There's not alot of things on Profit factor in the books but plenty of talk about it. More homebrew or house rules than set in stone rules. My question is how do you play profit factor in your session's? Im going to make my players spend profit factor on large things, like buying a mining company, BUT since they bought it they will get a yearly increase to profit factor. +1 or +2. To fix a ship they captured I'll have then spend profit factor to repair it and so on and so forth. What do you do though?

My advice? Try not to make too many home brew rules of your own in your first game as GM. Wait until something breaks before you try to fix it or you'll end up breaking the game yourself. That said, PF is one of the broken systems. I can give you a starting ship design that grants +25 PF per endeavor that you can fit Trade, Criminal, and Creed into, not that hard...the intro scenario from the core rulebook allows for that. Breakage!

You can look around at the threads. Everyone has their own home brews for PF. I don't charge permanent loss for PF except difficulties, colonies, and new ships. Ship repair takes time, so I don't charge them PF. Mining company? It would have to a really big one....major interests on a score of planets or more.

I don't get the mining company thing at all. Have they decided to become investment brokers? Assuming a return rate of 10% that company would have to worth 20 PF to return 2 PF per year. I can see your party eventually needing mining equipment, but why would they risk a huge part of their capital for equipment on the resources of a planet they haven't discovered yet? Oh well....neither here nor there.

Um, Important Interjection.

Profit factor is not Money , it's Weath . A profit factor represents things under the Rogue Trader's control and influence that generate a continuous stream of resources. For example, a small mining company (say, a few hundred employees) is worth about 1 or 2 profit factor depending on what they mine. Not 1 or 2 per year, 1 or 2 total. If they lose that mine, they lose that 1 or 2 profit factor.

The vast majority of things that a Rogue Trader buys are bought simply by rolling against Profit Factor to see if your army of accountants can file it away under "business expenses" at this point in time.

Profit factor should only really be truly spent on two things:

1) things that require a (large) continuous stream of money to maintain, like very expensive employees, retaining a personal dockyard at port wander, operating a voidship, etc.

2) Things that are so expensive they are out of the bounds of even a Rogue Trader's income. Reducing profit factor is like (and may literally be) selling off a subsidiary of your multi-planetary business. This should be reserved for buying things like: complete void ships, colonies and super-secret warp maps to fabulous planets of gold.

The rule of thumb I like to use is: If it can be bought with Thrones, it's not worth counting.

Also, to touch on Errant Knight's note, I think Profit Factor's ok, I have a problem with Achievement Points which is what he's actually talking about with that super-ship.

My group has never really bothered with the achievement point system, it's excessively granular, generates more paperwork for the GM and is generally way too breakable. Subsequently we tend to just play it by ear and raise or lower the profit factor by small ammounts based on what's going on in the story and what the players have managed or failed to do.

For instance if the party captures an enemy ship and adds it to their fleet we reduce profit factor, but if they sell it instead we would increase profit factor. Generally that's a big focus of how we try to determine it, income from our established ventures/invested wealth versus expenses and overhead.

When it comes to skills or componants that affect achievement points we just use common sense instead, like for instance if they want to haul a brunch of freight they need to be in a ship that has some sort of cargo hold. Or when the group is negotiating the sale of a prisoner and someone has bloodtracker we'll throw in some sort of boon or increase the profit factor generated by the sale. We've also had situations where the party has aquired items they knew the mechanicus would want, and then used those to barter directly for items and bionics they wanted that were a bit out of their normal price range rather than just sell the goods and recieve an increase in profit factor.

Nobody in the group has protested not even people who were in other games where they ran on the system as written. Now as for what the OP is asking he should probably do a bit more reading, so long as they're not buying too much stuff at once making a successful roll SHOULD NOT reduce profit factor. Yes there is a system in Into the Storm for burning profit factor to get stuff anyway even when you fail a roll but it's only really for buying things after you've failed the roll.