Owning Land, Borrowing Money, Creating Businesses

[nothingpoetic]

So I have been playing D&D only in 3.5, but have only played a handful of campaigns. The extent of these campaigns happens are pretty much... here is our job, lets kill stuff, and we role play stuff along the way, but characters really don't have outside lives. I am in a new campaign, and I am interested in understanding the rules around gaining land, borrowing money, and creating a business.

with gaining land... its a frontier setting, we came as reinforcements for a newly settled colony. I know all rules will be subject to DM's discretion, but vague idea, how does this stuff work?

I want to borrow money to get a ship and begin a shipping business, while doing some shipwright work as well.

The other question, how possible is it for a player to create a life outside the storyline, and is it too time consuming, will it take away from the rest of the game?

 

[moritheil]

Welcome to the boards!

So I have been playing D&D only in 3.5, but have only played a handful of campaigns. The extent of these campaigns happens are pretty much... here is our job, lets kill stuff, and we role play stuff along the way, but characters really don't have outside lives. I am in a new campaign, and I am interested in understanding the rules around gaining land, borrowing money, and creating a business.

with gaining land... its a frontier setting, we came as reinforcements for a newly settled colony. I know all rules will be subject to DM's discretion, but vague idea, how does this stuff work?

I want to borrow money to get a ship and begin a shipping business, while doing some shipwright work as well.

The other question, how possible is it for a player to create a life outside the storyline, and is it too time consuming, will it take away from the rest of the game?

The thing is, DnD doesn't really have detailed rules for extended life-building. It is, as you say, designed around the idea that you will kill things and loot the corpses.

Mechanically, they recommend Profession checks to determine how much gp you make in a given week.

 

[nothingpoetic]

Alright, figured as much. I don't have the DM's Guide handy so I wasn't sure if there were some rules in there that I wasn't aware of.

It just seems that a profession check for a guy who owns say.. 3 galleys that are shipping in trade goods and selling them to a colony starving for resources, seems a bit meager you know what I am saying?

 

[Ltheb Silverfrond]

If you are looking for these things in the core rules, you (unfortunately) will not find them. D&D was not built to handle an economy. Look at the rules for buying and selling; theres no way you can make money. (Since everything costs the same amount everywhere, and when you sell something you get 1/2 its cost) Now, as a DM, you could factor resource scarcity, but even then, unless its something ultra-impossible to get without insane markup, you wont really be making anything. The profession checks could be used, but then again they don't factor the size of your business into anything.
I'd make the three galleys give a +6 bonus (total, +2 each) to the profession check (But thats me).

But honestly, if you are a DM looking to have some sort of economy in the game, You need to either:
A - Deal with Profession checks and assign ad-hoc modifiers for everything.
B - Find a 3rd party sourcebook that deals with these things. (I am sure they are arround)
C - Just make it up. Assign however much amount of profit (or loss) you think is fair (and appropriate for the game). Your players might complain, but the game isn't made to handle this thing. Its about kicking in the door to the Tomb of Horrors and looting the gems from the demilich at the end.

If you are a player - Talk to your DM. Ask him if this is what he wants you to be doing and if he has a rules set he wants to use for this. If he doesn't want to deal with it, you probably shouldn't do it.
-
As for creating a life outside the storyline - Depends on the type of game. No real rules here. Some of my players come up with pretty detailed back stories for their characters so they have thing going on on the side that are just assumed to take place between adventures.

 

[blargney the second]

There are rules for PCs with businesses in DMG 2. You won't make money hand over fist, but you probably won't lose much either, and it's a great source for plot hooks.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I will recommend pointing you at three sources of info on this.

First is Expeditious Retreat Press, Magical Medieval Society covers all the pertinent things relating to feudalism, becoming a lord, holding land, running domains, etc. It also has an economic system simulator. The last part is in Silk Road as well, which covers trade and economics in more detail.

Second is Bastion Press, Airships. It's an OOP 3e softcover originally made for the Oathbound setting but it's system for shipping trade is fast and effective to a level of detail plenty good enough for most.

Third is The Dungeonominicon which is chock full of good stuff for all sorts of areas of 3e campaigns. The section you're looking for in particular is the Econominicon. In which they actually make the D&D economy make sense.

 

[Krensus]

The players in my game tend to enjoy the economic aspects of the world, so I added a few things in as kind of a side game. Pearls are cheaper the closer you get to the ocean, metal goods are more expensive the farther you get from mountains and trade hubs, things like that.

You may want to speak to your DM about establishing trade routes across whatever body of water your prospective galleons will cross. Perhaps use gather information to learn what is scarce there and plentiful in your area to increase your profits. This will probably help you edge out a few more gold per shipment, but I wouldn't expect a gigantic bounty of money. This will mainly be a diversion for you to play with, as most merchants are lucky to top a few hundred gold profit per year.

 

[boolean]

The players in my game tend to enjoy the economic aspects of the world, so I added a few things in as kind of a side game. Pearls are cheaper the closer you get to the ocean, metal goods are more expensive the farther you get from mountains and trade hubs, things like that.

Which leads to some weird situations when magic gets involved.

"Sorry, I can't use this pearl to Identify your item here at the beach. But it will probably work when we travel inland for a week or so."

 

[Rogue765]

Which leads to some weird situations when magic gets involved.

"Sorry, I can't use this pearl to Identify your item here at the beach. But it will probably work when we travel inland for a week or so."

"The Gods of the Sea are offended by your puny offering of this pearl. Do you think they are as easily satiated as the foolish Gods of the Desert or the Mountains? Bring them a much bigger pearl, one more fitting of their power, and I can Identify your item."

See. It's all in the marketing.

 

[azhrei_fje]

This will mainly be a diversion for you to play with, as most merchants are lucky to top a few hundred gold profit per year.

This is the key. If the players are expecting a constant source of income the GM should just lay down the law. First, running a tavern isn't heroic and isn't why they're playing the game. (At least, I hope not.) Second, while the tavern may be a great source of information and such, a PC is not going to want to be involved in day-to-day management of the place and so will need to hire someone for that. (Most such businesses were family owned and run, so the concept of hiring someone to run your tavern would've been completely foreign in the real life medieval ages. But this is fantasy.) Third, very few people actually owned land under the feudal system. Instead, they were granted a perpetual right to work the land, such right to be revoked by the ruling monarch whenever they wanted. Of course, if the worker of the land was effective, why would the ruler want the land back? They certainly don't want to be running a farm on a day-tp-day basis either!

Merchants could receive a charter from the crown to operate a certain type of business in a certain area. Bribes and graft were paid by the other merchants in the same industry, so it would be unlikely that a newcomer could start a business. And even if they did, guild membership was required. If you didn't have a guild membership, you'd find yourself without raw materials and lacking customers. And with a guild membership, you were part of the group that lobbied the crown against newcomers.

When I had players who wanted this kind of thing (at about level 10 or 11), I suggested that they draw up plans for how they would convince the king, the guild leadership, and so on, and then we would discuss it. But I told them up front that they wouldn't make more than 20gp per level per year. Most of the time, they abandoned the idea. The rogue, however, wanted to run a bar and he was prepared to lose money. He wanted the local contacts, perhaps be the frontman for the local thieves guild. Everytime we met to play, I would give him some tidbit of news without the other PCs knowledge. Sometimes they fit into the campaign, sometimes they were merely tangents. But he seemed happy.