So I know you are not gonna make a fortune doing so but that said what is the best/fastest way to earn gold during downtime? Lets say at 7th lvl (cause it's the earliest you can have Master in a skill)
I think @ 7th lvl the best I can find is the Craft skill using Assurance (Craft) doing something you have specalty crafting and impeccable crafter feats.
Eg you are a crafter that specalizes in woodworking and get a job crafting wooden things such as funiture cabnets or whatever.
Assurance give a garenteed success roll of 23 (level 7 base DC) assurance even garentees that the dc will stay within success due to it ignoring modifyers such as uncommon or rare or if you don't have approprate tools). With Impeccable crafter anything you craft and get a success on becomes a crit so you earn lvl 8 gold. So that's 3 GP a day. Can anyone do better? Would there be any issues with this working as discribed?
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Fortune effects don't work on downtime activities.
Asssurance is a fortune effect.
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Fortune effects don't work on downtime activities.
Asssurance is a fortune effect.
That's intresting I never noticed that. Odd I never though of Assurance as a fortune effect or "luck" based I though of it more as being so practiced at that skill that you could garentee a ceertin minimum result.
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Fortune effects don't work on downtime activities.
Asssurance is a fortune effect.
Where is it stated that you can't use Fortune effects for Downtime Activities?
The only thing I can find that remotely says that is on Page 500, but that only bans you from using instantaneous effects that impact the die roll, not things that you can do over a long period of time. It's not a ban on Fortune effects, it's a ban on using a temporary bonus to impact a long term effort.
Checks
Some downtime activities require rolls, typically skill
checks. Because these rolls represent the culmination
of a series of tasks over a long period, players can’t use
most abilities or spells that manipulate die rolls, such as
activating a magic item to gain a bonus or casting a fortune
spell to roll twice. Constant benefits still apply, though,
so someone might invest a magic item that gives them
a bonus without requiring activation. You might make
specific exceptions to this rule. If something could apply
constantly, or so often that it might as well be constant, it’s
more likely to be used for downtime checks.
That wouldn't prevent Assurance, as it doesn't make you roll twice, nor does it provide a temporary Bonus. Assurance definitely falls into the realm of something you could use constantly during the effort.
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The rules on rituals say:
As with other downtime activities, fortune and misfortune effects can’t modify your checks for the ritual, nor can bonuses or penalties that aren’t active throughout the process.
Which is weird because, as Aratorin points out, the general rule that fortune effects can't apply to downtime activities referenced here doesn't actually exist in the first place.
Point of order... Should that general rule exist? I've gone back and forth on it myself.
On topic: There is no one size fits all answer because most methods of Earning Income are dependant on the level of jobs available in your settlement. The only exception is Crafting (for yourself, not the market) which will always use your level for the rate you earn money. Otherwise, there are a lot of variables for your GM to decide on, such as the level of the settlement or whether a particular lore skill is of too little local interest to make money off of.
I think you can technically do jobs above your level if your GM gives them to you, though.
On a side note (and I know that this is probably due to balance reasons) I find it strange that by default you can't use skills like Medicine to earn income in a medieval society.
Dont seevwhy not. The section on Earn an Income states you can use pretty much any skill so long as there is a reason for it.
I did not say it was not possible, I just noted that is not among the "recommended/default/directly mentioned/primary" options listed in the CRB, namely perform, craft and lore.
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Assurance has the Fortune trait. Pg 408 mentions Fortune "effects" not impacting downtime activities in an off-handed way, but it mentions it nonetheless. Pg 500 mentions instantaneous effects not helping over time which makes sense. This leaves the door open on a ruling the way it's written. This could spawn a 50 page argument (not gonna read it).
Assurance works all the time. It's not instantaneous. It's not a Fortune effect like casting a spell that affects your next roll. It has a balanced trade off. You aren't going to get a great roll. In exchange, you won't critically fail. It seems like exactly the kind of ability a professional worker would have. They're not crafting a masterpiece installing your new toilet. They're just making sure it works, and having done it a hundred times, they don't mess up.
I would allow Assurance on downtime activities.
When I run earn income, it's generally going to be a two-step process.
Find a job: The PC has to spend some time just searching for a job. Succeeding here finds them several level(with some variation)- and skill-appropriate jobs for the settlement. Failing might mean only finding one or two jobs that either underpay or are low level. Critically succeeding might mean finding unusually well-paying or higher-level jobs.
After that, they can spend the rest of the downtime working.
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On a side note (and I know that this is probably due to balance reasons) I find it strange that by default you can't use skills like Medicine to earn income in a medieval society.
That's because Earning Income isn't just a function of doing a thing well, it is a function of how well you can market the thing. Also, most settlements have a cleric who can provide quicker healing than Medicine, and I've always assumed part of why clerics charge adventurers do much is do they can afford to provide free or low cost healing the poor members of their community.
And really, a few regularly scheduled 3 action heals are going to take care of most non-dire injuries if everyone gets close enough. If the injury is dire, you don't want to take the time to Treat Wounds anyway, you want an immediate Heal. Magic is also much faster and potentially more reliable at removing diseases and poison.
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I'm way off topic here but I never did like the "each town has a cleric" trope. Or each town has a wizard, or whatever.
I much prefer the idea that not all clergy are spellcasters. PF2 is the 1st game where there is a solid mechanical way for the town to have quality medics without having to have clerics, and I hope that changes the way people think about the "every town has a cleric" thing.
On topic:
Is it really that important to squeeze everything you can out of Earn Income? I'd think that if the choice was between "have a feature that's useful for adventuring" or "get juuust a little more out of Earn Income," I'm choosing "useful for adventuring" every time.
However, anything that gives you a boost to a skill you're already good at, and that is reasonably marketable (creativity allows ALL skills to be reasonably marketable, IMO, as the thieves guild wants Stealth, the duke wants Diplomacy, the veggie co-op wants Nature, etc., though not all settlements will have a market for all skills), will cut the mustard, as they say. Maybe they don't say that...
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Point of order... Should that general rule exist? I've gone back and forth on it myself.
I would say no - fortune effects should not be banned from downtime. Short term, non-repeatable effects should be.
Most fortune effects are short term, so it doesn't make much of a distinction.
If however, it is ruled that fortune effects are banned from downtime activities, I would probably request an exception specifically for Assurance. It just feels like something that should work.
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Personally I've allowed hero points, which are a meta device that aren't tied to anything in universe, but I'm more hesitant on things like halfling luck. But that line is blurry.
Personally I've allowed hero points, which are a meta device that aren't tied to anything in universe, but I'm more hesitant on things like halfling luck. But that line is blurry.
I'm off the opinion that limiting Hero Points makes them less fun, and generally allow them during downtime. And they're still a resource expended if one is used...
I also allow any skill that can be justified for Earn Income, but especially Medicine and Nature. I can't imagine doctors and vets not being in high demand...
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Personally I've allowed hero points, which are a meta device that aren't tied to anything in universe, but I'm more hesitant on things like halfling luck. But that line is blurry.I'm off the opinion that limiting Hero Points makes them less fun, and generally allow them during downtime. And they're still a resource expended if one is used...
I also allow any skill that can be justified for Earn Income, but especially Medicine and Nature. I can't imagine doctors and vets not being in high demand...
Depends how you fall on the "every town has a cleric" thing. I'm also reluctant to heap more uses on two of the best skills in the game attached to the best stat in the game. So I use any of the above explanations for why you can't use those skills to Earn Income.
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I also allow any skill that can be justified for Earn Income, but especially Medicine and Nature. I can't imagine doctors and vets not being in high demand...
To my mind the Medicine skill covers healing people, while the "Physician Lore" (or whatever it would be called) skill covers making a living healing people. With that in mind I might allow Medicine to Earn Income at as a significantly lower level job Physician Lore might offer.
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I also allow any skill that can be justified for Earn Income, but especially Medicine and Nature. I can't imagine doctors and vets not being in high demand...To my mind the Medicine skill covers healing people, while the "Physician Lore" (or whatever it would be called) skill covers making a living healing people. With that in mind I might allow Medicine to Earn Income at as a significantly lower level job Physician Lore might offer.
My willingness to treat Medine generously may also be related to the fact that I'm our groups primary Pathfinder GM, and I'm the main player in the group who actively likes playing Support roles.
Incenting choices like taking Medicine to help the party helps ensure that next campaign at least one player will jump to take it.
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Honestly I just feel the premise of OP is significantly off of intendend game function here. A major element of 2E was making all income earning in downtime, including indirect income earning by reducing cost of crafting, to be balanced against each other. The only distinction is really availability of appropriate activities in a given locale, but that is a factor of environment not special character build per se.
In that light, I think his attempt to use Fortune-based Crit upgrade Feat for Crafting to grossly violate that general dynamic. So for that reason I am happy disallowing said Fortune-based Crafting Feat while in downtime... Which is a rule conveyed by the rules currently, even if we can say the phrasing is suboptimal and it's location is inconvenient and counterintuitive. Reality is we can complain about such things for many rules, but that doesn't negate them existing.
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So for that reason I am happy disallowing said Fortune-based Crafting Feat while in downtime... Which is a rule conveyed by the rules currently, even if we can say the phrasing is suboptimal and it's location is inconvenient and counterintuitive. Reality is we can complain about such things for many rules, but that doesn't negate them existing.
I think you're off on a few points. For one, the rules on downtime activities don't actually say that. They say the opposite, that abilities that you can apply all the time are perfectly fine. Another, completely unrelated rule, suggests that they aren't supposed together...but again, those are rules in a completely different section that reference another rule that doesn't exist. To try to argue that's some definitive, clear-cut ruling seems like a huge stretch.
For another, simply banning Assurance doesn't actually fix the 'problem' here. The engine behind this combo is Impeccable Craft turning successful craft checks into critical successes, which translates into extra income. No Assurance makes it less reliable, but you're getting +2 to you checks thanks to specialty crafting and +1 (or more) from tools... so at the absolute worst on any check you could pass with assurance you're passing on a 7. Better if you have any amount of positive int or the DC isn't the maximum possible for assurance to work.
For a third, this isn't the only feat combo in the game that can be used to improve the amount of income you earn in a specific way. The simple fact that impeccable crafting even exists at all kinda undermines your insistence that all forms of earning gold via downtime are meant to be the same no matter what.
So... I explicitly wrote that I don't care where in the book a rule is stated, there is nothing in book saying a rule is only valid if it is in "appropriate" section. Maybe this seems like a bad place, or even "weird" as you stated yourself, but I can dislike other editing decisions of Paizo as well... that doesn't discount what is stated by the rules. Basically you're assuming this is an error. Maybe it is, but I don't see any proof of that for now. It's a straightforward reading of the rules that Fortune can't effect Downtime, even if explained in obtuse way. The rules say Fortune doesn't work for Rituals like other Downtime activities, the only way to ignore that for Downtime is to ignore the entire rule for Rituals as well.
More generally, I don't see Impeccable Crafting as ideal way to earn income in general, which is how topic is framed. You can't use it for "Gaining an Income" with Craft skill, only when crafting one type of item. If you sell it, you lose some value, so you only really gain it's full theoretical value when using the item yourself. Assuming you have need for X item, once you have the level relevant version of it, how is producing more useful for you personally? Positing infinite personal demand for X, consuming all of your personal wealth, isn't really viable because there is variety of "baseline magic items". This entire discussion also ignores REAL "ease", in that Crafting is not always possible in all conditions. Certainly it always requires putting up the minimum material cost, which other Earn Income activities don't, and if you only have 1 week of downtime and that isn't enough to complete your item you must either pay the remainder of full cost or leave the item in partial state of crafting, keeping your wealth in unusable state.
I have a question about the fabricated connections.
You can roll Deception in place of a different skill when attempting to Earn Income, Make an Impression, Request, or Subsist. You can use Fabricated Connections to Make an Impression or Request once per day, and you can also use it once per week to Earn Income or Subsist.
For example, if I have a 24 days downtime, does it mean that I can use only fabricated connections during a day by week ?
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My group has a setup where we have an alchemy lab set up in the back, so my alchemist can Craft on the road. The GM assigns a -2 penalty, but with impeccable crafter, I make a solid amount of money, although most of it goes into the group coffers as items.
I think the answer to this question has a lot of table variance. In my game, I assume the 4 days before crafting is gathering materials and securing a workshop, so if you already have materials and a workshop, you can just get going, and I assume finding a job for Earn Income takes the same amount of time as setting up to craft; in a city where you are well established, this basically takes no time, in a new place, you need to look around. Most jobs are level-2, but if you establish your reputation, do searching, etc, you can get up to you level. Going above your level usually requires you or a teammate to Gather Information and often Making an Impression on a wealthy client.
I also let people use non Lore skills without the earn income action to get money, but I assign penalties, usually by just giving the hard adjustment. This is because I assume that part of the lore skill is professional knowledge; medicine give you the knowledge to heal people, not the knowledge on how to earn the most money as a doctor, thievery lets you steal things, but doesn't tell you where all the best marks are, etc.
That said, I do let people with lore skills and an applicable mainline skill use the more favorable attribute for earning income with the lore if they can give a good explaination; so if you have underworld lore and thievery, I'd let you make a dex based underworld lore if you say you want to make money by stealing, a doctor with medicine and physican lore could use wis by saying they just treat wound/disease, etc.
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I think (I forget where it was stated) that highly specific rules surmount basic rules is the rule of thumb the Paizo guys follow. With that, the Fortune thing is really only talking about Rituals, but it seems to reference something left on the cutting room floor during the editorial process, which means it's probably not an intended (lack of) interaction. So, my best guess, is that they actually intended Assurance to work on downtime. This is probably more of a Rules forum topic than a General topic at this point, but that's my take on it.
Does Assurance work with Impeccable crafter? Assurance removes the roll, and Impeccable Crafter explicitly discusses what happens when you roll. Arguably, that would cause Impeccable Crafter to not trigger. I'm not saying that this necessarily *shouldn't* work, but I think that it would at minimum be a reasonable GM interpretation that the two don't work together.
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Does Assurance work with Impeccable crafter? Assurance removes the roll, and Impeccable Crafter explicitly discusses what happens when you roll. Arguably, that would cause Impeccable Crafter to not trigger. I'm not saying that this necessarily *shouldn't* work, but I think that it would at minimum be a reasonable GM interpretation that the two don't work together.
The game uses succeed and roll a success interchangeably. If we're removing things that require a roll, that would be EVERYTHING assurance affects... "When you’re actively using a skill, often by performing one of its actions, you might attempt a skill check: rolling a d20 and adding your skill modifier."
Does Assurance work with Impeccable crafter? Assurance removes the roll, and Impeccable Crafter explicitly discusses what happens when you roll. Arguably, that would cause Impeccable Crafter to not trigger. I'm not saying that this necessarily *shouldn't* work, but I think that it would at minimum be a reasonable GM interpretation that the two don't work together.
This was talked about during the beta/playtest era, A LOT. "When you roll a success"/"Succeed at a check"/whatever the heck, what it's saying is "the outcome of your skill check is higher than the DC". Assurance bypasses the die and just gives you a number, but that number still interacts with degrees of success (and things that alter degrees of success) normally, as though you rolled and got that outcome. It was a long time ago, but I believe Mark Seifter was the one that gave us that ruling about halfway through the playtest, around the 1.3 update. Good times, I don't miss them :P
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Assurance give a garenteed success roll of 23 (level 7 base DC) assurance even garentees that the dc will stay within success due to it ignoring modifyers such as uncommon or rare or if you don't have approprate tools).
Assurance doesn’t help against higher DCs, which is what would happen when crafting Uncommon or Rare items. It only ignores penalties.
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Since we're back on this topic, and ignoring the 7th level premise, I think the cheaziest way would be...
Start at L1. Start young, not ridiculously young, but something with a fantasy precedent like 12. Start with assurance in your lore. Work 7 days a week for 10 years at L1 tasks. Start the game with over 11,782 gp at a respectable adventuring age of 22.
(It's late. I didn't really do the math.)
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Also, since this has been bumped, I'll point out that the question of using Assurance has been answered in the 3rd printing errata.
Page 500: Since people have been specifically asking about Assurance with respect to downtime, after "If something could apply constantly, or so often that it might as well be constant, it’s more likely to be used for downtime checks;" we added "for instance Assurance could apply." to show that it's something that could apply constantly.
And link here to the updated rule as well.
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Also, since this has been bumped, I'll point out that the question of using Assurance has been answered in the 3rd printing errata.
Page 500: Since people have been specifically asking about Assurance with respect to downtime, after "If something could apply constantly, or so often that it might as well be constant, it’s more likely to be used for downtime checks;" we added "for instance Assurance could apply." to show that it's something that could apply constantly.And link here to the updated rule as well.
Thank you! And that's awesome they addressed this.
