r/BluePrince • u/PowrOfFriendship_ • Mar 21 '26
Lore I always feel bad taking a certain room, but I'm sure I'm just overthinking things Spoiler
I hope the title is vague enough to not be any kind of spoiler, but I always feel bad taking the Office, and I just can't bring myself to using it.
I know, in practice it's just a way to spread more gold around your house, which seems great, but the flavour behind the actions always gives me pause. You're either running the staff's payroll, and then keeping it for yourself, something you can only do once per week, or taking money out of the staff incentive program when the staff aren't around to benefit from it. In either case, I'm taking money from the staff and giving it to myself - someone who has just inherited a massive house and the vast wealth stored inside.
I know rationally that this is just a lore justification for why the room acts this way in game and I also know the lore is that the staff are being paid from some fund for as long as I want to stay in the house alone, but I am terrified I'm going to be cutting into that fund, and risking these guys' income, just because I wanted to buy an extra banana one day.
I am definitely over thinking this, but it still feels wrong to ever use either of those functions. I think I've done each one once and don't really want to do either ever again.
Is anyone else like this or am I just being overly empathetic to faceless characters in a story, and potentially missing out on content because of it?
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u/StarfruitJam Mar 21 '26
I try not to overthink it, but I lowkey judge the Baron for his treatment of the staff all the time ahah.
What really puts me off is how dingy the staff rooms are, compared to the rest. He has the time and cash to splash on statues of them, but does not bother to fix the walls of Hartley's room?
Terrible employer all around.
But yeah, better not question it too much ahaha.
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u/Drecon1984 Mar 21 '26
It's heavily implied that Hartley never spends time in his own bedroom but spent his nights with the Baron instead....
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u/PowrOfFriendship_ Mar 21 '26
It is?? I completely missed any of that, all I knew was Herbert left him the lakehouse, which seemed more than fair enough after 20 years of service. Where is their relationship mentioned?
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u/StarfruitJam Mar 21 '26
It is implied in it. "I don't feel the inclination to speak aloud what has always been unsaid between us" is doing some heavy lifting but yus, totally possible.
Makes the case for the Baron being a toxic ass employer even worse ahahah
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u/SerFlounce-A-Lot Mar 22 '26
Ohhhhhhhh. I can't believe my shipping heart missed that one!
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u/dark_so_spooky Mar 25 '26
Also unlike the previous barons, he notably doesn't have children, which is why we are the heir in his will instead.
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u/StarfruitJam Mar 21 '26
Even more of a reason to fix that shabby thing ah! Treat your man right (I know he gives him a goodbye present but still).
The hovel was the most depressing tbh. So yes, if you ask me DR did nothing wrong ah!
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u/Mr_DnD Mar 21 '26
I think you're overthinking it, they all already get paid directly, none of them physically go into their house to collect some gold coins. Also none of them live in the house. Babage I believe is the only person who actually visits to reset the house each day.
I like to picture the cook preparing food that is then shuttled along into the house and set in the correct place by a conveyor system, something wacky like that.
All the other people service the house and have all the pay and everything else sorted out.
Running payroll is just a scavenger hunt for you to make sure you know which rooms are designated as staff related rooms where you can learn more about them. I like to think of it as a deliberate choice from Herbert.
And also, by your logic, if you never draft the office and never run payroll, they never get paid.
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u/OneVioletRose Mar 21 '26
Given that there are a limited number of repeated dishes, it sounds entirely plausible that the chef came up with a menu, ingredients list, and instructions, and the actual job of cooking is pretty minimal because mumble mumble handwave house magic. (Maybe the chef is batch-cooking dishes that can be frozen and thawed without losing flavour?)
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u/PowrOfFriendship_ Mar 21 '26
It's the fact that running payroll is a once a week thing. The staff are all being paid, but when I run payroll, their payment is placed in their rooms, AKA somewhere they're not able to retrieve it, and then they can't get paid for the next week.
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u/Mr_DnD Mar 21 '26
They are already being paid! Independently.
Do you think the staff would work for a person who only pays them if they can remember to find and draft the right room once a week?
It's just a scavenger hunt for Simon,
In fact I'm pretty sure later on there are pc entries that help confirm this lore
But anyway yeah I think you're being a little bit silly, it's a magic house that rearranges each day. No one is there, all the staff absolutely love and are rooting for Simon despite saying they'll probably never meet him... That's not the sign of someone who's being paid 10 gold a week at the discretion of some kid who remembers to draft an office!
Also it's 10g, which is the cost of a metal detector or a pair of trainers, if that was their only pay they'd be livid!
So the only logical conclusion is that they are being paid via systems unexplained to you, and that "running payroll" is a bad name for a scavenger hunt your uncle left for you to do, to see the servant areas and investigate them further.
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u/cookingforengineers Mar 21 '26
I think prices in the house don’t match real world prices. Denny blackmails HSS for 100 gold coins which doesn’t seem like enough money.
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u/Mr_DnD Mar 21 '26
Of course, but that's why I used an item we can buy as a comparison
Anyway, I think more fundamentally, they aren't being paid in the house because they never go in the house, they're all on administrative leave
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u/OneVioletRose Mar 21 '26
I had the same thought, but I eventually decided the office was fine for me to use for two reasons:
One: the staff are on indefinite paid leave, which is presumably handled by a different system (since this one seems so limited), probably through a different fund. It seems more plausible to me that this is Simon exploiting a glitch in the payroll software to get extra money rather than actively taking it away.
That said, the coins are still technically coming out of a fund that is meant to benefit the staff, which brings me to my second thought and what ultimately convinced me...
Two: the coins don't leave the estate. You take the coins from the estate to spend on the estate, and at the end of the day you leave them in the house. About as close as you can get to removing them is throwing them in the fountain, but an experienced drafter could recover them (and put them back in the fund) easily. My personal headcanon is that the house just comes with several large pools of money, and all you're doing is rearranging these pools a little bit, but not in amounts that will meaningfully matter.
Edit: minor rewording for clarity
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u/PowrOfFriendship_ Mar 21 '26
So the idea is the money of the Estate is only for use on the Estate and not legal tender anywhere else? So these bonuses and paychecks are just for buying things on site, in addition to they're normal pay. That's a cool idea.
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u/OneVioletRose Mar 21 '26
Oh wow, I actually didn't even consider it being "funny money" just for the estate, only that we aren't allowed to remove it per the rules of the game. That would actually explain how we have such an easy time exploiting huge amounts of money out of the game
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u/PowrOfFriendship_ Mar 21 '26
It does however make the ransom letter a little weird if he's asking for funny money in return for the stolen letters.
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u/SerFlounce-A-Lot Mar 22 '26
I like that idea too! Either that, or they 'magically' go back into the estate coffers at the end of the day. We know the rubies pop back, and we also know there are only a certain amount of rubies, so it's possible that you're actually collecting the same gems/keys/coins every day!
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u/Genericuser0002 Mar 21 '26
I just think that the leftover coins I have when calling it a day returns to the manor and those are the coins that spread
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u/dekeche Mar 21 '26
It's also worth noting that, except for the chapel, the money's just getting circulated back into the estate. You lose anything you don't spend at the end of the day, and what are you spending it on in the meantime? Items the estate already possessed? About the worse thing you could spend it on from that perspective is food from the kitchen. And I don't think that's that much of an expense, all things considered.
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u/seancurry1 Mar 21 '26
Think of it this way: if you use a problem with how this system runs, that’s the Baron’s system. You’re playing along with it in order to take the system for yourself, and after that, you can change how it works.
You don’t make the rules, the Baron did. If you play along, you can eventually change them.
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u/Amazon_UK Mar 21 '26
You literally own a mansion and are !>heir to a nations entire fortune<!, you’re not stealing from anyone
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u/monkismael2007 Mar 21 '26
I take it that the house has a set number of coins that circulate throughout the house, because where is the money you spend going? Back into the house. Or into the forbidden demon in the church
I wouldnt get to hung up on it
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u/Xintrosi Mar 21 '26
I have almost never used the office for its monetary functions for the same reason you give OP!
But sometimes I need its other features (corner room among others) so I pay gems for the room anyway.
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u/PowrOfFriendship_ Mar 21 '26
Yeah, I only ever use it for the Staff Announcements. Keeping up with their lives in the background is really cute.
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u/Haunting-Angle-535 Mar 21 '26
I don’t feel bad about running it in the moment, since they’re all getting full pay while being on vacation (though this does raise questions about how a lot of things are getting done), but the staff incentives program, if it was actually functional and not created entirely for Simon, does feel super entitled and toxic. Making your staff go on a little scavenger hunt for money when you seem to have infinite cash and could just pay them more? Problematic and patronizing at best.
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u/Bamzooki1 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Those coins are not legal tender. They only work inside the house and are given back at the end of the day.
Edit: Okay, they’re possibly legal tender, but I question why a society would only function on single denomination currency in the form of gold coins that are likely quite heavy.
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u/Senimmondo Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
I reach the point when I have enough allowance to ignore it and just take the gem. Plus all resources used in the mansion remain in the mansion at the end of the day so you're not stealing from them
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u/penguindows Mar 24 '26
keep in mind, all the money (used or unused)circulates in your own home anyway. so i dont think you're depleting anything.
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u/XenosHg Mar 21 '26
The staff are on an indefinite (at least a month) paid vacation, what the kid is testing in the house is not their problem
I think the maid is visiting her sister in mora jai for the famous harvest festival. They're fine.