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

[Vodahim]

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)

[Vahnavoi]

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]

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]

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]

- 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.

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]

@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.

[Thrudd]

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]

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]

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]

@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]

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]

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.

[LibraryOgre]

I have some rules for starting a business, and I'd be inclined to raid the old Rules Cyclopedia or Birthright for domain rules... generating income via taxes and so on.

[NichG]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

@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]

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]

You think your money will be safer buried somewhere?

[Satinavian]

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]

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

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]

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]

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?

[NichG]

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]

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.

[LibraryOgre]

In working up Hacktrade, 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.