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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6099737" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, really, the easiest answer is , "No."There are guidelines, but that's not the same thing.   It's very difficult to treat setting tropes as 'rules', because its generally understood in any D&D heritage game that the DM controls the settings.   Therefore, the availability and cost of minions is generally the sole domain of the DM, as would be his approach to addressing rules silent issues like, "Who gets to call for the NPC hireling?"  Some tables will let you call for your hirelings, some won't, and some will let you call some of the time but allow the DM to veto.In general, D&D and its heirs assume the PC's use an 'Indiana Jones' approach rather than the 'Bellock' approach of hiring a bunch of laborers or an army.  Some DM's get touchy about PC's going 'Bellock' either because of the additional rules/adjudication burden involved in playing out dozens or ultimately hundreds of NPC's, or because they feel it plays against the heroic type (normally, in fantasy, only bad guys use minions).    Moreover, if you do go 'Bellock', because the game doesn't assume this approach by default, you'll typically find that the rules are poorly thought out and generally silent on exactly what happens.    Personally, as a PC I only pull out my 'Bellock' toolset when I know the GM is going to be metagaming against me and the game has gone antagonistic by design.   For example, if the game is 'Tomb of Horrors', feel free to hire a few hundreds porters, sappers, engineers, and mercenaries and dig the whole darn place up, build scaffolding everywhere, fill anything dangerous with sand, and generally avoid ever even stepping in the tomb.  Provided the DM doesn't 'cheat' by inventing new consequences to thwart you, and provided you have good people management skills, and provided you can handle the occasional wandering encounter, Ascerak's tomb is trivially defeated in this manner.  Indeed, you can treat almost the whole tomb as loot, carting off the artwork, the doors, the better more valuable stonework, and whatever else you want (though you might want to permentently slay the few demons charged with tomb repair if you do so).But in general, you are really asking for trouble otherwise and you better really talk the idea over with your GM before settling on a 'mastermind' type character as a PC.</blockquote>

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