How to run a business

[Poncho-Ninja]

I DM for some very imaginative players and, after recently clearing out a bandit camp, they set up a protection business that hires out trained cohorts to caravans to protect them from bandit attacks.

Are there any rules or books available that can provide me with stats for running a protection, travel and trade business?

[karkon]

Do you really want to get bogged down with rolling to run a business?

I suggest you give them a small profit margin (10%) and let it be successful for a while generating modest income. Then you can use it as a hook when their business starts getting disrupted.

[Stubs McKenzie]

I agree, the economy of D&D is borked, don't get too bogged down with rolls and rules as to how much they make, instead give them a % profit margin and use it for great roleplaying opportunities.

[ZomB]

You could just make a "day job" skill roll at appropriate intervals from the pathfinder society guide to organised play with an appropriate skill.

[karkon]

You could also start them at a lower profit margin (1%) and then encourage them to role-play trying to get more business and investing in better gear. Up the margin based upon their effort but have a hard cap of 10% (or whatever%) and a maximum income in GP.

[Stubs McKenzie]

A great hook may be if they start making a decent sum of money, have The corrupt tax man/corrupt official come sniffing around... however they resolve the situation, it will allow for a upper limit on how much they earn from the venture without making the upper limit seem contrived.

[meabolex]

I'd basically treat the business as an organization the PCs interact with. The organization should have a management structure that the PCs are a part of. . . but it should abstract the PCs from the actual duties of running a business (accounting, payroll, management, marketing, etc).

If they really want to get down to the minutiae of daily business issues, I think you should probably try to talk them out of that.

[Stubs McKenzie]

A great statement was made by James Jacobs a while back (pretty sure it was him?) that went something like... 'If all a character does is try to build and sell things all day that's fine, but he/she has stopped adventuring to do so, so the player should roll up a new character.'

[karkon]

Stubs McKenzie wrote:

A great hook may be if they start making a decent sum of money, have The corrupt tax man/corrupt official come sniffing around... however they resolve the situation, it will allow for a upper limit on how much they earn from the venture without making the upper limit seem contrived.

Love it! Great idea. This is one of the reasons I hang around the forums at all. To get ideas I would never conceive myself.

[Poncho-Ninja]

This is all great, thank you so much.
One of the characters has dropped out to help run things leaving the player to gen something new.

I'm going for the idea where the profit is modified by their actions and how well the business runs.

I also decided that necessity, fame and advertising would help dictate how much business they get. They can kill one or two bandit in the area to advertise themselves but if they kill all the bandits then the company will be obsolete. This also means that they can be corrupt and attack caravans while disguised and then advertise to the caravans (most of them are evil).

Thanks everyone.

[Nicos]

Power of faerun have some advices for runnin busines

[ZomB]

Poncho-Ninja wrote:

I DM for some very imaginative players and, after recently clearing out a bandit camp, they set up a protection business that hires out trained cohorts to caravans to protect them from bandit attacks.

Likely they will have adventuring parties coming to sort them out in no time ;-)

Actually that's not a bad limit. If the amount they are asking for would be big enough that the merchants could hire mercenaries to wipe them out for less - then there is a natural cap or consequence of their actions.

Traders might also hire mercenaries to attack their own caravans and kill your cohorts so they could claim you didn't protect them and ask for a refund with consequential loss expenses.

Some caravan passengers might be well able to deal with your threat by themselves.