Hey all. Listen, so my crew has a sailing ship in the middle of a sort of archipelago and even belongs to a major trading nation. This has added a little bit of a new wrinkle for me, because unlike in regular campaigns having downtime between quests now costs the party money in terms of crew wages and rations. My first thought was just awarding money in lieu of dealing shipping mechanics via a "the party made 1000gp trading last month" setup, but this seems to be not very dynamic or rewarding. What if the crew want to go raiding, or what if they suck at mercantilism/have a bad month?
So my second thought was to use the Profession system (check/2=gp earned/week) and sum the party's Profession: Sailor checks and multiply the result by 5 or 10 and use that method to generate the rewards they get trading.
Maybe add in a thing where each character can add in an Aid Another action on the group's check via Intimidate or Knowledge: Geography or Appraise, etc. to give them a feel for HOW they're making their money (running a tight ship, knowing who needs what goods, or cutting good deals.)
I have two questions for the community if you guys would help:
1) Is the x5 modifier about appropriate to represent the added value (and cost) of the crew's labor and ship's capital. Ideally, the players would be getting just a little bit more than a regular character would after subtracting the cost of the ship and the crew.
2) How do you guys think the size of the ship (and thus cargo capacity) would factor into the profit they should get each week? While I'm interested in hearing suggestions for RAW Pathfinder or Skulls&Shackles settings, my group just started using Frog God Games "Fire as she bears!" method for building ships and et cetera.
...or should I just skip the whole thing and say "You each personally get the results of an appropriate check as if it were a Profession:____ check, except you get a +2 bonus for owning a ship." -?
Here are some thoughts trying to make it relatively simple.
First make a sailing check to determine how many trades missions they can do in a month maybe DC 10 for one mission and plus one mission for each 10 they beat the DC. This represents how efficiently and quickly they can sail.
For each trade mission they put up some capital up front limited by ship size (maybe 500 gp for Keelboat, 1000 gp for a galley etc. (not sure if those are the right sizes but something like that)
For each trade mission they make a profession (merchant) check and return x% of there investment maybe DC 10 for breaking even.
Are you using the Ultimate Campaign book? They have a system that can impose various events during downtime, and the system used varies the amount of wealth you gain (goods or money) based on skill checks already.
Dot.
I'm running a campaign where one of my players invested heavily in several businesses. I use a mixture of rule sets from Ultimate Campaign:
1) I use the prices for Managers, Rooms & Teams, and Buildings & Organizations listed under Downtime for determining how much it costs to hire people or get a building built. I don't use any other rules under Downtime since they're complicated, mathematically flawed, and provide so little benefit for how much book keeping they need.
2) I use The Investment Mechanics to determine the profits and success of the business, treating the amount of money spent hiring people and building facilities as the amount invested. A ship your player buys would also be counted as an investment.
With this combination of rules, a PC can start a rewarding business with very little book keeping required. All the player has to do is keep track of what teams, ships, or facilities he bought and how much he paid for them. And all you (the GM) has to do is roll a percentile every game year or game month to determine his investment return. Simple, effective.