[RPG] Do the rules for running a business contradict themselves

dnd-5eeconomyfollowers-and-hirelings

My players recently came into possession of an inn in a small village and I'm trying to figure out how to run it.

On page 127 of the DMG, it says that an inn costs 5GP maintenance per day, including payment for one skilled and 5 unskilled hirelings. There are two main points of confusion for me.

  1. The daily cost for an inn on the roadside is 10GP, but this is supposed to include the payment for five skilled and ten unskilled hirelings. Since they earn 2GP and 2SP respectively, shouldn't the cost be at least 9GP higher?

  2. Of course, the section on total cost per day says that potential revenue is already factored in. But if that's the case, why is there another table on page 129, where you can roll a d100 in order to find out how much money you made?

As far as I see, these two rules contradict themselves.

Best Answer

Managing the 'contradiction'

I cannot give you an absolute definitive answer, but here is how I've handled it in the past, and how I reconcile that apparent contradiction:

The 'maintenance cost' listed for mercantile affairs (like an inn, shop, etc) is how that business performs if you ignore it. It has an income, it has expenses, and that (for the sake of simplicity) works out to the property losing money at the rate of the Maintenance Cost. They are making money, but not quite enough to cover their costs.

On the other hand...

An adventurer-owned business can earn enough money to cover its own maintenance costs. However, the owner needs to periodically ensure that everything is running smoothly by tending to the business between adventures. See the information on running a business in the "Downtime Activities" section of this chapter.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/between-adventures#Businesses

The 'Running a Business' table (downtime activity) represents how a business performs when you actually do something with that business, rather than just establishing that it exists and wandering off. You might screw up, and the business expends 1.5x its maintenance cost (the 0-20 range), but most likely it's going to perform better with someone actually taking an active hand in running it.

So that is how I have reconciled this 'contradiction' in the past. The businesses in the Ongoing Expenses table represents a business steadily (but slowly) losing money because no one is actively managing it. The 'Running a Business' results represent someone engaging with the business to try and make it actually profitable.

My Experience

My experience in this has generally been that players aren't very happy when they have to constantly expend Downtime to make sure their business doesn't cost them money...so I made a minor quest hook out of it, then rolled that into ongoing side-goals for the party. (In my case, they were running a roadside inn)

I suggested that the party could, perhaps, find a better manager to run the business while they were away, then maybe do some things to improve the business and make it more appealing.

So there was a short little quest where they went looking for someone to run the Inn for them, they drafted a well-organized NPC they'd met earlier, resolved some minor issue for them, and brought them on as their manager. Now, instead of just steadily losing money, the inn had an active manager, and I let them roll on the Running a Business table 'once a month' without having to run the business themselves.

Additionally, they started bringing home adventuring trophies, exotic alcohols, recruiting specialist NPCs (like a minstrel) to go to their inn. Depending on what they brought home, I either gave them bonuses to their d100 roll or added an extra die to the profits (if they got any).

This kept things pretty low impact for both the players, and myself, and they were quite happy with their inn.

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