Pay, Tips & the Loan
What a shift pays
Section titled “What a shift pays”Four kinds of money can move when a worker finishes a shift.
| Money | Who pays it | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Wages | You | To her, in full. A free worker on a waged job is paid; a slave is not, except in posts you always pay for, such as the Matron. |
| Takings | Customers, for sex work and other paid contact work | The house takes its cut (her House percentage) and she keeps the rest. Anything she pilfers comes off before the split. |
| Tips | Customers, or the bar and floor crowd | Split by their own rule, see below. |
| Supplies | You | Spent on what the shift used, for example drinks the bar had to buy in. |
The shift summary tells you each of these as it happened: what came in, what the house paid, what the house kept, what she kept, and the house’s net for the shift. A wage nobody paid is not reported as money anyone earned. The Accounting screen shows the same split, shift by shift.
Example. A good bar shift: the job’s wage is 155, the shift’s tips are 30, and the bar has no drinks from a farm, so it buys them in for 25.
- A slave barmaid draws no wage. The house keeps all 30 in tips and pays 25 for drinks: +5 for the house.
- A free barmaid on a 60% House cut is paid 155. The house keeps 18 of the tips and she keeps 12. After the drinks the house is down 162.
Bar and floor jobs (barmaid, waitress, bar cook, singer, bar stripper, the sleazy bar pair, pianist, escort and the casino entertainers) earn one tip per shift from how well she worked: nothing for a poor shift, then roughly one gold for every 8 points of performance. There is no upper limit. Each job measures performance on its own scale, so some jobs tip more than others for the same kind of worker; an escort’s tips run about three times a barmaid’s.
Paying customers of sex work tip only when they leave delighted. A delighted customer leaves a tenth of the money he still has after paying, so a poor customer leaves a few coins or nothing and a rich one can leave more than the price of the visit.
Who keeps a tip:
- A slave’s tips all go to the house.
- A free worker on a bar or floor job gives the house its cut at her House percentage and keeps the rest.
- A free worker doing sex work keeps all her tips; the house earns from the visit itself.
These tip rules are a stopgap. They will change when customers, orders and sales are reworked, so treat the amounts as current behaviour rather than a promise.
The bar does not sell drinks yet
Section titled “The bar does not sell drinks yet”A bar earns only from tips. Customers do not yet pay the house for the drinks and food they are served, so a waged free barmaid costs more than she brings in, and a slave barmaid roughly covers the drinks she pours. A farm helps: the bar pours the farm’s drinks before buying any in. Selling drinks and food through the bar is planned; until then, staff a bar for what it does for the rest of the building, not for profit.
The loan
Section titled “The loan”A new game starts with a loan from the bank. Each week you pay interest of 10% of what you still owe, so repaying part of it lowers the interest: at 2,000 left of 10,000 you pay 200 a week. Repay it all and the interest stops.
If you cannot pay the interest, the bank warns you the first time. The second time it adds a penalty of 10% of the amount you originally borrowed to your debt and gives you four extra weeks. The third missed payment ends the game. Letting the deadline pass counts the same way. A penalty becomes part of what you owe, so it is charged interest like the rest.