My Party decided on an adventurers guild as a setup for the campaing. I really like the idea, enables some easy questing with occassional oddball quests in between.
We soon came to talk about fees for the guild and we are all not sure avout how to go about it.
Skilled hirelings are half a gold a day, which is not a lot for the average adventurer
the next more expansive service starts at 4 gold a day which in turn seems quite expansive
So, question to all gamemasters - how would you go on about assigning fees for your guilds customers and rewards for your campaigns heroes?
I guess the first question is how much money is the party bringing in? Is 4 gold a significant portion of their income?
If so, then maybe you should look and see if a fixed share based income might be cheaper. For example, a party of 5 players might be receiving 20 gold a day. That means that the hireling get 20% of their earnings, effectively. However, if you split it as a "party of 6 characters", then it would be lower at 1/6 or ~16.6%.
And of course, if there is a large difference between the party and the hireling, then the hireling might get an even smaller share. For example, the shares might be divided into 16, and the hireling only gets 1 while each player gets 3 (5 playersx3=15).
This disproportionate split seems odd, but it brings my mind back to discussion of shares paid to sailors up until at least the 1800's (I am vaguely remembering some scene from moby dick here). Since adventuring has similar profit/risk ratios as sailing, and there might be large skill gaps, then this might be appropriate.
if there is a guild overseeing work and helping to broker deals, then reputation might also play a role. If your party is new and unknown, and the hireling an experienced local, then it might be harder to get a lopsided share deal in the party's favor. I think the guild might tend towards even splits just to save on the arguments, hassle, and back stabbing that uneven splits might attract.
This could also be a quest hook. If someone is "too" willing to take a lopsided deal... they might be planning to betray you and take a 100% share.
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I think you should just allocate some of the treasure budget from the treasure guidelines to bounty/job payments. Put in whatever treasure you want them to find in that particular quest, then the rest you put in as the reward money for finishing it. You can safely allocate the same part of the budget to multiple jobs multiple times, just make it so that when they pick one, by the time they get back the other jobs have been completed by other parties.
It actually makes more sense for the coins part of the treasure to be in the form of rewards and bounties - most monster lairs probably wouldn't really have 1000 gold coins lying around.
We soon came to talk about fees for the guild and we are all not sure avout how to go about it.
Are the players the owners and operators of this adventurer's guild? They accept wages/bounties/commissions from townsfolk and have overhead costs that they have to pay.
Or are they hired or freelance agents to an existing adventurer's guild where the NPC guild masters own and run the guild and they just accept jobs from them?
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Before you spend too much time mathing a balanced fee, ask yourself (and the group) how fun it is to do accounting.
If the guild is primarily a resting point in between short adventures, I suggest just throwing realism out the window, forgetting the economics of running a guild, and just saying the PCs pay a percentage (10%?) of whatever they earn to the guild. Bump whatever you'd give to them by 10% so that the guild doesn't affect their earnings.
If running the guild is fun, and players want the experience of running a successful enterprise, it's worth a little effort to see what's balanced and what makes sense for the overall economy. But if they're relying heavily on hirelings or other people taking the risk, their share of the profits are going to be much lower - adventurers only earn as much as they do because they're assuming all the risk of adventuring.
Okay as side notes.
The NPCs just founded the guild in an old building they got from a relative, so they are their own bosses.
They have (up to now) no running costs except for basic living costs
Also thanks already for the answers so far, there were already some useful infos.
The NPCs just founded the guild in an old building they got from a relative, so they are their own bosses.
They have (up to now) no running costs except for basic living costs
Nice. Then I would pay more attention to the wealth-by-level tables instead of the hired services table. You can use the hired services table to account for what the typical client will pay for the job to get done. But compensate for that with either treasure found during the job or intermittent high-value clients willing to pay a lot more for a particular job.
Next decision point: I expect that currently the party characters are the only adventurers working in this guild. And as you said, they currently have no overhead. If either of those changes, you may want to revisit things. Additional NPC adventurers will want to be paid and that money has to come from somewhere. Similarly overhead costs such as business licensing, advertising, or property taxes will have to be funded somehow. And it shouldn't come out of the character's expected equipment allowance built into the wealth-by-level table.
And if it sounds fun to have that level of realism, but not fun to have that much math: have them hire some NPC adventurers, and an NPC manager to run the place. Then simply handwave away all of the minutia about specific values. The NPC adventurers bring in enough additional money to cover their own costs and overhead and the NPC manager takes care of all of the paperwork of paying the relevant overhead costs.
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Another thing you can do is use the Earn Income table for inspiration.