a. Do PCs need to be present during a building's construction after spending the capital needed to construct it, or can they leave the construction unsupervised while they undertake an adventure? Will the construction continue without them present, or do they have to be in town and devote time as in Step 2 of the Activity Phase?
b. Should I be calculating whether downtime events occur while the PCs are away to determine if they need to resolve anything when they get back?
c. Are buildings being constructed built one at a time, or simultaneously? I currently have construction set up with a queue (i.e. you have to finish one before moving onto the next)
Situation specifics: So I'm running the Iron Gods campaign for my players, and before they left Torch, they earned and spent sufficient capital to have construction workers begin building up a couple rooms for their home while they were away (I told them construction would go on without them, but I don't know whether this ruling is correct). They didn't hire any managers, so capital attrition occurs at the rate of 1 per 7 days.
They left on Sarenith 18th, and the first room on the construction queue (a Dojo) is scheduled to be finished on Erastus 14th. In the game, it's currently Erastus 5th, and I expect the PCs to be back in Torch by the time the Dojo would be finished being constructed or shortly after that. After the Dojo is finished, a Common Room is queued up for construction.
My plan was to calculate if any downtime events occurred during game prep time before the session the PCs get back home, but since they didn't hire a manager, treat any needed checks as auto-failures or have a friendly NPC in town (like Khonnir Baine) attempt the check on their behalf as a favor. If they hired a manager, I would've had the manager attempt the check. Is this the proper procedure?
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Some replies, not in question order:
c) It depends on the settlement dimension. See page 80 of the Ultimate Campaign book, under "Spending Limits".
If the PCs house is in a Thorp, that has a limit of 2 resources spent/day and you want to add:
1 Alchemy lab, cost to create 8 Goods, 1 Influence, 5 Labor, 1 Magic (390 gp); Time 16 days
and
1 Altar, cost to create 2 Goods, 1 Influence, 2 Labor, 1 Magic (210 gp); Time 4 days
you need the spend the resources required at the rate of 2 points/day and the room need to be built sequentially.
If the house is in a Metropolis, spending limit 65 points/day, they can be built at the same time.
a) P. 92, Time: "You must be in the settlement at the start of the construction or recruitment period, but don’t have to spend any of your downtime days to begin construction or recruitment.", so the work advance even if the PCs aren't present.
b) GM dependant. P. 83, Downtime events phase: "For convenience, the GM may increment the chance of having an event and roll for events only when you are in the settlement, as dealing with events while you are away for long periods creates extra bookkeeping." That implies that the events are meant to be rolled regardless of the presence or absence of the PCs, but you can choose to roll them only when they are present.
Personally, if I had the time, I would roll them regardless of the presence of the PCs. Depending on the event it could have long-lasting effects that affect the PCs when they return or be ended and only cited when they return.
As an example, the PCs have built an Alchemy shop and left it in the hands of a production and sales manager.
While they are away you roll the event Discovery:
"Discovery: The introduction of a new material makes your alchemical recipes more potent, leading to booming sales. For 1d6 days, the business gains a +10 bonus on its first check to generate capital each day."
The PCs return after a week, so the event has already ended. The manager can say something like "Brekken did bring us a particularly potent batch of hiptkeria herb, so we were able to craft several alchemical healing items that were better than average. They did sell like crazy and we made some extra money."
If you roll the event that requires some skill roll the manager can make them.
It all depends on how important is the managing of the building when compared to the adventure flow.
Personally, I think that a 20% base chance of meaningful events is too high and appropriate only if you play a fast-paced campaign. In most jobs, you haven't a meaningful event every 5 days.
Naturally, the definition of meaningful can vary.
A barroom brawl in your tavern can be a daily event, but it is part of the day-to-day management of the tavern, not a meaningful event.
An excellent and helpful reply, thank you.
However, regarding question c, Torch is a Large Town, so the spending limit is 25.
Each of the rooms on the queue have capital costs of 15, so it sounds like it would be sequential. However, according to the rules, as per page 90:
"Each room and team costs one or more kinds of capital (gp, Goods, Influence, Labor, or Magic). when you construct a building or create an organization, determine what rooms or teams you want, add up the gp, Goods, Influence, Labor, and Magic prices for these rooms, and spend that capital to begin construction or start recruiting."
Doesn't this imply that once the capital is spent, it doesn't matter what the capital spending limit is, so long as the PCs spend the capital over the time necessary to reach the cost of the room. Thus, it takes a number of days in smaller settlements for PCs to gather up and organize the resources needed to start construction. Otherwise, PCs could never construct even a single bedroom in a Thorp if the spending limit inhibited whether a room could be constructed.
To use your example, it would take 7 days to spend/allocate the capital just to start construction of the alchemy lab (since Magic doesn't count toward the spending limit), then the requisite 16 days to build it. But then after that capital is spent and construction of the lab begins, couldn't characters spend 3 of those 16 days spending/allocating the capital toward starting the altar? If so, the alchemy lab and altar would start being built simultaneously, with the former having 13 days left and the altar with 4 days left.
So theoretically, my PCs could spend 15 capital one day to start construction of the Dojo plus 10 toward the Common Room, and the following day spend 5 to finish the spending of capital needed to start the Common Room, and then after that both rooms are constructed simultaneously?
Despite this rules reasoning, I'm a bit leery as to this interpretation due to situations where several rooms would be constructed simultaneously. But at the same time, if the capital were spent over time, it still follows the spending limit rule. Perhaps you or someone else might have more insight to share on this?
Also, there's the situation where the PCs were willing to reduce the time necessary by spending more Labor (as per page 92 under Time). I'm guessing this means they couldn't accelerate it further if the increased Labor cost would put the room past the daily spending limit?
In addition, the whole spending limit section is unclear whether it's per PC or for the whole group. I'm guessing they meant the latter, because otherwise PCs could just get NPCs to spend capital on their behalf. xD
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As I read it, the spending limit means that, in that location, you can't find enough workers to do more than that level of work in a day. You can spend the work on consecutive days and the amount done will stack up.
Note that you can spend extra labor to reduce the time required to build something, but that works only if you can spend it, i.e. if the location allows you to allocate more resources to the job.
The use of the term "spending" for different things in different sections of the rules (like the use of the term level in other parts of the rules) generates some confusion, but the Spending limit doesn't refer to what is spend for the whole project but to the speed at wick you can allocate what was spent to the progress of the work.
Spending Limits
The population of a settlement limits how much help you can get on a given day. The following numbers represent the limit of how much Goods, Influence, and Labor you can utilize in settlement each day. Even if you have a lot of Goods and Labor at your disposal from favors and such, a tiny settlement might have only a few hands to spare to turn that capital into finished projects.
Time: This entry indicates how long it takes to complete the room or recruit the team. You may divide the Time price for a room by 2, 3, or 4 by spending 2, 3, or 4 times its Labor price.
To use the Alchemy lab in a thorp example, it requires: "8 Goods, 1 Influence, 5 Labor, 1 Magic (390 gp); Time 16 days"
The guy having it built wants to build it as fast as possible, so he decides to cut down time with extra Labor and spend another 5 points of Labor to halve the time.
The cost, without the Magic part, now is: "8 Goods, 1 Influence, 10 Labor; Time 8 days".
He can build that?
In a day he can assign only 2 points of the spent resource to the projects and the project requires to assign 19 points to be completed, so, even with the extra flavor, it will require 19/2= 10 days to be completed. Better than the initial 16 days, but the limit imposed by the limited population of the Thorp didn't allow him to use the full benefit of the labor.
In a Large Town the extra Labor would have full effect, bringing down the needed time to 8 days.
The rules have you spend the resource at the start of the project for ease of bookkeeping and because you generally need your building materials and work crew at hand to start a project, but the spending limit limits how fast the project will progress.
All said and done, the downtime rules are guidelines, so you can tweak them to find what works best in your campaign.
Ah, I get what you're saying. In the case of singular rooms, the spending limit then isn't as much of a limitation with regards to what can be built, given you're dividing the cost of the room across the build time.
But if you wanted to construct an entire building, then it would slow down work because each room has to be built separately due to a lower labor pool.
So theoretically, in my Dojo and Common Room example, the Dojo could be completed within the time indicated (20 days) since it takes priority over the Common Room.
But with 10 more capital remaining on the spending limit after the Dojo work is allocated, the Common Room (which requires 15 capital) could be worked on, albeit at a slower rate (10/15, or 2/3 days of progress per day) until the Dojo is complete, after which the Common Room can be constructed at the normal speed.
So with this setup occurring, after 20 days of Dojo work, the Common Room would have 13-1/3 days completed, so then the Common Room would only need 3 more days to complete. Thus, both rooms could be constructed over the course of 23 days by making full use of the spending limit, as opposed to 36 days.
I think this is what I'll go with, since it makes the most sense.
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Yes, it works reasonably well, and seems to be intended to work that way.
Depending on the campaign circumstances the GM could do some adjustments.
Most APs are very fast-paced, so the GM could speed up construction to stay in the AP timeframe or (my preferred solution), slow down the AP timeline to allow for a more organic growth of the characters and the background.