the open.

And I don't remember (it's funny since I don't remember much anyway) rules or book's advices that encourages PCs to have their own domain and/or underlings. Except for the "Leadership" feat, that I used only during side sessions since DM and I played a lot more than the rest of our group, and it was a pain for DM to balance encounters with it.

As a new DM, I gave my PCs a plot of land. And did so poorly with it that from lvl 5 they didn't feel the need to put a foot outside of their castle.

But after reading lot of threads on GitP, some privates conversations and looking at recommanded sites, I now feel totally able to face any situations who could happen at the table.
Even letting them feel the consequences of being murder hobos. But letting them be murder hobos anyway if they enjoy it.

My BBEG will still try to retrieve the soul of his wife (in possession of multiple powerful beings), still bumping into them at times, and the world will still face huge changes if she is resurrected. (She didn't appreciate being betrayed nor having her soul twisted for so many years).

Slipjig

2022-09-03, 07:59 PM

There's been a lot of really detailed systems suggested here, but I think the most important question you need to ask your player is, "What interests you about running a business/becoming a Lord?" Do they just want their character to be treated as a Big Deal in RP because of their holdings? Are they looking to be able to throw large amounts of lawyers, guns, and money at problems? Are they looking for a King's Landing-style intrigue campaign? Or are they actually looking to spend most of the sessions RPing running the business, debating business decisons and interacting with customers/petitioners?

Once you know what that player is looking for, the first thing to do is figure out whether you have any interest in DMing that game. If the answer to that is "yes", then ask the other players whether THEY are interested in playing that sort of game. If the answer to either of those questions is, "no", be up front about that. Maybe you can agree to have the business running in the background, and agree to dedicate the first five minutes of each session to a mechanics-lite decision about how to address a challenge facing the business/realm, which your steward will execute while you go do hero stuff. If you are looking to not have the PCs swimming in money, you can specify that the domain/business doesn't throw off a ton of free cash. If your tenants owe you 20% of their harvest then you'll be collecting a lot of bags of flour and chickens, but potentially not a lot of hard currency.

If your players want to make the business central to the campaign, the 40k Rogue Trader RPG had some good mechanics for running a business empire mostly in the abstract. The crew has a "profit factor", and any time they want to make enterprise-level purchases, they roll against it. Any time the party did something that either expanded their business or generated a large pile of money that they left in the business, it could potentially raise the permanent profit factor. If you players are interested in running a mercantile-focused campaign, you might want to find a copy of the core rulebook.

In order to maintain game balance, I would suggest that the business generally pays for itself while throwing off minimal free cash, but perhaps providing some side benefits. If you run a rare books shop or a smithy, maybe the PCs make purchases that match the shop type at a discount. If they own a ship, their purser purchases appropriate cargo for the destination, so they travel for free.

Quertus

2022-09-05, 11:53 AM

As an old gamer, the idea that this would be game breaking is baffling to me.

having the PCs set up a business or castle or temple or whatever is a perfect antidote to murderhoboism. They have roots in the community

But the game is about them being murderhobos - giving them roots in the community breaks the game!

Tiktakkat

2022-09-05, 04:42 PM

If players want to start a business, they can. It does not make a profit; it simply pays to maintain itself. The PCs can use it to justify access to a particular class of items, typically alchemical items, outside of any other considerations for the size of the settlement.

Similarly, buying a house justifies the PCs having a safe place to store equipment between and during adventures. Specific minor bonuses and effects, like a library for research or a training room to switch class abilities, can be added for a reasonable cost - usually a few thousand gp.

To build an entire city, or just a fortress or similar stronghold, involves more gp, most easily represented by an allowance by level as with the Landlord feat, but without any hard and fast design requirements. Again, such an establishment maintains itself, and can be used to justify minor campaign effects such as using a title and being able to hang out with the nobility and not be treated like disposable flunkies.

Homes, businesses, strongholds, cities, even kingdoms, are a background thing, not a hard rules element that provides awesome bonuses and excessive wealth by level.
If a player thinks it makes his character more interesting and it fits in with events that have happened during adventures, they can acquire property and even become rulers as part of their character background. They can even claim "extra" wealth to pay for it all that does not have to balanced against combat equipment restrictions. All they need to do is create a good story that works with the campaign.

Easy e

2022-09-06, 11:00 AM

The more "rules" you put around the business/fortress/hamlet the more you handcuff yourself as the DM and the players to do cool and interesting things with it.

gbaji

2022-09-06, 04:22 PM

The strawman example where everything is decided by a single roll misses the point by a mile: actual gambling is rarely that simple. if you instead posit a game where players are given a pool of game tokens to bet on die rolls and they get to keep rolling as long as they have tokens left, not only is this a popular paradigm in gaming in general, you can find an entire genre of nominal roleplaying games where this is the backbone of the entire game mechanism.

That was not intended as a strawman, but a "reductio ad absurdum" argument. Basically, if "everything" is resolved via merely rolling the dice, then it's not likely to be as fun for the players. Just taking one concept and examining it taken to the extreme to test it. It's a logical formulation. If just rolling the dice to determine outcomes is "fun", then it should be fun no matter how far we take it. Clearly, that's not the case, so clearly there are more elements involved than just dice and outcomes. Nothing more than that to my example.

Even if your example, the assumption is that there must be some difference between each round of die rolling to make the gambling interesting. If the entire game is merely "bet your tokens, roll the dice, collect winnings until you stop or are out of tokens", you have a problem. If the average odds per die roll is negative (meaning you'll lose more often than you win), then over time you will *always* lose, until you run out of tokens. If the average is positive, you will *always* win. Over time (short term outcomes can vary, of course). The fun can only be if there's some specific risk also added to each roll (outside of token winning), that tilts the odds from "average over time" to "do I get lucky this one time". So, yes, having said tokens associated with other outcomes and rolling means that you maybe won some things and lost other things, and we're just calculating which things you won or lost. But if the only measure of success is number of tokens, then the rules clearly state whether you will win or lose over time.

There has to be something else on the line other than just tokens (money?), or the game doesn't work. Or there has to be something other than just die rolling (games with "hidden knowledge" like a player with a starting hand in poker, for example). Or it has to be a short term thing (so a player is hoping to "beat the odds" and then drop out of the game). Continued long term playing of such games will always result in average results.

The problem was the example economic rules in LotFP (a game I've never played for the record). The odds are very strangely presented. Anyone who's played any RPGs for any length of time knows that the average result of a die is always (1+2+...N)/N (where N is the number of sides on the die), which can also be presented as (N/2)+.5. Always. Average on a d4=2.5. Average on a d6=3.5. Average on a d8=4.5. d10=5.5. d20=10.5. d100=50.5. Always.

Their math applies that average, and then subtracts (N/2) from it. So the equation is (N/2)+(.5)-(N/2). The first and last elements cancel each other out, so the result for all investments per year, regardless of risk is .5% gain. But then they have a 1% chance of a business going bankrupt each year (for low risk, it gets worse in each risk category above that). Um... So in our hypothetical examples of 100 identical businesses, even at low risk, we're going to lose .5% of our starting investment every single year, minimum. Yes, a lucky roll one year might change that, but over time average will win out. No amount of mixing high and low risk investments make any difference here (except to make things worse on average). Maybe on one year, or two, but over time (which is presumably why people make investments), you will lose money.

They then add in the concept of accountants to improve odds. Again though, it's a flat increate to the success (d6% IIRC) with no association with risk, which still leaves us with the risk having nothing at all to do with average increase per year, but massively affects average loss via bankruptcy. Accountants are also presented as a flat cost per year, not a percent of the business. Ok. But this now makes things very complex. How many accountants do you need? Is that number based on the risk of the investment, or the value of the investment? It just says it's dependent on the number of employees (again, from what I remember, my eyes honestly kinda glazed over at that point).

The irony here is that one can conclude that it's not risk that matters, but cost per unit that does. So if I have a widget factory, I can examine my average yearly return based on the base risk, and the number of accountants I need to manage my factory business. I'll get a fairly well calculated average return over time as a result. But the cost for accountants is a fixed cost. So if I instead make gold widgets, everything else is a relative value (cost to invest and return on investment), but the cost for the accountants is fixed and thus lower relative to the price of gold compared to the price of say iron (or whatever we would normally make widgets out of ). Assuming the accounting math is no more time consuming if I'm making gold widgets, right? I should thus always aim towards investments that are high in value, low in risk, and have the lowest overhead (number of accountants) possible.

That's not to say that this isn't a semi-valid simulation of running a real business, but it still puts basically everything in the hands of GM determination. You could literally just erase all the math and just tell the GM (I'm investing X money into Y), and the GM tells you what you get over time as a result. Most of the rules don't really matter. If the GM is playing attention and doing the math, he's going to scale things to make it a set relative average rate of return anyway. The player only basically "wins" if he manages to trick the GM (maybe he's looking at the math and the GM isn't?), into a maximized form of business (convinces the GM that his million gold coin investment is low risk and really should only require one accountant cause hey, I'm just making widgets, right?)

I guess that is also a form of gaming, but it basically pits the players against the GM in a game of "who can lawyer the rules better", which IME is not a great game to play.

I guess at the end of the day, I'm always left with the question: What are you trying to accomplish with this? What do the players actually get for the effort? And sure, if your players really love this stuff and get a lot of enjoyment out of it, then by all means come up with some decent rules for it. But don't be surprised if your players, having far more interest in this portion of the game, come back to you some time later asking to do X or Y or Z because "I have all this money from my investments that you already allowed and the rules say I can use it for this". And hey, if you're ok with that, then go forth and play. If the players are having fun, then that's that. Just make sure that all your players are actually having fun and you're golden.

I have just yet to play in any game at any table where players, when given an opportunity to gain wealth in some method outside of active table play, will not a) find a way to game it to their advantage if at all possible and b) use the wealth gained to obtain some additional advantage for the non-economic portions of the game. if everyone at your table is equally interested and active in this aspect of the game, it can still all balance out. But if some are and some aren't, you're going to have a power imbalance at your table. Whether that's a problem also largely depends on player personalities. Might be fine, or it might be a source of conflict. YMMV.

Satinavian

2022-09-07, 01:16 AM

Even if your example, the assumption is that there must be some difference between each round of die rolling to make the gambling interesting. If the entire game is merely "bet your tokens, roll the dice, collect winnings until you stop or are out of tokens", you have a problem. If the average odds per die roll is negative (meaning you'll lose more often than you win), then over time you will *always* lose, until you run out of tokens. If the average is positive, you will *always* win. Over time (short term outcomes can vary, of course). The fun can only be if there's some specific risk also added to each roll (outside of token winning), that tilts the odds from "average over time" to "do I get lucky this one time". So, yes, having said tokens associated with other outcomes and rolling means that you maybe won some things and lost other things, and we're just calculating which things you won or lost. But if the only measure of success is number of tokens, then the rules clearly state whether you will win or lose over time.
I know many people think of cards when talking about gambling. But those investment rules actually mirror roulette instead. In roulette the only important decision you make is between high and low risk and accompaning rewards by choosing sets of numbers. You are very well allowed to bet on anything from a single number to the majority of the numbers. But the odds are that in long term the house always wins. There is no strategy, no hidden knowledge, involved beyond that and the starting situation is always the same.
Now, some people do indeed find roulette exciting and fun, but others don't.

Now we don't have the information how many accountents are needed and what there wages are in relation to buissness (accountant per employee does not help us if we don't know how many employees we need), so can't calculate their effect. But it is likely that the accountant cost is linear to the investment cost so the size of the operation is irrelevant. But with accountants giving a constant bonus it is certain that safe investments benefit more from accountants than risky one, potentially pushing them in the profitable zone.

gbaji

2022-09-07, 05:29 PM

Yup. I was actually thinking of roulette as well. I think the issue is that players know that in the long run the house has the advantage. So it fits into "short term experience" gaming. You are hoping to get lucky and win, then get out with your winnings. The other aspect of this form of gambling is the social aspect. It can be a lot of fun standing around a gambling table, with lots of other people cheering, getting comped drinks, whatever. The losses to the house can simply be looked at as a cost for the enjoyable experience (and that's probably the most healthy way to look at it). Heck. I've been known to plop myself down at a casino bar, put some cash into a video blackjack machine, drop a nice tip into the bartender's jar to start the comped drinks flowing and just hang out for a couple hours drinking, chatting with friends, and people watching. Whether I'm up or down at the end of the day doesn't matter. It's about the experience (and I've yet to not come out ahead when the cost of the free drinks is calculated).

Those social aspects can (and often are) also present in a RPG. But again, only in "short term" gambling choices. You choose to have your character risk something on the roll of the dice, the players look on anxiously awaiting the result, the die is rolled... and... OMG! you won! yay. Fun had by all. Or, oh no! you lost. Still exciting.

This doesn't work so well for side-table stuff like investments and businesses. Those are usually managed at a regular pace as a more or less accounting aspect of the game. Good for an occasional comment from player to player about how "Oh wow, my business gained 5% value this year", or "Oh darn, I lost one of my businesses." followed by some adjustments to the wealth record of the character. That's record keeping stuff. While interesting, it's not exactly exciting from a play perspective. From a social perspective, you're already hanging out chatting with your friends (players at the table), already have whatever drinks/snacks at hand, etc. So there's no increase in social interaction from this sort of play.

Again, I can't preclude the possibility of the entire table being extremely interested and excited to see what choices someone makes about the distribution of their business portfolio this quarter, and breathlessly await the results of the die rolls to see how well things went. I guess. Maybe? I may be a bit old school, but I suspect most players would far more breathlessly await the die roll results of a combat in which the party knight is attempting to withstand the onslaught of the evil dragon's breath attack with the assistance of the party mage bolstering their defenses, while the party rogue sneaks around to another side to distract said dragon, while the archer slings dragon slaying arrows at it's flank. But that's just me.