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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TiQuinn" data-source="post: 9343646" data-attributes="member: 4871">I've been looking at a few OSR systems as of late for a potential campaign, and I still see there's fair bit of emphasis placed on retainers/henchmen/followers, etc and on strongholds. From back in the 2e days when I first started playing, we rarely delved into using retainers or built strongholds because:A) Retainers meant another character sheet to have to manage, and players usually didn't want to do this, or they'd be forgotten about entirely. At the time, we were a big table - about 7 to sometimes 8 players, so that was one factor. We were also always adding more and more rules to expand the boundaries of what we wanted to do with characters, making the game bulkier. Today, I'm looking for less complexity, not more, so adding extra rules is not likely. If retainers are a key part of play, I want to make sure I highlight that.B) Building strongholds/domain management was a style of play that not every player was into. One time, the thief character wanted to start their own guild, and got incredibly "INTO IT", while the paladin and cleric players could care less. Again, probably would handle this differently today, but even now, I don't forsee the group I'm playing with wanting strongholds to be a big thing.However, when looking at fighters in particular, building strongholds is still one of the big crowning features of the class in games such as OSE and other retroclones, as are the use of retainers. For those who play OSE or any other OSR game that has these features, how often do they come up in your play? Are they crucial to either the classes that feature them (particularly martials), or to the survivability of PCs? Or alternatively, are they holdovers from the wargaming past and not something that I need to wrap my head around in order to make the most of the system?Thanks for your thoughts! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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