We are playing a kingmaker campaign, an i told me GM i wanted to own an herbalism shop and grow my own plants and stuff. He directed me to the downtime section, but i am really confused as to how it works exctly. It seems like i need to buy an alchemist shop/greenhouse then hire an artisans group, and a manager and i would barely be turning a profit just from gold a day (about 2g a day after paying the manager) Now i'm not even sure this is right, so can anyone explain how to go about doing this in stupid people terms so i get it, and maybe explain to me step by step what i need to do to make it happen? I understnd i wont get actual plants, hat i will get money or goods, and i kind of get that part, just not sure how to set it up.
First you need to acquire the shop. If you are able to buy it, the listed price is 2030 gp. If you need to build it, and you need to acquire proper Capital first. You can purchase it (which is also 2030 gp) or earn it (which costs half of that and takes time). Then you need to construct the building. The time of construction depends on the size of the settlement you create your shop - you have 101 units of Capital to spend, and the maximum spending speed is given by the Table: Settlement Spending Limits. Usually it will take several days. The shop includes the employees that make it possible to generate income even if you're off adventuring, but not a skilled manager.
The Herbalist shop provides income daily (during the Income Phase). I'll Assuming you want it to always generate gp. If you sum up all the bonuses from various rooms to earn gp, you get +36. If you Take 10 on the cech, you get 46. That means 4 gp 6 sp income daily. You get that whether you are in the settlement to oversee the business or away adventuring. Although if you're adventuring you only get that in bulk after returning to your shop.
However, if you are not in the settlement for a longer time, you may face attrition. If you're not storing capital other than gp, you don't need to worry about capital attrition, but if you're away for at least 30 days, your employees may start to think that you're dead and abandon you business (Business Attrition). To protect yourself from that, you need a skilled Manager. The pay of a manager for a herbalist shop would be 3 gp/day, leaving you with 1 gp 6 sp of profit daily, that you receive upon returning to the settlement.
But if you are not adventuring, you can also work yourself to generate more income (during the Activity Phase). In your case, you'd probably be making Profession (herbalist) check, and earn (1d20+(your bonus))/10 gp daily.
I skip all posible Events that may affect your business.
Okay thanks, that's about what i was thinking. My gm was mentioning having to hire a team and an organization as well, but thats not neccessary then. Also as the plants are all being done for alchemy purposes, I believe he mentioned i could also use craft alchemy (i have lots of ranks in that, none in herbalism.
As a 4arcanist/1 sorcerer, is it a good idea to snag leadership at 7 in order to remove the manager and put my cohort there instead for more capital? Or should i stick with my current plan of spell penetration. I am a compulsion based mind mage, w/ fey and serpentkind bloodlines, to increase my targeting options, though nearly all those spells are susceptible to SR. Though there are plants/alchemical items that help with that as well...
One thing to remember: you don't actually NEED to hire specific Teams/Managers to run your business. Per the Downtime rules:
Downtime wrote: For a room, the Earnings amount already subtracts the cost of having unskilled employees to do the basic work for you. For example, the Earnings listed for having a Bar already account for the wages of a bartender and servers. This means that if you construct the Garden room for example, and then leave town, during the time you're gone and with no one there to run it, the Garden still generates an Earnings check with +8 to GP each day. Taking a 10, this means that this room on its own kicks out 1 GP, 8 SP, every day, regardless of the staff on hand.
Now if you build Teams, they have their own benefits. If, per your OP, you are adding a Team of "artisans," which I'm guessing means Craftspeople in the Downtime rules, they would add +4 GP or Labor. So if you have a Garden (+8 GP) and some Craftspeople (+4 GP) then together and taking a 10 on your Earnings check they deliver a combined 22, or 2 GP, 2 SP worth of profit. Paying your team is factored into whatever money the business generates, so that 2 GP, 2 SP is considered your personal profit.
A Manager carries an ongoing cost, their pay each day, but they also add value. First off they usually have some levels in an NPC class and certain skills you or your business can benefit from such as Handle Animal or the spells of an Adept 3. Secondly and more long term, a Manager delays the attrition or loss of Capital during the Upkeep phase. If you're planning to be out on adventures for weeks at a time, a Manager is a must-have.
If not though, you don't really need them.
Last, but certainly not least, your business need not follow specific Room/Team combinations in the Downtime section. Let's say your herbalism shop wasn't just going to sell poultices and powders but also educate fellow adventurers on plants of the wild, help said adventurers store large amounts of vital herbs and even allow herb-using spellcasters to research unique combinations.
You might construct the alchemist shop/greenhouse, then add on a Book Repository focused on Knowledge: Nature, a Common Room for guided lectures or where students can gather and compare notes about wild herbs, a Magic Repository staffed by a Team of Druid 3 Acolytes, and finally 2 additional Storage areas in the form of a massive shed-like warehouse or perhaps a root cellar.
These new Rooms/Teams will add greater bonuses to the Capital you generate. They also help differentiate YOUR alchemist shop from all the other ones in the region.
One final note, about the Income phase. Your business doesn't always have to generate a single type of Capital if you don't want it to. If your final building configuration includes an Alchemy Lab Room, that Room carries a bonus of +10 on generating GP, Goods or Magic. During the Income Phase you could have your Business generate +26 towards GP and then take the Alchemy Lab's +10 and put that towards generating Magic. Taking a 10 the business earns you 3 GP, 6 SP, but then it also earns 2 Magic Capital.
As with Earning Capital, you have to spend 100 GP in order to use the 2 Magic Capital the business earns. Think of this like during one of its dealings that day the business made a contract for a local cleric to get a bunch of herbs up front at cost but then you'll be getting a deal on the cost of certain incenses and velum and prayers needed for magic item creation at a later date. Then using the Magic Capital your party's Wizard scribes a bunch of scrolls, 200 GP worth, that they just spend those 2 Magic Capital to pay the crafting costs for.
So your business can be composed of any Rooms/Teams you want, which generate bonuses to earning Capital during the Income Phase of Downtime. You don't HAVE to have Teams or a Manager to run the business, but it helps. Finally during the Income Phase you can decide what Capital to apply the bonuses to, or just lump them all together into one if you'd like.
Clear as mud right? :)
Well, Adjoint isn't wrong but I'd explain it differently.
The first thing you need to do is imagine what you want in a building. Now grab the pieces from here to assemble it. My suggestion would be to go minimal, and create separate buildings/teams as much as you can.
So a minimal Herbalist Shop could be a Storefront (190gp, +5 capital), and an Alchemy Lab (390gp, +10 gp/goods/magic). If you don't assign a team to the building...it is assumed to have enough staff to function as is. Mysterious isn't it?
Now you obviously want some plants, so lets buy a separate Greenhouse (300gp, +12 gp/goods/influence). Lets also hire an Acolyte (1st level druid, 440gp, +4 gp/influence/magic), and an Apprentice (1st level Alchemist, 520gp, +4 gp/influence/magic) to work away from the store and deliver finished goods to sell.
Instead of paying the gold cost for these, I'd prefer earning the resources and using them but it is faster to just pay the gold cost to hire and to buy ready made buildings if available.
So why do I think buying separate buildings is a good idea? Because, each building/team/organization generates income separately. Which means combining 2 +4 rooms together gives you a d20+8 to roll for income, but 2 separate rooms gives you 2d20+4 rolls for income! Well not really, but its the thought that separate organizations give more income rolls.
So for each organization you have to decide how to divide its bonus between what kind of income it can produce. For anything you put a +1 or more into you get to add a d20 roll. For every 10 in a resources, you get 1 of that type. For gold, you get 1sp x the result. Because this can require a huge number of rolls, downtime rules say you can take 10 for all of your businesses. Which means as long as you put in +1 you get a guaranteed 11, aka 1 resource.
Getting a resource is a bit of a lie. You earn the opportunity to buy the resource for half value. Then later you can spend resources instead of money to buy whatever it represents. The most useful ones are magic and goods. Goods buys any kind of item, and magic can be used when you cast spells, buy spell casting from NPCs, or attempt to buy or create magic items.
So lets go over an example of income from all of the organizations I've listed here. I want to maximize the resources and then throw any odd numbers left into gp. You may not need to generate influence since that is mostly used to gain bonuses in social interactions, but its also used to get yourself out of bad events so its best to have some for an emergency.
Herbalist Shop:(+15 gp/goods/magic) +10 magic, +1 goods, +4 gp = you can purchase 2 magic resource (10+10=20=2 magic resources), 1 goods resource, and 1gp 4sp in cash.
Greenhouse (+12 gp/goods/influence) +1 gp, +10 goods, +1 influence = 1gp 1sp, 2 goods, 1 influence. If you aren't so excited about goods you could make it +10gp, +1 goods, +1 influence = 2gp, 1 goods, 1 influence.
Alcolyte (and Apprentice, they both generate the same) +4 gp/magic/influence. +1 magic, +1 influence, +2 gp = 1 magic, 1 influence, 1gp 2sp. x2
So for the day you generate opportunities to purchase 4 magic resource, 3 goods resource, 3 influence resource, and 4gp 9sp. You can let the opportunities build up until you return to town and pay for them.
A manager would help prevent you from losing control of your businesses. A Guildmaster would be appropriate for a herbalist, so 3gp per day in expenses. It would be up to your GM if a single manager could watch all of your businesses and teams. Since they all focus on the shop, I don't see why it wouldn't be approved.
Also Leadership is a good idea. You can use followers as members of the various organizations. If you do, you still have to pay to hire them but they remain loyal. You won't lose control of the organization. Also your cohort makes for an excellent manager. If you have a follower of 3rd level or higher they also make good managers.
If you want to generate gold, its possible. What you need to do is craft items and sell them. Normally you don't generate profit this way, but you can use resources as the materials so you are basically only paying 1/4 of the market price, and selling it for 1/2 the market price. So each day of making magic items you can make 1k worth of items that sell for 500gp, which nets you a profit of 250gp if you use magic resources. You can double that by upping the crafting amount by raising the DC 5.
Well, actually you could buy gems and jewelry with goods and magic resources. 100gp worth of diamond dust resells for 100gp. A 1000gp gem costs you 1000gp worth of goods/magic resources and merchants accept it at full value. Silly Pathfinder economy.
Okay folks, thanks to you all for your p.o.v.s and suggestions. I think i got enough of a handle on it to make it work for me.
So the dem already went let us use this to make magic items at 1/4 cost claiming it's broken. He also says buildings dont come with staff because that's dumb and broken, so we also have to have a team purchased to run the business or we get nothing. I'm not even sure it's worth it at this point. Thoughts?
Kingmaker using downtime rules for owning a shop would likely result in the characters having way more money and magical items than they should. The AP has way more downtime than any other AP so it would really skew things out of whack.
I'm guessing your GM agreed to let you do it and then looked at the rules, realized the effect they would have, and is changing them so that it's really not worth it for you to do it.
What is your goal in running the store? If it's simply a character thing then I would suggest you say to your DM something along the lines of "Hey, can we just say that I own a store and that I don't get any benefit from it?"
If it's to make money then I'd suggest against running a store out of balance for the system. Even if you were only earn 2 gold a day that would be 60 a month, 720 a year... which would have been an extra 5,040 over the course of the campaign (as I ran it)... wait... that's almost nothing... never mind.
If you're building magic items with it... well, that skews things a lot more.
But that being said, DMing a player running a store is a pain in the ass because the DM has to keep track of the kingdom turns as well as the business turns, which are almost the same things just on different scales.
If one of my players asked to run a business and wanted to use the downtime rules I'd say no because it's not worth the headache.
Primary goal was to have access to rare alchemy ingredients for my own use to craft things for the group such as molly. I originally just wanted a garden so I could grow my own plants, rare or not to save some money on them and have them readily available. They suggested the entire downtime thing and had used it and told us to study up on it, which I did to excess, but know these new changes are making things more complicated
Evilserran wrote: So the dem already went let us use this to make magic items at 1/4 cost claiming it's broken. He also says buildings dont come with staff because that's dumb and broken, so we also have to have a team purchased to run the business or we get nothing. I'm not even sure it's worth it at this point. Thoughts? Honestly? If you want to get the most benefit for the least cost then just hire teams and don't bother building anything.
Explain to the GM that you are hiring NPCs to gather raw materials for you. They stockpile the stuff till you get back to town and exchange it. You can hire Alcolytes and Apprentice for that. You could also hire expert teams to represent alchemists that process the raw materials for you.
Not as efficient is opening a business and having all of the separate teams base out of there. The GM will probably insist on making it just one organization instead of 1 team plus 1 building and several separate teams. Its better to just go with what he wants than arguing about it. As long as it generates 2 magic capital a day it should be fine.
The actual gold produced by businesses isn't a big deal. Where it gets outrageous is the production of resources that you can use to craft magic items. Being able to halve that cost is worth the extra effort.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Heroe's of the wild has some downtime rooms and buildings meant for natury characters. Might just be perfect for what you're trying to do.
At a glance, there's the following buildings: druid's grove, redoubt, tree house, witch hut, and wood shop.
New rooms also include: arboreal (augmentation), archery range, attuned (augmentation), blind, grotto, mystic greenhouse, rangelands, reservoir system, and watering hole
More info on these rooms and buildings can be founder here: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/downtime/#TOC-Rooms
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