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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4962601" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, IMO the Leadership feat is ridiculous on several grounds:1) It's the only feat I can think of which a person can defacto acquire through roleplay.  In otherwords, what prevents someone who has fulfilled the requirements of getting retainers, followers, admirers, companions, and even worshipers by way of role play from effectively having the feat?  2) It's far and way the most powerful feat in the game.  From an objective standpoint, no character should not take the Leadership feat since the NPC/followers that come with it are far more powerful than any other single feat.3) The requirements for taking the feat are rather bizarre.4) It introduces a huge burden on the DM and generally slows play.  As a DM, I try to minimize the number of NPC's the players are interacting with at any one time, because I can only effectively portray one, maybe two, NPC's at a time.  If everyone takes Leadership, suddenly the party is continually crawling with NPC's in addition to the ones they'd normally meet.  This forces me to leave the NPC's in the hands of the players, which leads to problems (players start forgetting its an NPC, and get angry when I balk at what they say the NPC will do) and tends to make them non-entities when it comes to personality.  Additionally, if the player is running the NPC, they essentially get two turns to every one of another player, which is a way of hogging the spotlight and it ruins the game pacing because players get input too irregularly and get bored.IMO, the only reason the Leadership feat is in the game is to provide some back compatibility with the expectations of 1st edition AD&D where high level characters (here meaning 9th) acquired followers as a special benefit.  It was probablimatic back in 1st edition, and its even more problimatic in 3rd.I'm not going to get between you and your DM.  This is something for you to work out on your own, and my opinion isn't intended to be a club for you to try to beat your DM over the head with.If your DM says that Leadership has a Chr prerequisite, then it has a Chr prerequisite.  You've already accepted his right to house rule the system when it is in your favor, you can't now back out and force him to adhere to the rules as written.  I personally wouldn't take that route because it already factors Chr into the feat (you get weaker followers), but even if I allowed Leadership at all I probably would require, "Necessary background" before taking the feat - meaning that you had to do something publicly which would tend to make you famous (or infamous) and would tend to attract followers to you.  If your character is a a grungy adventurer that hasn't seen the light of day since 1st level, and you stumble into a tavern somewhere, I don't see how you can justify, "People want to come and serve me as lord and master." just because you say, "I take a feat that says that they do."Maybe your DM hasn't handled the situation as best as he might (since you are obviously angry and coming over here to whip up a lynch mob), but I don't see anything unreasonable about ruling that your character doesn't qualify for a particular feat.</blockquote>

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