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The downtime rules in Ultimate Campaign allow you to make earnings checks yourself, your buildings, and your organizations. They also allow you to add modifiers together, or break them apart, for different kinds of capital. My question is, why would you want to add them together? The fact that there is a dice roll involved for each would make it seem that it is ALWAYS better to divide checks as much as possible.
Let's assume you take 10 for your checks, for simplicity. Let's also assume you are getting +6 on your profession checks, total. Again, for simplicity. Now, let's say you have a Tavern. The sample one is listed as: 1 Bar (+10, gp or Influence), 1 Common Room (+7, gp or Influence), 1 Lavatory (no bonuses), 1 Office (no bonuses), and 1 Storage (+2 gp). If you spend a day running the Tavern, you'd make a Profession check as appropriate, and the building rooms would add a total of 19 to earn gp. You also get +10 for running it yourself. That's a 45, so you can earn 4.5gp per day.
Now, suppose you decide to separate them, so the Tavern earns separately from you? Your check is then only 16, while the tavern's is 29. That's 1.6gp for you and 2.9gp for the tavern, so your net income is 4.5gp. No problem yet.
BUT! Let's say you are opening up a chain, and now have two taverns. You run one, the other runs itself. Now, as before, you could just add up all the modifiers (take 10, +6 total profession, +10 self running, +19 for tavern 1, +19 for tavern 2) = 64 = 6.4gp. Or, you could make all the checks individually (16 for yourself, 29 for tavern 1, 29 for tavern 2) = 74 = 7.4gp. A whole extra gp, because you are essentially getting another 10 from rolling another dice. Still, 1gp isn't much of a game breaker.
Let's take it further, and assume we want to generate Influence as well as gp. We are again working ourselves and adding all modifiers together, but this time each tavern is adding +10 to Influence and +9 to gp, and the profession check is still gp. Now, adding all the modifiers, we wind up earning 3 Influence (10+10+10) and 3.4gp (16+9+9). If, on the other hand, we roll the taverns separately, we wind up with 4 Influence (10+10, 10+10), and 5.4gp (16+19+19).
This would only increase with the number of buildings created or number of types of capital earned. This isn't about whether the wealth is game breaking, this is a question of why you should get different results based on method chosen to determine earnings.
It's actually worse than that. If you have each room generate income separately, you get significantly more money.
As you said, the tavern's total is +19. When it runs without you, it gets a 29 and generates 2.9gp. If the Bar, Common Room, and Storage space operate separately, however, the Bar makes a 20 (2gp), the Common Room gets 17 (1.7 gp), and the Storage Room generates 12 (1.2gp) for a total of 3.9gp.
The problem comes because each roll you make gets an extra gold from the die itself.
There really should be a rule that states you can only make one roll per day, or something clarifying that you make one roll per distinct business, and you can't roll separately for each room in a building, etc.
Yeah, I considered that, but dismissed it because I'm not sure you can do it for each room. The rules for income say you make the check for the building, so unless you are putting one room in each building, that might be impossible.