Cohort Idol

[takasi]

Cohorts are already two levels behind. If they also have worthless stats, they will simply die and eat up money and resources.

You've pretty much answered the question, but is Leadership for a cohort with a non-elite array worse than the majority of feats available to a character?

 

[Wycen]

What does everyone else think?

Is Leadership not worth a feat slot if your cohort uses the non-elite array/

What point buy do you use in your campaign?

Now that I'm home rather than work I can sit down for a longer explanation. The answer has something to do with the campaign style.

For example, for my Sunday group the DM isn't a fan of followers. He doesn't even allow your cohort to come with you. That pretty much makes Leadership a bad choice unless you really want to work on the story of what your people are doing while you are crawling through dungeons.

But, it seems he may have relented a bit in the follower taboo. As I said I'm playing a noble and at 3rd level gained a "retinue". Think of it as Leadership Lite. Only NPC classes, they are followers, not cohorts, their level is half your level and they can never rise above 5th level.

So, I crafted a dwarven adept, equipped with a cure light wounds wand. Why? Our party has 2 cleric but neither player was able to make it that day.

So you have an NPC class saddled with a non-elite array and in this NPC's case no hope of anything better than 5th level and the only reason the character existed was as a stop gap measure.

Now, let's consider if I gained the benefit of Leadership as it hopefully works in most campaigns.

I believe we used 32 point buy. For my "cohort" (I don't get one until next level - 6th) I choose a dwarven cleric. Depending on if I want 18 for WIS, I have to sacrifice points in another stat or 2. I chose to go with a 16 for Wisdom.

Compare the Elite Array and assign the 15 to Wisdom. The cohort can start at 4th level due to the leadership score, so I can assign the 4th level ability bonus to WIS for a total of 16.

Either way, that is a bonus of one 1st level, 2nd and 3rd level spell, versus the bonus of one 1st level spell for the non-elite array. And this is specifically for a spell casting class.

Then the closests your cohort can be to your level is 2 levels lower, unless you are a bad leader, then it could be lower, (course then why are you taking the feat, you might have better choices).

The non-elite array might work better for a Fighter or Rogue, but they are still hampered by that 13 STR or DEX. A certain race might help this, such as half-orc. In my case I went with dwarf because they have darkvision and the CON bonus and other abilities complement my character's lack of said abilities, being human, (pitch black dungeons not my cup of tea).

So I guess at the end of the day, if you get attached to a crappy PC or NPC you might want to keep them around, but starting with a crappy character is something most people don't enjoy. If I'm generalizing and you are one of those people, howdy.

 

[Rystil Arden]

You've pretty much answered the question, but is Leadership for a cohort with a non-elite array worse than the majority of feats available to a character?

Obviously, it depends on how you use it and whether you can bring to bear the large numbers of Followers (usually not--usually at most you are dealing with the cohort coming with the PCs on adventures). When I that it depends on how you use it--Obviously, if your GM lets you abuse Leadership for crafting, for instance, and the crafts cohort sits around out of the line of fire and provides you with a whole bunch od free item creation feats for the price of Leadership, then you're getting a huge deal from the feat anyway. But assuming that you want to take the crap stats cohort on an adventure with you, you are faced with the following issues:

1) The cohort is at best 2 levels behind
2) The cohort's stats are worthless
3) Not a guarantee, but cohorts *usually* are underequipped because PCs want to keep their best loot for themselves

Mix these together, and you wind up with a recipe for disaster. 6th-level PCs have HPs around 56 (about average for a Fighter), 42 (about average for a Cleric), and then at the lower end 33 (about average for a Rogue or Wizard--the two are often equal because Wizards are forced to grab reasonably high Cons to live). Now, the best you can do with the cohort is to put one of your precious two stats with a bonus into Con. On average, Con will be +0. A level 4 cohort joining that party above thus would have 22 Hit Points for a front-line Fighter (danger Will Robinson!), 16 for a Cleric, 12 for a Rogue, 8 for a Wizard. These cohorts are pretty much guaranteed to accidentally be a casualty of war. Enemies shot off a Fireball? Oops, even though the cohort Cleric rolled a 20 and made the save (her Ref save is probably +1 or +0 due to stats), she's still down. And don't get me started on AC--if you don't pick a class with heavy armour, the AC is going to be terrible. And if you do pick a class with heavy armour, it probably means the cohort is a frontliner who will die horribly because of their meagre ineffectualness.

So in essence, if you want to bring the cohort along and you don't want a feat that just costs you gold for Raise Dead spells, then yes, Leadership to gain non-elite cohorts is worse than, say, Improved Initiative.

 

[hong]

Yep, playing one. Actually, I'm playing the cohort of one of the other PCs.

The stats don't fit well with the guidelines given.

It's a 10th level game; the cohort itself is a medium-size 4hd (down from the normal 7hd) Mimic, Psychic Warrior (1). His only known power thus far is Expansion... so he can pretend to be bigger things.

Everybody loves Sticky the Mimic.

No mang, you just like cube-shaped things. Cuuuuube!