Oddbean new post about login | logout on average you're gonna pull in about 15gp a week and it takes 1250gp to get the place up and running, so I feel like there may be some justification to house rule it so that fixing up the tavern is _beneficial at all_
If you quadruple the output of successful rolls, the place pays itself off on only 17 weeks, which is within the realm of possibility for the game, and it also makes the rolls feel much weightier: on a critical tavern success you can make hundreds of gp in a week https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/170/415/786/806/388/original/fc94e27d6bfc050b.png
Anything that gives the players a +10 bonus on the Tavern Roll is worth ~35gp, which you can do a bunch of times, like, 7 or 8 times and have it still pay off for the players. If they do something heroic enough that people want to talk about it or think of a clever way to improve business to the tavern? A temporary +10 to the Tavern roll, sure.
If they're regularly, actively adding a bunch of +10s to their Tav rolls under this system through Gameplay, they could have the place paid off in ~4 in-game weeks
"What if my players get so obsessed with optimizing their tavern operations that they don't spend any time adventuring" well I guess we're playing co-op SimTavern now, so long as they're having fun it's cool by me
that still might be too slow, though, a "week" in the game is 10 days, that's 10 full long rests, if you think of a session as maybe containing one, maybe two long rests, it could take a whiiiiile
we can also make this much faster by rolling on the table Every Day rather than Every Week. More fun: a roll on every long rest. This lowers the expected value of the roll to 31gp a day (the bonus of the roll is determined by how many days between rolls), but it just means they've gotta hustle on those +10 bonuses more. if they're doing about three heroic or tavern-friendly things per long rest, that has the place paid off in 8-9 long rests, which is much closer to where I'd want it to be.
keep in mind if we assume that our players long rest about every 2 hours, we play about 4 hours a month, that means that the tavern is profitable in about 4 real life human months
just now realizing that this has made the tavern's operating costs 60gp/day rather than 60gp/week, which is much higher: I can fuss around with that to make it more dramatic...
here, a swingy but ultimately profitable daily tavern roll with an operating cost of 6gp/day start the players off with a +10 thanks to "opening week" and hope for the best... https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/170/580/930/902/192/original/8007fc29421d866a.png
