The PCs buy the Tipsy Pixie Inn and have grand plans to make it the most famous inn in the kingdom. They are going to decorate it with trophies from their adventures, incorporate magic into its operations, and establish it as the premier venue for the party’s charismatic bard. That’s a cool and fun plan - as the GM you have to bring the plan to life, which requires creating challenges and problems for the PCs to overcome. You need to give your players opportunities to articulate their vision and demonstrate their cunning. Yes, they might falter and that’s fine for it’s the journey that’s important and sometimes it’s the downs that define it. Players will be far more enthusiastic and proud of the Tipsy Pixie if they had to earn its success. As a GM it can be difficult to set up a narrative for the goals of your players depending upon how oddball the goals are, but I have found a number of commonalities that work whether the players are forging an interstellar empire or creating a chain of robot dealerships.

Setting up the Plan

Your players’ plan likely begins with a barrage of questions for you. This can put you on the spot as you might not have any idea of the profit margin for inns in your kingdom or how much is the interstellar empire’s operating budget. You will need time to consider the situation and come up with specifics so at first be vague. It’s critical though, even with vagueness, to encourage your players and signal the challenges they will face down the road. Here is what I do:

1. Allude to the potential. “There’s money in inns, especially the famous ones where customers are happy to be gorged for the opportunity to be close to greatness.”
2. State why existing businesses/endeavors aren’t rolling in the gold. “Most inns are inefficient operations, reliant upon the whims of cheap travelers, greedy local suppliers, and then there’s the guilds and barons who sometimes help but often get in the way.”
3. Reiterate the potential. “Of course, few innkeepers have the gold, connections, and status you all have - that’s invaluable.”

This three-part formula works for everything. The players are encouraged and at the same time warned of the potential obstacles they might face. If the players are still interested, they will press for more details - at which point you should turn the tables and ask them a lot of questions. Do they want to buy an existing inn or build from the ground up? What’s their menu? Entertainment? Decor? Your questions help engage the players, because every one of your questions they answer is empowering them in their plan. Answering questions also forces your players to think about what they really want, which buys you time and may even entertain your players outside of the game, as many players will continue to plan out-of-session. Once they’ve given you enough information, you should punt the specifics to a future session. “Okay your loyal retainer Brunsk will spend a few weeks visiting inns in the area to get a feel for things.”

Choices

Everything should begin with choices. For instance, give the PCs three potential inns they might buy. Once again there’s nothing wrong with formulaic answers as with a little window-dressing the players won’t recognize the formula.

1. Establishment with history but in decline. “The Golden Bear Inn has been around for over a century with grand rooms and a lot of history; it’s where the last king stayed when he visited here 30 years ago. The place is worn and has lost a lot of its old charm as the owners are just clinging to the past.”
2. Blank slate. “The Tipsy Pixie is a good-sized inn that does an okay business but has little character; the innkeeper is a miserly old man.”
3. Real fixer upper. “There is the old Debrune Manor up the road that’s for sale, big place, would make a great inn, and the owner is selling at a bargain price but the place is supposedly haunted.”

Don’t be surprised when the players flip around your choices or do the unexpected. If they have wealth, they might end up taking all three. I see this all the time. They decide the Debrune Manor might be a great base for the party and the Green Druid and Golden Bear could be set up to cater to two different groups of travelers (common folk and the wealthy respectfully). They might also scrap all three options and find a new one - build an inn from the ground up! This is what players have in abundance: vision. Encourage it, run with it, and let them have fun with their imagination.

Problems, Lots of Problems

Once the players have a plan and start acting on it you need to toss stuff at them. GMs present the problems and PCs provide the solutions. You don’t need to come up with solutions to your problems, in fact you shouldn’t, all you need to do is present good problems. So what’s a good problem? This is a complicated issue, one we will touch on again and again, but generally good problems involve resource allocation and moral/ethical dilemmas. Good problems involve people, or NPCs; you can’t have a problem without NPCs and the nature of the NPCs often influences the solutions proposed by the players. So here’s a few examples for our Tipsy Pixie scenario:

1. The Guild of Innkeepers has voted to blacklist all non-human performers in their inns as part of a deal with human-only Royal Performers Guild.
2. One of your best waitresses is allergic to the chimera heads mounted in the Grand Hall.
3. You catch a young kid pickpocketing people at the Tipsy Pixie.
4. A rival inn is spreading rumors about you having a moldy cellar where you store your food.
5. The Royal Army is coming to town - lots of customers but it could be very rowdy.
6. A noble is trying to poach your cook, who is quite talented.
7. The local inns approach you with a plan to price fix during upcoming holy days when the town will be filled with people.

Okay you will notice that these are generally small scenes that require a solution or at least a course of action. You should extrapolate from here. For example, with #2 if the PCs notice the allergic reaction of the waitress but do nothing then you can extrapolate that the waitress might leave the inn and also that the PCs don’t do much of anything on behalf of their employees beyond pay them a wage. Now if the PCs remove the chimera heads or take some other action then they’ve signaled their intent to take care of their employees. This doesn’t mean there’s a right and wrong solution; what you are looking for is what sort of environment and strategy the PCs are developing. With this example, if the PCs are just indifferent to their employees then they will have some cheating and minimal loyalty but unless they actively abuse their employees there shouldn’t be anything too significant against them. However, on the other hand the PCs now have shown an interest in their employees that might expand to dragging in the PCs to family and personal matters, and believe it or not, players love to get involved with this sort of stuff.

Recruitment

Players who are really into the Lawful Stuff are always into recruitment. Players want to adventure and manage their holdings at the same time, which is only possible with competent help. Recruitment is often the single most important decision players will make - who is managing their interests while they are either gone or busy. What they are looking for is always the same: loyalty and competence, maybe with a dash of cleverness, but that’s far less important than loyalty and competence. I’m going to do an entire installment on recruitment and retainers next month; this is really a big deal.