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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6163778" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Hey S'mon.  Yup.  You have a great blog.  I've read your stuff including your companion characters and you do an excellent job reproducing your sessions.  Do your players help you out with the blog?  That is a lot of content on there.  Given your career and family life, you must be scrambling for time.  I know I am.  I would like to post much more prolifically and respond to many more posts than I do but I just don't have the time.  I can't imagine doing a solo blog, reproducing a campaign in detail as you've done there (so I'm assuming your players lend a hand).That is precisely what I do but their primary use in my campaign is rounding out our party.  We basically rotate from session to session on whose companion will move from background color to actual mechanical cog.  Having a friend play the captain of the Ranger lodge or even one of our normal companion characters (the bear/dog/sentient sword) is a very easy way to include someone off the cuff.  As above, with a properly done CC you can basically have just a few decision points and minimal resource tracking.I do the same but I like to bounce it up and down (by 12 % to 25 %) with a minor or major rider to the Standard attack.  Overall, the Striker companion does ~ 21.7 DPR (with some quality melee control and skirmishing) throughout the course of a 4-5 round combat, the Defender does ~ 17.8 DPR (with a ton of melee control and damage soak) and the Leader (controller with a small c) does just under 18 DPR on low # fights and upwards of 20.4 on AoE fights (with some hefty control and healing to boot).  Those numbers work well for us I tend to run a lot less combats than (what I assume is) standard and correspondingly our standard encounter budget is L + 2 rather than L.  Our group makeup is probably a bit hefty for the encounter budget of a small group.  A Bladesinger, Duelist Rogue/Ranger and Swarm Druid/Shaman are all ridiculously survivable on their own and can put out a lot of damage and control.That is another great thing about the CC makeup.  Yutes and newbs alike can grasp them readily so introducing new players (and a new generation) comes easy!</blockquote>

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