Re: [RULES] Ultimate Campaign - Downtime
Ok, I have looked at the Ultimate Campaign Downtime rules in respect to Organizations and Buildings, Capital and such.
The rules are kind of convoluted, but the concept of being able to purchase building and creating teams of people to man an organization seems like a wonderful idea in general. I was willing to overlook some of the complexity for the goal of being able to build a building and teams. Granted, it provides a limited ability to effectively get certain things for half price if you follow through some extra steps, but that in itself doesn't seem like a game killer, just a reason to consider using it.
However, some other things sort of made me concerned it might be a little broken, the rules seemed to imply people would want to simply combine bonuses rather than rolling multiple times. Rolling once of just taking 10 with one roll. This of course was like taking 0 on all the other 'potential' rolls, so it seemed counter intuitive. Granted, limiting the number of businesses one could manage seemed reasonable and might be able to be used to limit the number of rolls one could make.
Next, someone pointed out in a forum post, that with daily income checks, many buildings or teams would even without direct supervision, would pay for themselves in profit in less than a year. This seems contrary to common sense, and additionally is inconsistent with cash investments as defined by the Investments rules in the same book. It maintains one would normally expect an annual return on investment closer to some smaller percentage of the original investment, not anything even close to over 100%. That seems generally unreasonable for the rules to easily allow, and made me consider if adjustments would have to be made to utilize the rules.
Another individual proposed changing income rolls to weekly, and this begins to make some sense, but I wasn't set on it yet. I decided to look at a couple other benchmarks mentioned in other rules.
First, unskilled laborers have long been listed as getting a general average pay of about 1sp per day. Looking over the Cost of Living rules, something that has been around for a while. Poor is 3gp per month, or about 1sp per day. If you look at running a bunk room for profit, one tenth of that would be a share of about 8sp per day if the building got income every day. That would at best leave them 2cp for food, and nothing to pay for expenses related to a spouse or children, or anything else at all. If income(rent) was collected every week, if we rounded income up to 1sp per week as the person's share of rent, that would leave them 4 to 5 more sp to put towards dependents, food, etc. It also opens up a remote possibility that two parents, whom are unskilled laborers, might be able to afford a house, which would run about 9sp if done weekly, leaving the potential of being able to pay that with two or three unskilled workers if they don't have a big food bill. This could still potentially fall under the poor standard of living if it were a pretty basic house.
Now lets look at Average, by the rules you are supposed to live somewhere private, something like a house, or private apartment, that amounts to about 3.3sp per day in your 'budget' If houses' drew rent income daily, based on their base income, that 9sp would leave you with over a 5sp deficit before even looking into food or other costs. That means that someone wouldn't be able to afford to live in a private house unless they have two or more others breadwinners living with you. Yes, by definition, standard is supposed to provide private living space. I could have bought into a spouse living with someone, but getting into requiring three, is by definition a form of communal living, which Average, by definition is supposed to be the step into.
This seems to show that at least twice, we almost have to insure that income from a basic building such as a house (to be rented) needs to be cut down to once a week to make some basic predefined economies work out as intended.
Wealthy, the daily amount goes to 33sp. While they could have been able to afford the little house, even at daily cost, it doesn't reflect the wealth aspect it should. As I looked at it, presuming the weekly framework, it occurred to me, that 100gp/month was around 25gp/week. This would easily be able to be seen as earning/purchase/spending 1 unit of Influence capital per week, and 10gp of other expenses maintaining a larger than normal house. Honestly this made a certain sense based on the description.
Extravagant, multiply the above by 10. It is the first one that mentions someone owning the building they live in. However, I think it is a reasonable for some in the Wealthy category might own their own home as well. Not that renting one would be out of the question in that case either. Most extravagant individuals probably would own their own homes and estates however, even if indirectly. I'm thinking that this involves constantly purchasing and spending capital such as influence in their hometown, building and maintaining their extravagant lifestyle, with people depending on them for their own livelihood.
I'm thinking that Wealthy and Extravagant may well be allowed to write off a certain amount of maintenance of Organizations and Buildings, using a portion of their cost of living they pay.
Next problem:
Buildings produce profit (now probably switched to a weekly scale) when run as a public business for profit. If a building is not conducting public business, you don't make a profit. Which seems like a reasonable rule. Until you realize that a early premise of the rules was to have buildings not have an upkeep cost, simply applying the default rule that the upkeep costs were taken out of your profits, so you don't have to do extra math. The problem becomes, if you run the building as a private party house for you and your friends, it doesn't make a profit. Cool, that is simple enough, but the part that is unreasonable, is that while you sacrificed your profits, you still acquired no upkeep cost. Somehow you have to pay the staff who maintain your party house, which you only allow you and your friends to enjoy! By default, you have no such cost, with the rules as is.
At a minimum, I think if you are going to maintain a building as somewhat active at a private level, you should have to pay at least the GP cost of what it would have made if run it for profit. Alternately, I could see someone producing/and buying a relevant unit or more of capital. If you are using your private house to hold parties to influence some of the important citizens, that will cost you the cost of the influence, which will likely be more than the base gp cost. That seems like a reasonable use of such a home, even if 'private'.
Paying this basic gp upkeep would probably be minimally staffed, using the building to produce capital would reflect calling people in to work extra.
To consider a building more than at most minimally staffed, there might be an expectation that a certain minimum production of capital is done per week/month based on what it could produce. I'm working on how this should potentially be calculated.
Teams are even more important in my opinion that they have an upkeep cost if they are being kept private. If they are not being run to provide an actual income for you via the public, then in my opinion they really need to have an upkeep cost. [you might be able to let some buildings, such as a shack out in the wilderness, just sit for a while, with minimal impact] Teams will want to keep getting paid to stay around.
In my opinion, if they aren't producing a form of capital (or a GP from public work) then a team is merely being held on a retainer. They aren't actively working for you. The retainer would be the amount of profit they would have made in profit. The staff come in to check in, verify if they are needed, get their pay and leave if nothing to do. They may actually after checking in may go and work privately themselves, even using equipment you provided (but they have to maintain it out of their own work) so you don't get additional costs due to their work. This retainer however means that when you come back, and have work for them, they will be prepared to come back and tackle projects you bring forward for them. Having them working daily for you, requires them either making a profit, or contributing towards producing some form of capital the can contribute towards.
If you have an alchemist on retainer, paying them only their retainer, you can't come back expecting them to have produced a dozen potions of healing for you for free just because they are around. On the other hand, if you have him (his team) working, and successfully produce a unit of Magic Capital, and pay for it (50gp for 100gp unit) it would seem pretty reasonable for you to turn in this unit of magic that was produced for two healing potions.
Note that if they don't have somewhere to work, the rules say you produce half as much profit/capital. (however, for the 'support costs/retainer' i'm suggesting, this isn't halved, as you are presumed to be paying some sort of support for the building you provide them, if you are providing them a building)
Any thoughts on this beyond.
[just scrap downtime Capital/Organizations/Buildings, its broken]
I'm trying to find a way to use as much of it as possible as closely as intended while bringing it more in line with some of the economics that are more consistent with other established parts of the game.
It seems like for Organizations/Buildings making their gp income rolls be weekly seems very achievable/workable fixing a lot of the scaling. What am I missing? (other than expenses of course for private holdings) Are there other reasonable ways of calculating that?
Suggestions and feedback would be very welcome.