(I preface this that this is my first dedicated campaign, so I'm a novice.)
My GM is the very literal sort when it comes to alignments, and has already threatened my Pally king with punishments for acts we disagreed about the morality of. (We bombed a knowledge check and offered the Kobolds the bandit bodies as a friendly gesture. He called it chaotic, I called it practical use of resources.) So I can't pull funds from the treasury, even if I can afford it unrest-wise. So my question is what ways can I generate personal income?
Our Sorcerer is using Leadership to have a guild produce and sell items. She's insistent we not do the same because we'd be wasting feats, but it's hardly right to rely utterly on her income. I could invest in a Craft skill I suppose, but I'm unsure of the effectiveness of that route. Would taking another profession be a better route? (I picked up Cartography for the mapping in book 1.)
Third-party, Paladin, LG, lvl7
Str: 10
Dex: 10
Con: 10
Int: 18*
Wis: 12
Cha: 14
*Third-party race has a feat that allows Int instead of Str on melee rolls.
OK ... see if your GM would be open to your using the Downtime rules from UCAM to start an organization of some sort. That doesn't earn nearly as much gold as adventuring, but it could provide you some gold.
How is multiple PCs with Leadership wasting feats? I could see the argument if we're talking about crafting feats, but Leadership gets each PC one or more unique cohorts that can be used for different things.
"Nobody else take proficiency with a high-damage weapon. I've got that covered, so no need to waste the feat."
She has since clarified her position, Andostre. She's the most experienced of our group, so I misunderstood her intention. She meant it would be a waste of a feat if I used it in the vein of making a knightly order or something. Using it to make money, she'd recommend.
She has suggested that I take Leadership to make the first national bank. (Though this really rustles my jimmies, due to the complete historical inaccuracy of state treasury, much less national banking.) Anyways, I think following her suggestion and having each of our members take Leadership for various economic endeavours would make the most cents.
Anyone got other suggestions, though, or is this really the only way for PC's to generate income?
Most rpgs are designed to keep PCs from making too much money. If they follow the wealth-by-level standard, they will still end up being very wealthy compared to most of the people around them. Any get rich schemes that I;ve ever heard about are dependent on a GM allowing a PC to "role play" such exploits. Usually, the best way to generate personal income is to go adventuring.
Fair enough. It just seems that we're under equipped at some points. Ah well. I suppose things will work out as the downtime rules start helping with that.
Edit:
I realized that our equipment problem may be simply magnified by the fact that we're very rapidly moving from challenge to challenge instead of spending time getting our affairs in order. It doesn't help that our GM had 3 major threats appear all at once and we had a timelimit to take them all out. (Not saying what they are to remain spoiler free.)
Leadership is useful for commanding troop units. It would not be a waste of feats, as it will be useful if you ever intend to lead troops in battle. Besides, those knightly orders you mentioned could serve an economic gain function as well. After all, who serves as caravan guards within your land? In Ultimate Campaign, there's rules for using an organization to make money. It won't make as much as the sorcerer's magic making group, but it would make you some extra during your downtime.
On a simple level of strategy, yes, using leadership to get followers and then forcing them to make things for your benefit is a good way to generate wealth if it is allowed.
As a DM, I would be disappointed and somewhat frustrated if all my players dedicated their feats to trying to game the wealth by level system. But then, I wouldn't have allowed the first player to make his underlings craft things and give him all the profits to begin with, so it's hard for me to judge how things will be in your group. It sounds like your DM has a fairly mechanical view of alignment, so it may be that he feels the same about Leadership and thinks it is only natural that players should try to squeeze every benefit out of it according to the letter of the rules.
If it were me, I think I would consider talking to the DM about this. I would tell him that I would like to start a knight's guild and feel like this would be the most realistic for my character, but I feel like the party is short of gold and that I will be penalised by not using the feat to make gold by crafting. You might be able to reach some compromise where you are able to earn money in another way; or it might be that he already feels the party is too rich, and that's why he's throwing plots at you so thick. It's a bit of a sticky problem, because it is probably hard for the DM to keep the game and the party balanced when one person is going out of their way to game the system for gold.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to use Leadership to create an organization that makes money for the player character. However, as a GM I wouldn't allow somebody to, say, order a cleric cohort to create 20 potions of Cure Light Wounds, then harvest the profits from selling those potions. As a matter of economics, there's not always going to be a demand for those 20 potions of Cure Light Wounds, and there won't always be a group of customers able to full price for them.
But let's say a sorcerer PC does want to create a guild sorcerous guild and make money off of it. He can do this with the downtime rules. He could simply take his followers and fit them into the teams listed in UCAM. He'd probably supplement this with his cohort, and maybe a few people he retains with capital. Then? Well, he'll make his daily checks, and he'll earn money over time.
I haven't read the downtime rules yet, but thank you all for the feedback. The DM is very mechanical, indeed. Been a fun first campaign, though.
I don't know if this is in those rules or not, but sorc said that 50% is for the worker, 40% is to her, and 10% is to the Crown. So that's nice.
We're not trying to game the system. We're just concerned because the trolls were almost a TPK and my character only survived because of the DM's mechanical interpretation. "They attack until ko and then move on." This saved me at -9 (against ten CON) and one more attack from his full round.
As for the gameyness of it, I would point out that unrest for withdrawals is already gamey. In the medieval world, there wasn't a treasury, only the king/duke/count/Baron's purse and all debts were owed personally instead of at a "state" level. So they're getting mad that I'm using my money to buy things...
Also: Sorc is a longtime player who could've broken the system to smithereens by now, if that was her intention. Tmk, she plans to blow most of the gold on fluff an filler.
However, now that we're in agreement that it's gamey, are there other ways of generating wealth for the pc's? I've seen the salary suggestion, but he is pretty cautious about adding new books, so I don't know if he'd go with home brew.
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