Hirelings/Cohorts? Does any every hire them?

[Loren Pechtel]

I've never been in a party that has even considered any form of combat hireling.

 

[Andras]

Let's see, in my current city-based campaign, my pcs own a large house, a warehouse, and a tavern-supply company. They're building a museum. They also have a secret laboratory, and a magic/mechanical loom that weaves tapestries.

They have 4-5 guards, two spies-in-training, a cleric (cohort), an artist, a bookbinder, a secretary/lab assistant, and 3 other servants all in full-time hire. They constantly talk about hiring more. Oh, and they have a bard/storyteller on retainer. They are about to have to hire employees (and a manager) for their new tavern-supply business.

They dream of owning the other 4-5 buildings in their block as well. I swear, they're more business entrepreneurs than adventurers at this point!

Anyone else have a sudden flashback to the cartoon in the middle of the 1st Edition DMG with a party of adventurers sitting around a table: "It's a great new fantasy roleplaying game. We pretend we're workers and students in an industrialized and technological society." The monk is holding a book titled 'Papers and Paychecks'.

 

[krupintupple]

as far as cohort are concerned, yes they accompany me as a "robin" to my "batman". as for followers, they're all "alfred" and "commissioner gordon". followers get blown apart no matter how many of them there are. a single 5th level fireball will basically bring down 95% of these guys even if they pass and it doesn't roll overly well. my solution? keep them in your base of operations, or the city where you roll. make them do alchemical research, or spell research, or a stone masonry or carpentry, or spell component collection, or running a business on the side, etc. give them ranks in "profession: law, politics, business" and basically have some members of the city council or your local law office on your side. i had a PC who ran a brothel using charismatic half elf bards and experts to charm, seduce and divest information out of most of the city folk who'd come in for a good time. he explained it was more like the brothel from Planescape: Torment, and his girls could get information out of anyone. politicians, the city guard, foreign nationals, etc. pretty soon, he had an expert pulse on the city and could even tell when the markets would tumble, or trouble'd be on the horizon. oh, and it made him a pretty penny too.

basically, have them work for you in ways that matter, because being turned into paste during the first encounter outside of the city after a single ogre hits them isn't really helping anyone.

the only caveat i say for this, is to make sure your DM is ready, or wants something like this. there's a good chance it may fluster them, or go against the grain of the campaign and they may just say "It caught fire and they all died." so communicate with them well beforehand what you're interested in doing!

 

[Starbuck_II]

Agreed. I also don't allow the 'leadership' feat in my 3e games. I want the game to center on the pcs, not their hordes of hirelings.

We also don't have a history of using them. I.e. in 1e and 2e we also never used them.

You don't use the feat to obtain hirelings. You only need money.

 

[Jhaelen]

You don't use the feat to obtain hirelings. You only need money.

I guess that's why I put the word 'also' in the sentence, meaning we 'also' don't use followers or cohorts in our games.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

You hire a 1st-level Fighter for several long adventures but he gains no XP? It must REALLY suck to be a hireling :-(
"I am the veteran of Battles of A and B, mercenary through and through!"
"So I guess you're a pretty good fighter then?"
"Uhhh... Yeah... Sure... Look, I'd like to get a share of the loot, would that be ok? Even 0.01% is fine!"
"Sure but we are fighting against an owlbear so I don't think..."
"It's fine! We-we-we sell it's TEETH and then I get my share of that loot! Whatever but just DON'T hire me!"
"Well... Ok..."

 

[Persiflage]

When you enter this stance, you become more difficult to hit with each successive attack that misses you. Each time a melee attack misses you, you gain a +2 dodge bonus to AC. This bonus lasts until the start of your next turn and is cumulative for the round. The bonus applies to any attacks made by all opponents until the beginning of your next turn.

Pearl of Black Doubt: there has never been a better reason to adventure with fifty blind 1st-level commoners dual-wielding rolled-up newspapers...

Seriously though, the only time any gaming group I've been a part of has made extensive use of followers or hirelings (as opposed to cohorts), the campaign was explicitly biased in that direction. To simplify book-keeping I wrote a greatly-extended Leadership system, where continued investment bought additional benefits in one or more Leadership Qualities (such as Pillar of the Community, Merchant Prince, Underworld Connections, etc). In essence, I added a Leadership mini-game to the system... It allowed characters (particularly Epic characters) to use their fame, position and influence to have major confrontations - with a marked in-game effect - with other powerful and influential figures, but without stabbing each other in the face or levelling the city.

In that case, the use of hirelings and followers worked extremely well and indeed was the focus of the campaign in many ways. Even so, half the point of the Leadership Qualities was to abstract the use of followers to achieve certain tasks, rather than individually keeping track of people too low-level for you to care about. You "spent" followers to buy ranks in the various qualities in order to achieve certain benefits. Ultimately it put game mechanics around stunts that well-known high-level characters (and their enemies) should be able to achieve (e.g. getting someone thrown into or released from jail, discrediting opponents, raising a mercenary force, getting funding for a venture) without having to roleplay the minutiae if you don't want to. One day I might even post the system somewhere in the unlikely event that anybody cared.

Meh, sorry, off the point... Nostalgia happened

Anyway, I suppose the answer to the OP is: not really, and not often. In my experience - deliberate campaign shenanigans like the above aside - most characters get so complex that it's hard enough to keep track of everything they can do, without throwing in the heartache of tracking hirelings and followers. Not that I'd stop anyone doing it in my games; people just tend to feel they've got enough to do already. Where they are used, it's invariably "meanwhile, back on the ranch" setups. There's a guy who occasionally plays in our group whose Paladin has a sizeable private freakin' army at his beck and call... but they're always summoned to do things like "guard this village against further attacks whilst we investigate the troll warrens", "take up stations on those three hills and light a beacon if you see the dragon", "take this loot back to town, get me a good price on it and distribute 20% to charity" and whatnot. So far, he has never asked me to run a combat involving his gang of "church soldiers" and I'm frankly quite relieved about it!

 

[Daazimal]

Hirelings and henchman, as they were called in second addition were fun. I had a rogue that would hire other thieves to use them as diversions and stuff, or to steal something from the mark, I would target, or just to gather intelligence. With a good DM they can be quite interesting, it just depends on how you use them, and then let the DM work out their reactions.

 

[TanisFrey]

Playing in a game with 8 players with 13th level character and 3 of us have leadership. The one player, who is running a Prestige Paladin of Sune, has maxed the leadership chart and is bucking for Epic Leadership for his next feat.

 

[Dog Moon]

Pearl of Black Doubt: there has never been a better reason to adventure with fifty blind 1st-level commoners dual-wielding rolled-up newspapers...

Seriously though, the only time any gaming group I've been a part of has made extensive use of followers or hirelings (as opposed to cohorts), the campaign was explicitly biased in that direction. To simplify book-keeping I wrote a greatly-extended Leadership system, where continued investment bought additional benefits in one or more Leadership Qualities (such as Pillar of the Community, Merchant Prince, Underworld Connections, etc). In essence, I added a Leadership mini-game to the system... It allowed characters (particularly Epic characters) to use their fame, position and influence to have major confrontations - with a marked in-game effect - with other powerful and influential figures, but without stabbing each other in the face or levelling the city.

In that case, the use of hirelings and followers worked extremely well and indeed was the focus of the campaign in many ways. Even so, half the point of the Leadership Qualities was to abstract the use of followers to achieve certain tasks, rather than individually keeping track of people too low-level for you to care about. You "spent" followers to buy ranks in the various qualities in order to achieve certain benefits. Ultimately it put game mechanics around stunts that well-known high-level characters (and their enemies) should be able to achieve (e.g. getting someone thrown into or released from jail, discrediting opponents, raising a mercenary force, getting funding for a venture) without having to roleplay the minutiae if you don't want to. One day I might even post the system somewhere in the unlikely event that anybody cared.

Meh, sorry, off the point... Nostalgia happened

I think this is really awesome, actually. Leadership has been taken numerous times in our group, usually to fill some gap we're missing in the group [healbots tend to be the most common cohort], but even then we never use the crappy people cause they would all die too quickly. But this... seems like a perfect use of the crappy people.

If you still have the system, I WOULD care to look at it.

Recently in our group, we hired a coach for the 1 cp/mile. Cause our group was supposed to go a couple day travel north and I asked the DM how many miles that would be. He was like 60 miles. I was like dude, that's like 2gp with tip to go back and forth... and thus we had a coach giving us a ride to our destination.