Building time and costs

[thecrimsondawn]

I am looking around the PFSRD for the amount of time it takes NPCs to build structures, the cost of said buildings, and information like that, but I keep ending up with Kingmaker data and some other system that I have never seen before with goods and production and the like. I am trying to find this information out to calculate just how powerful or useful the Lyre of Building is as we just lost a major city in game and we would like to rebuild it.

Anyone have a link or something that I am just not finding?

[P.F.]

The system which governs construction of individual buildings is called Downtime. Here are the Paizo and PFSRD links to that system.

The system is a little convoluted, but essentially you can EITHER buy an existing building for the listed cost, OR slap down double the gp cost and have a new one built to order, OR go through the "earning capital" system and build it with capital points which doesn't cost double but you have to pay the gold out ahead of time as you earn the capital points.

Also, the authors have hilariously optimistic notions about the relative costs of different kinds of structures.

For an entire city, the Kingdom Building system might work better. The page says 1 Build Point is worth approximately 4000gp as a reference point, so the costs in this system are higher than the ones listed in downtime.

edit: The costs are wildly different. An identical Inn would cost the equivalent of 4,260 gp to build in Downtime with Capital Points, or the equivalent of 40,000 gp in Build Points with the Kingdom building system.

[thecrimsondawn]

Ok so lets see....

House

Create 32 Goods, 1 Influence, 31 Labor (1,290 gp)

Rooms 1 Bedroom, 1 Kitchen, 1 Lavatory, 1 Sewer Access, 1 Sitting Room, 1 Storage

A small cottage that can house up to two adults or a new family.



That GP cost - is that the total amount of gold needed to be spent on materials and labor to have the house built?
If Yes - then if you provide said mats yourself, or otherwise get them for free, it would be 1/3rd that for crafting reasons.
If No - Then its either the already adjusted crafting price, or a down payment of sorts.

Im asking this mostly due to the wondrous item I talked about in my above post. It says for every half an hour of playing, you can achieve an amount of work equal to 100 laborers working a full day. That is roughly 14 weeks of work every half an hour, however the system is not really clear on just how much progress that is. Its like a blank check tossed in to give your DM a headache.
For example, with the use of a couple of spells, I could turn a mountain range into a rather nice quarry and just randomly build a fortress for more or less free with a what? 2000gp magic item and a couple days downtime?

Unless there is something I am missing, this needs to be flagged for a ratta or further clarification. Then again frankly speaking, the whole craft skill formula needs a revamp I feel. No way is any player going to spend hundreds of weeks to make a single mithril plate armor (or if highly focused, still several months)

[Florian]

Keep in mind that the Lyre is practically a legacy item that has been around with the same text and power since AD&D and has never been fully supported beyond "GM, come up with something".
IIRC, the downtime and kingdom rules just notes using it is a trade of, either half time or half cost while the character using it is stuck sticking to the construction site non-stop.

[thecrimsondawn]

So I think I figured out the math after playing with some figures for a while. From the Buildings and Organizations page, there is a cost to have it built, as well as a gold tag if you want to buy it right out. The cost to have it built represents goods (gaining, prepping, or otherwise having all the building materials needed to do the job) Influence (The legal right to make such a project I would assume. A kingdom will not allow a nobody to just randomly build a Fortress close to a city after all) Labor (The amount of time and effort needed to be put out by workers, or the number of workers), and magic (any additional costs and supplies over the normal). Since the gold cost is market price to buy it out right (assuming you have the rights to buy it depending on game age), You can calculate the cost to build it at roughly 1/3rd or less, depending on what you provide yourself.

Here is the math I did.
Craft rules is you multiply the DC to build something by your check to find out how much progress in silver you make. I calculated the building of a house (1,290 gp) as a DC 20. The average lv1 commoner that would be working on this project would have 1rank(1) 3 bonus for class skill (4), tools to do the job (6), aiding each other (8) and maybe a +1 ability score bonus (9), taking 10 on the project since you dont rush these things without reason (19). I round this up to 20 to keep it simple.
DC20 with a 20 craft check is 400sp worth of progress per 'week'. If you take the gold cost to build an item and divide your 400sp into its price in silver (a house being 1290gp would be 12900sp), you end up with a result of 32. If you look at the labor cost of a house, it is 31, so while I may not have the exact numbers or formula for it yet, this is close enough I feel. There is however a couple issues.

1: Crafting like this would really be 1/3 the cost to build it. If 1290 is the gp cost, it would really be 430gp to build it yourself. That would translate to just under 11 weeks of work for 1 person to build a house. With a team of people, you could build far, far faster, and with a magic item worth 100 peoples worth of work every half an hour, things get a little crazy. How crazy? 400 silver worth of work a day divided by the number of days in a week (as per working by the day rules under craft) would be 57sp worth of progress in a day. You have 100 of these every half an hour with that magic item. That means that item causes 5700sp (570gp)worth of progress every half an hour used. That means you can easily build a house in a half an hour if you have the materials around for it to work.

2: Building it yourself does not calculate labor costs, but does calculate the materials, so if you are able to supply the materials yourself, you should be able to cut that down to nearly free. For example, lets say you want to build a castle and you have spells able to turn the side of a mountain into a stone quarry and you have the trees provided from a nearby forest. This covers most of the base matter that a fortress will be made out of. It does not however cover furniture for the bedrooms, kitchen supplies, training equipment for the dojo, ect. It also does not cover whatever that magic component is, but odds are your spellcaster can provide that for like...10gold. If a party wanted to build a fort and had the power to cast these spells, then they could easily build one with next to no time at all and with next to no cost at all. Lets not even talk about how trifling 6k gold would be at level 10 or so either...

3: My math fails to calculate some other factors that change the rates a bit. Anything with a magic component ends up with a rather different labor result. This different result is one that causes 'less' workers or time to be needed not more too. Still working on figuring this one out.

4: I have not found much data on the costs to add extra rooms and the like to a building. This once again all goes to the DM for a new cost.


All in all, from a player perspective - Paying the listed gold price feels balanced to the economy that is already buggy at best (really, have you looked at the price for wood?), and paying 1/3 the cost to build something yourself is still acceptable since you can make it custom the way you like. From a DM perspective, outside of ramification for building "some" of the listed buildings, the prices seem acceptable, and can very much allow a player (or several players) to invest in businesses to make money while they are out. If the players would like to cheese the system by providing the materials and labor themselves, that is also fine. Just force them to manually buy and track (and give you a list)of every single thing in the building they are building at that rate.

A couple things to remember - Even during down time, people need to eat. If you dont have that ring or ion stone, players will need to calculate food costs for long amounts of downtime that they are not making money on.

Skilled and unskilled laborers are so cheap they are nearly free. They provide their own food, but also are not really that helpful outside of their paid task. They also will not come out to a dangerous area without some serious hazard pay.

The leadership feat is a good way for the face of the party to organize a building system. These would then be 'free' workers in a sense, but I would be careful with the abuse of this as we all know how broken that feat is. Also I remember seeing an NPC class that could be taken as a cohort that can provide materials for crafting for free I think. I have work in a few so I dont have time to look it up, but keep an eye out for that too.

If a king, duke, or other major leadership official finds out that a major defensive structure was built within proxy of any major settlements or military installations, there will be ramifications, even if they own the land.


I think that is about all I have to say on this subject thus far. Thoughts?

[DarkSoul]

I think that regarding the Lyre of Building, you'll probably save yourself some headache by just forgetting the "100 humans" part and go with the 3 days construction per 30 minutes played. There's nothing in the downtime system that says how many laborers you get with a point of labor, so trying to come up with a number will either be completely up to the DM or just wasted time on something irrelevant.

Were I DM'ing, you'd pay for goods, influence, and magic, then determine how long your building would take to build based on the "Time" values of its component rooms. Once you've determined the days needed, divide by 6 to figure out how many perform checks you need to make in a row.

[Diarmuid]

edit: The costs are wildly different. An identical Inn would cost the equivalent of 4,260 gp to build in Downtime with Capital Points, or the equivalent of 40,000 gp in Build Points with the Kingdom building system.

The important thing to note in the Kingdom Building rules is that you're not just building a single Inn. You're building a whole city block devoted to many "Inns" as a city resource.