Yet Another Leadership Thread

[Insight]

I have a philosophical and game balance issue with the Leadership feat. This may be caused by how it's been implemented in our campaign, in the ambiguity of the feat's description and rules, or any combination of the above.

In essence, for the cost of one feat, you get to run an additional character. My understanding is that, in a lot of campaigns, these cohorts are not combat characters and are not constantly around to provide support. Unfortunately, the feat as written does not specify this. Instead, with a broad interpretation of the Leadership feat, you get an additional character who is probably 2 levels below your main character.

An additional character means more spells, more attacks per round, more hit points to soak attacks, etc. This seems completely unbalanced to me for the cost of one feat, especially one with fairly mediocre prerequisites.

I'd be curious to see how people handle the use of this feat in their games. Do you allow people to take Leadership to gain another character that's around all the time? Do you limit how often the cohort can help out? Do you rule that the cohort cannot be a combat character? Do you ban the feat altogether?

I'd especially like responses from people who allow the cohorts to be available 24/7 and how they dealt with the increase in player ability and firepower.

 

[Aus_Snow]

IMHO, Leadership should be a skill. But then, as I've said before (and will say again for the price of an ale), Diplomacy is too general a skill.

So it should be split up!

I'm working on things like leadership as a skill, currently. If I finish these things, and if I remember, I'll post some details at a later point.


my 2 copper pennies, for now

 

[Spatzimaus]

Most people I know who've taken Leadership have done so for a combat-oriented cohort. Fighters get a support caster, casters get a fighter who protects them, that sort of thing. On paper, this is really strong. You ARE getting a second character to work with, after all, even if he does lag a couple levels behind the rest of the party. But it's not unworkable, in practice, because of a few different things.

1> You don't have full control over that character. In fact, the rules as written don't give you any actual control over those characters; they're DM-controlled NPCs who just happen to feel loyalty to one individual. As a general bookkeeping issue IMC we let the players control their own cohorts most of the time, but it doesn't have to be this way, and either way you can't just order the cohort to sacrifice himself for the team. In Piratecat's Story Hour (over in the Story Hour forum, of course), for instance, they often have visiting players stop in for a session, and those people usually play the cohorts for the day; while this results in some personality jumps, it makes the characters much more interesting.
What this means, in practice, is that the party figures out what roles they mainly want to play, then take cohorts to fill in the group's gaps. No clerics? Not a problem. This isn't much different than having players handle multiple characters in the first place.

2> They lag at least two levels behind the rest of the party, often more. This isn't a small difference; I played a Rogue 2/Sorcerer X for a long time, and people on these boards kept telling me how "underpowered" I was by not being at the same spell level as the rest of the party. Now, imagine if I hadn't even had those Rogue levels... that's what a sorcerer cohort would be like. For fighter types, you're lagging on BAB and HP. In either case, your saves are worse. And how far behind the cohort lags depends on your CHA; to reach the -2 cap, you need a CHA mod of +1 at 7th to 9th level, rising to +5 at 19th level (and you can't get an 18th level cohort, period). How many people do you know with a +5 CHA modifier, even at 19th level? If you're level 20, and have a +0 mod, your cohort is 14th level, which is dead meat in most encounters.
(This assumes no other modifiers to the Leadership score. While most players get a plus on Reputation, the -2 for a familiar/mount/companion is also common.)

3> Loot is in finite supply. Any loot that goes to the cohort is loot that the players don't get. But cohorts don't work for free, either; no NPC, no matter how loyal, is going to put his life on the line alongside you and then stand by while you get all the loot. No matter what, they still have to be equipped to be effective, which is still a drain on your resources.

In my experience, the bigger problem with Leadership is the Followers. They're just not very useful. I mean sure, a hundred level 1 followers looks nice, but what exactly can they do? So most people just write off the followers as a "support structure" and then abstract it from there. A priest with Leadership just has influence with his church, my Psion with Leadership has high rank in a craft guild, that sort of thing.

 

[tjoneslo]

I'm another person in favor of using a Leadership as a skill. I use the feat tables to describe the approximate strenght of the people the leader can attract, and have the character make Leadership skill checks (with charisma) to find and recruit their cohorts, followers, hangers-on.

You'd think 100 first level followers is useless. Until the players discover the usefulness of 100 pikemen with shields (aka a roman legion). As long as your leadership can hold them together,

 

[Mortis]

100 pikemen with shields (aka a roman legion).

More like a Macedonian Phalanx.

Useful until targeted with a Fireball (or similar) spell.

Regards,
Mortis

 

[Shayuri]

Two words.

Spy Network.



My current plan is to build a big network of ordinary people that nevertheless owe their alliegience to me, and draw from their skills and observations a la The Shadow...

 

[Spatzimaus]

Until the players discover the usefulness of 100 pikemen with shields (aka a roman legion)

Not even close. You would actually take 100 1st-level pikemen into a level 20 battle? Even ignoring the fact that one good fireball kills the entire group, what exactly can they do? With an attack bonus of maybe +4 and around 10 HP, they'll never hit a level 20 target due to all the magical AC, so what exactly are they good for? The only thing I can come up with is the Aid Another rules, and even that's really not too effective for level 1s. Plus, if you read the splatbooks, in one of them they explained that the followers were of NPC classes. So no, 100 Warrior pikemen really aren't going to make any difference, and most Good people would frown on "leaders" who bring along useless cannon fodder to be killed in the first battle.

Shayuri's "spy network" idea works in theory, but again, you're talking about primarily level 1-2 characters. They just don't have the skill ranks to do many useful things, although it's a bit better; a +7 or +8 for Gather Information can be a useful thing to have, especially if your followers are spread out. This applies to a lot of skills; most of my followers are craftsmen, and a Craft of +7 or so allows you to Take 10 for most mundane items just fine.

IMC, we rewrote the feat to be point-based, so that you could choose to buy more high-level followers at the expense of the level 1s. By "high" I just mean levels 4-5ish; high enough to actually have some skill ranks and feats, low enough to still not be useful in combat. Most people who took Leadership ended up doing this, because it's just so much more useful to have a follower who can hit those high DCs on occasion (craftsmen that can make Masterwork, for instance).

 

[tjoneslo]

You would actually take 100 1st-level pikemen into a level 20 battle?

I would, if, as you point out, the D&D rules didn't nerf the forest of pikes against your lone hero, who should be a pincushion.

Proper equipment for the troops is essential. Giving each a half used magic wand of fireballs, or other attack spell makes for some very unpleasant battlefields.

The Spy Network is another area where the D&D rules falls somewhat short. I agree with Shayun. Having 100 guys who clean stables, each in the 100 noble's manners would be a huge asset. If the DM was running a noblility intrigue campaign.

But this is where Leadership as a skill makes more sense then Leadership feat. If you have the skill, you can recruit those that would be useful, rather than simply attracting whatever rabble the DM chooses to throw at you.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I would, if, as you point out, the D&D rules didn't nerf the forest of pikes against your lone hero, who should be a pincushion.

I'll agree that there's a realism gap in this game, and a spear in the guts should be fatal no matter how many bugbears you've slain. However, that being said, it's not entirely unrealistic. Don't overvalue that sort of support; if you were a special forces commando-type guy, you wouldn't want a hundred effectively untrained (level 1 commoner) guys as your "backup", even if they were given decent equipment. Yes, historically many of the old Greek armies were made up of these sorts of half-trained men, but those that were tended to break and run pretty often. Ever heard the phrase "with your shield, or on it"? Soldiers who broke and ran would drop those big, heavy shields, so soldiers would be told to either come back with the shield (meaning you held your ground), or have it used as a stretcher to carry your corpse back.

Now imagine how much worse it'd be in a fantasy campaign, when it's possible to run into an enemy that you simply can't deal with. The classic phalanx only had to deal with swords, spears, javelins, and maybe arrows. These are all things that can be dealt with using spears. The flying, invisible guy lobbing fireballs? The dragon? The elemental who ignores your blows entirely? Not quite the same thing. So, no realistic depiction of level 1 fighters would have them holding their ground against those sorts of enemies, and the DM should rule that they broke and ran the first time they faced something unusual.

Oh, and rules quibble:

Proper equipment for the troops is essential. Giving each a half used magic wand of fireballs, or other attack spell makes for some very unpleasant battlefields.

Wands are spell-trigger activation. You have to be a class that has the spell on your list (which isn't possible for 1st-level NPC classes), or else be able to fake it with Use Magic Device (again, NPC classes, so only the Expert could try). So that plan doesn't work, even ignoring the difficulty in finding half-used wands.

 

[tjoneslo]

I'll agree that there's a realism gap in this game, and a spear in the guts should be fatal no matter how many bugbears you've slain. However, that being said, it's not entirely unrealistic. Don't overvalue that sort of support; if you were a special forces commando-type guy, you wouldn't want a hundred effectively untrained (level 1 commoner) guys as your "backup", even if they were given decent equipment. Yes, historically many of the old Greek armies were made up of these sorts of half-trained men, but those that were tended to break and run pretty often.

Using half-trained men as armed forces was pretty standard until the middle of the 18th century. The break and run was pretty usual problem armies had to deal with. This is part of the reason I like Leader as a skill rather than a feat.

Now imagine how much worse it'd be in a fantasy campaign, when it's possible to run into an enemy that you simply can't deal with. The classic phalanx only had to deal with swords, spears, javelins, and maybe arrows. These are all things that can be dealt with using spears. The flying, invisible guy lobbing fireballs? The dragon? The elemental who ignores your blows entirely? Not quite the same thing.

I'd argue the point that the crew of 1st level people had never seen such things. Given their prevelance in the D&D world, defense against weird stuff can not strictly rely upon the PC's. But I guess that's another point failed realism.

Oh, and rules quibble:

Wands are spell-trigger activation. You have to be a class that has the spell on your list (which isn't possible for 1st-level NPC classes), or else be able to fake it with Use Magic Device (again, NPC classes, so only the Expert could try). So that plan doesn't work, even ignoring the difficulty in finding half-used wands.

Point taken, I will use this moment to express just how much I hate the idea of NPC classes.