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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 775114" data-attributes="member: 3051">Part of it is that we're a lot more flexible on Leadership than the DMG allows.  It's not "I take the Feat... BOOM... hundreds of people are now following me!"  It's more of a gradual accumulation of power.  And like you said, it only makes sense for an Aristocrat to START with something.For example, my Aristocrat/Psion is from a wealthy merchant family.  At low levels he was the rich kid, but his father ran the business.  After a while he took Leadership, to represent when he took over the business (Cohort was the guy who ran the business, Followers were the employees).Then, we have more of an EL-balancing thing.  You can trade up/down followers to get ones of different levels (divide by two to get level+2, that sort of thing)Now, in the simplest sense you can treat this like I said, using the DMG Leadership Feat and then giving a bonus.  Really, I'd like to rework the entire Feat like this:LEADERSHIP (General)> Requires CHA 13, level 6> When you take the Leadership Feat, you get a number of Leadership Points equal to your character level plus your permanent CHA minus 10This is retroactive, so you get an extra point each time you gain a level or increase your permanent CHA.  Charisma from temporary sources (spells, items) doesn't give points.If you take the Feat again, just double the amount it gives.So, at minimum, you get 9 points (6 level + 13 CHA - 10), enough to get a weak Cohort and a few miscellaneous supporters.> Followers: With one point you can buy 5 level 1 followers, 3 level 2, 2 level 3, or 1 level 4 follower.  2 points gives a level 6, 3 gets a level 7, 4 gives a level 8, and so on with doubling-for-plus2.However, no Follower can have ECL higher than half your character level (round down).> Cohorts: To get a new Cohort (with ECL = L-4) costs 6 points, plus 2 points for each previous Cohort, Mount, or Familiar you had (second costs 8, third costs 10, etc.).  For every two points you spend, you can increase one Cohort's ECL by 1, and that's in addition to the increase they all get whenever you level (so 12 points gives a Cohort with ECL one less than your own).  No cohort may have an ECL equal to or higher than yours.Drop all that "great prestige" and "caused the death of followers" stuff.  It's just not worth the headaches to argue whether you've gained a reputation of power.EXAMPLE:Bob the Prophet is a level 12 Cleric who just gained the Leadership Feat.  He has a CHA of 14.  He gets 16 points to spend, and buys them like this:1 Cohort (ECL 9): 6 points + 2 to bump ECL20 level 1 followers: 4 points4 level 4 followers: 4 pointsHe could spend 2 points for level 6 followers, but he can't go higher than that since it'd exceed Level/2.So, the "Natural Leader" ability of the Aristocrat would be:> Gain one bonus Leadership Point at each even level (2, 4, 6, 8, 10...), even if you don't take the Leadership Feat.  However, you can only use these points for Followers; you can't have a Cohort.> The Cohort level cap increases by 1 every five levels.  So, from levels 6-9 your cohort can have the same ECL as you, from 10-14 they can be ECL L+1, 15-19 L+2, 20 L+3.And then either:> The base cost of each Cohort is reduced to 6 plus 1 per Cohort/Mount/Familiar.OR> The cost of raising Cohort ECL is reduced to +1 per ECL increase.I'm going with the first one for now, but we'll see.  I was thinking of adding a limit that you can only gain one Cohort each time you take the Feat, but the increasing costs make that unnecessary.So, Bob the Aristocratic is a level 11 Aristocrat with CHA of 18.  He has 5 points, which he had to spend on followers.  At level 12, he takes Leadership, so now he has 26 points (6 for Aristocrat, 12 for level, 8 for CHA), no more than 20 of which can be spent on Cohorts.He takes:1 Cohort (ECL 12): 6 points, plus 8 for ECL bumps30 level 1 Followers: 6 points4 level 4 Followers: 4 points1 level 6 Follower: 2 pointsI'm still tweaking Follower costs; as it is right now it's pretty much impossible to have the 100+ Followers the DMG gives, but I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.I'm also thinking of upping the Aristocrat "Natural Leader" ability to be:Level 1: gain (CHA mod) Leadership PointsEvery even level: gain one pointall of which can only be used for Followers.This basically gives a half-strength Leadership for free.  I don't want to just give the entire Leadership for free, though.</blockquote>

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