So, as some of you may know, in the game I'm playing right now, the Gm has given me a town with a silver mine. Well, he and I mostly sorted everything out for the mine, but now I'm really really confused on how to determine a shop's income. How much gold does it make, and how often? In the Ultimate Campaign guide, in I believe Chapter 2, it describes buildings and whatnot, and mentions that the gold a shop makes has already taken into account unskilled labor payment.
But how much and how often for say... an Inn? I also have a Bardic College, farms, Alchemist lab thingy, etc.... Any help would be nice. Thanks guys.`
It's a little complex, because of the difference between "Rooms" and "Buildings."
An Inn, for example, contains a Bar, a Bath, a Bedroom, a Common Room, a Kitchen, a Lavatory, a Lodging, a Stall, and a Storefront. (p. 110). But the actual money is made by the rooms in the Inn; the Bath adds 3 to earnings and the Common Room adds 7.
Also, "earnings" don't have to be gold. You can earn gold pieces, but you can also earn Goods, Influence, Labor, or Magic -- for example, if you decide to run the Bar at a loss, you can get more people in your bar which gives you a greater pool of friends to draw upon for Influence (and you can also listen to more gossip, which gives you a better idea of what is going on).
The actual amount you earn comes from p. 77 et seq. and involves a skill check. For example, if you have a Profession (bartender) skill of +6, you can take 10 and make a skill check of 16, which means you earn 1.6 gp per day. Even if you don't actually have a bar and you're just wandering around town selling drinks.
If you have a building with a Common Room in it, you can tend bar there and you'll earn 2.3 gp a day because of the +7 associated with the Common Room. If you have a Common Room and a Kitchen at your Inn, you'll get another +4 and earn 2.7 gp/day. If you have a Greenhouse as well -- why, I have no idea -- you'd earn still more money, I guess because you can sell both flowers and drinks, or maybe because you can make exotic herbed drinks (Mint Julep, anyone?).
So... to get this right... you take all the rooms INSIDE of a building, add their bonuses together, make a skill check, and that is what gp or influence, magic, or any combination of the two you earn, a day, correct?
Well, you make a check for each kind of capital you're earning that day, I believe, but yes, that pretty much right. The check result is divided by 10 for gold, and every full 10 points you get on the check earns a point of capital of the other types. Importantly, you still have to pay the earned capital cost for non-gp earnings, which tend to cost more than you'd earn in gold, so, for example, to self-fund, say, influence, a building would have to earn 15 gold per day for each point of influence it generates, so the building would need +140 on the check for gold, just to pay for a single point of influence (since you can take 10 on the earnings check), and that would net you zero gold and 1 influence.
Since I know you're doing a long-term downtime session, I'd suggest earning gold for at least 6 months a year, and earning other types of capital the rest of the year.
Also, you have to have the gold to pay the earned cost before you can earn the other types of capital (you can't technically have a building self-fund on a same-day basis, but you can do it with a one day delay).
To simplify things, you might want to just come to an agreement with the GM about long-term earnings: per day, it's check /10. Per week, it's check/2. Per 3 months would be check*6.5. Per 6 months = check*13. Per year is check*26. You can easily figure out that a monthly income should be check*2.166666.
I'd be inclined to go for a monthly check, since that offers the best of all worlds: not too many checks to make, but you can mix and match your capital over the time you have.