a question for the gamer types

As you probably don't know, Bob, [profile] kniedzw and I are running a Dragon Age game right now, using the Pathfinder system. A couple of our players have decided to go into business -- they basically staged a hostile takeover of the trading contracts belonging to a certain noble house, since they knew in advance that said house was about to go down in political flames.

So now we're trying to work out how to handle the business in a way that will make it rewarding and worth the investment of skill ranks/character effort/etc, without flooding the game with so much money as to completely unbalance things. I have some ideas for how we might do this, but I also know this is something other people may have dealt with in their games, so I thought I might as well toss the scenario out here and see if anybody has suggestions.

For context, these are level 5 PCs, so average character wealth is roughly 10K-11K gp. There are two PCs involved in the business. They took out a loan to foot the bill for buying out the contracts; we haven't specified how much money that was, since the whole economy of D&D is borked in the first place and putting numbers on things would only highlight that fact. What I'm aiming for is a) some way to measure the scale of their enterprise, b) some way for them to draw off limited amounts of cash as profit, based on that scale, and c) some way to link the maintenance and growth of the business to their skills. (One PC has Profession: Merchant, and the other has a wacky good Diplomacy score.) As I said, I've got a potential framework in mind, but I'm interested in other ways of handling it. Thoughts?

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Published on July 17, 2013 11:10
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message 1: by G. (new)

G. Tyler Well holy shit and you play pf too?! Awesome! Ohh you know that there is a dragon age system for pen & paper that should provide a lot of answers on the world itself.

Now as for things that might help you out
1. ultmate campaign covers systems like investments, buisnesses, and running other stuff like that
2. The other thing that might be cool is to have you gm pull up the caravan rules and maybe run it as a caravan on top of your regular game.

If you have more questions feel free to hit me up! I'm actually working on some additions to the caravan rules for print so if you have any questions hit me up!


message 2: by Marie (new)

Marie Brennan Regarding the world, I'm pretty set; I just didn't want to use the DA system, as I wasn't very impressed by it. I'll take a look at Ultimate Campaign, though -- thanks!


message 3: by G. (new)

G. Tyler G. wrote: "Well holy shit and you play pf too?! Awesome! Ohh you know that there is a dragon age system for pen & paper that should provide a lot of answers on the world itself.

Now as for things that might ..."


Yeah that's what I keep hearing from people about it as well. That being said it still might have some world information that could be useful.

As for Ultimate Campaign thanks! The rules on exploration are reprinted from kingmaker so I know you're in for a treat. Forewarned though the chapter about building buildings and organizations is good but not as ergonomic as it should be and might require a few reads so that everything makes sense.


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