Characters Running Shops? Any rules on this?

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

Hey BigFreekinGoblinoid,

This doesn't look like it has the kind of details that I need for running the shops, but it sure does look useful for my campaign!


Rock on.

Great ! Ummm - which one?

This might be helpful if you want to actually role-play haggling: ( I lifted & modified this from " The Serpent Amphora") :

Both parties roll a Diplomacy or Profession ( Merchant ) check. If the seller wins, the base price is raised by 5% for every point above the buyer's result. If the buyer wins, the price is decreased by 5% for evey point above the seller's score. Price should never drop to less than 50% or increase to more than 150% of normal costs.

 

[Arnwyn]

Ah... a D&D pet peeve of mine. It's the year 2002, and there are *still* no adequate rules for PCs running their own shops/taverns/inns/whatever on their down time, or rules for buying/selling goods (and shipping them). What if PCs have a ship, and decide (since they're sailing to a particular city during their adventure anyways) they'll ship cargo as well? How much can they buy items for? How much can they sell it for? What modifiers apply? *sigh*

[rant] This is an example of where d20 publishers aren't meeting gaming needs (how many more books of prestige classes & feats do we need?). No wonder sales are dropping. It's a glut alright - a glut of "same old, same old". [/rant]

Anyways, there's an article in Dragon Magazine during the first half of 2000 or so (pre-3e) called "Ill Gotten Goods" (or something close to that) that has some decent guidelines on running a business. It would be a good start - it includes your starting investment, expenses, profit - but is fairly simplistic and any situational/advanced modifiers will have to be added by the DM. I'm sure glad it was published, though.

 

[Neo]

I think shop rules shouldn't be too difficult to work out...

let see firstly, I don't think Profession skill is relevant for running a shop (i.e being an employer) as it is more pertinent for employees of someone else.

So where to start..

CONCEPT
What kind of shop is it... lets say an Inn you could use various sytems for building the Inn like the Stronghold Builders Guidebook and so forth...

SERVICES
But for a mechanics standpoint lets assume you have your site for the Inn, I would say first you need to look at what services are being offered, with an Inn i'd list the following.
1. Drinking Customer
2. Food
3. Boarding Customers
4. Stabling
These things are your sources of income.

PATRONAGE
Next you need to consider how many people will be using these services each open period, this is likely to be tied to the size, capacity, location and quality as well as the reputation of your facility.
So lets assume the standard inn has a capacity for 50 people in the bar room, 20 of whom could be seated and hence feeding customers, and has a capacity to sleep 30 people 1o of whom in private rooms the remaining 20 in a common room.

Base Drinking Customers 3d10 /24 Hours
-2d10 if trouble previous night
+1d10 if some form of entertainment provided (+2d10 if renowned performer)
+1d10 if in a low class district
-1d10 if in a high class district
+1d10 if Inn has a positive reputation
-1d4x10 if Inn has a bad reputation

Base Feeding Customers 2d10 / 24 hours
Modifiers as above plus
-1d10 if Inn has an obvious Vermin problem or other health issue

Base Boarding Customers 1d10 (rooming) 3d10+10 (common room) / 24 Hours
Modifiers as Above plus
+1d10 if Inn is safe and rooms have locks
-2d10 if Inn has been robbed in last 24 hours.
-1d10 if Inn has an obvious Vermin problem
+1d10 if it is Winter

Base Stabling Customers 5d4x10% / 24 of hours of total customers have mounts which need stabling.

PRICES
Then all you need to do is consider your prices for the Inn if you use standard PHB prices
Room (Private) 5 sp / day
Room (Common) 1 sp / Day
Ale (Mug) 4 cp
Common Meal 3 sp
Pitcher of Wine 2 sp
Stabling 5 sp / Day

INCOME
If you assume every customer eating has a pitcher of Wine, and every drinking customer has 3 mugs of ale each per night, this will allow you to work out your average income per person.
e.g
Each Drinking customer spends 12cp
Each Eating customer spends 5 sp
Each stabling customer spends 5 sp in addition to any other costs they may incur
And Each Rooming Customer spends 5 sp (Private Room) 1 sp (Common Room)

Of course these are average prices you could vary patronage each night by +1d10 for every 10% of price below average, or -1d10 for every 10% over average price if you want a greater or lesser turn over based on price.

Then consider 1d3% of the total income for a night is lost because people skip thier bills.
and 1d3% of the total amount each night is gained extra due to tips, this should allow you to work out the total income for an evening.

EXPENDITURE
Once you have the total income for a night worked out you need to work out your total expenditure in order to work out your profit.
First Wages:
Stable Boy/Groom 15cp/day
Cook 1 sp/day
Waitress 1 sp/day
Bouncer 2 sp/day
Entertainer (optional) 4 sp/day

Running Costs:
1. Rent if any...
2. Protection money to Thieves guild if any...
3. Bribes to Town Guard in event of trouble if any...
4. Taxes 0.1% of total nightly income (meaning you pay on avergae about 3% total income in any month in Tax)
5. Supplies if you consider that there are 395 pints in every 50 gallon barrel of ale (that is roughly 100 peoples worth of drink per barrel) and each barrel costs 10gp.
ALSO 198 pints in every 25 gallon cask of Wine (or roughly 40 eating customers per casks worth of wine) and each cask costs 5gp
ALSO Each meal costing roughly 15 cp in materials
6. General Maintenance, this covers repairs, replacement furniture and the likes and is 1d2% of the sites total value annually.
7. Advertisement (Optional) for every 50gp spent on advertisement each month increase the total monthly profit by 1d4%. No advertisement at all, simply relying on word of mouth will mean the business suffers a 1d6% loss in total profit over the first 12 months of business until it becomes established.

And you should then be able to determine how to run a functional Inn.. there is some paperwork involved obviously and the above steps can easily be modified as appropriate based on the kind fo shop or business you wish to run.

hope this helps?

 

[Xaltar]

Wow! Now that took some thought.


Thanks!

 

[jmucchiello]

Who wants to roll all of those dice? Use the profession rules for monthly income.

There are no rules for running a shop because the economics of D&D are screwy. If you have 50,000 gp to open a shop, you could pay 5 people 1 gp a day to deal with the shop and the shop would only have to break even to last 10,000 days (or roughly 27 years). That is silly, how can a shop make no profit for 27 years and be in business that long? It can't but 50,000 gp is a drop in the bucket for a retiring PC.

Just handwave the whole thing. As long as the city/country is not at war, the place makes a profit. Roll some dice to see how much.

Joe

 

[Ravellion]

I would say there are no rules because of the back to the dungeon mentality of 3e. Not a lot of patronage in dungeons for your bakery. usually...

Rav

 

[Neo]

Who wants to roll all of those dice? Use the profession rules for monthly income.

There are no rules for running a shop because the economics of D&D are screwy. If you have 50,000 gp to open a shop, you could pay 5 people 1 gp a day to deal with the shop and the shop would only have to break even to last 10,000 days (or roughly 27 years). That is silly, how can a shop make no profit for 27 years and be in business that long? It can't but 50,000 gp is a drop in the bucket for a retiring PC.

Just handwave the whole thing. As long as the city/country is not at war, the place makes a profit. Roll some dice to see how much.
Joe

Heya Joe

Well I for one would prefer to roll dice, not because I love rolling dice, but because I don't think running a business in an RPG should be as simple as a single skill roll simply to determine income. There are far too many mitigating factors in running a business to consider to just assume you make profit all the time and in random amounts all the time as the Profession skill implies. But if profession works for you thats great, each to thier own and all that. But Xaltar asked if their were any rules for running a business, hence I posted the above ones which are a form of those I use.

I for one love a bit more detail and thought in things like that because it makes the PC's downtime or non adventuring activites more involved than just "Roll a dice" and have everything relating to thier downtime activities relate back to that single result.

 

[Privateer]

Here is the best, easiest to use system for business running I've seen yet -- it's based on Craft, but Profession could concievibly be used as well with little modification.

http://gez117.free.fr/dnd/economic.html

 

[Tonguez]

I for one love a bit more detail and thought in things like that because it makes the PC's downtime or non adventuring activites more involved than just "Roll a dice" and have everything relating to thier downtime activities relate back to that single result.

Personally I think that if you are gonna go to that kind of detail then the whole process of negotiating with suppliers, managing staff through to selling wares to customers should be roleplayed.

The single roll mechanic is to determine whether after taking into account all the mitigating factors (eg Orc Raids driving up prices, the King imposing an import tax on your raw materials) you are able to successfully turn your raw materials into Profit.

Do I really need to know that on Tuesday I had 12 drinking customers and 8 eating out of 20?
What I perosnally would be more interested in is that during the Teusday sessiona Barbarian came into the bar and started harrassing the barmaid so I had to kick him out and got into a fight wherein the City Watch had to be called (and I now owe them 25 gp) and I made 200 gp that week.

The Adventure possibilites of Running your own business (eg merchants trying to establish trade routes across pirate infested waters! Having to find an alternate route to Khitai since the Hobgoblin Empire has closed the Overland route through Kazhkar) are huge...

 

[Vaxalon]

I believe that what's important in a "running a shop" campaign is not how much money you make, but what happens in the course of running the game.

Here's how I'd handle it...

In the course of a year, there would be anywhere from ten to twenty challenges that the store faces.

Each challenge would be of CR 1-3, unless the shop was in a VERY dangerous area.

The challenge could be a difficult customer, a greedy tax collector, or anything else that could threaten a business.

If the challenge is handled poorly, then profits will be impacted. If the challenge is handled well, then profits will not be impacted. The shop's profits are the treasure for this campaign. Other rewards are rare.

After a few levels, there would be little to no XP for the PC's.