Board Thread:Midian Ideas/@comment-24302820-20160924050544/@comment-24302820-20161009094620

I may want to change this so that points above ten add the mercantile level to the profit instead. Possibly doubling this at numbers above twenty or under zero. Or, I could double the losses for numbers below ten, and have some greater penalty for sub-digit results. I think that I might like this skill to be a bit swingier than it is in the above writeup.

The way that the math works out, a journeyman craftsman acting as a sole proprietor of a business who has no real skill at finances has an effective +1 on the skill check. This is enough to keep the lights on, but won't make them rich. The bulk of shops will operate this way.

The mercantile level, by the way, is the number of households needed to support a business of that type. It runs from only twenty for a greengrocer to 1400 for a Forge of the Wonderworks. This would mean that a local farmer's market would only have profits and losses of one percent per point on the die, as the weather is a much greater factor of concern for this business than the economy. At the other end of the scale, a technomancer wanting to go into business for herself could have tremendous profits (70% per pip) but similarly have huge potential losses due to expensive product development, items that are too new &/or scary to really sell, or just from the occasional explosion. Most businesses are going to be around 10-12% per pip.