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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Persiflage" data-source="post: 5358415" data-attributes="member: 73597">Pearl of Black Doubt: there has never been a better reason to adventure with fifty blind 1st-level commoners dual-wielding rolled-up newspapers...Seriously though, the only time any gaming group I've been a part of has made extensive use of followers or hirelings (as opposed to cohorts), the campaign was explicitly biased in that direction.  To simplify book-keeping I wrote a greatly-extended Leadership system, where continued investment bought additional benefits in one or more Leadership Qualities (such as Pillar of the Community, Merchant Prince, Underworld Connections, etc).  In essence, I added a Leadership mini-game to the system...  It allowed characters (particularly Epic characters) to use their fame, position and influence to have major confrontations - with a marked in-game effect - with other powerful and influential figures, but without stabbing each other in the face or levelling the city.In that case, the use of hirelings and followers worked extremely well and indeed was the focus of the campaign in many ways.  Even so, half the point of the Leadership Qualities was to abstract the use of followers to achieve certain tasks, rather than individually keeping track of people too low-level for you to care about.  You "spent" followers to buy ranks in the various qualities in order to achieve certain benefits.  Ultimately it put game mechanics around stunts that well-known high-level characters (and their enemies) should be able to achieve (e.g. getting someone thrown into or released from jail, discrediting opponents, raising a mercenary force, getting funding for a venture) without having to roleplay the minutiae if you don't want to.  One day I might even post the system somewhere in the unlikely event that anybody cared.Meh, sorry, off the point...  Nostalgia happened  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Anyway, I suppose the answer to the OP is: not really, and not often.  In my experience - deliberate campaign shenanigans like the above aside - most characters get so complex that it's hard enough to keep track of everything they can do, without throwing in the heartache of tracking hirelings and followers.  Not that I'd stop anyone doing it in my games; people just tend to feel they've got enough to do already.  Where they are used, it's invariably "meanwhile, back on the ranch" setups.  There's a guy who occasionally plays in our group whose Paladin has a sizeable private freakin' army at his beck and call... but they're always summoned to do things like "guard this village against further attacks whilst we investigate the troll warrens", "take up stations on those three hills and light a beacon if you see the dragon", "take this loot back to town, get me a good price on it and distribute 20% to charity" and whatnot.  So far, he has never asked me to run a combat involving his gang of "church soldiers" and I'm frankly quite relieved about it!</blockquote>

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