Are my building costs correct? Should I avoid the Ultimate Campaign building rules?

[Zagig]

One of my players wants to build a guildhall for their mercenary company. He's taken the Leadership feat and will soon have a cohort and some followers. They are in a large city that generally has lots of adventurers.

He's calculated the cost of the building at about 8,000 gold using the room costs in UC. It's my understanding that this includes furniture, doors and windows and possibly the cost of the land as well.

This seems really cheap to me for such a big building. Okay, I know it's not going to be the 100,000 gold or so that it would have cost in AD&D 1e. I feel like we're missing something here that should make it more expensive. Is this correct?

If this calculation is correct, maybe I should just skip using the UC building rules and decide on my own how much it would cost. Have you found the UC building rules work really well for your campaign?

[AwesomenessDog]

You could probably double, triple or quadruple that amount to make it more realistic without destroying the point of the Kingdom Rules. In normal Kingdom management, you aren't some random person building from scratch through private contractors, you are the guy who goes to the guilds and tells them they will do this for this much, because the guilds are in your permanent salary, and operating on your land, and using materials that you provide from your mines and lumberyards.

A regular PC doesn't have all these discounts, and therefore shouldn't pay the normal price for a BP.

[HighLordNiteshade]

Zagig wrote:

He's calculated the cost of the building at about 8,000 gold using the room costs in UC. It's my understanding that this includes furniture, doors and windows and possibly the cost of the land as well. This seems really cheap to me for such a big building.

Stronghold Builder's Guidebook from 3.0/3.5 provides the following for a Basic Chapel: For a 20x20 building with 10' ceilings, including an altar, pews, a closet, and a religion icon costs 1,000 gp. It will seat between 30-40 people, depending on the layout.

I'm not sure how that size compares to your player's building, but it is a data point for you from another source to compare to UC.

[Diego Rossi]

8,000 gp are a good sum. My playing group has made a rough calculation of the purchasing power of a gp based on the cost of living and the consideration that the average living standards are lower than in modern times. An average lifestyle cost 10 gp/month. We decided that it was roughly equivalent to 500 Euro or Dollars/month (the accuracy of the conversion is so limited that it doesn't matter if you prefer € or $).
So an 8,000 gp building is the equivalent of a 400,000 Euro/Dollars building.

It all depends on what is present in the guildhall your players want to build and its location.
Offices, a meeting room, and maybe a small apartment for the guild master (cohort)? It seems appropriate.
Barracks for all the troops, with an armory, a smith, stables, a mess? Probably not, unless the number of soldiers is small.
If you want a separate room for married troops and NCOs it goes up again.

On the other hand, in a medieval/renaissance society the labor cost is low, it is the prices of the materials and the transportation that are high. And soldiers can do some of the work.

I would use the Downtime rules of Ultimate Campaign to see how much it will cost based on what they want to build.

Note that if the player wants to use his followers as a mercenary company he should pay them.
They will do work for him for free if they can, but being part of a mercenary company will use all of their time. They will be unusually loyal and disciplined, possibly the core of a larger unit, if he wants, but they will not work for board and food unless there are the chances of good plunder or there is a crisis that can be resolved in a reasonable time frame.
At the same time, they can provide an income, if they are a successful mercenary unit.

[LordKailas]

There are kingdom-building rules and then there are downtime-building rules. As AwesomenessDog points out the player shouldn't be using the kingdom rules unless they have an actual kingdom.

The downtime building rules state that a guild hall is the following

Buildings and Organizations wrote:

Guildhall

Create 67 Goods, 66 Labor (2,660 gp)

Rooms 1 Common Room, 1 Kitchen, 1 Lavatory, 2 Offices, 1 Secret Room, 1 Sitting Room, 2 Storages, 3 Workstations

The headquarters for a guild or similar organization.

So, the character could either purhcase a preconstructed building for 2,660 or they would need to spend 67 goods and 66 labor to have one built.

Assuming a guildhall isn't for sale they could purchase the goods and labor to have one built. Goods cost 20gp each and also labor costs 20gp each. 67x20+66x20 = 2,660.

8,000 is probably correct if the structure they want is substantially nicer than the standard guildhall.

For comparison, a Castle costs 7,390 gp, a noble villa costs 8,920 gp and a palace costs 19,640 gp.

So, their proposed guildhall is somewhere between a noble villa and a castle in terms of cost. Probably because (being a PC building) it's similarly fortified against assault or contains a number of very expensive rooms.

If you feel this is too cheap you could always charge the character for the land separately and say that this cost represents the building alone.

[avr]

I'd think the big cost of a mercenary guildhall would be creating and maintaining connections with the mercs. The hall itself is probably nothing special. Build them a pretty mansion and they'll wreck the place in no time.

[Mark Hoover 330]

To generate the cost of building the Mercenary Guildhall the PC needs to calculate the cost of each individual Room and Team they're creating and add them all together. 8,000 GP is likely correct. Each room comes with the most basic furnishings and appointments for it's function. An Office comes with a locking door, a window if it is on an exterior wall, a desk and chair. There is an upgrade that PCs can pay for that adds lavish furnishings, if the PC so wishes.

Ultimately it's up to you as the GM what rules you want to use or costs you want to enforce. If you want the PCs to spend more, charge them for the land, taxes and duties to the local government, guild charter costs to have an actual guild approved by the state, etc. You could also charge them for excess training gear, additional material for targets or practice dummies, backup tableware and mugs for when the rowdies inevitably break the first set, and so on.

Purely by RAW though, the 8,000 is probably correct. The UC Downtime building rules are meant to be a convenient way to handwave the construction of a business or organization that eats up a lot of time and resources from the PC(s) to construct, returns very little in the way of actual GP profit, and is generally useful in creating greater amounts of Capital which can in turn be used to create cheaper items for the characters or help them with some skill checks or actions while in the settlement they're building in.

If that appeals, use these rules. If it doesn't, you may want to use the construction costs of older editions of D&D.