Sailing ship earnings

[theillway]

I bought a sailing ship as part of a downtime/intrigue based campaign, but I don't know how much it would earn me.

The downtime rules can sort out how much everything around a ship earns -- piers, dockhands, a ship captain and sailors, even a whole waterfront -- but I can't find anything to help me figure out what I would earn if I owned a whole mercantile ship.

My only thought would be to somehow reverse engineer the ship like it was a building under the downtime rules, but normal buildings don't move and can't carry you places, so I'm not sure that's a fair comparison.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

[Meirril]

Ships don't work like a business. If you own a shop in town, you can check up each day how it is doing. You can collect small amounts of money daily from the receipts which is conceptually what happens with the downtime rules.

Trading ships buy cargo, move to a different port and see what the prices are like. If there is demand for their cargo, they can make a profit. If someone made port a week before with a huge amount of the same cargo they have now, there might be nobody in port that wants the cargo your ship is carrying. If you had really bad luck and didn't check your sources before you left you may have actually purchased cargo that originated from the port you just sailed to, and you paid more for it than they sell it for here. Trading long distances is a boom or bust business. Huge upfront expenses, high risk from pirates, storms and mutiny, and long waiting periods before they pay off. None of this fits in the Downtime rules.

Use the Investments rules for investing in a trade company. Just because you own the ship doesn't mean that you'll get all the profit. Each member of the crew is going to demand hazard pay and the ship itself will incur costs along the way.

[Wonderstell]

theillway wrote:

My only thought would be to somehow reverse engineer the ship like it was a building under the downtime rules, but normal buildings don't move and can't carry you places, so I'm not sure that's a fair comparison.

Meirril wrote:

Ships don't work like a business. If you own a shop in town, you can check up each day how it is doing. You can collect small amounts of money daily from the receipts which is conceptually what happens with the downtime rules.

'

Trading ships don't. But I don't see a problem if you use it as a ferry, which is basically "a shop in town" since it's bound to a specific route.