I don't follow. Henchmen are constructed in basically the same fashion as any other PC, are they not?
Not in OD&D. These were random hirelings, remember; at the very least it was never assumed you were going to find spellcasters available.
I don't follow. Henchmen are constructed in basically the same fashion as any other PC, are they not? Certainly before the introduction of the 1e DMG in 1979 there were no rules for rolling up beyond "3d6 in order 6 times." They had the same class choices, etc.
OD&D hirelings--which is what we're talking about--didn't appear to have a class at all. They certainly weren't assumed to be clerics or wizards, and its not clear what combat table they were supposed to use. The weren't really classed any more than a lot of the 1 HD humanoid monsters were.
Since there were no other rules for them of which I'm aware it is impossible to say if they were 'different' in some way, that would have been a choice dictated by an individual GM.
I can only go by what I saw, and what I saw pretty consistently in multiple groups was that they were treated about the same as above. This was probably by implication with the way the follower rules for higher level PCs were set up.
If we take the 1e DMG henchmen rules as roughly how Gygax did it, then they might have had less equipment, perhaps? Usually the first treasure haul rectified any such lacks. As for the personality, our experiences may differ I guess? PCs had precious little personality in most cases to start with, its hard to go down from there!
Yeah, they may not have been particularly nuanced, but virtually everyone I saw in my OD&D days applied a noticable personality to their PCs. They might be ridiculous and over the top, but they weren't personality lacking. Again, remember the people I was playing with came from the SF fandom community; they were thinking in terms of playing fantasy protagonists or at least major NPCs, not random wargame chits (though there were always a person here or there like that).
There are hard limits imposed by Charisma, though even a 12 will let you get up to 4 'hirelings' (the term henchmen and any distinction between them and hirelings is purely an invention of AD&D). I'd note that the limits in 1e are, IIRC, somewhat lower, but only apply to true henchmen. Thus, going by the rules on PP10-13 of Men & Magic, a starting first level party would be hard-pressed to get much, as each hireling requires a minimum of 100gp to enlist! Granted, once a party has delved a few times it would be possible to have 20, sure. I only rarely saw anything like this, and in those cases they were mostly AD&D hirelings, 0 level non-advancing humans who can be hired for perhaps a dozen GP or less and wouldn't even HAVE stats.
I'm just going from what others have said. As I've noted, I never saw a group with more than a hireling or two, usually to manage the pack animals (or to function as two-legged versions of same).
We did often allow 2 PCs, but again I would say that was not super different from henchmen, per se. Also remember that the original rules are a bit different in that they emphasize leadership and service. Monsters can be attracted to your service with reaction checks! Charm is a permanent condition, and it isn't all that unusual to have charmed servitors. Monsters could also be subdued (again refer to Men & Magic in the 'NPCs' section around P12). So, the game, as originally written, was intended to allow for an entourage, and indeed was built on the chassis of Chainmail where 'heroes' are leaders of armies.
Yeah, never saw much of that, either. Don't think I ever saw an OD&D DM that was going to allow you to drag along charmed monsters (or if they did, it was the same way they'd permit small numbers of hirelings).
Again, I'm not talking about what the game was designed for; I'm talking about how it seemed to actually be used in the wild, at least on the West Coast.
Anyway, I still contend that a lot of groups had and allowed for a type of entourage, though the Gygaxian conceit of PCs each having their own wasn't that common IME. The party itself was more of a collective entourage, whereas in the Ur Campaigns it seems there were dozens or 100's of players and they formed parties on an ad-hoc basis. We were not gifted with such numbers of players! If we had 5, that was super, but I only remember having maybe 20 players in a group once or twice in the mid 80s. At that point things did take on a bit more of the form that Gygax seems to envisage.
Keep in mind that in some areas (again, remembering my bias abotu what I saw out here), players were often a rotating function; a lot of games were run at conventions or at game clubs, so while you might have a kind of default group, it wasn't uncommon to be playing with people you only played with rarely or had never played with before. There was even a term for it "open" as contrasted with "closed" campaigns.
