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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5887744" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yes, but this is highly germane because FOR ME AD&D (and we won't even touch 3e, the word 'balance' doesn't belong within 10,000 light years of THAT) 'class balance' didn't even come close to cutting it. Differing XP totals was just a PITA and did very close to zilch for the game. It certainly didn't balance anything for squat.I hated the whole "ability score lottery" nonsense too. Let people play their character concept for cripe's sake. It really isn't that hard to make decently balanced classes and making paladins 'rare' does nothing for the fact that when you have one it isn't all that balanced against other 'martial' characters. IME fighter's followers were worth squat basically. They were much lower level than the character, and thus largely irrelevant. It was never made clear whether they got XP or how much, if any. Even assuming they DID get XP they had to be paid, you had to build a stronghold, and they were always subject to loyalty. At best if you rolled 96-00 you got a leader that was reasonably useful as a henchman. Still, as a class feature it was a bit of a shaft since you could BUY the same sort of henchman for far less gold and trouble than building a stronghold, and the 0 level troops were just a resource suck. At best if your goal was build your own little empire it might save you a fairly paltry amount of gold raising a few extra troops.Ironically the much more capable ranger OTOH at least COULD with a very good roll get a substantially useful follower, and didn't have to jump through any hoops to get theirs. Rogues followers were a bit more marginal but still more handy than the fighter ones and chances were pretty good you'd at least end up with several that were close enough to your level to be useful in numbers.Followers were certainly SOMETHING, but especially in the case of the fighter they were fairly marginal benefits. Given the overall mundanity of the concept it was also kinda hard to justify them being a specific class feature. I always thought that the whole thing would have been more interesting if it had been more story driven and less restricted. 1e's 'just make a chart for everything' IMHO didn't serve too well in these kinds of situations.</blockquote>

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