Players working as Specialists

Hello!

Recently, a couple of my players realised that by taking certain proficiencies (such as knowledge) a number of times they can work primarily off-screen to bring in fairly decent sums of gold. So what I was wondering, do any of you apply some kind of rolls to see whether they find employment within their field and the likes or do you just give them the flat amount per month and perhaps throw in a wandering monsters encounter if they leave the city during it.

I don't think it would be a problem... I don't think they get xp for that right?

 

New set of math to run: is working for a few months to build a nest egg for merchanting caravans more worthwhile than caravaning from the get-go? (ditto dungeoneering, except that plate armor is so cheap...)

Without doing a ton of math, I think it comes down to risk and whether you're eligible for XP.

If the amount you're profiting is so small that you won't get any XP and there's risk on your trade route, chances are it's more worthwhile to sit and be a craftsman for a while.  But as long as XP is on the table, there's an incentive to try mercantile ventures.

That being said, my players initially tried to do some trade routing early on in our campaign.  A combination of me utterly flubbing the random encounter rules in civilized terrain and them transporting only a single wagon full of grain with a cavalcade of henchmen meant they were quickly disappointed with the results.

They do not. I don’t have a cite right now, but the rule as I recall it is that characters only gain XP from gold gained where risk was assumed.

(Whether that’s mercantile risk or domain risk or adventuring risk, there has to be some factor of risk to it. Working a job does not have that kind of risk.)

edit: I found the cite for this. ACKS Core page 113.

You have to have money to make money.

 

and the more money you make, the more money you have to make to gain XP. a corollary to the fundamental theorm of "mo' money, mo' problems"