Prophet2b said:
Because they'll actually be owning the shop and having to pay for daily expenses, I'm wondering if there is any good way to handle all of the nitty-gritty details that are going to be involved?
It's COMPLETELY dependent on your campaign. Specifically, the type of government you use, the local economy, and so on, so almost any answer can be justified.
I'd like it to be realistic without being overly complicated (always a challenge!). I have a few ideas, but I was hoping I might get some input from others more wise than I.
Taxes are very iffy. First, while the concept of a land or property tax is old, income and sales taxes are a relatively recent invention (at least in the amounts we're used to); for instance, when they were making the U.S. Constitution, some people wanted to put in there a clause that explicitly limited the income tax to no more than 3% of your income. Others felt that 3% was way too high, and that spelling it out explicitly like that would only encourage lawmakers to set it that high. Even property taxes can be iffy, since in many historical cases nobility and the Church were exempt from taxation.
No nations of that era tried to pay for a professional, national military force, a well-maintained national road system, a welfare system, and so on. Plus, the lower life expectancies meant retirement pay (and Social Security) wouldn't have been an issue.
As for bank loans, there were professional moneylenders, but their terms would be considered ridiculous by modern standards. Part of the reason for this discrepancy is stability; if the historical moneylender was suddenly run out of town (for his religion, his political views, the collapse of the economy, a massive war...) he wouldn't get his money back. That isn't an issue in the modern days.
Adventurers would be far better off just saving up their money and doing their purchases the hard way. Especially since, as others have pointed out, an adventurer who simply refused to pay back his loan would be difficult to stop.
BUT: this assumes the D&D economy is identical to that of mideival Europe. It isn't even close. First, D&D's economy is adventure-based; if all the rare metals and gems are found in areas swarming with monsters, the wealth will be concentrated in the hands of those who can actually deal with said monsters. Also, those monsters will naturally have loot of their own, and adventureres basically have carte blanche to massacre the "monster" races and keep their loot. Outside of open, nasty warfare, there were few opportunities for soldiers to get this kind of booty, and their survival rate was so low that it wasn't that popular.
Second, there's the complications of magic. When low-level magic can create the food and water needed for basic survival, when a mid-level mage can use
fabricate to craft items that would otherwise take weeks in a matter of seconds, when long-distance transport and communications are safe and secure for those who can afford it... it makes a huge difference to the economy. In a previous campaign, I made an NPC organization that was a Psion/Sorcerer guild which had cornered the market in all sorts of crafting disciplines; they used all the magical tricks to do things better and faster than the mundane crafters ever could dream of.
Third, the skill/XP system used by D&D is horribly biased against non-adventurers. You can't gain levels without XP, you can't raise your skills above pathetic without character levels, the inherently higher stats of an adventurer (and the ability to buy +INT magic items) act as extra skill ranks, and so on. An adventurer who dabbles in crafting will therefore be able to out-produce a master craftsman Commoner easily.
In figuring everything out straight out of the PHB and DMG, though, I am wondering how on earth any profession that doesn't make more than 5 sp/day could possibly survive.
The short version was, they didn't. The average person in the closest European analogues didn't own horses of their own (or if they did, it was a draft horse they kept on their farm), didn't own shops, grew most of their own food, and had a dozen kids to provide free labor. Even if you limit the discussion to city dwellers, many businesses were run out of homes (or at least multi-use buildings, with the upper floors or back rooms being the living area). Since your pawn shop doesn't really require any specific skill (you're not crafting anything), you wouldn't be part of a craft guild and couldn't use apprentices to help reduce labor costs.
But as I said, you could easily construct an economic system that completely changed all this.
