Adventurers making money with profession

[Shabe]

Lets see are exotic weapon merchants renowned for being extremely wealthy? is he going to sell in bulk or to individual orders? if he wants to go at it full time then perhaps he will get together enough money, to buy a house and live comfortably.
If he makes the weapon at base price of 90% phb then sells at 100% he will probably get enough money to allow him to keep his smithy going, travel the country a bit with his horse and cart and keep him in beer and food. In my eyes the 4e default world doesn't contain many other heroes, the market would be very small so he likely wouldn't be seeing a return in his investment.

So basically if he did it part time then he could make a few gold on the side enough to take care of inconsequential stuff like inn fees and food. Perhaps if he made the boasts in the right place to the right person you could run a skill challenge to see if he impressed someone enough with his weapons to get a bulk order in, then perhaps you could reward it with a treasure parcel and some xp.
The making of the weapons is automatic but you can rule the time it takes, 2 hours simple, 1 day military, 1 Week for superior.

The thing is you probably don't want to upset the treasure/money balance in the game, but it can add some nice flavour to the character, but it can't make a +1 weapon out of thin air.

 

[Obryn]

I have a player who plans to make an exotic weapon merchant in a campaign I'm planning.

How would you handle such a thing in your 4.0 chronicle with the new rules?

Sounds like a neat idea!

Honestly, though, this doesn't sound much like any normal use of "profession" mechanics to me. Instead, it sounds like quests. Heck, you could build an entire campaign around this character.

QUEST: Thag the Orc has a dream that he will one day own the Choppa of Destiny. However, a group of Hill Giants are currently using it for food preparation. If you can bring it to him, he's agreed to pay 1,500 gp. Also, you'll get 1,000 XP or something.

QUEST: Filifalfilifallafallafila the Elf is looking for a very ornate longbow. If you can find one for him(?), you'll get 2,000 gp.

...and so on.

Really, for interesting stuff like this, turning it into a profession roll is ... well, kinda lame, IMHO.

-O

 

[lukelightning]

One of my biggest problems with 4e is that the designers have decided on what they think is fun and chosen not to support anything else.

Or you could say that they, through experience, research, and market testing, found out the areas of the game that are truly core and supported those to make the game as universal as possible while still staying true to the concept of "Dungeons and Dragons."

Nothing is preventing WotC from coming out with supplement books that deal with economics of D&D, business rules, etc.

But for them to include these in the core books? Not a good idea. There are hardly any business/economics rules in any RPG, and those that do exist all carry flaws. Even if they did include them in the core books, there would be just as many people upset that the rules were unrealistic or impractical or just plain wrong.

 

[Mirtek]

Quite a few famous FR adventurers are running their own businesses.

Mirt the moneylender, Bronwyn who sells much of the loot from her adventurs in her own antique shop, Jarlaxe who is head of a mercenaries company, Danilo Thann who is working in his family's business and running a bard college, ...

 

[Verys Arkon]

If you have access to the 3.5 DMG II, there are some good rules for running a business (page 180-188) that you could probably adapt without much trouble. Just because you are using 4e doesn't mean all your 3.5 material is completely useless Alternatively, if you prefer a more abstract approach, framing the character's business as an 'affiliation' from PHB II could work too.

 

[tafkamhokie]

Reasonably, the cost you can sell something at is say 40-100% above the cost of production/acquisition depending on how many products are available that could be reasonable replacements for what you sell. Some things can modify that outside of that range. For example, trade goods from the East could be sold in early modern Europe at 200% or 300% markup because of the cost, difficulty, and danger in getting those goods to the end market. On the opposite extreme, highly exchangable and prevelent commodity goods might only have a 10% markup. Once you take into account other expenses (overhead, labor, taxes, etc.), the profit on a transaction is probably much less than the gross markup - probably only a 10th of that.

Not to be persnickety, but you can sell something for whatever the customer is willing to pay. No more. No less. Your cost affects your profitability and how long you can stay in business, but it has no real effect on price.

Back to the OP, has the player considered just taking a business course where they play small business simulation games? If he really wants to run a business (i.e. keep track of inventory, manage costs, market his products, etc) it sounds like that would be more appropriate than a D&D game. If he just wants a background for his character that is interesting, that is different.

But the game assumes the players are (and want to be) heroes who wander around doing heroic things. While running a business can be interesting and profitable and even fun to some, it is not really heroic...at least not within the framework of D&D.

If you want to carry through with a business simulation, you may want to contact a nearby college and see what their business school uses for small business simulation games and see if you can get their class notes and a copy of the software. That is going to be far more useful than anything in the PHB or DMG.

 

[webrunner]

D&D and it's ilk are just not designed to be economic simulations, they're sword-and-sorcery simulations. When the standard "state" for an adventurer is "swinging a sword at a dragon" then "here's 15 pages on supply routes" is not exactly what they wanted to focus on. It was a choice, and it's not that they're saying "don't be a merchant" they're saying "Most of your play is going to be attacking monsters. There's no real room in that for economic rules". That's what a) supplements and b) other RP systems are for.

 

[Logos7]

And that's supposed to be good for some reason?

moral of the story: DnD doesn't do economics because economics suck.

what would really happen when pc's go to small towns flood the economy with gold and then leave? stupid rates of inflation. If this happened at all semi regularly it would never stop ( finding coins that are on value with yours but that you can't account for because they belong to ancient civilation are bad for economics mmmkay). There was an article on paizo a while back about how this would work that was preety informative about the things you would have to consider but the jeist was: Poor people don't use cash, and rampant inflation helps ensure everyone is poor.

Boo Hoo can't sell your sword for more than 1/5th of what you bought it for. First of all I don't consider this to be terribly unrealistic (especially if it is used but you can think of a lot of things that loose immediate value for just "being off the lot" per say). It would certainly be more realistic to offer crap loads of gold for the sword and just increase the price of everything else by a random large interger everytime you shop. (I'm thinking of instances where in periods of heavy inflation baskets of money where stolen, and the money POURED OUT because it was so worthless. Period where people would be paid twice a day so they can go out and buy things before their pay devalued before they got home)

Moral of the story. These rules for making money as a Pc shopkeep are as unrealistic as the 1/5 rule and quite possibly more so. I would suggest following the quest modle that was mentioned above if you really want to do this. and hey look the ruleset supports it....

 

[Cavalorn]

How would you handle such a thing in your 4.0 chronicle with the new rules?

I'd write new rules. An entire crafting system, using skill checks to 'salvage' raw materials (Nature to skin a buck, for example; Dungeoneering to extract ore) and then adopt a system modelled on rituals, whereby each kind of item had a ritual-like process to make it which you could master (in the same way that rituals are mastered).

It's quite surprising to me that with all the MMORPG comparisons that people are making, 4E doesn't have a crafting system in place at all, with the exception of enchanting items and brewing potions.

 

[Celebrim]

Not to be persnickety, but you can sell something for whatever the customer is willing to pay. No more. No less. Your cost affects your profitability and how long you can stay in business, but it has no real effect on price.

Yes, and no. You can sell something for whatever the customer is willing to pay, but that doesn't really provide us any explanation for why something has the price that it does.

If you set a certain price far in excess of your cost, then observers will percieve that they can manufacture or obtain the good themselves and sell it at a lucrative profit while undercutting the price point you've set.

If you set a certain price far in excess of your cost, then buyers will percieve that the costs of going elsewhere to obtain the product more cheaply are smaller than the costs of obtaining the product here.

If you set a certain price far in excess of your cost, then buyers will percieve that there are similar products which they can substitute for your product at a lower cost.

If you set a certain price far in excess of your cost, then buyers will question the utility of the product at that cost. That is, they may note that they cannot realize a profit from the purchase of your product.

All of these factors together limit what you can reasonably charge.

However, I wasn't attempting to assert any sort of formal ecnomic theory with respect to how the price of goods is set. I was merely grabbing a range of numbers I thought representative of what is actually observed in the market. That is, regardless of how prices are actually set, if you examine the market sellers are setting prices that are roughly a 50% markup. Various factors - some of which I mentioned - effect that, but 'you can sell things for what buyers are willing to pay' is utterly nonexplanatory from a mechanical perspective.

Back to the OP, has the player considered just taking a business course where they play small business simulation games? If he really wants to run a business (i.e. keep track of inventory, manage costs, market his products, etc) it sounds like that would be more appropriate than a D&D game.

Again, given that 'run a merchant company' is something a great many groups have historically done when playing a D&D game, how is your answer any different than saying, "Sounds like badwrongfun to me."?

But the game assumes the players are (and want to be) heroes who wander around doing heroic things. While running a business can be interesting and profitable and even fun to some, it is not really heroic...at least not within the framework of D&D.

That is either a serious failure of imagination or a terrible amount of hubris, or perhaps both.

If you want to carry through with a business simulation, you may want to contact a nearby college and see what their business school uses for small business simulation games and see if you can get their class notes and a copy of the software. That is going to be far more useful than anything in the PHB or DMG.

So you are suggesting that a modern business simulation is a useful model of running say a 16th century inspired high seas merchantile company on a fantastic world where magic and monsters abound? Are you really suggesting that such 'small business simulation games' would be useful, or is this in fact just a snarky dismissal of the OP in disguise - the polite equivalent of saying 'Go away. We don't want your kind here?'