the care and feeding of underlings

[funkysnunkulator]

as time goes on, characters may aquire cohorts, followers, slaves, employees or whatever.

in your games, how active are these characters? how often are thier purposes out of sync with those of the party?

how do your players deal with this? how do your dm's deal with this?

are interparty fireworks a common theme in your games?

 

[DrunkonDuty]

In a game I'm running one of the PC's has recently taken leadership. So far we've only got the cohort, who is a fairly high level character in their own right. As far as the day to day costs go: I don't worry about them. Then again I don't worry too much about the PC's day to day costs either. I let them declare how much they spend per month and what sort of lifestyle they lead is based on that.

I think I'll just go with 'declare how much your spending, I'll work it out from there.' Just have to come up with a rough list of lifestyle costs/month/man. Including costs for being out on campaign. And this gives me and the player an easy reference for working out how well treated the followers are for determining loyalty/leadership scores.

 

[Polydamas]

In the current campaign several of my fellow players have taken leadership. In terms of the cohorts they are portrayed as being equal members of the party, but with an especially close relationship to the player's pc (squire, love interest etc...). The DM normally asks what sort of cohort the player wants and then designs the NPC and works them into the game (or adapts an existing NPC.)

As our campaign focuses heavily on our "home city", their followers have made quite an impact. One player is heavily involved in the city politics and so has turned his followers into a police force for an abandoned section of town. With his bonuses to leadership and high level, this is fairly significant force. The other player seeks to spread his faith and so has decided his followers are converts to his religion...as a martial faith, they assist the town guard.

Cohorts tend to get equal cuts of the treasure, and the pcs collectively donate gear to the large group of followers (the off +1 sword they find, for example). Followers are assumed to be self supporting and equipped with basic items...if you want to outfit them with full plate, you'll have to pay for that.

The politics player also maintains a mansion full staffed with hirelings (supplemented by some followers). He pays their salaries, and we have actually undertaken adventures just to meet the staff and repair budgets on the place.

 

[funkysnunkulator]

do you run these individuals as individuals. beings with thier own goals and agendas? do you make regular use of this? any use of this?

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Got to admit, so far I've taken the lazy option and the cohort is run by the player. Of course in my defence I already have a whole kingdom of NPC's to run.

I admit that if spent more time running the cohort the player would be happier. He doesn't want a simple extension to his character sheet but a genuine NPC. And of course this will give me more plot hooks.

 

[funkysnunkulator]

oh absolutely. it does get tough. we sometimes let the players run the cohorts. our players are professional grade. we play character. that is, the characters get played according to what the characters know. not what the players know. so our players are really good at playing more than one character simultaneously. we even have two gals that like to play up the bickering that happens between the characters and cohorts. yep. identity crisis, just around the next bend....

course, due to the vast number of npc's that can be involved, we evolved into a group with a dm council. 12 dm's. one dm runs a given game. 6-12 players. the other dm's take the roles of npc's (typically outside the party), make food and drink runs, do quick research on rules questions or things like that. then the dm's have our own sessions where we plan encounters, treasures, personalities, economies, politics, weather.... everything.

BEST game on the planet. except everyone elses. yours are the best games on the planet, right? oh yeah.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I wondered what you meant about DM's council. I thought maybe you were in a Living campaign.

Extra GM's to help with the NPC's (and pizza!!) That's sounds like a great idea.

With numbers like that I assume you're in a gaming society. I've just got a small group, 4 of us as a rule. 2 of us GM but we run separate campaigns. The other GM guy does run the occassional side adventure in my games, I run the occassional one in his, but by and large we do our own campaigns.