Ultimate campaign teaches us that every room has a construction time. If you are willing to increase the amount of labour capital used in the construction of said room, you can speed up the construction.
Why does room construction time stack?
Let's say I want to have a lavatory constructed and that I pay for my capital, rather than participate in the construction myself. Building this lavatory would take 4 days. If a party member of mine then wants to build their own lavatory, they can do so at the same time, and that lavatory will be done in 4 days as well. Meaning that after 4 days, 2 lavatories will have been built. But if -I- want another lavatory built, then the construction time of the 2 rooms will stack, making it take 8 days, instead of 4, despite there being no difference in prize.
Call me crazy, but I imagined that when my fellow party member decided he wanted to build a lavatory, he paid for a seperate construction team to work on his lavatory, the same time my team was working on mine. Why is it then, that I cannot hire 2 construction teams and finish in 4 days, without having to pay double the labour cost to both teams?
-Nearyn
Because building the second floor comes after building the first? And because the rules are abstractions and already silly fast?
And you can hire more help and be done faster i think that simulate hvirring every one in the area to work on your house, NOW!
Edit: spelling.
It would make sense to me if I was building a tower, that I cannot construct the second floor, before the first floor can hold it up. But if I'm not it stops making sense just as fast.
The rules are abstractions, I get that, I just don't think that stacking the construction time is a reasonable or elegant solution. It becomes sillier and sillier the more you use it. With every room you add, you add to the workforce, but the increase in man-hours worked worsens the construction speed of the component rooms. It's contrary to every reasonable fiber in my body.
-Nearyn
bump
Look, what are you really looking for here? The downtime rules are nonsense. The closer you look at them the less sense they make. Even if they actually worked out you are doing a bunch of work for a system where nothing costs more than a few thousand gold, and thus doesn't matter after the lowest levels anyway.
Complaining about it is like complaining that, during a chase, casting fly helps you use Diplomacy on an Ogre. Yes, it doesn't make any sense. But that is how the subsystem works, and it is one's own fault for thinking they it provide anything more sane than that.
@Dorsey: There's an idea.
@Mort: I hoped to make sense of the fact that room construction time stacks. I'd also perhaps hoped for a few alternatives to the present rules, but I did not specify that.
@Billy: That does make more sense to me. If you have to dig out a larger foundation, ensure the stability of the load bearing walls, and finally build one, big, interconnected roof, I guess that it only makes sense that it adds to the time. Without any personal experience with building construction, I'd probably have made it so that you took the construction time of the room that took longest, and added half the time of the others, to represent each room having their own work-team. Then you'd have the option of stacking time as it is now, by only hiring one work-team to do -all- the rooms, but that would cut the cost of labour by 1/4th, or somesuch.
-Nearyn
My best guess would be that the Downtime rules, like many other rules, doesn't take in account how many of each service provider there exists.
For example, if you were looking to recruit a trained hireling in a city, it wouldn't matter (as far as the rules are concerned) if your friend just dropped by and recruited one a bit earlier. In fact (as far as the rules are concerned) it wouldn't matter if a million of your friends each entered the city before you and hired one, you would still have the same chances to find one!
Of course, your GM could easily say that all the available hirelings have already been employed - just like he could claim that your friend would have to wait for his lavatory (since all the local plumbers are currently employed by this 'Nearyn' guy).
The rules are probably written that way to provide decent guidelines on a characters options in a vacuum. Simulating the entire businesses and their impact on the availability of services would certainly get silly very fast! And the price for this streamlining is some anomalies when multiple PC attempt to employ the same services, like your Lavatory example.