Cohorts - how are they played?

[Li Shenron]

The only time I've ever had a cohort, our party started to build a stronghold and a city grew up near it. My paladin took leadership and assumed leadership of the town. My cohort was a fighter/paladin in training, and I kinda left him to run everything while I was adventuring.

My DM said that I rarely spent any time training or accompanying my cohort (which was not why I took the feat), and basically turned him against me. It kinda soured me on the whole idea of a cohort, that is, the cohort can easily become a liability if the DM wants to go that direction.

I eventually stopped playing my paladin so that he could devote all of his time to caring and defending his city/followers.

Leadership ruined my character!

.02

Your DM ruined your character Anyway it's not uncommon to treat leadership that way, and honestly I would not take the feat as a player mostly because I don't want it to be screwed up by a DM who thinks you should supply the feat with RP (which obviously does not happen with other feats).

 

[UltimaGabe]

While the leadership is the likely the most powerful feat ever made (likely giving the player extra spotlight time in addition to the extra power), having it also eat up XP's earned by other players probably doesn't make it better. If anything it just makes it doubly worse for your fellow players.

I've always run it by the rest of the group first, and they always seemed fine with it. Nobody has ever complained about having another meat shield in the party.

 

[Scion]

I've always run it by the rest of the group first, and they always seemed fine with it. Nobody has ever complained about having another meat shield in the party.

Do you also charge extra exp for animal companions and the like? If not then there seems to be a disconnect between the two. Both are essentially the same thing, they just go about it in different ways.

 

[Thanee]

While the leadership is the likely the most powerful feat ever made (likely giving the player extra spotlight time in addition to the extra power), having it also eat up XP's earned by other players probably doesn't make it better.

Note, that in 3.5 the cohort does NOT anymore reduce the XP rewards handed out to the PCs.

It basically gains free extra XP, which are not derived from the earned total, but simply added on top.

Bye
Thanee