Cohort's Cohorts?


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My group has been woundering about this lately too. My advice to the DM was "the Leadership feat says that it is in the DMG because it should be up to the DM to allow leadership or not in his game. Having a cohort or two can make a big difference in a game and shouldn't be allowed across the board. However, if the DM decides to design a campaign where the players are, perhaps, military leaders, then perhaps having a chain of cohorts would be ok.

Basically, if the DM wants to deal with it and he thinks it is suited for his game, then sure. Otherwise, no.

I did a little math and figured that a 12th level character with an 18 Cha. who had a cohort with Leardership and also had an 18 Cha., and his cohort also had leadership and an 18 Cha. and so on, alll the way down to a 5th level cohort, that 12th level character would have a little more than 100 followers and cohorts.

On one hand that's not unreasonable, I can imagine a 12th level warlord with at least that many followers. However, I doubt many DMs would allow so many followers in their typical campaign unless that's what they were designing the game about in the first place.

so basically, my advice is leave it up to the DM. I don't know of any clear rule about it, but there might be one somewhere.
 
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I don't the intended that and if you think about it, they should be able to do that.

I mean, It's: Leader > Co-hort > Followers

Not: Leader > Co-hort > Co-hort's co-hort > Followers > Co-hort's Followers.
 

To answer the original question. Yes there is no reason that a Cohort could not take the leadership feat and have his own cohorts and followers. But like it's been pointed out, there should be a real good reason for this, and the DM should definitely be asked before taking this feat. We have a situation in our game that we got a keep from the deck of many things. So a few of us took leadership to have loyal people to maintain the keep for us while we are adventuring. My cohort being the highest level one in the keep also took leadership to have sergeants to lead the followers, etc etc It works nicely, makes for an interesting story, but really serves us little purpose in the way of adventuring.
 

If your are going to be engaged in high politics, this might make much sense - the cohort is a trusty ally, who has his own friends. (Be aware that the followers of the cohort are not followers of the "first" character in the row...)

But even in smaller things that might make sense - imagine 2 barbarian tribes, a larger and a smaller one, that sometimes work together. Now imagine they begin to merge, and at some time, both leaders might gain enough reputation and trust among their people that they qualify for the leadership feat...
 

I would let a characters Cohort attract followers. Likely I would give a chance for the cohort to leave the PC,after all,if he is attracting a cohort of his own he is likely a leader not a follower.
 

There is nothing that says that you can't do this.

However - a cohort's maximum level must be one level lower than that of the PC

Regardless of a character's leadership score, he can't recruit a cohort of his level or higher

Leadership feat description - second sentence; under the descrptor of "Cohort level" - bottom left hand corner of pg 45.

the 12th level PC - assuming idealized conditions - could assemble a "cohort chain" of no more than eight characters - and the 8th character is inelligeble to continue the chain because that character must be below 6th level.

This presumes that
1. The leadership feat is PC legal in the first place
2. your GM allows cohorts to have the leadership feat

Real Problems start occuring if a character's leadership score changes - or the chain is broken outright via the death of one of the "leaders"...
 


the 12th level PC - assuming idealized conditions - could assemble a "cohort chain" of no more than eight characters - and the 8th character is inelligeble to continue the chain because that character must be below 6th level.

If you count all the followers, they add up to over 100. Yes a handful are cohorts, the rest are followers.

There would also be a problem with experience points. If you did xp the way it is supposed to be done for cohorts, then some of those guys will get so few xp that they will never go up a level. Which doesn't really seem right.
 

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