Downtime: separate building checks vs summed bonus

Question

The earnings passage under Rooms and Teams states

If you have multiple buildings or organizations in a settlement and they can generate the same kind of capital, you don't have to roll for them separately—you may add all their capital modifiers together and attempt one check for that kind of capital. If you spend a downtime day earning capital on your own, you may add your building and organization bonuses to your roll instead of rolling separately for yourself and each of your businesses or organizations.

Now take the alchemy lab for example, which earns +10 Magic. Let's say I own two of them in separate buildings.

I can do either of the following

1. Sum their bonuses, and take 10 for a total of +30, and earn 3 Magic
2. Take 10 on their checks separately, yielding +20 and +20, and earn 4 Magic

These two options are clearly not equivalent, yet I can choose between them as I like? What if I own a hundred alchemy labs? They're not expensive at all even for a relatively low level party. It seems like a player (or even an entire party, at GM discretion?) should have to sum all bonuses of like type in a settlement, to avoid getting redundant opportunities to take 10 in the same day.

Is this an oversight or by design?

Answer 1

I think the reason for this is contained in the paragraph before:

Most of the time, it’s simplest and quickest to just apply all the gp bonuses from all the rooms in each of your buildings and take 10 on the roll.

You can do it optimized or simple and quick. Optimized, you roll each building separately. Simple and quick, you add them together and make a single roll.

And while we're at it, the simple and quick vs. optimized is probably best decided with input from the GM as well. They're the ones often looking for the simple... :)

Answer 2

There is a list of Rooms and there is a list of Buildings. An Alchemy Lab is in the Rooms section. By RAW you make income checks for Buildings not Rooms.

Under the rooms section it says "You can use the following rooms to construct buildings." None of the example Buildings are a single Room (although the Granary is composed of 10 of the same Room type).

However, the Buildings list is a sample list. It would be for your group to decide what other Rooms you would need to add to your Alchemy Lab for it it qualify as a 'Building'.

Answer 3

Note, there is a specific example of rolling for different rooms independently when creating different things. It also uses the word "may" when talking about rolling for the Building. If a GM were to interpret that to mean that "all rooms creating the same type of output have their bonuses combined and one roll is made", I would have my rooms working as diversely as possible.

For example, Dance Hall has a Common Room and a Storage Room. They can both produce GP at +7 and +2, respectively. If they both produce GP, combined is +9. Taking ten gives 19 or 1 GP. If, however, the Common Room produces Influence instead, that is 12 for GP and 17 for Influence for 1 unit of each.