Applicable Bonuses on Earn Income checks

[John Woodford]

Can circumstance bonuses (e.g. from Specialty Crafting or Virtuosic Performer) be applied to skill checks to Earn Income? I didn't find anything about it in Lorespire or this forum.

[Tomppa]

There's nothing that would limit or prevent CIRCUMSTANCE bonuses from applying to earn income checks in general. However, some bonuses do not apply to Earn Income actions:

For example, Specialty crafting applies to Crafting checks to CRAFT items of the specified type: Earn Income is a different action/activity, it's not Craft (which is a specific action under the Crafting skill), so it would not benefit an Earn Income check. However, if you had let's say Blacksmithing as your specialty and you spent your downtime to Craft a sword or armor, then the circumstance bonus would apply to your crafting check.

Virtuosic performer on the other hand, applies whenever you're attempting a Performance check. Earn income is specific action under the performance skill - if you were doing an earn income check using performance, you would benefit from virtuosic performance, because it applies to performance checks. Note the difference between the two feats: First one applies a bonus to an action called Craft, while the second applies a bonus Performance checks (regardless of what the underlying action is).

A more common example of this distinction is the feat Acrobatic performer: You can roll an Arcobatics check instead of a Performance check when using the Perform action. It doesn't replace all uses of performance with acrobatics: you couldn't, for example, do earn income with performance and replace the check with acrobatics instead, because the action you're taking would be Earn Income, not Perform.

This issue often pops up with perfromance/perform and crafting/craft because those skills and their respective actions are very similarly named. The difference would be clearer if the actions were called something different, like "act" and "create" instead of perform and craft.

[John Woodford]

Thanks, that makes sense It wasn't clear to me whether the intent was to make the effect of the two feats different for the purposes of the Earn Income Action--the flavor text for use of the Craft skill to earn income specifically calls out making items to sell, and it seemed odd that you'd be better at making an item for yourself than you are at making it for trade. OTOH, using Craft to Earn Income is heavily abstracted, so there's no guarantee that you'd be using it to make something you specialized in.