In Blades in the Dark, the PCs collectively make a Crew, but one of the resources a Crew can have is a Cohort. A Cohort can be either a Gang or an Expert. The Cohort gets one Advantage and one Drawback, or if you like two Advantages and two Drawbacks. These are tags like “Brutal” or “Loyal” or “Savage”. Cohorts can also be involved complications and Entanglements for the Crew.
There are a couple of ways you can use Cohorts. You can send them out to act on their own. Typically, a Gang would roll dice equal to your Crew’s Tier for any kind of action resolution, and an Expert would toll Tier +1d. So, if you send your Gang of Thugs out to chase some rival dealers from your territory, and you were a Tier 2 Crew, they’d roll 2d to see how it goes.
You can also have your PC Command the Cohort in action. For this, you would use your PC’s Command Action rating rather than the Crew Tier. You could also bring PC resources into it in this case by Pushing or taking a Devil’s Bargain, or by getting Help from another PC.
Finally, you can lead the Cohort in a Group Action. In this case, each PC and the Cohort would roll the appropriate Action, and everyone would get the highest result, at a possible cost of Stress to the Leader of the Group Action. So if the PCs and their gang were trying to sneak into an enemy compound, they’d choose a Leader, they’d each roll their Stealth Action, and the Gang would roll Crew Tier. The highest result is shared by all, but the Leader would take a Stress point for each failed roll.
Some Crew or PC abilities can increase the effectiveness of a Cohort, such as making them Elite at their given role, which grants them a +1d to Action rolls that pertain to their strength.
So there are different degrees of use to Cohorts. They can bolster your forces or they can be sent out on their own. In a game like BitD with its “fiction first” approach, I can imagine different groups of players interpreting exactly what the impact of deploying a Cohort might be. While they aren’t necessarily essential to the game, they’re an interesting element and a potentially powerful resource for the Crew, and they can help push the game into new and interesting directions.
