PC starts a buisness advice needed

[Bastoche]

Hi,

First off, the PC is me. Second, I'm a rogue8/ftr4/shadow thief 2 (CL 14) in forgotten realms. A Waterdeep based campaign. I just acquired the leadership feat. The cohort will be a wizard (12th level). I have the opportunity to buy a future guildhouse site near the city.

As some of you may know, piece of land in waterdeep are very expensive. A few hundred thousand gold pieces. Don't have the exact value, it will be sold during an auction (that I may "trick"). I don't have much trouble finding the money. I can borrow to money lenders and I have a mansion I could use as a garantee (or the guildhouse itself). I could mortgage my magical items too (near 150000gp in worth for my 14th level, minus what I have cash). I also won the favor of a noble family and my character is a noble himself (though at odds with his father...). Anyway. The point is I can get the money.

The problem is rembursing.

Here is my question at last. How much could a generic shop bring up in gp per month?

I'm a very proficient jeweler (15 ranks) and the idea was to make some sort of a museum or art gallery. I got could publicity toward the nobles and the idea would be to have a hip place for nobles to hang out (the place used to be a gamble house) like a bar with very valuable furniture. There would be a shop specialized in material components (100 gp pearl, 1000gp diamond powder, etc) for spells and also a jewel shop.

How long would it take to recover the investement assuming I borrow all of it? Discuss...

 

[Crothian]

THe proffesion skill has rules for how much monewy some one makes

 

[Steve Jung]

The Dungeons Master's Guide II has some detailed rules for running a business.

 

[Elephant]

The Dungeons Master's Guide II has some detailed rules for running a business.

...which boil down to:

Roll some dice, lose some money. Then roll some more dice and lose more money.

Rinse and repeat...

 

[BiggusGeekus]

First and most important: the economics of D&D is crazy insane and makes no sense. This is critical to understand. The base unit of currency in the game is not the gold piece, it is the magic item. That's where everything flows from.

Which makes running a buisness easy! Figure out the challenge rating of this roleplay encounter, determine the number of experience points the character would be rewarded, and reverse engineer that from the magic item creation rules to figure out how much money the buisness earns. Does this make any sense at all? Of course not. But your character is designed to advance in gold and exp based on the challeges he faces, not in the decision making ability used to overcome those challenges.

Were I your DM (and by now you're probably very glad someone of my geekosity lives far, far away from you) I would figure out what roleplay and possibly combat challenges I wanted to you face when getting the buissness running and the consequnces stemming from that:

* thieves break in
* rival noble tries to sink you
* you are threatened with losing your noble status since you preform common labor
* someone comissions an item that, unbenkownst to you, is a dupilicate of some other item they intend to steal and replace
* you money lenders (Vinnie and Guido) decide you need to pay back the money sooner rather than later and you are now have to answer to the Thieves' Guild.

... I'd work up what CR those challenges were, figure out how much gold/exp you'd get from beating them, and divide that by however many weeks in a year Waterdeep has. That's your income per week.

Again, I need to stress that D&D fails as a buisness simulator. It's about as good in finance as a finance book is about D&D. The Craft and Profession skills are nuts. The income and population distribution rules are nuts. The only thing that isn't nuts is the part where you kill things and take their stuff.

Trying to make the D&D finance and economic rules approach anything that might actually work is to delve into an insanity that would dwarf the madness of Great C'thulu himself. Don't even try to attempt it. If nothing else, think of the children!

Happy gaming!

 

[dvvega]

One thing that no one has mentioned is that you could raise the capital by selling shares in your business.

Say you needed 100,000 gp to get it started. And that you thought you might make 100 gp a month.

Then you sell each share of as 1,000 gp for 1% of the business. That way you can have many investors and for each share they will get 1 gp per month. You of course want controlling interest but this means that you only need to borrow 51,000 gp for yourself instead of the full 100,000 gp.

Of course you could make each share worth more money, but the same percentage.

D

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

* thieves break in
* rival noble tries to sink you
* you are threatened with losing your noble status since you preform common labor
* someone comissions an item that, unbenkownst to you, is a dupilicate of some other item they intend to steal and replace
* you money lenders (Vinnie and Guido) decide you need to pay back the money sooner rather than later and you are now have to answer to the Thieves' Guild.

... I'd work up what CR those challenges were, figure out how much gold/exp you'd get from beating them, and divide that by however many weeks in a year Waterdeep has. That's your income per week.

Huh. That's a neat idea. It keeps it from being a pure number-crunching exercise. Because, otherwise, it becomes too much like work, and that's just boring.

As an aside, late in our old Birthright game, as we'd hit epic levels and occasionally had adventures on the planes, one of my money-making ideas was to pay some giants to strip-mine mineral deposits on the Outlands. They could adequately defend themselves from most random encounters, and by using divination magics, we could find profitable veins. Never got around to doing it, but the DM thought it was a good idea.

Brad

 

[Flyspeck23]

One thing that no one has mentioned is that you could raise the capital by selling shares in your business.

Say you needed 100,000 gp to get it started. And that you thought you might make 100 gp a month.

Then you sell each share of as 1,000 gp for 1% of the business. That way you can have many investors and for each share they will get 1 gp per month. You of course want controlling interest but this means that you only need to borrow 51,000 gp for yourself instead of the full 100,000 gp.

Of course you could make each share worth more money, but the same percentage.

At 1% per month it'll take you more than 80 years before you've even made a profit.
Or, to put it another way: if you need 100,000 gp as a start-up, and the shop will reap 100 gp per month... don't start.
Unless you're an elf and can wait.

 

[Bastoche]

* thieves break in
* rival noble tries to sink you
* you are threatened with losing your noble status since you preform common labor
* someone comissions an item that, unbenkownst to you, is a dupilicate of some other item they intend to steal and replace
* you money lenders (Vinnie and Guido) decide you need to pay back the money sooner rather than later and you are now have to answer to the Thieves' Guild.

hehehe. Maybe ok for #2. But for #3, in waterdeep pretty much every noble has to run a buisness. As for the others... Well... I am a shadow thief. I'm the one who does that