| Lady Asharah |
Last thread I found on this subject is now 7 years old so I didn't want to necro it.
My question is how to calculate the time it takes to build a room because I have encountered two methods.
Lets set up the scenario:
We're in a Large Town (25 Capital/day limit) and want to build a small tavern (Bar + Common Room + Lodging)
Bar: 6 Goods, 1 Influence, 5 Labor, 16 Days to build
Common Room: 7 Goods, 8 Labor, 16 Days to build
Lodging: 10 Goods, 1 Influence, 7 labor, 16 Days to build.
Method 1:
Spend all the required Capital, wait 48 days (16x3), voila building done
Method 2:
Add up all Capital (45), divide by amount of capital available to spend per day.
1.8, or 2 days to spend all required capital. But buildings don't go up magically and require time to put work into, hence the time cost (duh).
So you spread the required capital throughout building time:
Bar: .75 Capital cost/day
Common Room: .94 Capital cost/day
Lodging: 1.13 Capital cost/day
This means that you can build the entire structure within 16 days (instead of 48) and still have 22 untapped Capital expenditure per day to build more rooms simultaneously if you so choose. After 18 days the tavern is open for business.
Now I think the method 2 is the correct one as it addresses the problem Method 2 doesn't: If I'm building a tavern with Method 1, it will take 48 days... if I'm building two taverns that are across the street from one another, it will still take 48 days and I end up with two taverns... but if I double the amount of rooms in the first tavern it will now take 96 days to build... which makes absolutely no sense.
| Mark Hoover 330 |
As I understand the Construction rules, you only need to be present at the start of construction. So in Phase 2 of the Downtime rules where you start a new Downtime activity, you spend up to 25 Capital towards the construction of what you want, tell the builders to start building, and it will take however many days from that point for the room or rooms you've paid to start construction on to be done.
Rooms can be built concurrently, so if you take 2 days paying for all the costs of all the rooms in the tavern, once that's all paid the 3 rooms are being constructed all at once, so 16 days to finish the work, right?
| Meirril |
Here is an example posted on D20.
Inn
Suppose you want to spend downtime constructing a friendly traveler’s Inn. It needs a Bar so it can sell drinks, and a Kitchen so it can serve food. Guests need a place to eat and rooms to sleep in, so it must include a Common Room and a Lodging. To keep your guests’ horses safe, it must include a Stall. By adding up all the Goods, Influence, Labor, and Magic values in the Create and Time entries of the rooms’ stat blocks, you get a total of 33 points of Goods, 3 points of Influence, 32 points of Labor, and 90 days. By spending that capital, after 90 days of construction time your inn is finished.
The daily restriction on how much capital you can spend per day is how many days you need to spend in town making arrangements before construction can begin.
So in your example you can spend all of the capital needed for the building in a single day, so you can immediately start construction. If you pay for all 3 rooms at the same time, it takes 48 days to finish construction.
Now to be silly, but technically correct. Lets say we build the rooms one at a time. 16 days later you have the lodging built and begin construction on the common room. You can draw income from the lodging while the next room is being built. When that is completed you can begin construction on the bar and collect income from the lodging + common room. It is utterly stupid, but fine according to the Downtime rules.
| Lady Asharah |
See, that makes no sense.
This way I can start building an "Inn" that will take 52 days to finish (I noticed lodging takes 20 days, not 16, after I couldn't edit anymore)
But if I build Bar + Common Room + Lodgings as three separate rooms, they will take a total of 20 days because they are being build concurrently.
Anyone who has ever been at any construction knows rooms are not being built one at a time. You put up the walls in all the rooms, then you put in fixtures in all the rooms, then you do finishing in all the rooms. If a building has multiple floors you don't even generally wait to finish one floor before moving on to the next, it's all a matter of available manpower to work in multiple rooms simultaneously.
And rules do account for the manpower, in the above example that's 25 Capital/day. Building a structure one room at a time, especially a small one like the above inn means you are spending something like 3 Capital per day which is woefully inefficient.
To be sure though, I seem to have missed that example which explains the rules rather clearly, and still makes no sense realistically speaking.
| Mark Hoover 330 |
If we accept the premise that Rooms can be created separately and benefit PCs upon completion, regardless of the final business they're attached to, then where is that room being built, logically? In other words, say you're building JUST the lodging for an Inn. It's a weird place to start, but sure.
Are you literally saying that, upon paying for the construction to start a team of builders appears on an empty lot and constructs a 20 to 35 square building, with walls and a roof, that is simply a door that leads into an interior divided into a couple smaller rooms that people pay for, like a motel?
Then if you add a bar and more later, where are you putting those? Are you building vertically or horizontally? How are you piecemealing this patchwork quilt of a business together?
I ask this because in a current campaign I'm running, I'm using the Downtime rules. 2 players, right at level 2, decided to take advantage. One wants to have a merchant's guild house, the other a dance and magic school. Of course at level 2, after buying some adventuring gear neither had the cash to buy these fully formed businesses outright or even construct them in whole.
Also the game I'm running is pre-printed material so for level 1 they got to know the merchant city they're in. The merchant city that says over and over that buildings crowd each other within the outer walls which guard it. So where are these PCs going to find the space to just start a nice big building like a dance and magic school, one room at a time?
The answer is that the individual rooms they were "constructing" were being re-constructed from existing space they'd gotten the rights to build in. The dance and magic school for example is being retro-fitted onto an abandoned corner townhouse tenement. The bare bones of the building are there but the rooms have to be built into the existing structure.
Now that they've hit 4th level and are heading back to the city, the magus is planning to add 2 rooms to his school. Being a Large City, he'll be able to pay for them both to start construction in Phase 2 of a single day's Downtime. If the bones of the building are there and he's able to spend the Capital all at once, plus we've established that buildings can be constructed one room at a time if desired per the rules, why couldn't he start construction on 2 rooms simultaneously?