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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Hope" data-source="post: 4580058" data-attributes="member: 27051">Impossible for adventurers, yes.  Unless your character is focussed on running the business, most PCs won't have skills high enough to make it worthwhile.  Which is as it should be, imho.The characters in the Dark Sun game hired a couple of NPCs to run the business side of things for them (Experts with maxed out business skills and levels in DS-specific trader prestige classes).  The PCs generally used their trade caravans as cover for infiltrating hostile cities and growing a small, but steady profit.  Large profits only came from actually risky gambits.  Profits generated by the NPCs (via the DMG II system) were enough to keep the house ticking over and slowly growing.  Ths is as it should be, because it keeps the focus of the game where it belongs and relegates the day-to-day drudgery of running the business to the background.  There's no way it could replace adventuring as a way of making money.In this DS game, the PCs were involved in a government cover-up of the assassination of the city's sorcerer-king.  They framed a trading house from an enemy city and were rewarded with some of that house's assets (a building, some livestock, transport and a small amount of trade goods).  Incidentally, this counted against their "wealth per character level", which was rather amusing ("No, you can't have a magical steel sword - here is a house and 30 kanks instead.  Quit grumbling.")Far from killing the campaign, it gave the PCs something to care about and to lose, tied them into the local setting more closely, and rewarded their nefarious actions in a suitably cynical fashion.I agree completely.  They soon realised that they needed to have someone else do the running of the business for them.  Had the party not come to a nasty end in Kalidnay, I was intending to have their trusted employees embezzle most of the funds and ruin the business in their protracted absence.Oh well, there's always the new game to try that in... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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