If you love bears there is the bear druid option.  Mechanically not the most powerful but it has some nice flavour to it.

That could easily be remedied by changing the Vermin Shape II to 15th level?  Or maybe 14th level and then modify the form of the dragon II to 15th level?

As for the bear (I found a Bear Shaman) and the goliath druid, both of them limit shape-changing drastically, my goal is to enhance shapeshifting and limit spell casting.

Ok, I have looked at the Ultimate Campaign Downtime rules in respect to Organizations and Buildings, Capital and such.

The rules are kind of convoluted, but the concept of being able to purchase building and creating teams of people to man an organization seems like a wonderful idea in general.  I was willing to overlook some of the complexity for the goal of being able to build a building and teams.  Granted, it provides a limited ability to effectively get certain things for half price if you follow through some extra steps, but that in itself doesn't seem like a game killer, just a reason to consider using it.

However, some other things sort of made me concerned it might be a little broken, the rules seemed to imply people would want to simply combine bonuses rather than rolling multiple times.  Rolling once of just taking 10 with one roll.  This of course was like taking 0 on all the other 'potential' rolls, so it seemed counter intuitive.  Granted, limiting the number of businesses one could manage seemed reasonable and might be able to be used to limit the number of rolls one could make.

Next, someone pointed out in a forum post, that with daily income checks, many buildings or teams would even without direct supervision, would pay for themselves in profit in less than a year.  This seems contrary to common sense, and additionally is inconsistent with cash investments as defined by the Investments rules in the same book.  It maintains one would normally expect an annual return on investment closer to some smaller percentage of the original investment, not anything even close to over 100%.  That seems generally unreasonable for the rules to easily allow, and made me consider if adjustments would have to be made to utilize the rules.

Another individual proposed changing income rolls to weekly, and this begins to make some sense, but I wasn't set on it yet.  I decided to look at a couple other benchmarks mentioned in other rules.

First, unskilled laborers have long been listed as getting a general average pay of about 1sp per day.  Looking over the Cost of Living rules, something that has been around for a while.  Poor is 3gp per month, or about 1sp per day.  If you look at running a bunk room for profit, one tenth of that would be a share of about 8sp per day if the building got income every day.  That would at best leave them 2cp for food, and nothing to pay for expenses related to a spouse or children, or anything else at all.  If income(rent) was collected every week, if we rounded income up to 1sp per week as the person's share of rent, that would leave them 4 to 5 more sp to put towards dependents, food, etc.  It also opens up a remote possibility that two parents, whom are unskilled laborers, might be able to afford a house, which would run about 9sp if done weekly, leaving the potential of being able to pay that with two or three unskilled workers if they don't have a big food bill.  This could still potentially fall under the poor standard of living if it were a pretty basic house.

Now lets look at Average, by the rules you are supposed to live somewhere private, something like a house, or private apartment, that amounts to about 3.3sp per day in your 'budget'  If houses' drew rent income daily, based on their base income, that 9sp would leave you with over a 5sp deficit before even looking into food or other costs.  That means that someone wouldn't be able to afford to live in a private house unless they have two or more others breadwinners living with you.  Yes, by definition, standard is supposed to provide private living space.  I could have bought into a spouse living with someone, but getting into requiring three, is by definition a form of communal living, which Average, by definition is supposed to be the step into.

This seems to show that at least twice, we almost have to insure that income from a basic building such as a house (to be rented) needs to be cut down to once a week to make some basic predefined economies work out as intended.

Wealthy, the daily amount goes to 33sp.  While they could have been able to afford the little house, even at daily cost, it doesn't reflect the wealth aspect it should.  As I looked at it, presuming the weekly framework, it occurred to me, that 100gp/month was around 25gp/week.  This would easily be able to be seen as earning/purchase/spending 1 unit of Influence capital per week, and 10gp of other expenses maintaining a larger than normal house.  Honestly this made a certain sense based on the description.

Extravagant, multiply the above by 10.  It is the first one that mentions someone owning the building they live in.  However, I think it is a reasonable for some in the Wealthy category might own their own home as well.  Not that renting one would be out of the question in that case either.  Most extravagant individuals probably would own their own homes and estates however, even if indirectly.  I'm thinking that this involves constantly purchasing and spending capital such as influence in their hometown, building and maintaining their extravagant lifestyle, with people depending on them for their own livelihood.

I'm thinking that Wealthy and Extravagant may well be allowed to write off a certain amount of maintenance of Organizations and Buildings, using a portion of their cost of living they pay.

---

Next problem:
Buildings produce profit (now probably switched to a weekly scale) when run as a public business for profit.  If a building is not conducting public business, you don't make a profit.  Which seems like a reasonable rule.  Until you realize that a early premise of the rules was to have buildings not have an upkeep cost, simply applying the default rule that the upkeep costs were taken out of your profits, so you don't have to do extra math.  The problem becomes, if you run the building as a private party house for you and your friends, it doesn't make a profit.  Cool, that is simple enough, but the part that is unreasonable, is that while you sacrificed your profits, you still acquired no upkeep cost.  Somehow you have to pay the staff who maintain your party house, which you only allow you and your friends to enjoy!  By default, you have no such cost, with the rules as is.

At a minimum, I think if you are going to maintain a building as somewhat active at a private level, you should have to pay at least the GP cost of what it would have made if run it for profit.  Alternately, I could see someone producing/and buying a relevant unit or more of capital.  If you are using your private house to hold parties to influence some of the important citizens, that will cost you the cost of the influence, which will likely be more than the base gp cost.  That seems like a reasonable use of such a home, even if 'private'.

Paying this basic gp upkeep would probably be minimally staffed, using the building to produce capital would reflect calling people in to work extra.

To consider a building more than at most minimally staffed, there might be an expectation that a certain minimum production of capital is done per week/month based on what it could produce.  I'm working on how this should potentially be calculated.

---

Teams are even more important in my opinion that they have an upkeep cost if they are being kept private.  If they are not being run to provide an actual income for you via the public, then in my opinion they really need to have an upkeep cost.  [you might be able to let some buildings, such as a shack out in the wilderness, just sit for a while, with minimal impact]  Teams will want to keep getting paid to stay around.

In my opinion, if they aren't producing a form of capital (or a GP from public work) then a team is merely being held on a retainer.  They aren't actively working for you.  The retainer would be the amount of profit they would have made in profit.  The staff come in to check in, verify if they are needed, get their pay and leave if nothing to do.  They may actually after checking in may go and work privately themselves, even using equipment you provided (but they have to maintain it out of their own work) so you don't get additional costs due to their work.  This retainer however means that when you come back, and have work for them, they will be prepared to come back and tackle projects you bring forward for them.  Having them working daily for you, requires them either making a profit, or contributing towards producing some form of capital the can contribute towards.

If you have an alchemist on retainer, paying them only their retainer, you can't come back expecting them to have produced a dozen potions of healing for you for free just because they are around.  On the other hand, if you have him (his team) working, and successfully produce a unit of Magic Capital, and pay for it (50gp for 100gp unit) it would seem pretty reasonable for you to turn in this unit of magic that was produced for two healing potions.

Note that if they don't have somewhere to work, the rules say you produce half as much profit/capital.  (however, for the 'support costs/retainer' i'm suggesting, this isn't halved, as you are presumed to be paying some sort of support for the building you provide them, if you are providing them a building)

---

Any thoughts on this beyond.
[just scrap downtime Capital/Organizations/Buildings, its broken]

I'm trying to find a way to use as much of it as possible as closely as intended while bringing it more in line with some of the economics that are more consistent with other established parts of the game.

It seems like for Organizations/Buildings making their gp income rolls be weekly seems very achievable/workable fixing a lot of the scaling.  What am I missing?  (other than expenses of course for private holdings) Are there other reasonable ways of calculating that?

Suggestions and feedback would be very welcome.

So, I'm just going to tackle that first quandary about pay and housing (because I have a hernia, it's a rough ride home, and it's making me too cranky to have read everything all at once.)

I think you're overestimating rent costs. (Or maybe it's just a homebred rule I have been doing so long I have forgotten that it's a homerule) My base standard for unskilled labor housing costs is 5c/day. Yes, it's expensive, but that gives them enough left to have a basic diet of bread, a little cheese, some veggies, with a copper or so saved after each day. Yes, it isn't much, but that's the point. These are the least skilled least paid people around. This isn't the seamstress, this is the lady that darn your socks for you. It's also why people did a lot of hand me downs, because replacing or buying new was hideously expensive for them.

You also have to bear in mind that the idea of these people that fall into the unskilled labor constitutes the "dirty starving peasant" mentality, and that food came in much bigger chunks than they do now. A cheese wheel was generally about 2 or three foot across. They had time to save up for the next cheese wheel after a purchase. So yeah, they are poor, but that was the idea too. Not a lot of people had the money to travel, or buy new things, etc. In fact, those that did were rare outside of nobility, and even the nobility generally relied upon guesting for many things.

I'm basing rent costs off of the Ultimate Campaign - Downtime chapter talking about Buildings and Organizations.  Take a look at http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamema...ther-rules/downtime/

It defines methods of building rooms for a building, and defines a way of calculating income for it.

A House is defined as the following:
Create 32 Goods, 1 Influence, 31 Labor (1,290 gp)
Rooms 1 Bedroom, 1 Kitchen, 1 Lavatory, 1 Sewer Access, 1 Sitting Room, 1 Storage

If you add up all the rooms of the house, it ends up giving your a +9 to a gp income roll.  So if the buildings are generating income without direct involvement from you, you end up basically making a Take 0 roll.  (if you are directly involved, you theoretically roll a d20 and add that to the bonus)  This gives you the SP made for that building/team for the day.  [similar to a profession roll for income]

So the house by those rules generate you a minimum of 9sp, but could in theory generate you an extra 1 to 20 extra sp per day, that I'm not even taking into account.  I'm also presuming rent is equal to the income for the building, meaning I'm not taking into account expenses related to the house.

My costing for unskilled labor's housing was based on the income for a single bunk room, which is +8, and its description defined it as being able to house 10 individuals.  So a base income of 8sp, divided by 10 people would be 8cp per time period.  But that presumes you can normally fill the whole room at 100% and that someone isn't rolling the die to up their income at that facility, and there are no expenses.  Meaning cost is probably going to be a little more than 8cp based on the downtime buildings income rules.

Example:
Bunk Room
Earnings: (gp or Labor) +8
Create: 7 Goods, 4 Influence, 7 Labor (400 gp); Time 24 days;
Size 15–35 squares

Again, the point of the exercise is to figure out what I need to make the downtime rules work, preferably without too much extra work.  I think presuming that the published Cost of Living rules are reasonable, which they seem roughly reasonable, the downtime rules seem to make the defined lifestyles, out of reach of their defined cost ranges.

Switching capital income rolls to once a week seems to correct a good portion of the issues, reducing both income from it, as well at certain expected costs.

A poor inn stay according to http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipm...ervices#TOC-Inn-Stay is 2sp per night, but perhaps paying a month at a time you could get better pricing for instance.

I dunno, sounds a bit high.

Roughly
Daily wage of unskilled person: 1 sp = $40.00
1 gp = $400.00
1290 gps = $516,000.00

Keep in mind that there really wasn't a think equivalent to disposable income back then. Peasants would be at the poverty line and all but the best tradsmen would be much poorer then traditional middle class.

In modern times, the bottom 20% of the US spends their paychecks as follows:

• Housing - 40%
• Transportation - 15%
• Food - 15%
• Healthcare - 8%
• Enterainment - 5%
• Apparel and Services - 3%
• Vices (drinking/smoking etc) - 2%
• Misc. Expenses - 2%

If you translate that 15% transportation into "supplies needed for trade" like diggers buying their shovels, farmers having their scythes and wagons etc and convert it to gp/sp then it's as follows:

12sp a month on housing/rent
4sp 5cp a month on food
4sp 5cp on job supplies
1sp 5cp on entertainment (so like a show a month kind of thing)
    6cp on drinking and vice
    9cp on clothing for the month


So it would earn 12sp a month, give or take. Now granted there is stuff like maintenance, taxes etc. I would say realistically you would only make 3-6sp a month, perhaps even just 2d3sp / month profits.

Ok... trying to focus back on how to get the Downtime Rules to seem to be more compatible with existing aspects of the fantasy economy already in place.  I don't want to go through and re-price and re-income every room and team.

I have to say that many of the unskilled labor would live in tenements rather than individual houses, that would probably be priced closer to bunk or common room type pricing. Even with a house costing 9sp a week, it is feasible that a peasant family might be able to afford a cheap house if there was more than one worker helping pay for things.  [even a spouse staying at home probably produces food for trade with others, actually functioning in effect as a form of worker]

I really feel like saying housing, being limited to a cost of 3-6sp per month would have to be at best the communal/non-private housing mentioned in the Poor lifestyle of Cost of Living.  it listed the poor lifestyle at 3gp/month which would basically eat up the unskilled workers money.  Which is probably reasonable, and maybe how they intentionally priced it.

If your suggesting a house would need to only make 3-6sp a month that kind of throws the existing rules out the window.  Both the Cost of Living Rules, and the Downtime rules.  I'm not sure I'm coming out with much usable if I scrap both those.

While taking the feedback, which might have been saying perhaps the cost of the house was high, I could try to lower it, but by what means?  Such items are currently built by units of Capital, so to reduce it I either have to revisit every room/team, or I'd need to revise the cost/value of each type of influence.

Another concern, by reducing the frequency of the income rolls, it reduced the problem with extremely high rates of return on the investment.  Cutting the cost, without further cutting the income will escalate the income rate.

I will confess it seems like a business would have times when things just aren't profitable, so having some sort of DC roll you have to exceed, to get any income would help cut back on the income.  I imagine the events are supposed to do something like that, but I haven't gotten enough experience to determine how effective they are at that.  How do you balance the no income with the pain of, you telling me my entire merchant guild just failed to turn a profit this month, might seem really painful.  If that is the case, how to architect it?  Another option, instead of rolling (or not rolling one die) and adding the bonus, to determine the number of SP earned per timespan (guessing week).  Instead every time you hit an extra +10 bonus for a gp(cash) roll, you remove 10 and add a d20.  Roll the dice, add the remaining bonus and half to give you your income in SP.  Hmm...  I guess if you take 10 on the rolls that is just halving the income roll.  Any good ideas, anyone?

Again, I'm trying to use the framework of the rules as much as possible as is, I am just trying to tweak them to make them more in line with the practical aspects of the economies.

You are free to charge as much or as little as possible in your game, of course and if you think you've got the right price, don't let me dissuade you otherwise.

From my knowledge of real estate (in the current setting) most landlords only make a couple hundred $$$ per month on top of their mortgage so when I'm saying 3-6sp a month that is the profit. Chances are they're charging, say 15sp a month but then that money is going right back (in an abstract way) to paying taxes, bribes, maintenance, lost to thieves etc. resulting in a net of 50% of that, give or take.

You are correct that this is based on a single working household but that was common back then. Because of the lack of time saving items like indoor plumbing etc. just maintaining basic human necessities of hygiene, food, and supervision of children (no schools means kiddos running around 24/7 until they're old enough for an apprenticeship or working the farms too). Additional family members can pitch in but I'm kind of doing it as a wash because that's additional mouths to feed.

Multiple families could share the same living space and that was common in dense cities but less so in more spacious areas, I think.

Anyway for a modern house worth $100,000 and you make $200 profit a month, it would mean that to fully pay for that house it would take nearly 42 years to buy that house completely off of those profits alone. Applying that same frame to a house based on your costs would be a total charge of 25sp a month.

Seeing that makes me realize why the banks seemingly own everything :P

 My issue is that of the Dicotomy between a "Working household" and a "Roleplay household".  The Nuclear Family as a Household is a modern invention, the habit of current children remaining in the "home" is actually a fall back to more Normal times.

  That said the Working Household as a unit is important to the Downtime and I would assume Kingmaker rules.  If One wishes to stretch ones abilities with the Systems one attempts to work within the defined systems.  So One uses the "Down time rules" to describe a Roleplay household of three Family Elders, two brothers and a sister, as the sister is oldest she is head of household. The families of the two brothers, wives, remaining on site children, and their families. As well as servants and thralls.

In other words a single "Roleplay Household" that is made up quite legitimately of many "Working Households" and in Kingmaker could appear as a single farming Thorp.

The designations of:
* "Thorp"
* "Role-play Household"
* "Working Household"
* "and {Nethys knows what else}

 All technical terms fit, The Pathfinder Systems are a tool, a paint brush to define a world.  Practicing with the System to understand it, is "Fun" for some people.

 And painting the a world in the Systems colors as rewarding as casting a bronze statue.

The question is how do you integrate Roleplay ideas, plotline, and assorted technical Game Systems to paint the picture you want.

A Haiku is defined by the set of artificial and arbitrary limits set on expression; so is Pathfinder.

I thought this is where you were going with it at first :P

And I concur. I don't know how true medieval life occurred and surface research on medieval economies leaves a lot to be desired.

My position is that an "economy" requires regular trade and that the The first Edition best described it when it explained that "unpopulated" had nothing to do with the actual number of people.

  I hold that it meant there was little to no Regular economy/trade. they could mostly live of what they scavenged or raised.  Their tools would only be what they could arrange. Wood, Stone "tears", skins, bones, cord, etc.

A river valley could be "populated" by villages along a river trade route. The Villages, Hamlets, Thorps, Dorfs, and Single dwelling  within two leagues; would be involved with the Villages trade.  But the rest would have little to do with the Village folk and their strange ways.

Some believe bronze age Norse world wide trade in Bronze collapsed when the Celts developed Iron-work, and blocked trade access. The Norse regained travel when they learned how to work "bog iron", as well as possibly the collapse of Celt sea power when their whole armada was destroyed by the Roman armada. The Celts couldn't reach their foriegn supplies of Mast timber to rebuid their sea power since they had used up all local mast timber.

  We play a lot of Heroes of letters of Marche and Reprisal, but oddly enough economic exploration could create just as many plotlines.  Picture a company of Soldiers of fortune made up deliberately of multi-racial characters.. so they could explore to find Resources Well know to their people and convince the locals to allow trade.

Mast timber means nothing to "Uncivilized" folk that can't make

I'm actually a part of a medieval recreation group that does a lot of reaearch. I can help out with medieval economies if you wish, but it's way longer than would be really practical to post here.

In reply to Lord_Johnny (msg # 47):

There's also the influence magic would have on the economy.   While I've tried to touch on this myself, think of the average farmer having access to Create Water.  Or a miner with Mage Hand.  Or a tailor with Mending.  And so on....

I usually reserve cantrips and first level spells for Masters of a given craft.

Part of what I believe Loreguard is trying to do see if he can make the systems play well together. and what might need to be done [hopefully as little or in RAW as possible to make it seem reasonable.

All these posts are crazy old...

I don't suppose that anyone has a good adaptation of the Birthright Campaign Setting for PF2, do they?

PF2 is still pretty new and, as a whole, rPoL tends to lag a bit behind the cutting edge as it takes awhile for the books to get enough penetration that you can reliably get games going.

As for adapting Birthright, what rules specifically are you concerned about?

Three things:

The Noble Class // Background

Bloodfeats // Blood Abilities

Differentiations within Human to reflect differences in ethnicity

So PF2 already has a Noble background. Is there something about it you don't like?

In general even in PF there isn't much actual distinction between human ethnicity beyond access to specialized languages and traits. Honestly I think with the backgrounds that kind of has it covered. People from Region X typically have Backgrounds Y or Z should suffice, no? Personally I would instead work with the player and describe the ethnicity involved and give the player a chance to either embrace or reject that stereotype.

For example say you have an ethnicity of Conan the Barbarians. I would say the default for that ethnicity is the Nomad or Warrior background and have the player emphasize Strength or Constitution as an ability boost. They don't have to, they could play a physically weak mage because why not? but that should be incorporated into their character how they were very different then their peers and possibly a disappointment or viewed as cursed by their parents, or maybe blessed depending on how the culture views magic.

For blood abilities that gets trickier as this represents an actual bonus ability that will curve the players ahead of normal. If you want a higher power game then I think this could be represented with a free feat. So you would roll as normal and then find a close equivalent.

Looking at blood feats on Birthright.net I see some that are easy like Alertness. That becomes Canny Acumen (Perception). Alter Appearance means the player gets a Disguise Self cantrip 1/day etc. Bloodmark (+1 on charisma checks) can also probably just be brought over as is.

Looking at that website there is a crap ton of blood abilities and it appears like you should randomly roll for them so I would say just have a player roll and translate them on an ad hoc basis instead of converting a hundred abilities and only using 3-4. If they get one that just seems tricky I'm willing to help for specifics but to my knowledge there is no current effort to convert PF2 completely to Birthright.

In reply to praguepride (msg # 53):

Take a look at Eberron's dragonmarks. They have some analogs. And are likely a good way to start converting.

Here's a house rule I just added to my game (because I just picked up a new player playing a witch).  Not as sweeping as some of the ones here, and therefore easier to incorporate into your game, if you like.  Comments?

3rd level:  Fast Hexes

Starting at 3rd level, a witch can cast hexes more quickly a number of times per day equal to half the witch's level, rounded up.  When using a Fast Hex, the witch casts as a move action any hex that normally is cast as a standard action.  The effect of the hex is unchanged from a normal casting of the hex.  This means that the witch can both cast a hex and take any standard action (cast a spell or another hex, make an attack, etc.) in the same round, as long as she doesn't otherwise use her move action.  She would still be able to take a 5-foot step.

Reasoning:  As a class-defining feature, I find that the hexes are underpowered.  Their effectiveness is about that of cantrips, which means that the ones used in combat will never get used by high-level witches because the opportunity cost is too high.  They would be better off casting a real spell at that point.  For cantrips and orisons, this is fine because they aren't class defining.  However, the hexes are at the center of the definition of a witch and they shouldn't become something that is never used in combat.

Rather than try to redefine them individually to become more useful as a witch gets more powerful, I thought that this was an easy compromise, something on the order of a Full Round attack by high level fighters, and with the same limitations.

No comments?  I was hoping that someone with more experience either GMing or playing witches would chime in.

I have DMed witches and run some as NPC's.  I don't think hexes are underpowered.  Some hexes are underpowered and some are not meant for combat.  IMHO "Fast Hexes" is too good for free.  It might work as a feat with a limited number of times per day.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:40, Sun 25 Oct 2020.

Thanks for the feedback.  I have warned the player that if it seem over-powered, we might have to cut it back.

I do have it as a limited number of times per day, though, and so far it only applies to common hexes, not major nor grand.  I'll let you know, as we progress, how it works out.

My whole thinking on this started out with her first hex she used in combat.  She used evil eye to reduce the opponents saves by 2.  I was thinking how really lame it is:  For future spells, it is only a 10% chance of having an effect, and they get a save on the hex itself that they are roughly 50% to succeed on.  So it's only 5% chance of mattering, per spell you cast after.  If it were an AoE, then it would make sense, but for a single target, spending a whole round's worth of spells just to have a 5% chance of improving a couple of future spells against that opponent didn't seem worth it, to me.

What's actually funny is that the hex worked exactly as it was supposed to.  The witch then threw a Hold Person on the target, and he would have made his save by 1 if it hadn't been for the hex.  In spite of it working that one time, I still thought it was kind of lame.

In reply to Zag24 (msg # 58):

And you're getting a good understanding as to why players tend to min/max their characters.   Sometimes, it really is that one point which matters.