rules for an economy?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


Are there any rules which give a solid footing for a DM to run an economy? I heard about the unchained action economy and got excited then read it to find I was completely wrong as to what it is. So are there any rules out there to help balance an economy, because these situations always come up for me (players open a brothel and I need to work on supply and demand and what impact it will have, or the players rob a metropolis and acquire about five million gold worth of goods and need to unload it). So os there any help out there in the DnD world for a non-economist like me to handle this?


You want the Downtime rules. Started in Kingmaker, continued in... Ultimate Campaign? That being said, they're still wonky. Probably some fixes out there if you go looking.


Stick to WBL meaning personal value of all items on a player's person, and any extra money earned by strongholds (or brothels) being tied up in salaries and other luxury goods with no combat impact. If they liquidate, it's time for every major thievery guild in existence to swoop in on the 100,000s of gold they suddenly find themselves with.

It's important to realize that 1 gold piece is enough to live comfortably on for a few days. At level 1 your adventuring party is middle class. By level 12 they are the top 0.01% of earners in Golarion. Land is not as important or valuable as magic items. Any major move in magic items purchasing would be extremely well known by governments and criminal organizations. If a level 10+ character makes major upgrades to their gear it would represent a continental shift in the economy.

That's why just looking at WBL and making sure your players don't get too high or too low is important. Everything else is just fluff that can be hand-waved. The easiest Paizo published material to use to augment personal wealth is the downtime rules, but never allow players to convert Capital back to gold. Instead Capital can be invested into Build Points.

So 1 build point would be the equivalent of 40 magic. Then that build point can only be spent on more capital - it never, ever comes back to the player. When I get a little bit of time (and assuming I remember) I can work through the brothel example.


Pathfinder doesn't do economy. It's meant for adventurers to do adventures, not run businesses.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Oxylepy wrote:
...in the DnD world for a non-economist like me to handle this?

Be glad that you are a non-economist.

As one it gets ... hairtearing fast if i dont shut up the little voice in my head fast.

"Look at these gives facts. City generation rules give the following distribution of classes as X. These will lead to Y, which in turn would lead to Z, even if we control for some different price elasticity and ... pseudo-medieval campaign worlds off the rails."

And dont get me on the effects of close to zero marginal costs of golem-based production and magic-items. Or what a permanent Wall of Fire and a Decanter of endless Water can be used for. Once set up and at nearly no running costs...

I just repeat the MYST3K-Mantra:

"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes / And other science facts / Then repeat to yourself 'It's just a show, / I should really just relax.' La-la-la"


Guru-Meditation wrote:
Oxylepy wrote:
...in the DnD world for a non-economist like me to handle this?

Be glad that you are a non-economist.

As one it gets ... hairtearing fast if i dont shut up the little voice in my head fast.

"Look at these gives facts. City generation rules give the following distribution of classes as X. These will lead to Y, which in turn would lead to Z, even if we control for some different price elasticity and ... pseudo-medieval campaign worlds off the rails."

And dont get me on the effects of close to zero marginal costs of golem-based production and magic-items. Or what a permanent Wall of Fire and a Decanter of endless Water can be used for. Once set up and at nearly no running costs...

I just repeat the MYST3K-Mantra:

"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes / And other science facts / Then repeat to yourself 'It's just a show, / I should really just relax.' La-la-la"

Even before you get into those weirdnesses, it's the fixed prices for everything that are based on strict multiples of the raw material cost and don't vary with Supply and Demand.

It's an adventure game, not a world simulator. If you want to be an adventurer who runs a business in your downtime, you can make that work. Just expect it to be handwavy.


thejeff wrote:


It's an adventure game, not a world simulator. If you want to be an adventurer who runs a business in your downtime, you can make that work. Just expect it to be handwavy.

It also breaks really, really quickly, or it gets boring really, really, quickly.

For the vast majority of humanity in time and space, getting a 1-2% return on your invested capital was considered a very good thing. That's one reason that inflation was not really a thing for centuries.

But this means that you need to invest 12,000 gp in order to get yourself a 10 gp a month "average" standard of living off your rents. By the time you're high enough level to do that, you're high enough level that it no longer matters.

So there's two ways to deal with it. One is to say "the hell with it, I'm going to run a brewery for adventure potential and role-playing purposes and not bother with the money." The other is to bamboozle the game master into letting you get a "real" RoI, which will quickly give you more wealth than you can possibly imagine, and break the game balance like a toothpick.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
thejeff wrote:


It's an adventure game, not a world simulator. If you want to be an adventurer who runs a business in your downtime, you can make that work. Just expect it to be handwavy.

It also breaks really, really quickly, or it gets boring really, really, quickly.

For the vast majority of humanity in time and space, getting a 1-2% return on your invested capital was considered a very good thing. That's one reason that inflation was not really a thing for centuries.

But this means that you need to invest 12,000 gp in order to get yourself a 10 gp a month "average" standard of living off your rents. By the time you're high enough level to do that, you're high enough level that it no longer matters.

So there's two ways to deal with it. One is to say "the hell with it, I'm going to run a brewery for adventure potential and role-playing purposes and not bother with the money." The other is to bamboozle the game master into letting you get a "real" RoI, which will quickly give you more wealth than you can possibly imagine, and break the game balance like a toothpick.

For much of history "capital" wasn't really a thing, but that's another debate.

Yeah, "run a brewery for adventure potential and roleplaying purposes" is the way to go.
As hiiamtom said above, separate business money and adventure cash. Keep to something like WBL for balance, whatever the business does.


thejeff wrote:
For much of history "capital" wasn't really a thing, but that's another debate.

There wasn't a word for it, but it certainly existed. But precisely because the RoI was so terrible, it normally wasn't the sort of thing that you could buy in an ordinary market transaction.

But ships didn't build themselves, and neither did shipyards. If you decided that you wanted to build a fishing boat or a trading vessel --- no, you probably couldn't buy one, not for money -- you had to invest some sort of resources into it, and you had to have those resources from somewhere.


Oxylepy wrote:
r the players rob a metropolis and acquire about five million gold worth of goods and need to unload it.

I'd just like to handle this for a second, just to give you an idea of the scale in which we're dealing.

If you look at the price list, a pretty good approximation of the buying power of a US dollar (or euro) is one copper piece. In other words, 1 gp = $100 == 100 EUR.

So that "five million gold worth of goods" is about $500,000,000 -- a half billion dollars.

You simply can't unload that. There aren't enough buyers.


Oh, right, I assumed I would have to heavily shift any economy rules to something more along my gaming style. Prices tend to be inflated for "living comfortably" and stay the same for magic gear. Just about everyone in the world is around level 10-50 and the PCs are typically stuck being babies. The metropolis costs are often considerably higher than what the GM guide had in it. I meant rules along the lines of effects of unloading the value of a city upon a market that moves within a month about five times that value

For comparison: a dragon egg starts at about 30-50k at auction, while a newborn was about 60-150k. Those are starting values at silent auctions. Slaves depend on what they are and tend to go from 50gp to 100k. The whole party ended up crewing their ship (plus shackles of durance vile) for a couple hundred thousand, and in magical goods from ransacking the city they had about 2.8m. Then they ended up dropping like 300k each on bags of holding (large enough to hold 2.5 collosal dragons each)


and actually, the half a billion in general magic items as a comparison to a real coty actually seems right


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

To my knowledge, the only tabletop RPGs that even attempt to try and simulate an economy that can survive casual scrutiny are Harn and ACKS (the Adventure Conquerer King System).


Aha^ thanks, I'll have to look through them.


Back in ye olden days of 3e, it used to be a common thing for people to see in the books that unskilled labor made a silver a day and how the economy was completely broken because no peasants could afford anything with that, yadda yadda yadda.

It actually ended up working out quite well when you realized that the silver per day was for unskilled manual labor (ditch digging, basically). Any peasants would likely have Profession (Farmer) or Profession (Innkeeper) and would be making profession checks for weekly amounts of gold.

I once did up a whole thing about a typical peasant farmer family and how they not only made enough money for things like, well, FOOD, but they also made enough to set money aside for things like healing potions and trips to the cleric every once in a while, all while still keeping a fairly good standard of living (lot of stuff like having craft(clothing) and craft(cooking) and craft(woodworking) to make their own basic stuff most of the time).

For PCs, its easy. Just owning a business doesn't do jack, somebody has to be making Profession checks to run the place. Best business in the world can be driven under by a poor manager, and a good manager can turn a refrigerator company in Alaska into a thriving business.

Aka, either the PCs are giving up the adventuring life to mind shop and make profession checks every week, or they're hiring someone else to make those checks. Don't worry about details beyond that, its a straight up profession check for X amount of gold.


Edymnion wrote:

Back in ye olden days of 3e, it used to be a common thing for people to see in the books that unskilled labor made a silver a day and how the economy was completely broken because no peasants could afford anything with that, yadda yadda yadda.

It actually ended up working out quite well when you realized that the silver per day was for unskilled manual labor (ditch digging, basically). Any peasants would likely have Profession (Farmer) or Profession (Innkeeper) and would be making profession checks for weekly amounts of gold.

I once did up a whole thing about a typical peasant farmer family and how they not only made enough money for things like, well, FOOD, but they also made enough to set money aside for things like healing potions and trips to the cleric every once in a while, all while still keeping a fairly good standard of living (lot of stuff like having craft(clothing) and craft(cooking) and craft(woodworking) to make their own basic stuff most of the time).

Though there's still an awful lot of weirdness in having all jobs pay equally, based strictly on the skill roll of the person doing them.

A Profession(ditch-digger) earns just as much with a check of 15 as a Profession(lawyer) does. Craft(ladder) makes you as much as Craft(jewelry). You can hand-wave it by assigning higher skills to the more prestigious jobs, but it's still handwaving.


hiiamtom wrote:
When I get a little bit of time (and assuming I remember) I can work through the brothel example.

OK, so a Brothel is 4BP and needs a house, which is another 3BP. That's 28K for the buildings alone if you built them for scratch on your own land or bought something existing. If you convert within a city you would need to buy the existing buildings, then pay this amount for the conversion. The time depends on the spending limits to downtime activities (for example, a large time can have 25 labor spent per day meaning it takes 56 days to build these).

Once established it runs itself and you don't have to think about the day to day tasks. If they want to make money, count it against their future loot to balance it out. If they try to expand too far or take too much money then bring a gang running competition to them or bring heroes trying to save the workers against them.

Basically, any money the PCs use should reflect their WBL and nothing else. If you are running WBL high then that's fine, just don't let them try and break the system without consequence. If you use my advice you essentially have consistent costs for what they want to do, you don't have a lot of paperwork, and the business is only as important as running a business gets. If the PCs spend a lot of time there, invest more quests into keeping it safe/dealing with local law enforcement/drama in their worker's lives. If they just want to party there between adventures then let them do that.


That sounds far better than the system set out in Pathfinder's Ultimate Campaign. Where is that from? The cost sounds far more reasonable than 7k for a castle


It's the Kingdom Building rules for the BP costs (I can't tell you how perfect the costs scale), I think it's based on the Ultimate Campaign version though the Brothel building was left out when Paizo dropped a few unappealing things from the AP. I will say a castle is 216,000gp using that as a guide (and takes 1.2 years to build). It has worked well so far.

Build Points
The Building costs and size

And then the things I grabbed from the Downtime Rules for some of the timing/labor representative costs. From Ultimate Campaign as well.

Capitol Values
Settlement Spending Limits

And then the most important, Wealth by Level. This is the scale you want to go by as "average" value of goods held by each of your PCs. By tracking to this number it makes life incredibly easy as GM compared to balancing on the fly and only takes a google sheet to do the math for you.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / General Discussion / rules for an economy? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.