Downtime Options for Kingmaker

Selling Crafted Items & Loot

When it comes to selling items through your shops, we’re creating new rules. I’ve been talking with several of you, brainstorming how this is going to work. There are lots of rules that kind of come close to what we’re doing in this campaign, but nothing solid. So, we have to make up something new.

The downtime rules for running a shop (including a magic shop) really only let you earn a few gold a day (which takes into account everything like overhead, products sitting on shelves for long periods, product loss for when a couple of halflings crawl into backpacks and wait until you close the shop before robbing you from the inside, etc.) So, the standard shop rules are probably pretty accurate in how much profit they actually produce per day.

The real sticking point is that you may be able to craft all sorts of things, but the bottleneck will be how quickly those items sell. We can assume that, if it was as easy as cranking out a 1,000 gold piece item a day and selling it, then merchants would do that for a month and then retire.

Also, the typical crafting rules mean you can create something for half the cost of the item, and then turn around and sell it to a merchant for half the cost of the item, so there’s no real advantage to doing that. But we’re looking for a way for you to be both the crafter and the merchant.

There are some rules that are intended for selling structures, but I’m going to adapt those rules to make a quick and easy way to hopefully balance out all of these various factors:

• You’re out in the frontier, without a lot of trade, so not much gold flowing
• You’re in a small village, with not a lot of competition for that flowing gold (assuming you’ve picked a shop without competition)
• When you make an item, it will take some time for it to sell
• The standard shop rules account for standard overhead costs. If you’re crafting higher cost items, expect that there will be larger overhead costs, too. (Security, marketing, etc.)

So, here’s what we’re going to try…

When you have an item to sell, either crafted or loot:

Decide which store will sell it. You can have one item up for sale at a time in each store. (Be sure that the item makes sense in that store.)
It takes 4d6 days to find a buyer without spending any downtime. You can reduce that time by 1d6 days per 1 Influence spent.

Once you find a buyer, there is a 50% chance that they will buy it. If they don’t buy it, repeat the previous step.

If they do buy it, you get 75% of the full value of the item.

You can then replace the sold item with another item up for sale, with the day after the sale being “Day 1” of looking for a new buyer.

EXAMPLE:

You craft a magic item that has a full retail value of 1,000 gp. It costs you 500 gp to craft the item. You put it up for sale in the Magic Shop.

You roll 3d6 and get a 13. On the 13th day the item is up for sale, an interested buyer comes into the store.

You roll a 42%. Success! The buyer pays for the item. After all of the various expenses and other factors that we’re shortcutting, you receive 750 gp.

NOTE: I plan to apply the same rules regardless of how valuable the item is. So, when you are crafting really high-ticket items (at higher levels), you can expect to make more for those, which makes sense.