If a party in a class III market decides they really need 260 pints of military oil, how long does the production of said oil take? 260 days, 104 days (2.5 per day, since production of 5 gp per day and 2 gp per unit), or some other number? How much parallelism in production is possible when commissioning multiple items at once?
I am not an Autarch (and I suspect your questions are at the discretion of the Judge), but you might consider my post: http://autarch.co/forums/house-rules/acks-military-oil-production
I think the search function is still missing (?), but I was lucky enough to find my old post on the first try.
Two different people running two different parties needing to know how fast they can produce a United-Nations-worrying-amount of military oil is exactly why the D&D game is the best game.
Yeah, dividing by the number of available alchemists was something that had occurred to me; yours takes more things into account (opportunity cost, apprentices). Thanks for the link!
Sadly this isn’t something that has actually come up in my games, but as I’m gearing up to start a new one I took another look at commissioning and went “Huh… I could see them wanting that much oil. For equipping a DaW unit, or maybe flooding a dungeon with liquid fire, or aerial bombardment of beastman villages.” They were always running up against oil availability last campaign, but never thought to commission it.
After some fairly complex number-crunching, I am now able to offer some clarified and updated mechanics on Commissioning Equipment.
COMMISSIONING EQUIPMENT
If equipment the adventurers desire to purchase is not available, they may commission it to be created. The advantage of commissioning equipment is that ten times more equipment can be commissioned than is available as inventory. Where the number available is listed as a percentage chance, multiply the percentage by 10 and divide by 100%. The integer quotient is the number of units available, and the remainder (if any) is the percentage chance of one additional unit being available.
EXAMPLE: Marcus is in Siadanos, a Class V town. He would like to commission the local smithing guild to create plate armor (60gp). There is a 25% percentage chance of one unit of plate armor being present in a Class V. Therefore Marcus can simultaneously commission (250/100 = 2 remainder 50) 2 suits of plate armor, with a 50% chance of a third. The Judge rolls 1d100 and gets a 32, so there are 3 suits of plate armor available.
The disadvantage of commissioning equipment is that it is not immediately available. Buildings and vehicles, which can be built by large groups, are constructed at a rate of 1 day per 500gp value. Animals take 1 day per 1gp value to find and train. Other equipment takes 1 day per 5gp value. All commissioned equipment is worked on simultaneously.
EXAMPLE: Since equipment takes 1 day per 5 gp to commission, it will take (60 gp / 5 gp) 12 days for the three suits of plate armor to be completed.
If you don’t want to mess with the change in the core rules, you can simply rule that all commissioning is simultaneous. But the above will give you results that are more correct given the assumptions of the in-world economics.
All that is left is purchasing that amount of oil on letters of credit using bills of lading through third party common carriers so no one knows who is about to burn down the city.
ah yesssss, more to feed my “Supplemental Rules” folder
Excellent! Thanks Alex
Nice
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but this seemed to contain the most recent commissioning call. If someone commissions something where most of the gold value is in the materials do we still use 5gp per day? For instance if someone commissioned a gold ring with a ruby inset would we include the gem’s cost as part of the labor time?
I would not count the gem’s cost, no, since the adventurer is providing it. The jeweler would instead be responsible for the added value.
So for example if the ruby is worth 500gp and the final piece of jewelry will be worth 600gp, use (600gp-500gp) = 100gp.
I discuss the role of materials in commissioning in another thread but more-or-less if you provide the materials the time goes down.
When you say that the work can be done simultaneously..
if i take the exemple gave in "of Coins and Commerce".. in a market class III you can commission up to 15x10 swords at 10gp each. Does that mean that the armourer and his team can produce all the 150 swords in 10gp/5gp = 2 days. That makes 1500gp value in only 2 days against their 160gp/month and they still got 28 days of work
"it will take (60 gp / 5 gp) 12 days for the three suits of plate armor to be completed"
there in 12 days they can produce 3*60=180gp against their 160gp/month
Am I misunderstanding something?
Commissioning should not be understand as commissioning one specific person in the market - that would be handled by hiring a specialist and having him do work for you.
Commissioning is an abstract system intended to reflect the maximum resources of an entire market. So you might be working with several armors yourself, working with a provisioner who has sub-contracted it out to several armorers, working with the merchant's guild to ship in goods from nearby settlements, etc. It doesn't really matter - the point is that you can commission 15 swords.
You might ask "where do these armoers come from? The Hireling Availability by Market Class table says only 1d4 armorers can be hired per month!" And that's true. But that's why we don't use the hireling system for resolving this. The number of specialists that are available as hirelings in the market is always lower than the total number that live in and around a settlement. Just as the total number of buildings available for rent is always less than the total number of buildings in a settlement and the total number of people on the job market is always less than the total number of people. A town of 12,000 people (ACKS Class III) might have e.g. 8 to 10 armorers but ACKS will only have 1d4 available for full-time hire in any month.
Also, swords are the highest possible gp value good you can have before you tip into the next tier of availability (e.g. if swords were 11gp then there'd only be 2 available for immediate purchase and 20 commissionable). So if for some reason in-play the number strikes you as "wrong" you could certainly reduce it. For instance, if you've statted out your town and you know there's no other armorers nearby and the maximum output is 5 swords, then that's fine. At best we're offering guidance, not physical law.
[quote="Alex"] After some fairly complex number-crunching, I am now able to offer some clarified and updated mechanics on Commissioning Equipment. COMMISSIONING EQUIPMENT If equipment the adventurers desire to purchase is not available, they may commission it to be created. The advantage of commissioning equipment is that ten times more equipment can be commissioned than is available as inventory. Where the number available is listed as a percentage chance, multiply the percentage by 10 and divide by 100%. The integer quotient is the number of units available, and the remainder (if any) is the percentage chance of one additional unit being available. EXAMPLE: Marcus is in Siadanos, a Class V town. He would like to commission the local smithing guild to create plate armor (60gp). There is a 25% percentage chance of one unit of plate armor being present in a Class V. Therefore Marcus can simultaneously commission (250/100 = 2 remainder 50) 2 suits of plate armor, with a 50% chance of a third. The Judge rolls 1d100 and gets a 32, so there are 3 suits of plate armor available. The disadvantage of commissioning equipment is that it is not immediately available. Buildings and vehicles, which can be built by large groups, are constructed at a rate of 1 day per 500gp value. Animals take 1 day per 1gp value to find and train. Other equipment takes 1 day per 5gp value. All commissioned equipment is worked on simultaneously. EXAMPLE: Since equipment takes 1 day per 5 gp to commission, it will take (60 gp / 5 gp) 12 days for the three suits of plate armor to be completed. ***************** If you don't want to mess with the change in the core rules, you can simply rule that all commissioning is simultaneous. But the above will give you results that are more correct given the assumptions of the in-world economics. [/quote]
Alex, based on this rule, when would more equipment be available for commissioning? My party likes to commission iron rations (!). If they are in a Class V market, there is 1 week available normally for each month in town (1-6 gp). (I've always assumed that was the total available, not the total per person seeking them - please correct me if I'm wrong).
Using the core rules commissioning rules, they can commission them faster than they'd normally be available: even assuming 5 gp each, one week would be available every day, rather than one available per month. Even paying in advance, this is hardly an inconvenience.
Using these new rules, 10 weeks would be available. At 5 gp each, they would take 10 days to produce. Still much faster than 1 available per month. So if they commissioned these 10, when could they commission another 10? Next month? If so, doesn't this just mean that the party should just commission all their low-cost expendables to get more faster?
To summarize the rules above: If equipment the adventurers desire to purchase is not available, they may commission it to be created... Ten times more equipment can be commissioned than is available as inventory. Buildings and vehicles, which can be built by large groups, are constructed at a rate of 1 day per 500gp value. Animals take 1 day per 1gp value to find and train. Other equipment takes 1 day per 5gp value. All commissioned equipment is worked on simultaneously.
Since the inventory is "x per week" the intent was that after you had purchased the existing inventory (if any) you could order ten times that much each week. Depending on the product ordered, the delivery might be the same week, the next week, etc.
Assume a Class IV town.
1. Adventurers would like to buy comfrey (10gp value). 5 comfrey are available each week. 50 comfrey can be commissioned each week. The comfrey will take 2 days to be delivered. Additional comfrey can be ordered the week following, arriving (one week + 2 days) later.
2. Adventurers would like to buy plate armor (60gp value). 1 set of plate armor is available each week. 10 plate armor can be commissioned each week. The plate armor will take (60/5) 12 days to be delivered. Additional armor can be ordered the next week, arriving (one week + 12 days) later.
Adventurers absolutely *should* be commissioning goods regularly. The volume of equipment available at the market classes is otherwise quite limited.
OK, then, a follow-up question: was there an errata I missed that changed the core rules availability from per month to per week? The hardcover I have says "availability per month" on p. 40.
Alex? Anyone? :)
I'm puzzled by this once-a-week thing, too. Every example I can find says that availability is per month.
On a related note, I've been ruling that the limit on comissioned items is a limit on how many items can be being comissioned concurrently, not a limit on how many items can be comissioned in total in a month. In other words, a new 'batch' of [commission limit] items can be produced every [price/5] days. This means that cheap items such as rations can be produced at a great rate, while more items worth more than 150 gp may actually end up being produced at significantly lower rates than [comission rate/month].
I apologize but I simply made an error in my post above. The rate is per month. Between trying to get the Kickstarter out, write this month's Patreon article, and release Axioms 4, I simply erred.
Apologies for causing confusion!