Pc in charge of an dragon M. enclave- Help [Archive] - Wizards Community

Pc in charge of an dragon M. enclave- Help [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
terranshadowstaff
03-01-05, 08:45 PM Abby stay out and that goes for the rest of my gaming group. You know who you are.

Hello everyone,

I was wondering how much money does a dragon marked house make per month/or per year. The reason is that I have an pc in charge of an enclave and I need to know how much gold the house makes and there expenses. So, the pc has a round about figure on how much gold he or she has on hand. Any comments would be appriecated.

P.S. I know about the favored Dragon mark feat and was looking to expand on the idea. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Shurijo
03-01-05, 10:22 PM Check out how House Phiarlan does with the Shadow Network at DragonShards (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20050221a)

You could set up some payments similiar to that way.

Also somewhere there's a thread about how the DM's should/can handle the Favor of the House feat. One DM (IMHO) did a good job of saying that it should always be inline with the DM's direction of the game. And to make 3 different outcomes with different DCs. A DC 10 with something less than you (DM) wants to give the player, DC15 of something that you want to give the player, and DC 20 of something a little better than you want (but nothing to disrupt the adventure) to give.
Cloud Divider
03-02-05, 12:22 AM Abby stay out and that goes for the rest of my gaming group. You know who you are.

Hello everyone,

I was wondering how much money does a dragon marked house make per month/or per year. The reason is that I have an pc in charge of an enclave and I need to know how much gold the house makes and there expenses. So, the pc has a round about figure on how much gold he or she has on hand. Any comments would be appriecated.
The easy answer: He's got as much money and other assets as the plot needs him to have. Does he need to fight off a hostile takeover by someone else and you want it to be easy? He just happens to have a fat slush fund. Want it to be hard? His enclave is hemorrhaging money and his upper management is NOT happy with his constant requests for additional funding and support.

Is the PC in charge of a major House Enclave in a major city or trade center? They'd likely have thousands of GP on hand. Maybe even tens of thousands. If he runs the Deneith Enclave in Wroat, he may even be in charge hundreds of people (...and thus the payroll to employ them, and the income resulting from the work they produce).

The detailed answer is probably WAY more work than you probably care about. I mean, this is D&D, not Ledgers & Accountants. But hey, I have this wierd compulsion to play with numbers like this when the opportunity comes up (I did figure out what the rough monthly operating costs of my PC's business in Sharn was...).

So let's assume it's a small enclave (10 people, plus The Boss), in a small town (pop 1500). Of those 10 people, he's got 8 "active" personnel, the other 2 perform support duties (secretaries, administrative, bookkeeper, whatever - the point is that they don't provide any income but they produce income indirectly - they let your people focus on their jobs rather than multitasking at stuff they suck at). Let's use the Deneith as the example, because they've got a good employment/income values to use in Sharn... So of the 6 "active" people, he'll have one White Blade (6sp/day), two Gray Blades (4sp/day), and five Black Blades (2.5sp/day). The Back Office people cost 2sp/day, and your agents get paid 40/50/60% of their earnings based on rank (Black/Grey/White).

Your daily income (assuming you're working at 100% capacity) is then 26.5sp/day. The cost of business is then 4sp (overhead) + 5sp (black) + 4sp (grey) + 3.6sp (white) = 16.6 sp/day. Not counting other costs (rent, equipment, other consumables). Lets say you pay rent for an average storefront/office in Sharn - so 2d4x10gp/month; call it 50gp/month. (buying the place would cost 2d4x1000, assume it's not paid for for now). So 9.9gp/day x 28 days nets you 27.72gp/month. So unless The Boss actually brings in some money, the business runs in the red by about 20gp/month...and that's assuming that he's operating at full efficiency! ...So hopefully Rent isn't an issue (or you just find a cheaper place of business).

Note: the Rent figure is an estimate - Sharn:CoT doesn't give rental rates for businesses. However, if you compare the housing buy/rent rates, you can extract the relationship and estimate a cost for business rental rates.

So if you want your Enclave to essentially be run by it's bootstraps, the above math will work. 20gp a month is pretty trivial for a PC. If the PC is essentially building a new enclave in a new market, this isn't unreasonable (Adventurers as Eberronian Venture Capitalists?).

If you remove rent as an issue (the House owns the property, and the PC doesn't have to worry about rent or property tax or any similar operating costs), the 10+1 man operation makes just under 30gp/mo of profit. That's still pretty good money... It's not rich, but that means The Boss can live fairly comfortably even if he only manages the business (rather than does jobs too). Certainly far more so than the typical peasant (who might see 1gp/mo).

If you want it to be a "bit" easier, give the PC some petty cash (I gave my PC's 1000gp - about a year's worth of business expenses, or a very tempting slush fund when you're only 2nd level). That was probably a bit generous, but scrabbling to make rent wasn't too high on my priority list for what I wanted to do with the campaign.

In the case of a Dragonmarked house, the PC wouldn't likely be able to keep much of their Enclave's profit, it'd likely be kept in a business fund, and some portion funneled up to the next level. There'd probably be a minimal amount of discretionary funds available to the PC in case of contingency (but the specific amount will likely be a function on the day-to-day costs of running the business).

So to sum up with the 10-man Enclave:
Gross Income: 74.2gp/mo
Operating Cost: 46.48 gp/mo
Net Income: 27.72 gp/mo (a whopping 332gp/yr profit)
Discretionary Funds (call it 10x): 277.2gp.

Note: As small as this site is, chances are pretty high that it's not really supposed to be sending much money upstream, and likely using that to build up the site for the future.

You could likely scale these figures up for a nonmagical (but skilled) mundane mercenary outfit. 100 able soldiers? Your Rent-An-Army costs 500gp/mo to operate, but probably makes between 750-1000gp/mo.

The lesson? Deneith bodyguard businesses make pretty crummy investments. Unless they're all Dragonmarked (not likely) the income is pretty minimal. Maybe they make more money when combat pay bonuses show up... Alternately, the Deneith make their "real" income in influence and not money. Certainly plausible...

A Jorasco hospital is likely to do better, even at 8gp/CLW spell. A teeny clinic (Chief Marked Healer + 1 receptionist + 1 Adept or other caster 1 + 1 Expert w/ Heal skill) that only performs 1 Cure Light a day will make 225gp/month (the overhead personnel costs become practically irrelevant, at this point). Even with a fancy office (2d8x10gp/mo rent, call it 90gp), they still make over 100gp/mo profit. Granted, such a clinic probably won't have anywhere near that kind of business in anywhere BUT a big city (8gp is quite a bit of money for common folk that make up 60% of the population)...

Anyway. So that's a lot of words that basically prove my point: Pick an amount of money that "feels right" to you. Anything more becomes a pretty meaningless exercise in fantasy economics.

So if I were to do it (PC runs a 40-person Enclave in a Large Town), they may have maybe 5-10k in discretionary funds above and beyond operating costs; this probably doesn't refresh very often. Even that could get burned through pretty darn quickly if they went jet-setting on business trips aboard a Lyrandar airship (at 1gp/mile). Bring ANY kind of magical transportation costs into the picture, and you blow the economic model out of the water (a train trip once a year for the Chief to go from Wroat to Sharn for the Enclave Operators of Breland Conference will cost about 500gp!).

I'd give them access to enough to buy incidentals ("Hm, my Black Blades have been attacked recently by wererats - time to issue some silver arrows to the troops..." or "Need to stock up on some CLW potions and a few Magic Missile wands for this upcoming op...") but not enough to buy big magic doodads for personal use (sure, maybe he can afford that +1 Defending Flaming Burst Halberd with his discretionary funds, but can he justify it to his superiors and their accountants?).

I dunno - maybe some kind of Resource-like mechanic might be worthwhile; the result of a Skill roll (Knowledge: Business? Diplomacy?) determines how much they can extract from the Enclave's coffers.
terranshadowstaff
03-02-05, 01:49 AM Thank you Shurijo and Cloud Divider for your comments. I loved the detail you put in your answer, cloud Divider. The dragon mark house is lyander (the airship house in sharn) is the enclave my pc is runing at the moment, till his cousin returns from a buisness trip that will take him a few weeks or months ( I have not decided yet). Also, I will try to find the dragon shard you metioned Shruijo on the different dc ratings for the pc favor house checks. It may come in handy in the near furture. Thank you both for responding to my question so quickly.
Cloud Divider
03-02-05, 09:20 AM Thank you Shurijo and Cloud Divider for your comments. I loved the detail you put in your answer, cloud Divider. The dragon mark house is lyander (the airship house in sharn) is the enclave my pc is runing at the moment, till his cousin returns from a buisness trip that will take him a few weeks or months ( I have not decided yet). Also, I will try to find the dragon shard you metioned Shruijo on the different dc ratings for the pc favor house checks. It may come in handy in the near furture. Thank you both for responding to my question so quickly.
Where is the Enclave located? Is it the Sharn Lyrandar enclave?

If that's the case, there's going to be piles of gold. One can make a fairly safe assumption that Lyrandar Tower (see the Sharn:CoT web enhancement) is the only place to dock/drydock airships in Sharn.

So let's say there are two airships that come and go each day, and each carries 4 paying passengers (in reality, there's likely more passengers, but between the ones getting discounted travel and the ones paying full price, 4 might be a reasonable average). A flight to Wroat costs on the order of 500gp. So Lyrandar would be issuing at least 4000gp/day in tickets (and likely much more). Even if the passengers themselves aren't paying the price, an equivalent amount of favor/influence is being paid by someone, somewhere, for the service.

And two airships/day is probably not too crazy for Sharn, the massive metropolitan center that it is. Even if you take airships to run on a schedule like cross-Atlantic schooners in the 18-19th century, I bet New York had quite a few comings and goings each day (and certainly at least 2).

So the Sharn Lyrandar would be taking in something like 1.3M gp/year. Their personnel overhead costs (dockworkers, office staff, house guards, pilots) are pretty minimal (certainly below 10%). If you were paying these guys 20gp/day on average (including the dockworkers), and had 100 employees, then it gets pretty crazy (about 700k gp/year). But I'd bet the average income across the staff is probably closer to 1-2gp/day (or 35-70k gp/year, or about 5% of net).

Who knows how much "maintenance costs" airships have. I could probably make some rough estimates, but it'd require cracking open an economics textbook. Maybe assume something like 5% of their purchase price goes to maintenance annually. So figure Sharn has 4 airships that are normally "stabled" there, and I forget what an Airship goes for. Let's call it 500,000gp. So 500,000 x 5% x 4 airships = 100,000gp/year in maintenance (so 10% of your net).

To keep things from getting TOO crazy, assume that the Lyrandar pay some taxes to the Brelish crown and to the Sharn council, and have payments to Kundarak venture capitalists that provided the raw capital to pay for the airship fleet. So cut 15% of net for property/business/etc taxes (10% to Breland, 5% to Sharn), and a 20 year Kundarak loan on the 2M gp in airships at 10% compounding interest (230,000gp/year, or 17%). The Kundarak cut could quite likely be MUCH higher - a big trade hub like Sharn is probably going to subsidize the smaller Lyrandar docks that don't have anywhere near the volume. So the Kundarak cut could be as high as 25-40%.

So to total up:
1.3M net income/yr
-5% personnel
-10% airship maintenance
-5% facility maintenance
-15% taxes
-17% loan payments
=48% net profit, or 624,000gp/year.

Even with a 40% Kundarak cut, they could still be making 300k gp/year in profit... That incidentally means that the Sharn Kundarak take in at least 230,000gp/year from ONLY the Lyrandar (and likely as much from others in Sharn). So while the Lyrandar see buckets of money, those Kundarak practically swim in the stuff (Scrooge McKundarak of the clan Kundarak). The Kundarak enclave might as well be Fort Knox, for the raw tonnage of gold that will be present at any given time. 230,000gp is about 2.5 TONS of gold.

Also, it's important to note that while whoever's running the shop can probably expect a healthy performance bonus (call it 10,000gp/year), he still can't just go crazy and buy whatever he feels like. The Lyrandar patriarch still holds him responsible for that money and making the most of it. Sponsoring bacchanalian parties probably doesn't buy you into the patriarch's good graces (that is, unless you've got more dastardly motives, like buying influence with the attendees or starting blackmail dossiers on them).

Oh, and that's also assuming "only" 8 full fares are paid from Sharn to Wroat each day (8 fares/day is 4 thousandths of a percent of the population of Sharn; or roughly 5% of the top 10% of Sharn's Upper Class making a single round-trip airship flight to Wroat and ONLY Wroat a year). Wroat-Sharn is probably the shortest leg that will reliably have airship travel. So the Sharn Lyrandar could quite possibly have a much, MUCH higher income. Maybe by even an order of magnitude.

(Is this a good time to segue into the "transportation costs in Eberron are all goofy from an economic standpoint?" discussion? I covered that in another thread a few weeks ago)

Anyway, compared to what Lyrandar (and Orien) rake in, Deneith and any of the Houses that generally provide nonmagical services are basically paupers by comparison. Lyrandar = Microsoft or Boeing, Deneith = Uncle Bob's Neighborhood Security Service. So again, it's just not very sensible to worry too much about Fantasy Economics...
Docrailgun
03-02-05, 10:52 AM The posts above mine in this thread ought to serve you in good stead, but if you need "rules" that you can quote to players or a DM rather than the admittedly useful suggestions you've already seen here, just figure what the average Profession (whatever is appropriate) skill test for the average member of the enclave is, and multiply that by the number of Dragonmarked folks in the enclave. Some percentage of that (I would say 10-20%) probably belongs to the enclave itself, and is per week. Extrapolating things beyond the average weekly take is a matter of simple math.
Of course, this doesn't take into account how much more expensive than average Dragonmarked-House services are than normal professions, but for simplicity's sake it _could_ be argued that the money from the Profession skill is simply profit after expenses, bribes, licenses, and so on.
Abby stay out and that goes for the rest of my gaming group. You know who you are.

Hello everyone,

I was wondering how much money does a dragon marked house make per month/or per year. The reason is that I have an pc in charge of an enclave and I need to know how much gold the house makes and there expenses. So, the pc has a round about figure on how much gold he or she has on hand. Any comments would be appriecated.

P.S. I know about the favored Dragon mark feat and was looking to expand on the idea. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
terranshadowstaff
03-02-05, 11:59 AM Yes Cloud Divider, the enclave is located in Sharn: Cot. I am sorry that I did not post the location before, I thought I did for some reason. I am just Wowed by your detailed answers and thank you for your time and input.

At first I had similiar thougths as you on the subject Docrailgun, but I think I am going to go by Cloud Divider figures to make it a little easyer for me.

Again thaks everyone for responding to my question and if anyone else has something to add, I am all ears.
Cloud Divider
03-02-05, 02:38 PM Just did a bit more thinking...

I'm not sure what the expected useful life is of an airship. 20 years may be excessive. If you cut the loan period down to 10 years, the Sharn Lyrandar will pay about 325,000/yr (25% of annual gross). Incidentally, I'm pulling the loan payment data by using an online mortgage calculator - the principles are the same. So if we can safely assume that the Kundarak have developed the concept of compounding interest, it's in good shape... So now there's about 60% of the gross accounted for by expenses (780,000gp/yr).

If we take the subsidy concept again, and up the loan payment from 25% of net to maybe 50% of net; that'd result in 80% operating expenses. The remaining 20% profit is still pretty sizeable at 260k...which basically means the Sharn enclave could be commissioning a brand new airship every 2-3 years without having to resort to Kundarak loans.

Even a 20% profit is pretty spectacular by modern standards. Microsoft, the billion dollar industry that it is, made about 25% profit as of Feb 04. Nestle made about 8%. Boeing (roughly analogous to Lyrandar) made 1%...

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
terranshadowstaff 03-01-05, 08:45 PM	Abby stay out and that goes for the rest of my gaming group. You know who you are. Hello everyone, I was wondering how much money does a dragon marked house make per month/or per year. The reason is that I have an pc in charge of an enclave and I need to know how much gold the house makes and there expenses. So, the pc has a round about figure on how much gold he or she has on hand. Any comments would be appriecated. P.S. I know about the favored Dragon mark feat and was looking to expand on the idea. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Shurijo 03-01-05, 10:22 PM	Check out how House Phiarlan does with the Shadow Network at DragonShards (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20050221a) You could set up some payments similiar to that way. Also somewhere there's a thread about how the DM's should/can handle the Favor of the House feat. One DM (IMHO) did a good job of saying that it should always be inline with the DM's direction of the game. And to make 3 different outcomes with different DCs. A DC 10 with something less than you (DM) wants to give the player, DC15 of something that you want to give the player, and DC 20 of something a little better than you want (but nothing to disrupt the adventure) to give.
Cloud Divider 03-02-05, 12:22 AM	Abby stay out and that goes for the rest of my gaming group. You know who you are. Hello everyone, I was wondering how much money does a dragon marked house make per month/or per year. The reason is that I have an pc in charge of an enclave and I need to know how much gold the house makes and there expenses. So, the pc has a round about figure on how much gold he or she has on hand. Any comments would be appriecated. The easy answer: He's got as much money and other assets as the plot needs him to have. Does he need to fight off a hostile takeover by someone else and you want it to be easy? He just happens to have a fat slush fund. Want it to be hard? His enclave is hemorrhaging money and his upper management is NOT happy with his constant requests for additional funding and support. Is the PC in charge of a major House Enclave in a major city or trade center? They'd likely have thousands of GP on hand. Maybe even tens of thousands. If he runs the Deneith Enclave in Wroat, he may even be in charge hundreds of people (...and thus the payroll to employ them, and the income resulting from the work they produce). The detailed answer is probably WAY more work than you probably care about. I mean, this is D&D, not Ledgers & Accountants. But hey, I have this wierd compulsion to play with numbers like this when the opportunity comes up (I did figure out what the rough monthly operating costs of my PC's business in Sharn was...). So let's assume it's a small enclave (10 people, plus The Boss), in a small town (pop 1500). Of those 10 people, he's got 8 "active" personnel, the other 2 perform support duties (secretaries, administrative, bookkeeper, whatever - the point is that they don't provide any income but they produce income indirectly - they let your people focus on their jobs rather than multitasking at stuff they suck at). Let's use the Deneith as the example, because they've got a good employment/income values to use in Sharn... So of the 6 "active" people, he'll have one White Blade (6sp/day), two Gray Blades (4sp/day), and five Black Blades (2.5sp/day). The Back Office people cost 2sp/day, and your agents get paid 40/50/60% of their earnings based on rank (Black/Grey/White). Your daily income (assuming you're working at 100% capacity) is then 26.5sp/day. The cost of business is then 4sp (overhead) + 5sp (black) + 4sp (grey) + 3.6sp (white) = 16.6 sp/day. Not counting other costs (rent, equipment, other consumables). Lets say you pay rent for an average storefront/office in Sharn - so 2d4x10gp/month; call it 50gp/month. (buying the place would cost 2d4x1000, assume it's not paid for for now). So 9.9gp/day x 28 days nets you 27.72gp/month. So unless The Boss actually brings in some money, the business runs in the red by about 20gp/month...and that's assuming that he's operating at full efficiency! ...So hopefully Rent isn't an issue (or you just find a cheaper place of business). Note: the Rent figure is an estimate - Sharn:CoT doesn't give rental rates for businesses. However, if you compare the housing buy/rent rates, you can extract the relationship and estimate a cost for business rental rates. So if you want your Enclave to essentially be run by it's bootstraps, the above math will work. 20gp a month is pretty trivial for a PC. If the PC is essentially building a new enclave in a new market, this isn't unreasonable (Adventurers as Eberronian Venture Capitalists?). If you remove rent as an issue (the House owns the property, and the PC doesn't have to worry about rent or property tax or any similar operating costs), the 10+1 man operation makes just under 30gp/mo of profit. That's still pretty good money... It's not rich, but that means The Boss can live fairly comfortably even if he only manages the business (rather than does jobs too). Certainly far more so than the typical peasant (who might see 1gp/mo). If you want it to be a "bit" easier, give the PC some petty cash (I gave my PC's 1000gp - about a year's worth of business expenses, or a very tempting slush fund when you're only 2nd level). That was probably a bit generous, but scrabbling to make rent wasn't too high on my priority list for what I wanted to do with the campaign. In the case of a Dragonmarked house, the PC wouldn't likely be able to keep much of their Enclave's profit, it'd likely be kept in a business fund, and some portion funneled up to the next level. There'd probably be a minimal amount of discretionary funds available to the PC in case of contingency (but the specific amount will likely be a function on the day-to-day costs of running the business). So to sum up with the 10-man Enclave: Gross Income: 74.2gp/mo Operating Cost: 46.48 gp/mo Net Income: 27.72 gp/mo (a whopping 332gp/yr profit) Discretionary Funds (call it 10x): 277.2gp. Note: As small as this site is, chances are pretty high that it's not really supposed to be sending much money upstream, and likely using that to build up the site for the future. You could likely scale these figures up for a nonmagical (but skilled) mundane mercenary outfit. 100 able soldiers? Your Rent-An-Army costs 500gp/mo to operate, but probably makes between 750-1000gp/mo. The lesson? Deneith bodyguard businesses make pretty crummy investments. Unless they're all Dragonmarked (not likely) the income is pretty minimal. Maybe they make more money when combat pay bonuses show up... Alternately, the Deneith make their "real" income in influence and not money. Certainly plausible... A Jorasco hospital is likely to do better, even at 8gp/CLW spell. A teeny clinic (Chief Marked Healer + 1 receptionist + 1 Adept or other caster 1 + 1 Expert w/ Heal skill) that only performs 1 Cure Light a day will make 225gp/month (the overhead personnel costs become practically irrelevant, at this point). Even with a fancy office (2d8x10gp/mo rent, call it 90gp), they still make over 100gp/mo profit. Granted, such a clinic probably won't have anywhere near that kind of business in anywhere BUT a big city (8gp is quite a bit of money for common folk that make up 60% of the population)... Anyway. So that's a lot of words that basically prove my point: Pick an amount of money that "feels right" to you. Anything more becomes a pretty meaningless exercise in fantasy economics. So if I were to do it (PC runs a 40-person Enclave in a Large Town), they may have maybe 5-10k in discretionary funds above and beyond operating costs; this probably doesn't refresh very often. Even that could get burned through pretty darn quickly if they went jet-setting on business trips aboard a Lyrandar airship (at 1gp/mile). Bring ANY kind of magical transportation costs into the picture, and you blow the economic model out of the water (a train trip once a year for the Chief to go from Wroat to Sharn for the Enclave Operators of Breland Conference will cost about 500gp!). I'd give them access to enough to buy incidentals ("Hm, my Black Blades have been attacked recently by wererats - time to issue some silver arrows to the troops..." or "Need to stock up on some CLW potions and a few Magic Missile wands for this upcoming op...") but not enough to buy big magic doodads for personal use (sure, maybe he can afford that +1 Defending Flaming Burst Halberd with his discretionary funds, but can he justify it to his superiors and their accountants?). I dunno - maybe some kind of Resource-like mechanic might be worthwhile; the result of a Skill roll (Knowledge: Business? Diplomacy?) determines how much they can extract from the Enclave's coffers.
terranshadowstaff 03-02-05, 01:49 AM	Thank you Shurijo and Cloud Divider for your comments. I loved the detail you put in your answer, cloud Divider. The dragon mark house is lyander (the airship house in sharn) is the enclave my pc is runing at the moment, till his cousin returns from a buisness trip that will take him a few weeks or months ( I have not decided yet). Also, I will try to find the dragon shard you metioned Shruijo on the different dc ratings for the pc favor house checks. It may come in handy in the near furture. Thank you both for responding to my question so quickly.
Cloud Divider 03-02-05, 09:20 AM	Thank you Shurijo and Cloud Divider for your comments. I loved the detail you put in your answer, cloud Divider. The dragon mark house is lyander (the airship house in sharn) is the enclave my pc is runing at the moment, till his cousin returns from a buisness trip that will take him a few weeks or months ( I have not decided yet). Also, I will try to find the dragon shard you metioned Shruijo on the different dc ratings for the pc favor house checks. It may come in handy in the near furture. Thank you both for responding to my question so quickly. Where is the Enclave located? Is it the Sharn Lyrandar enclave? If that's the case, there's going to be piles of gold. One can make a fairly safe assumption that Lyrandar Tower (see the Sharn:CoT web enhancement) is the only place to dock/drydock airships in Sharn. So let's say there are two airships that come and go each day, and each carries 4 paying passengers (in reality, there's likely more passengers, but between the ones getting discounted travel and the ones paying full price, 4 might be a reasonable average). A flight to Wroat costs on the order of 500gp. So Lyrandar would be issuing at least 4000gp/day in tickets (and likely much more). Even if the passengers themselves aren't paying the price, an equivalent amount of favor/influence is being paid by someone, somewhere, for the service. And two airships/day is probably not too crazy for Sharn, the massive metropolitan center that it is. Even if you take airships to run on a schedule like cross-Atlantic schooners in the 18-19th century, I bet New York had quite a few comings and goings each day (and certainly at least 2). So the Sharn Lyrandar would be taking in something like 1.3M gp/year. Their personnel overhead costs (dockworkers, office staff, house guards, pilots) are pretty minimal (certainly below 10%). If you were paying these guys 20gp/day on average (including the dockworkers), and had 100 employees, then it gets pretty crazy (about 700k gp/year). But I'd bet the average income across the staff is probably closer to 1-2gp/day (or 35-70k gp/year, or about 5% of net). Who knows how much "maintenance costs" airships have. I could probably make some rough estimates, but it'd require cracking open an economics textbook. Maybe assume something like 5% of their purchase price goes to maintenance annually. So figure Sharn has 4 airships that are normally "stabled" there, and I forget what an Airship goes for. Let's call it 500,000gp. So 500,000 x 5% x 4 airships = 100,000gp/year in maintenance (so 10% of your net). To keep things from getting TOO crazy, assume that the Lyrandar pay some taxes to the Brelish crown and to the Sharn council, and have payments to Kundarak venture capitalists that provided the raw capital to pay for the airship fleet. So cut 15% of net for property/business/etc taxes (10% to Breland, 5% to Sharn), and a 20 year Kundarak loan on the 2M gp in airships at 10% compounding interest (230,000gp/year, or 17%). The Kundarak cut could quite likely be MUCH higher - a big trade hub like Sharn is probably going to subsidize the smaller Lyrandar docks that don't have anywhere near the volume. So the Kundarak cut could be as high as 25-40%. So to total up: 1.3M net income/yr -5% personnel -10% airship maintenance -5% facility maintenance -15% taxes -17% loan payments =48% net profit, or 624,000gp/year. Even with a 40% Kundarak cut, they could still be making 300k gp/year in profit... That incidentally means that the Sharn Kundarak take in at least 230,000gp/year from ONLY the Lyrandar (and likely as much from others in Sharn). So while the Lyrandar see buckets of money, those Kundarak practically swim in the stuff (Scrooge McKundarak of the clan Kundarak). The Kundarak enclave might as well be Fort Knox, for the raw tonnage of gold that will be present at any given time. 230,000gp is about 2.5 TONS of gold. Also, it's important to note that while whoever's running the shop can probably expect a healthy performance bonus (call it 10,000gp/year), he still can't just go crazy and buy whatever he feels like. The Lyrandar patriarch still holds him responsible for that money and making the most of it. Sponsoring bacchanalian parties probably doesn't buy you into the patriarch's good graces (that is, unless you've got more dastardly motives, like buying influence with the attendees or starting blackmail dossiers on them). Oh, and that's also assuming "only" 8 full fares are paid from Sharn to Wroat each day (8 fares/day is 4 thousandths of a percent of the population of Sharn; or roughly 5% of the top 10% of Sharn's Upper Class making a single round-trip airship flight to Wroat and ONLY Wroat a year). Wroat-Sharn is probably the shortest leg that will reliably have airship travel. So the Sharn Lyrandar could quite possibly have a much, MUCH higher income. Maybe by even an order of magnitude. (Is this a good time to segue into the "transportation costs in Eberron are all goofy from an economic standpoint?" discussion? I covered that in another thread a few weeks ago) Anyway, compared to what Lyrandar (and Orien) rake in, Deneith and any of the Houses that generally provide nonmagical services are basically paupers by comparison. Lyrandar = Microsoft or Boeing, Deneith = Uncle Bob's Neighborhood Security Service. So again, it's just not very sensible to worry too much about Fantasy Economics...
Docrailgun 03-02-05, 10:52 AM	The posts above mine in this thread ought to serve you in good stead, but if you need "rules" that you can quote to players or a DM rather than the admittedly useful suggestions you've already seen here, just figure what the average Profession (whatever is appropriate) skill test for the average member of the enclave is, and multiply that by the number of Dragonmarked folks in the enclave. Some percentage of that (I would say 10-20%) probably belongs to the enclave itself, and is per week. Extrapolating things beyond the average weekly take is a matter of simple math. Of course, this doesn't take into account how much more expensive than average Dragonmarked-House services are than normal professions, but for simplicity's sake it _could_ be argued that the money from the Profession skill is simply profit after expenses, bribes, licenses, and so on. Abby stay out and that goes for the rest of my gaming group. You know who you are. Hello everyone, I was wondering how much money does a dragon marked house make per month/or per year. The reason is that I have an pc in charge of an enclave and I need to know how much gold the house makes and there expenses. So, the pc has a round about figure on how much gold he or she has on hand. Any comments would be appriecated. P.S. I know about the favored Dragon mark feat and was looking to expand on the idea. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
terranshadowstaff 03-02-05, 11:59 AM	Yes Cloud Divider, the enclave is located in Sharn: Cot. I am sorry that I did not post the location before, I thought I did for some reason. I am just Wowed by your detailed answers and thank you for your time and input. At first I had similiar thougths as you on the subject Docrailgun, but I think I am going to go by Cloud Divider figures to make it a little easyer for me. Again thaks everyone for responding to my question and if anyone else has something to add, I am all ears.
Cloud Divider 03-02-05, 02:38 PM	Just did a bit more thinking... I'm not sure what the expected useful life is of an airship. 20 years may be excessive. If you cut the loan period down to 10 years, the Sharn Lyrandar will pay about 325,000/yr (25% of annual gross). Incidentally, I'm pulling the loan payment data by using an online mortgage calculator - the principles are the same. So if we can safely assume that the Kundarak have developed the concept of compounding interest, it's in good shape... So now there's about 60% of the gross accounted for by expenses (780,000gp/yr). If we take the subsidy concept again, and up the loan payment from 25% of net to maybe 50% of net; that'd result in 80% operating expenses. The remaining 20% profit is still pretty sizeable at 260k...which basically means the Sharn enclave could be commissioning a brand new airship every 2-3 years without having to resort to Kundarak loans. Even a 20% profit is pretty spectacular by modern standards. Microsoft, the billion dollar industry that it is, made about 25% profit as of Feb 04. Nestle made about 8%. Boeing (roughly analogous to Lyrandar) made 1%...