I'm still a bit confused about how you use teams and businesses in the Downtime rules, and I think it's a big enough thing to warrant its own thread. If anyone else has questions regarding these things, just ask them and we might pool our limited understanding together to solve them out.
Now supposed I have recruited two teams of soldiers and they are now my "Mercenary Company". I want to send them to work patrolling the surrounding area for bandits and weak monsters to generate goodwill with the locals in the form of Influence (one of the four "resources" your teams can generate).
I know that to generate Influence in this way, each point of Influence requires of me a 15 gp investment (food, medical supplies, danger pay, and so on I assume).
Now what I don't know is how long are they going to work and how much Influence do they generate?
And what on days when I don't want to send them out and order them to not create Influence at all. For example guarding my little personal stronghold. Do I have to pay them nothing?
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Pouring some more over it, I've come up with this possible solution:
Since it consists of two Soldier teams that provide a +5 bonus to earn gp, Influence, or Labor, the whole Mercenary Company has a bonus of +10.
I send them working for one day and they roll 1d20+10 for a result of 23. Page 79 tells me a 23 grants me 2 Influence.
Now at nightfall they return to me and then I have to pay 30 gp for the expenses they had during their hard work that day, and then I get to cash in the 2 Influence on my account.
Is that correct? That still leaves open the question of upkeep for having these guys at the ready at my stronghold the whole time even on days when they don't work. Do they get no wages at all?
As near as I can tell from glossing over the organization rules (I mainly focused on the building ones so far) organizations work similarly to buildings: You make a skill check for each day and the result goes towards whichever Capital it is you're trying to earn.
I find repeated references to "upkeep", but I can't find the details on it anywhere. From what I can tell salaries are either calculated and withdrawn from your income before your net profit (if you use the organization to earn gold pieces), or considered part of the cost if you're using the organization to earn Capital.
Edit: Found this little tidbit: Unlike a team, a manager requires daily wages paid in gp.
I guess the capital you're putting into the team is considered long-term pay...? I'll keep looking.
One sulution would be to assume that generating gp is the default mode for every organization that they will do every day. Only when you order them to will they try to make Goods, Influence, Labor, or Magic.
The four resources all costs you gp, while gp is the only one that creates it. And you can never have too much gp, so there is no reason to have them sit on their asses and do nothing.
In my example, the mercenaries would make an average of 20gp per day, and assumedly this already has their wages substracted.
However, that leads to the question why I would have the two teams of five work as a single organization of ten? If they work separately, they would make 15gp each for a total of 30gp.
For a room, the Earnings amount already subtracts the cost of having unskilled employees to do the basic work for you. For example, the Earnings listed for having a Bar already account for the wages of a bartender and servers. For a team, the Earnings amount assumes they are working at a building you own. If you don’t provide a building for the team to work in or from, halve the Earnings for that team.
Actually they'd make 20 silver, not 20gp. The gp calculation specifies that you divide the end result by 10, and that's the amount of money you've made.
Furthermore, the problem with income doesn't just go for teams, Yora.
Let's say you have a bar, a common room, and some bunks.
The bar adds +10 to a gp roll, the common room adds +7, and bunks add +8.
Adding all of that together we get +25 for a total result with take 10 of 35, meaning that building would be making 35 silver per day.
However, if each room was placed in a different area and you can take 10 for each of them, you'd be making 20+17+18 = 55 silver.
Another question: Let's say my 10 soldiers also need a place to sleep, so I build Bunks for them.
Bunks generate +8 gp or Labor. Do I get those if I let my own soldiers sleep there, or only if I rent it out? Maybe the soldiers are accepting less pay because they get a place to sleep as part of the job, which in turn means they would effectively paying me rent.
I just statted up a little bandit fort (which grew a bit out of hand) and that place could generate a lot of income. But is that because all these things improve the effectiveness of the resident bandits, or are those again earnings I could make if I rent out the place to travelers?
There are some restrictions on earning on page 93 that might be relevant.
[...]Otherwise, it's a private building and doesn’t generate capital because it’s used by only you and your friends. If you start your own cult with Acolytes and Priests, you might decide they sell healing and generate income. If your thieves’ guild has Acolytes, you might decide they only heal members of your guild, and therefore don’t generate income.
But in the case of Bunks, a group of soldiers would not be the staff maintaining it, but actually the customers using it.
So, any Room always generates its normal income. If I put a team to work there, I get the teams income in addition to that?
Say I have a building that consists of a kitchen and two common rooms. It's a cheap place to get food that can provide me with +17 gp or Influence and +4 gp or Goods. If I also recruit two teams of Craftspeople, a team of Lackeys, and a team of Laborers, I can turn it into a fancy restaurant for which I also get the full income from these four teams?
Of course, I'd also need an Inkeeper as manager. (This is so much fun ^^.)
But with my mercenaries, it gets a bit more complicated. They need a barrack to opperate from, but I don't think there is any benefit to expand a single Bunks with a Dojo and Kitchen.
However, I feel like I could give them some of their wage in food which my Kitchen makes, so the soldiers could be both my employees and customers at the same time.
You can make this a lot more complicated once you are starting to come up with creative uses. But that might be to a great deal because of my idea to use the rules for running a business to build a political and military power base. Which I think it might not have been intended for.
The quote I gave earlier was edited for brevity, I'll re-quote the full text below:
Whether a unit generates its listed capital depends on your intentions for the building or organization, and should follow common sense. For example, if you construct a building with a Bar, Common Room, and Kitchen, you might want to use it as a tavern or a headquarters for your adventuring party. If it’s a tavern, it’s open to the public and generates capital. Otherwise, it’s a private building and doesn’t generate capital because it’s used by only you and your friends. If you start your own cult with Acolytes and Priests, you might decide they sell healing and generate income. If your thieves’ guild has Acolytes, you might decide they only heal members of your guild, and therefore don’t generate income.
If you intend for your building or organization to generate capital, you must explain to the GM how it does so. You can change the purpose of your building or organization (for example, renovating an old military barracks into an inn or turning your greedy cult into a generous one) and in doing so change the capital it generates. You should choose one idea and stick to it, however, as a business that’s open to the public on an irregular basis makes less money, as does a business that frequently changes its purpose. The GM might reduce the capital buildings generate in such situations.
Based on the line with the acolyte, I'd probably rule that if you're using the bunks, the kitchen and the dojo as a base for your organization, you won't be making money from the buildings themselves. Your teams will, however, have buildings to work out of and so they'd make their full earnings instead of only 50%. In general teams and rooms interact very well, but there are some organizations where needing a building to make the full income is a bit of a stretch and mercenary companies is one of them.
I guess you could say that having a base of operations like a fort or a keep to your name makes you a cut above the average sellsword and lets you demand higher prices?
(This is so much fun ^^.)
It really is, stuff like this has always appealed to the kid in me that spent his weekends rerouting creeks or building snow castles with his dad :)
We had Lego. 5 big boxes of it. Now our younger cousins have it. ^^
@Dorsey
That is entirely fair - you could even argue that the income from the bunks your soldier team are occupying is the share of their pay that goes back to you for offering accomodations.
As for fun update construction happy smiley times, I'm currently learning the rules as I go by statting up a complete Varisian traveling family with the character background rules and designing their wagons as well with the room building rules - I'm continually amazed by how well written and flexible these rules are!
As for fun update construction happy smiley times, I'm currently learning the rules as I go by statting up a complete Varisian traveling family with the character background rules and designing their wagons as well with the room building rules - I'm continually amazed by how well written and flexible these rules are!
I am planning the same as a long term goal for my rogue in our RoTRL campaign. I used the basic Vagabond organization, added an additional Guard team and then added the Auditorium, Game Room and Storefront rooms to make the "circus" for my traveling band of entertainers! I have a Manager that is a Smuggler/Stage Manager to run the circus for when I cannot. Works beautifully! It will take a little over 120 days to match my buy in then its pure profit after that. By that time, I hope to make 7th level and I will have the Leadership Feat (Noble Scion PrC); this group will then become my initial followers, =)
"Hey everybody! I've got a great idea. How much do you think the local peasants would pay to see a real, live Tarrasque?"
You know, recreating the plot of King Kong with a Tarrasque in Absalom could be a very interesting storyline - I wonder how long it would take before the players caught on...