NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8497479" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Not in OD&D.  These were random hirelings, remember; at the very least it was never assumed you were going to find spellcasters available.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.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.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).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).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.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.</blockquote>

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