NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7032345" data-attributes="member: 996">'Back in the day,' whole section in the DMG on them?  Charisma gave you max henchmen and a loyalty modifier?Apparently, really back in the day, in Gygax's basement, it was standard operating procedure for every PC to hire mercenaries and recruit (hopefully) loyal henchmen to prowl through the dungeons under Castle Greyhawk with them.  (Because, y'know, those PCs were prettymuch all magic-users and needed someone to take the hits.) 1e was written as if players were going to do that incessantly.  I've actually rarely seen it, even back in the early 80s.  I did go to the trouble of recruiting a full party worth of Henchmen for my high-CHA Druid PC once, though (then there was Animal Friendship, then there was Name Level when you got lower-level Druid followers).  And three of the PCs in the long AD&D campaign I ran had love interests and one an annoying side-kick NPC, who adventured with them at least a bit.  One also claimed a keep at 9th level, and had a bunch of NPCs taking care of it for him.More recently, I've had 1 player since 2010 who was pretty enthused about the idea of having NPC helpers... no, wait, 2 - in the playtest one player was psyched to play a Noble since it gave her servants.  And, really, in 5e it should be a winning strategy because numbers tell so heavily...But, yeah, old-school henchmen/hirelings, and NPC hangers-on in general, have never been hugely popular IMX.  I have to agree with pemerton on that.</blockquote>

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