In one of my games, the players were inquiring about hiring a ship crew and purchasing a bhoat. i looked through all my books and could find nothing on how much it would cost. Does anyone here know?
Are we talking D&D? On page 129 of the PHB it lists the costs of ships (under Transport) or passage on a ship (under Spellcasting & Services). Stormwrack also has more information.
The WOTC book Stormwrack gives prices for ships, but I didn't find anything about the cost to hire though. It also list the crew complement needed to run the ship. The DMG lists the cost of hirelings, though sailors aren't listed. You could roughly figure that a Caravel costing 10,000 GP with a crew of 10 (need at least 7 and ship can carry total of 30 crew & passenger) would cost:
Crew- 10 x 3 sp/day = 3 gp per day
Ship- this is where it gets tricky as most ships make money on cargo which can vary. If you figure that a ship last five years (I made that number up) then to break even a ship would need to make about 6 gold a day. Most want to make a profit so if you figure 10 gp per day you would have a profit (not counting crew costs) of 8250 gp at the end of 5 years.
After all of that I would say roughly 15-20 gp per day to hire the ship (crew, ship, captain and supplies)
Of course I have no documentation for any of this other than the cost of the caravel from Stormwrack.
Or you could do it the easy way and find the information in the PHB like Phoenix Knight did.
thanks!