Malphegor
2022-12-16, 05:45 AM
So, for a while now I've been occasionally dabbling in the idea of playing some kind of character who mass produces a lot of stuff very quickly and makes profit. Essentially, I want to take WBL, and grind it beneath my boots, and spit upon its remains as I look forth upon the path of gold to achieve true power- being stinking rich and powerful.
So this short post is entirely about how to make passive income with far too much investment and time.
Part 1: Capitalism, Ho!
Section One: Pawning Your Loot
To put it bluntly, the existing rules for individual item sales in 3.5 are not favourable to the player at their basic.
First you need to be able to Appraise the item's value. Success or failure means you evaluate the item's value by + or - 50%. By default, if people spend the time actually using this skill but don't have ranks in it (in actual games I've been in it tends to get ignored and it's assume everyone knows the value of any item just because we're lazy lol) you could be making a massive loss.. Which is why, where possible, if you're going to appraise something, do it from the comfort of a well stocked business base where you can take 20 and might have employees assisting your checks with Aid Another checks. This is slow, it is boring, and you gotta do it in the early stages.
While we're on the topic of Appraise, note that on p97 of Complete Adventurer, it expands the Appraise skill that lets you do rough appraisals in one round, figuring out what category of item it is, Common, Rare, Exotic, and Unique. Won't tell you the gold value, but it's quick and you can quickly appraise 10 objects in this way in the time it would take you to appraise it 'properly' with the base rules for appraising.
More importantly while we're in Complete Adventurer, on p98-99, there's the Haggling rules. By Diplomacying someone to Helpful with a one minute check, you can ensure 10% off the price on all buying you do off them. 10% off for establishing friendly relationships with the people you want to ensure you're in a friendly relationship with is really good.
Side Note: It would be cool if this also affected what people will buy your items at, perhaps if you diplomacied them to helpful they're more willing to buy your items at +10% markup, but heyho, it doesn't say that in the text. It would make for a reasonable houserule though, so DMs, consider it if you have a economic focused character.
Given we're looking at discounts and markups, let's next look at the Mercantile Background feat. Level 1 feat, it's a Regional feat (limited availability, specific to races or regions, although I'm unclear on whether one can just purchase skill ranks to count as knowing of the techniques from a region... but that's pretty moot at level 1 I guess) in Player's Guide to Faerun (expanded in Unapproacheable East to also include Shou Expatriate character region people), and was an Ancestor feat in Dragon #315, it lets one once a month buy an item with 25% discount from anyone. and a at any time, sell your items for 75% off the list price instead of the default 50%.
With this, you're making 25% on whatever you were normally selling. The buying discount seems to be limited to individual items, although ask your DM about bundling large quantities of items together as a single 'item' for the purposes of trade. (you also get some extra 300 starting gold which is a lot yes at first level but you'll see how expensive stuff gets later)
However, the sales one is an always-on buff to your sales value. Anything you sell, now has only -25% of its value removed.
But all this is pretty small scale. Everything we've said so far, while mechanically interesting, is still you lugging around items to vendors, like it's a Elder Scrolls game, and going 'you there, vendor, what will you take for my wares'.
So here is the stage where we shift from adventurer trying to pawn off his loot to business owner. This is the point that... uh, well, a lot of all of this so far will not be useful for.
Section Two: "What is Double Entry Book-Keeping"
So, we're going to be building a business. Many, in fact We want it to be self-sustaining and require minimal effort, given, as adventurers, we're probably going to have other issues to focus on. Dungeon Master's Guide 2 has rules for businesses on page 180, where you make a single profit check once per month and get gold in return. It's very abstracted, it doesn't even really care about how many employees you have (it cares a bit about the wages of specialists but it's really small but does increase by +20 each extra specialist you add... I don't know why either) or what you actually sell as a product, what it cares about is the Captial category, the Resources, and the Risk of the business type you choose.
Profit checks are based on the following formula:
Profit= ((1d20+Profit modifiers from a table based on how much effort is put into a business+the primary skill of that business type)-25)*the particular kind of risk level that business has.
For example, a shop where the level 12 owner has skills, is spending 40 hours a week focused on the business, is in a massive city, and has business partners, is in a guild, could have a profit each month of
Profit=((1d20+2+3+4-4+15)-25)*50gp
Which assuming a roll of 10 for this
Profit=(30-25)*50=5*50=250gp
So every month, assuming averageish rolls, they get... less than the starting gold they began play with at level 1.
And they spent a lot of effort doing so. 40 hours a week is a full time job.
However, another shop, which didn't put the effort in, but has business partners running the place for them, that's only a -8 penalty (resulting in a 350gp loss), and besides, every 3 months you can add to the profit checks by investing 25% of the capital value of the business. +1d4 every 3 months to the check, with no cap or limit on how many times you can do that means that with enough gold flow in, eventually even the worst businesses if you can keep them running with adventuring money, will inevitably end up profiteable eventually. You just need to survive long enough to be too big to fail. And you can't go into a death spiral, as every failure causes a cumulative penalty into the next profit check.
So basically, it takes 6-12 months of massive investments to neutralise that -8 penalty, but then the place is pretty self-supporting enough to just about make profit regularly... which sounds pretty reasonable, a year of rocky starts to eventually be floating a year in is about right for a business.
Be warned if your DM is taking account of the gold in a region that you might want to look at stronghold building rules eventually to have a single headquarters that's in multiple cities at once.
Startup capital is kind of a pain as a lot of the starting business capital is kind of expansive. I like shops as they can be fairly unobtrusive despite being high risk, and it's reasonable enough to, while starting in cities, have a series of horses and carts that they run out of- nomadic traders who go from place to place. Cheap, albeit it does penalise you a little.
Next, we need to supplement this.
in Player's Handbook 2 has the Affiliation rules, which includes a Business affiliation. there is no reason not to use these, as it means that those within the companies you build have a RAW-backed wage of 200gp as one of the options, and various other perks like influencing organisations or getting prizes for being well liked.
That 200gp/month income on p185 of PHB2 is... kind of funny given the business rules we've just seen in DMG2, as it means that every employee of yours in the company, regardless of how the business is doing or what they're selling, gets paid 200gp every financial period.
So while the business itself might be making 10gp one month, everybody gets a 200gp paycheck.
I have no idea how realistic this is, but hey, free money.
Summary of the business section so far
So you're making a flat basic 200gp a month, and your businesses will, over the course of one year, eventually become profiteable. Individually, if you're involved, you can add 25% on to the value of any one item, but you don't need to get involved, and the passive income will grow and grow until you invest in more businesses and the game of D&D has just become Cookie Clicker but slower and with a lot more effort.
You can make a lot more gold much more quickly by adventuring, but I thought I'd make a post just showcasing how... there is rules out there for making passive gold.
It won't be fast, but once it's set up, any and all time-skips in your game become worth their weight in, well, gold, as suddenly being frozen in a stasis spell for a millenium or any other kind of D&D oddness like that means you can emerge in the fantastic Greyhawk 2000 vaguely 20th century inspired modern future, and, luck willing, walk into a business you founded and get your backpay.
This was a bit disorganised a post but I liked getting my thoughts down on this so I might do more posts here in future showcasing fun stuff I quite enjoy thinking about too much.
(there was gonna be a part 2 but uh I lost track of what I was gonna say beyond Gremma’s Cauldron + Mercantile Background = making weak potions for nothing but time)
So this short post is entirely about how to make passive income with far too much investment and time.
Part 1: Capitalism, Ho!
Section One: Pawning Your Loot
To put it bluntly, the existing rules for individual item sales in 3.5 are not favourable to the player at their basic.
First you need to be able to Appraise the item's value. Success or failure means you evaluate the item's value by + or - 50%. By default, if people spend the time actually using this skill but don't have ranks in it (in actual games I've been in it tends to get ignored and it's assume everyone knows the value of any item just because we're lazy lol) you could be making a massive loss.. Which is why, where possible, if you're going to appraise something, do it from the comfort of a well stocked business base where you can take 20 and might have employees assisting your checks with Aid Another checks. This is slow, it is boring, and you gotta do it in the early stages.
While we're on the topic of Appraise, note that on p97 of Complete Adventurer, it expands the Appraise skill that lets you do rough appraisals in one round, figuring out what category of item it is, Common, Rare, Exotic, and Unique. Won't tell you the gold value, but it's quick and you can quickly appraise 10 objects in this way in the time it would take you to appraise it 'properly' with the base rules for appraising.
More importantly while we're in Complete Adventurer, on p98-99, there's the Haggling rules. By Diplomacying someone to Helpful with a one minute check, you can ensure 10% off the price on all buying you do off them. 10% off for establishing friendly relationships with the people you want to ensure you're in a friendly relationship with is really good.
Side Note: It would be cool if this also affected what people will buy your items at, perhaps if you diplomacied them to helpful they're more willing to buy your items at +10% markup, but heyho, it doesn't say that in the text. It would make for a reasonable houserule though, so DMs, consider it if you have a economic focused character.
Given we're looking at discounts and markups, let's next look at the Mercantile Background feat. Level 1 feat, it's a Regional feat (limited availability, specific to races or regions, although I'm unclear on whether one can just purchase skill ranks to count as knowing of the techniques from a region... but that's pretty moot at level 1 I guess) in Player's Guide to Faerun (expanded in Unapproacheable East to also include Shou Expatriate character region people), and was an Ancestor feat in Dragon #315, it lets one once a month buy an item with 25% discount from anyone. and a at any time, sell your items for 75% off the list price instead of the default 50%.
With this, you're making 25% on whatever you were normally selling. The buying discount seems to be limited to individual items, although ask your DM about bundling large quantities of items together as a single 'item' for the purposes of trade. (you also get some extra 300 starting gold which is a lot yes at first level but you'll see how expensive stuff gets later)
However, the sales one is an always-on buff to your sales value. Anything you sell, now has only -25% of its value removed.
But all this is pretty small scale. Everything we've said so far, while mechanically interesting, is still you lugging around items to vendors, like it's a Elder Scrolls game, and going 'you there, vendor, what will you take for my wares'.
So here is the stage where we shift from adventurer trying to pawn off his loot to business owner. This is the point that... uh, well, a lot of all of this so far will not be useful for.
Section Two: "What is Double Entry Book-Keeping"
So, we're going to be building a business. Many, in fact We want it to be self-sustaining and require minimal effort, given, as adventurers, we're probably going to have other issues to focus on. Dungeon Master's Guide 2 has rules for businesses on page 180, where you make a single profit check once per month and get gold in return. It's very abstracted, it doesn't even really care about how many employees you have (it cares a bit about the wages of specialists but it's really small but does increase by +20 each extra specialist you add... I don't know why either) or what you actually sell as a product, what it cares about is the Captial category, the Resources, and the Risk of the business type you choose.
Profit checks are based on the following formula:
Profit= ((1d20+Profit modifiers from a table based on how much effort is put into a business+the primary skill of that business type)-25)*the particular kind of risk level that business has.
For example, a shop where the level 12 owner has skills, is spending 40 hours a week focused on the business, is in a massive city, and has business partners, is in a guild, could have a profit each month of
Profit=((1d20+2+3+4-4+15)-25)*50gp
Which assuming a roll of 10 for this
Profit=(30-25)*50=5*50=250gp
So every month, assuming averageish rolls, they get... less than the starting gold they began play with at level 1.
And they spent a lot of effort doing so. 40 hours a week is a full time job.
However, another shop, which didn't put the effort in, but has business partners running the place for them, that's only a -8 penalty (resulting in a 350gp loss), and besides, every 3 months you can add to the profit checks by investing 25% of the capital value of the business. +1d4 every 3 months to the check, with no cap or limit on how many times you can do that means that with enough gold flow in, eventually even the worst businesses if you can keep them running with adventuring money, will inevitably end up profiteable eventually. You just need to survive long enough to be too big to fail. And you can't go into a death spiral, as every failure causes a cumulative penalty into the next profit check.
So basically, it takes 6-12 months of massive investments to neutralise that -8 penalty, but then the place is pretty self-supporting enough to just about make profit regularly... which sounds pretty reasonable, a year of rocky starts to eventually be floating a year in is about right for a business.
Be warned if your DM is taking account of the gold in a region that you might want to look at stronghold building rules eventually to have a single headquarters that's in multiple cities at once.
Startup capital is kind of a pain as a lot of the starting business capital is kind of expansive. I like shops as they can be fairly unobtrusive despite being high risk, and it's reasonable enough to, while starting in cities, have a series of horses and carts that they run out of- nomadic traders who go from place to place. Cheap, albeit it does penalise you a little.
Next, we need to supplement this.
in Player's Handbook 2 has the Affiliation rules, which includes a Business affiliation. there is no reason not to use these, as it means that those within the companies you build have a RAW-backed wage of 200gp as one of the options, and various other perks like influencing organisations or getting prizes for being well liked.
That 200gp/month income on p185 of PHB2 is... kind of funny given the business rules we've just seen in DMG2, as it means that every employee of yours in the company, regardless of how the business is doing or what they're selling, gets paid 200gp every financial period.
So while the business itself might be making 10gp one month, everybody gets a 200gp paycheck.
I have no idea how realistic this is, but hey, free money.
Summary of the business section so far
So you're making a flat basic 200gp a month, and your businesses will, over the course of one year, eventually become profiteable. Individually, if you're involved, you can add 25% on to the value of any one item, but you don't need to get involved, and the passive income will grow and grow until you invest in more businesses and the game of D&D has just become Cookie Clicker but slower and with a lot more effort.
You can make a lot more gold much more quickly by adventuring, but I thought I'd make a post just showcasing how... there is rules out there for making passive gold.
It won't be fast, but once it's set up, any and all time-skips in your game become worth their weight in, well, gold, as suddenly being frozen in a stasis spell for a millenium or any other kind of D&D oddness like that means you can emerge in the fantastic Greyhawk 2000 vaguely 20th century inspired modern future, and, luck willing, walk into a business you founded and get your backpay.
This was a bit disorganised a post but I liked getting my thoughts down on this so I might do more posts here in future showcasing fun stuff I quite enjoy thinking about too much.
(there was gonna be a part 2 but uh I lost track of what I was gonna say beyond Gremma’s Cauldron + Mercantile Background = making weak potions for nothing but time)