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I have no idea what to do with this now. I loved the idea that the players came up with and I'm often really flexible so I let them do it. Now, my only problem is, what kind of profits are they going to be looking at on a weekly basis? Monthly? In-game, of course.

They have a ship captain and crew and general item cost for the one ship. And they plan to add more ships to their business when they have the opprotunity. Of course, they specified that they wanted only the best of the best crew, so that would run them a pretty gold piece. But I don't know what kinda profits they'd be making off one ship.

And I feel like I should roll a d100 to determine things that might happen on the ship. Attacked by pirates, not attacked by pirates, if they are attacked - the pirates win and lose the ship or lose their profits, or they lose and the group gets another ship, the ship gets wrecked and they get a cut in their profits due to repairs (or they have to pay the funds outright with the gold they get from adventuring), and etc etc..

Any help and ideas with this sort of thing. 

Man, just relax and let the ship go off once in a while, don't worry too much about it.

Fit the Ship's income as monthly, maybe, and give your players a treasure parcen when the ship comes back every month; be kinda generous as they at least made quite the investment on it. You can start off giving them small gold parcels each month, and roll 1d20 after the month ends. If the result is -10, they had a so-so month, if it's above 10, they had a good month with it. A reslt of 1 should be like a critical failure and this means they get no profit or something happened to the ship and a result of 20 would mean things went better than expected.

Now, think of it as their business. If they start having customers (take the d20 result as a base for their business success) think making their earnings higher, and encourage them to get another ship to gain even more money with it. You can make this interesting and fun for them and for you too  

Dec 15, 2012 -- 10:23PM, CCS wrote:

What kind of profits can be had from the ship is irrellivant.
Because anything the ship makes?  It could just as easily lose+ on a future voyage through any # of means.

The true question is how many different adventure ideas can you come up with involving a boat?
Pirates,
Mutinies,
Passengers,
Sea monsters,
Atlantis & other such places,
Transporting rare/exotic/extra valuable items,
Sailing into the unkown
Serving as a taxi to get the PCs from one adventure to the next. 

But I think he means that his players didn't got the ship for themselves: They want to start an a-la-Titanic sea travel enterprise it seems. He's just wondering how to explain whay to do with this business and what could hapen to the passenger crew.

 

Who would be so foolish as to go on a three hour tour though?

That aside, I wouldn't do a treasure parcel.  That's a large gain for a single ship.  If money was that easy, peasants would be swimming in gold.

It sounds like the players just like the ownership of something.  They want to be more a part of your world.  This means you are doing something right.  You could give them seasonal profit of a d20/level in gold and leave it at that.  If it's a 20, double it.  If it's a 1, make it a loss in the same amount that rolling a 20 would bring in.  For any bigger losses, you could make a module out of it.  Like a raid of pirates or spoiled cargo or something.

Dec 16, 2012 -- 6:32PM, erachima wrote:

You're about 8 types of wrong on that. International trade is high-return, high-entry-barrier, and high-risk.

You're about 8 types of wrong with that.
We are talking about a single boat on a single small trip.  Making 10,000 gold?  Please reread the op's post.  He never said a single thing about investing enough for that kind of capitol.  He never mentioned merchants at all.  Just a boat crew and a boat.  And a transport ship isn't going to make that much either.