A Land Far Away

I've noted a fairly wide inter-server and intra-server difference in the amount of coin a player can make doing unskilled, low risk labor like fishing, trapping, farling. ( not to offend any RL fishermen out there...in this post I am talking about repeatable, non-combat related work activities that generate gold for a player)

What do people think is a fair wage for the results of a hard day's labor?

Well, in PnP, a PC with ranks in Profession (fisherman) would make a roll once per week, at the end of the week (this is working for 8 hours a day for 7 days, rule not adapted for 10 days). You roll 1d20 + ranks in profession + Wisdom modifier, and you get half of that in gold pieces.

Profession is a skill that is not useable unless you have at least one rank in it, and you must specificy your profession, much like the craft and knowledge skills.

Other ways a PC can earn money are the Perform or Sleight of Hand (Pick Pocket) skills, which generate a number of coins per day depending on the performance check.

Would it be possible to create profession skill categories that could be tested against a set difficulty check related to the source of the profession. For instance certain trees in the forest would make good for harvesting useable wood, but not all of them. Once the character interacts with the tree, they are left with a certain amount of useable wood that they could take back to the town and sell as raw materials to merchants. This could be done with fish, wood, mining, all kinds of stuff that would give the player actual real-time progress (albeit low, copper level income) instead of having to sit out of play for a week to chump up 20 gold.

Serious farming should not be able to earn more than 100/hour. I tried to set the TPI fishing system to 35/hour (dead boring, but you can earn enough to stock up on supplies if you really need to). So far, I'm not aware of anyone abusing it (say Full Plate + Tower on a 1 XP Ftr1).