Hokay, let’s play a pretendsies game!
I’d like to establish a trade route between Riverfall and Nobridge, which are 7 hexes apart and connected by river. (I’m assuming that the distance values are all in 6 mile hexes?)
They’re both Class IVs, so I pay 2500 gp at each location to set up an office. 250 of that goes towards building a warehouse capable of housing 2000 stone, and the rest goes towards potted plants and attractive workers, because you need RESPECT.
Now that I’m 5000 gp poorer, I set up a 5 wagon caravan, since my PC actually already owns six wagons.
I assign a 1st level Venturer to the trade route. After consulting your megachart, I conclude that 1 week per market is the best result. It should yield a profit of 694 per month.
Now, since it’s a class 4, there’s a -3 penalty, but since I double officed it, there’s a +1 bonus.
So he needs a 16+. Something will Go Awry on a 1 or 2. So, with this setup, 10% of the time catastrophe will strike, 25% of the time he’ll make a profit, and the remaining 65% of the time, he will fail uninteresting.
So this guy will make no money eight months out of the year, and wreck my caravan once a year. Setting aside catastrophes for a moment, that’s 1,860 in costs per year, versus 2,082, for an average of 222 gp earned per year.
But maybe that’s just because he’s a scrub! What if he’s level 4?
Then he’s going against a 13+, and the numbers work out to 7 months of costs 5 months of profits, or 1,085 versus 3,470 for 2385 per year expected from that caravan.
For reference, if I’d invested in a 4th level Spy, he’d be earning
8d12*100 (avg 5200) per month, minus the failure rate… succeeds on a 16+ means 25% success rate means expected value 1300 per month, total yearly income of 15600. So 4th level venturer way, way less profitable than a thief hideout. (Of course, there have already been threads about how thief hideouts are wildly more profitable than any other kind of endgame. Still! Some of the other PCs have domains that’re generating revenue in excess of that right now.)
Thoughts:
I’m curious about the 5% arbitrage rate. That’s wildly out of sync with what the arbitrage rules have actually generated for me. (I mean, rolling 4d4 for prices, roughly one merchant in six is going to be offering 70% or lower for their prices, which means even if the next place is only buying at 100%, you’re running a 42% profit. Heck, even if you lose your roll for bargaining at both ends, that’s 80 to 90, which is 11% profit. I guess the above fails to take into account taxes, but still.
Are we assuming that the prices PCs encounter are surreal, and don’t represent the realities for most venturers?