Working a side profession with minimal DM involvement; possible?

[Draconi Redfir]

For a future character concept I'm thinking on, I'd like to try and play around with starting up a side business in the world, likely with the leadership feat involved and kind of collecting any stray NPC's we may come across during the game. I'm thinking something of a delivery service, get a cart and a donkey to start off with, and have my people take goods from one city to the next either as merchants or a postal service.

The problem with this concept that i can think of is that it might require a lot of work on the DM's front, and my regular games are public meetup games, that can have upwards of eight to ten players all at once due to the open drop-in nature of the meetup. So my attempts at managing my own business could likely be taking a huge amount of work from an already bloated DM who has at least seven other people to worry about, if not more.

Is there any way you can think of that i could take the burden of determining the outcome of the delivery service, it's sales, success, failures, and events onto myself rather then putting it all on the DM? My best guess would be one or more sets of tables i could roll on to see how successful the day's or set of day's trek was, how much coin was made, and then determine how to allocate that coin to influence the success or failure rate of the business depending on how i spend it. I could then inform the DM of what happens and what i do, and if they have anything to cause a challenge for it, they could introduce it. It would probably take some DM help to set up, but could it work?

has anyone had something similar to this set up? Does, or could it be done? or is this just one of those things that would absolutely involve the DM every step of the way?

[Kurald Galain]

It's definitely possible. For instance, Pathfinder Society allows "day job checks" at the end of each adventure, representing side businesses that characters may have between adventures (assuming the character is trained in craft, profession, or perform). This could be a good starting point.

[Draconi Redfir]

is there a website somewhere that explains day job checks at all? Not finding anything on google. I found Improved day job, but no source on the checks themselves.

[Kurald Galain]

Yes, the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide (which is a free download from, among other places, paizo.com).

[icefractal]

There are multiple subsystems you could use for this. They all require GM approval to get started, since they're optional systems, but after that you can pretty much just update them by the rules alone.

Downtime - The most detailed. It will take a long-ish time before this produces an amount of money you'd care about, and depending on the pace of the campaign maybe it never will, but it also gets you "social currency" you can use for some purposes, and potentially lets you craft magic items for 1/4 price (the rule in question is vague and is either completely useless or lets you craft at half the normal cost). This one may require a little GM attention because some of the events involve dealing with NPCs, but that could be done outside the usual session time (or just re-roll those events).

Alternate Profession Rules - These are pretty great actually, with a reasonable amount of startup time you can be producing a nice amount of money. Here's the key - don't put more than one rank in Profession. The more ranks you have, the more money and time it takes to upgrade the business and hire employees. Just get whatever other bonuses you can and stick with a single rank. Detail wise, they're in the middle - you don't have daily events happening, but you do have named employees and businesses (once you hit a "Large" business the way to expand is to start a second one).

Investments - These are pretty much only for flavor unless your campaign has years go by between levels, the pace of earning is rather slow. They're also pretty abstract and don't get into details.

[NomGarret]

Logistically, I’d see if the DM would be willing to handle this away from the table, through email or the like. That way, table time can be focused on what the party as a whole is doing, and if there are results of your rolls that would be interesting to incorporate into a game, the DM has a chance to plan those in.

A lot of the time the exchange will be pretty simple. “Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s what I roll. The table says this is the result.” The DM will confirm it, you’ll mark off some numbers and everyone moves on. But there’s that chance something more exciting will happen and you’ll want the payoff to be worth it.