One of my players is an Artificer, and they’ve decided that their long-term character goal is have passive income to fund increasingly expensive magic-item crafting.

Their first idea was becoming a landlord. The party saves a town, they buy damaged or cheap property there, repair it, rent it out, and then collect passive income while the party is off adventuring.

But apparently that was only the beginning.

Some of the other ideas they’ve floated:

* A village they went to was recently almost destroyed by a dragon. The artificer offered the villagers reconstruction loans to rebuild their homes and businesses. The goal is the loans eventually get paid back with interest.
* Buying businesses in places the party regularly visits and hiring NPCs to run them while they’re gone.
* Financing merchants or caravans in exchange for a percentage of the profits.
* Buying land around settlements they expect to become more valuable after the party makes the area safer. This is a big one! They want to do this one in combo with their other ideas.
* Investing in mines, lumber operations, farms, etc. to secure cheaper raw materials for their own crafting.
* Eventually establishing some kind of bank or moneylending company where NPCs can deposit money or take out loans.
* Offering towns development money after disasters, wars, monster attacks, etc., and then making money off the recovery.
* Buying warehouses and charging merchants for storage.
* Funding new taverns or shops in recovering settlements in exchange for partial ownership.
* Creating an adventurer insurance scheme where people pay regularly and receive compensation if they lose equipment, get injured, die, etc.

I like these ideas in theory, because it gives them something to care about besides adventuring and creates a ton of potential plot hooks. At the same time, I don’t really want every session to become Fantasy Accounting Simulator, or for passive income to completely trivialize the normal D&D economy.

How would you handle this mechanically?

Would you just abstract investments into downtime rolls and periodic income? Actually track individual properties, businesses, and loans? Put risks on them like defaults, destroyed property, corrupt managers, bad harvests, monster attacks, economic downturns, etc.?

No, sorry. Lol it's not really the game for that. They would essentially be playing their own mini game.

We have a guy who is in our general gaming circle who does stuff like this. He makes a character that is a blacksmith, plays him and then retires him. He then makes a cleric, plays it a retires it. Then he wants to use those characters to get free services because his new character is friends with them. Lol

Bastions

DM advice: " Yeah, I'm not doing all that."

"No" is a full sentence

Sounds like an opportunity for some locals to rise up against their oppressive rent-seeking overlords.

Well done, you just became the bad guys 😂

I’d have the Fantasy Accounting Simulator happen between sessions. Player gets to have things they care about without taking up group playtime.

Giving players something they love gives a DM something to threaten. Many poor hooks can emerge from this.

If you still want to incorporate it you can make a very easy system. At the start or end of every session or day they wake up, they can make a dice roll. You can make them earn some "profits" based on their roll. After all, their crops may burn, their warehouses may be target to heists, and bandits may raid their villages. It doesn't even have to be anything like that, it could just be that "bad weather fucked up your crops" or "the items your merchants are trading are not in demand at the moment".

But they have to get that money somehow. I'd make that a hassle too. Like, they need to get to a bank in a major city kind of thing.

So essentially, it will just be a dice roll or two at every session. You can track their money and tell them how much they have when they make it to a bank

Is there nobility in your setting? Technically all the homes and buildings are already owned by the local Liege Lord/Baron/Count/Duke, etc.

You don’t purchase the damaged property from Tim the Blacksmith, you’d have to buy it from Lord Baron, and he has no reason to give away his property, as he’s already a literal landlord.

Investing in businesses is fine, as that’s how you get a merchant class and aristocrats, but the land itself is owned by the nobility.

Ultimately though, this either gets hand waived to background noise, or it becomes the game. Ask them what their Player-At-the-table goal is, not just the characters goal.

I firmly believe in the BECMI solution. You get to own land only when you retire from adventuring.

step 1: forcibly change their alignment to lawful evil

I'm a little concerned that in a game of magical fantasy your friends dream is to become an immoral capitalist who makes money off the suffering of the poor.

Genius.