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GameMastery Guide / Player Characters / Player Interactions

Entrepreneur

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 72
The economic heart of most pseudo-medieval campaigns is their businesses, each creating revenue for the local lord and providing specialty shops, guilds, taverns, and other structures needed by adventurers and the common folk. Players generally fall into one of two molds as entrepreneurs, each of which has an impact on local businesses. The first is the player who seeks to sell everything acquired from the bodies of fallen enemies. The second is the businessman who sees an opportunity and wants to stake his claim.

For both types of entrepreneurs, the GM should follow simple rules to ensure that everyone at the gaming table is having fun. Don’t let yourself get locked into rolling on charts for long periods while other players wait, or let the minutiae of the items collected slow down the game. Instead, presume the characters choose the most valuable items— and only the most valuable items—and quickly move the adventure along. While your players might be eager to loot all of the soldiers’ short swords, collecting their old boots for sale later is a waste of adventuring time. If a character is big on appraising things, have him roll at the end of each session to ensure that he takes the most valuable possessions with him. Don’t slow down the game determining the value of the gilt on a doorframe or the darts in a disabled trap.

Next, determine how much the player can reasonably recover from the dungeon. Calculating the weight and mass of items can be tedious, but saying that everything in a dungeon is bolted down is unrealistic. The game already has rules for encumbrance, but an easier house rule might be that the character can carry one vaguely defined item (the pieces of a disabled trap, the limbs of a destroyed golem, the brasswork off a vampire’s coffin) per point of Strength, with accommodations for any magic items like bags of holding. This speeds the game along and helps prevent stopping every time the GM describes a shiny bit of room dressing. And don’t forget that the character’s weapons and armor count toward the total—if the entrepreneur wants that third tapestry, he’s going to have to leave his sword behind.

The value of mundane loot is closely tied to the magic level of your campaign, the size of the city the players deliver the goods to, the need for those goods, and the quality and quantity of the goods. Delivering 20 suits of chainmail to a sleepy village likely floods the market and earns a pittance, while that same armor in a town scrambling to arm itself would earn significantly more. As a general rule, try assuming a 10–20% payout where there is a moderate need for the items and then adjust from there.

Archives of Nethys

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Entrepreneur