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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6058327">I still favor this being something a player should choose to opt into.  Same goes for things like Mounted Combat.  These are interesting features, but how do you satisfy players who have no interest in riding a mount?  I suppose they could play another class, but if every class has the "Leadership Score", then it's somewhat expected that everyone has followers, but what about people who don't want them?  How do we translate their desire not to run several different sheets of PC's into something they CAN use? I don't see anything mechanically wrong with this system.  However, this really only satisfies a specific group of players, the kind of folks who like to run multiple characters, or trade out characters on a regular basis.  I can see this becoming more and more complex(and unnecessarily so) with the higher the character's level becomes.  A lvl 20 high-CHA character could have 15+ followers!  In an average game with 5 players, that would be 75+ henchmen!  Even at level 10 you could be looking at somewhere around 30-40 henchmen, in addition to the "original" 5 PCs.  Even at 5-6 henchmen per player, that's still a very significant amount of information to manage, and with increasing complexity with character creation the higher level you go, I feel that it would lead to less interesting henchmen and more "Big bulky fighter guy <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=3" target="_blank">#3</a> " situations.Using this system, especially at lower levels, you could reasonably rotate out two or three characters and end up with a single player having dozens of "cannon fodder" henchmen, defeating the entire purpose of creating a unique and interesting sub-party in the way the Hobbit does.I would suggest keeping henchmen as henchmen forever, never allowing them to have henchmen of their own nor let them equal or exceed the Leader-player's level unless the leader player dies, or the campaign splits and Henchy <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=3" target="_blank">#3</a>  will never again get to venture with the party due to the secondary-party adventuring somewhere new.  Admittedly, this is fun for some people.  It is not fun for everyone, and personally as much as I enjoy creating characters, even this would lead to burnout for me.  At some point I'd give up putting effort into them because really, with this many henchmen, how long are they really going to last?  Why put that much effort into a dozen different characters, half of whom I'll never play, and the rest will likely die on their first day out. I don't understand why character death is something difficult to deal with.  Your PC is dead, but your player isn't.  So, unless you're going to kick Bob from the game when his dwarf barbarian "Bloodfist Ragebeard" dies, why can't Bob simply make a new character?  PC creation may be difficult at times, but creating one new character is going to be a lot easier than creating and maintaining 12 over the life of a campaign.  Perhaps when your party returns to town, they encounter a sorcerer/witch/warlock human woman who hails from Bloodfist's tribe(remember that barbarians don't generally care about your race) who psychically felt his death as she was once his lover.  Aside from that simple introduction laying some creative groundwork for a new character, I can't see that placing a significant burden on the party or the player anymoreso than creating half a dozen near-PCs. In my experience, there tends to be a reason why a player doesn't want to have a "backup" character.  In my case, it's because I take a lot of effort to make a character specifically tailored to this campaign.  I DONT make "Heavy-hitter Guy <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=5" target="_blank">#5</a> " characters, and I generally feel that having backups leads to me devaluing the character I worked so hard on. These rules for this in 3.5 are pretty clear-cut.  If the DM is using a wealth-by-level model or simply roll your wealth die and multiply by your level, it doesn't take more than a minute or two to figure out how much gold a new character has.  In any good game played with friends, this never happens.  Even the thieving rogue tends to "respect the dead" or at least the evil-eye that the now dead PC's player is shooting them.  I honestly don't think I'd want to continue to play in a game where the party turns into a pack of wild dogs as soon as a dear friend of theirs dies.IMO: you're right in the emphasized part there.  For certain groups of players, this would work brilliantly.  However, I don't see it as a significant improvement over simply creating a new character when necessary(death, party-split, ect..).  For people who aren't interested in this system, be they folks who don't like managing multiple characters, have difficultly building, ect...  how do they benefit?  How can Leadership be put to use for them?Like I said, as an optional rule for a group of players who likes this kind of thing, great, but as a core game mechanic I wouldn't recommend it, at least not without some sort of consolation prize for people who don't like managing many characters.I think having a "super-heroic" party is more dependent upon the campaign style than simply the number of players.My thoughts are this: get rid of the 1/2 level mechanic.  Far too many characters to reasonably handle, it's more likely to lead to PC "cloning"(IE: having Bloodfist Ragebeard's henchies all being FistBlood BeardRage or Ragefist Bloodbeard, ect...) than to creating a diverse toolbox of PC's for the player to choose from.  Make the number of henchmen simply 1+natural CHA mod(cannot be 0 or less due to negative modifiers).  This is enough for high-CHA characters to get their little band of groupies, and low CHA characters to still get at least one companion, I feel this will lead to more creative companions who players are more interested in playing in side-adventures, trading out in case of illness or emergency on behalf of the primary character.  Thirdly, drop the XP penalties.  Let the henchmen be full-fleged characters except that they lack the Leadership score, and can only gain it in the case that the primary character "dies" or is otherwise unable to play.  Simply have your players denote which character is their primary at the start of the campaign.Fewer, more creative, more equal henchmen will IMO, lead to valuing each of them higher than having half a dozen that will inevitably lag behind and gather dust.  It gives players more skills to draw from(assuming they don't twin their main PC), fewer things to manage, and I think will generally result in a better game than each player having a whole party unto themselves.</blockquote>

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