Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24302820-20180101030511/@comment-24302820-20180110020716

I suppose that a brief overview of how crafting--or other occupational/economic concern--works is in order. First though, you need to know about wages.

The base wages for a job is based on the time-to-learn for that skill or suite. The basic reasoning is that tasks that are harder to learn would be worth more money. It's kind of like how jobs involving college degrees tend to pay better, and ones with more difficult collegiate programs will pay better than those with easier class loads. You start with one-half of the time-to-learn for the skill in hours. Add in a hundred florins if the skill is doubly difficult to learn, or counts as two skills at character creation; harder skills pay better. You also add in another hundred for every prerequisite skill, or skill level. To this you add a 300f/month kicker. This is half a guilder per day, and you just aren't going to find anyone willing to work for less money. Completely unskilled labour is paid at this 300f rate. That's just enough money to slowly starve.

If the job requires additional skills, you start with the most expensive one, and add a hundred florins for every required skill. Or, use the rates from a skill suite, treated like it's a single skill, whichever is cheaper for the one doing the hiring.

Here are a couple of examples. Let us say that you wanted to hire a telekine, because you fancy the idea of smuggling a living weapon in as your dinner companion with the duke that no pat-down can notice. Telekinesis has a time-to-learn of 1600 hours. Half of this is 800. Telekinesis has both double learning difficulty, and counts as two skills at character creation. Both of these add a hundred florins into the mix. Finally we add our 300 minimum, and get a final monthly wage of 1300f. In our second example, our job creator is now looking to hire someone who can inscribe a bunch of Repel Spirit circles to protect him from the duke's ghost after that whole incident with the telekine. Repel spirit is only a 200 hour skill, but does have prerequisites. It requires Circle of Protection: Spectres which in turn requires Lesser Protection Circle. Each of these adds a hundred florins to the salary of our circle-drawer. Half of repel spirit's time-to-learn is 100 hours, adding in another couple hundred from the prerequisites and the 300 florin 'kicker', and we get a salary of 600f per month.

So, that's wages, but what about crafting? How much one person can craft is based on their wages. Productivity is measured in money, because money is what matters most in the world (after highschool football, of course). An employee adds value equal to their salary. Thus, someone who earns 600f a month can do 1200f worth of work. If there are material costs (like for our circle-drawing second example--powdered iron, bone, & salt aren't free) then this is added into the final production value. For most jobs, materials costs--to include raw materials (iron for a blacksmith) and expended resources (coal for the smith's forge)--will be equal to wages. Or, to put it another way, your raw materials costs are a third of the finished goods'. Our ghost-repelling mage can then create 600x3=1800f a month in magic circles.

Now, you might be thinking that it's really easy to make money. You just open up any shop, hire somebody to run it, and you'll make just as much as they do, without having to lift a finger. You should note that this doubled or tripled productivity is the normal maximum. That is, it only works if that employee spends all of their time making or doing, and chances are your shop--especially at first--just isn't going to see that many customers. For most people, going into business for yourself is slightly less profitable, and certainly a lot riskier, than being hired to work in someone else's shop. Passion projects--you are working on something big and special for yourself that you really, really want (and have the time to do so) or an artist during a manic creative phase--adds another multiple to this. This is the absolute maximum productivity rate, and there isn't a lot you can do to go beyond this. This passion project addendum certainly isn't a degree of productivity you can cajole an employee into doing.

Just to wrap up this big post with a couple of quick points, assistance bonuses increase productivity by 5% per +1. That is, hiring an assistant who does nothing else but help you on this one big project adds 25% (from the +5 active assistance bonus) to your productivity. Superior tools can provide a similar bonus, but poor tools can subtract from your production rate instead. Finally, increased levels of skill allow you to make better things, and make them faster. Journeymen see a one-third increase over apprentices, masters see another third added, and specialists also get a one-third increase. For example, someone earning 600f as a base wage increases this to 800f as a journeyman, and 1000f a month as a master. If the skill in question is a proficiency, then we use the usual 3:1 conversion rate to equate their skill level into an apprenticeship.