Not in OD&D. These were random hirelings, remember; at the very least it was never assumed you were going to find spellcasters available.
I'm not finding any indication of this in the actual text of Men & Magic... In fact it even states the terms under which Magic-Users and Clerics would be interested in being hired. They want magic! In any case, any hireling would be level 1, the exact statement being 'Only the lowest level of character types can be hired.' (M&M P12). Again, presumably they are rolled up like PCs, so they are mechanically identical.
OD&D hirelings--which is what we're talking about--didn't appear to have a class at all. They certainly weren't assumed to be clerics or wizards, and its not clear what combat table they were supposed to use. The weren't really classed any more than a lot of the 1 HD humanoid monsters were.
Again, read page 12 and etc. of Men & Magic, this is simply erroneous. While the idea of '0 level humans' or 'non-adventurers' is certainly inherent in OD&D it isn't systematically articulated, and the terms 'hireling' and 'henchman' for example do not have the particular meanings they acquire in AD&D. M&M P12 talks explicitly, and only, about classed NPCs.
I can only go by what I saw, and what I saw pretty consistently in multiple groups was that they were treated about the same as above. This was probably by implication with the way the follower rules for higher level PCs were set up.
I'd have to go look at the follower rules in M&M, but IIRC they do include fighters gaining bodies of actual Chainmail-style troops. Presumably these sorts of 'minions' don't really get stats, though perhaps if a player chose to have his character single out a few of them then they would get 'filled in' as more complete characters, and might even become level 1 fighters or something. Its really unclear that you can even HAVE 0-level hirelings in OD&D, a level 1 fighter is mechanically a 'veteran', which is already a grade of troops in Chainmail, so potentially they are not that uncommon. It is only in AD&D where the notion of 'Adventurers are a special group of people who can level up' is introduced.
Yeah, they may not have been particularly nuanced, but virtually everyone I saw in my OD&D days applied a noticable personality to their PCs. They might be ridiculous and over the top, but they weren't personality lacking. Again, remember the people I was playing with came from the SF fandom community; they were thinking in terms of playing fantasy protagonists or at least major NPCs, not random wargame chits (though there were always a person here or there like that).
I think we all had SOME degree of personality traits for any PC that lived long, yes. Not always, but there was an alignment and who they were associated with, and maybe some note scrawled on the sheet. IME it was pretty sketchy. Henchmen might have been less developed, but there wasn't much more down you could go, and if you rolled up 2 PCs and dived into a game, I hardly think they each had much personality. It seemed to me that this kind of game was pretty much the same as having one or two henchmen, just without all the advertising and gold trading hands.
I'm just going from what others have said. As I've noted, I never saw a group with more than a hireling or two, usually to manage the pack animals (or to function as two-legged versions of same).
I think this is more typical in later AD&D play IME. We often had 2 PCs, and usually one would be a 'backup' and virtually a henchman, or maybe even really a true henchman, though I agree we didn't use those rules super often. We did hire hirelings to keep the animals safe or whatever now and then, though dealing with them was often elided from play. Frankly 0-level hirelings become pretty useless after about 3rd level, the monsters just chew through them on round 1 and that's that. More likely they all see the ghouls approaching and scatter, only an idiot wouldn't.
Yeah, never saw much of that, either. Don't think I ever saw an OD&D DM that was going to allow you to drag along charmed monsters (or if they did, it was the same way they'd permit small numbers of hirelings).
Again, I'm not talking about what the game was designed for; I'm talking about how it seemed to actually be used in the wild, at least on the West Coast.
Well, in the games I played in, the whole reactions and recruiting monsters part was definitely less emphasized. In the oldest rounds of games it was there, when we used OD&D rules. Later we used Holmes Basic, and AFAIK it doesn't really discuss this kind of thing, though it has some of the reaction rules in it IIRC. Anyway, I don't think we're far apart, a few cases of monsters following PCs existed in our games, but not too many. We were more likely to use RP vs just dicing reactions in those days. And THAT is the RP we had, it was the players using their PC alter-egos to navigate through the game world fiction and accomplish things, nothing much else. I cited my 'psychotic' ranger, he was a super unique case, like the only one around. Sure, my friend had Francis McGillicutty (FM, get it) who had a nasty sense of humor, and Triborb VII who was basically a mad wizard, and a couple others I forget, but that was the extent of their personalities, and these were PCs that he ran for YEARS and were advanced to high levels. All my wizard PC's personality consisted of was he was super intelligent and min-maxed every situation, and his goal was learn all about everything, that's it. Played the character for years, cannot tell you a single thing about his backstory, it didn't even exist. He was a vehicle for expert play, nothing more. Towards the VERY end of the arcs of those characters, after they were semi-retired basically, they got a few elaborations. This was well into the 90's. Questioner tried to start a magic school, etc.
Keep in mind that in some areas (again, remembering my bias abotu what I saw out here), players were often a rotating function; a lot of games were run at conventions or at game clubs, so while you might have a kind of default group, it wasn't uncommon to be playing with people you only played with rarely or had never played with before. There was even a term for it "open" as contrasted with "closed" campaigns.
Well, at The Bunker most games were just one-offs where people used 'floating characters', and campaigns were more of a specialist thing. The players were a pretty steady roster, but it was DM of the week, basically. Otherwise campaigns were the rule, though it wasn't too unusual for one to be assembled using a roster of existing PCs, some of which might have originated in a totally different game.
