The leadership Feat

[Tobold Hornblower]

I'm with the hard Buddha on followers. Those are the loyal folks that live and work around the stronghold-- craftsmen and farmers, mostly.

A cohort can adventurer, though. That doesn't add any more to the adventuring party than the animal companions.

But, Dareoon, if you are worried about that, what do you do about hirelings. By the time my character is high enough level for the leadership feat, he often employs a score or more of low level warriors and an officer or two.

 

[mikebr99]

I see it as more of a Mentoring program...

The person that you pick up wants to be like you... wants to learn everything he/she can from you.

This is NOT a way for a Wizard to shore up his fighting skills!

 

[Benben]

I was wondering how dms deal with this. If you are running an adventure and a pc had the leadership feat how do you deal. they could/wold have a cohort and several lower lvl characters. Would your new dungeon of death suffer utter defeat? that ambush that you carefully planned be foiled by the groups new numbers? Also how do you deal with xp?

Generally, I extract the followers from standard play. They can be used to support the players base of operations, or merchant fleet.

Cohorts are another thing entirely. I let the players play them in combat and what not. But I can as a DM speak through the cohorts at any time. Additionally I can act as the cohort in non-combat times as well. This gives the players more to do in combat, but let's them know that this isn't a second character that they get to play.

For me xp is easy. Cohorts get full xp for combats and are considered full party members. Rarely I hand out tactical awards, and those can go to a cohort, but that's only happened onec in two years of play. What cohorts don't get is role playing xp. I play a high RP game, so this keeps cohort advancement lower than the players.

 

[ConcreteBuddha]

Oh yeah, I forgot to explain why I don't allow adventuring cohorts:


A) Everyone in my group understands the power of this feat. In one campaign, at level 6, everyone took leadership (5 players). They also had some pretty decent leadership scores. It completely changed the dynamics of the game. Less roleplaying occurred, as the players were commanding armies as opposed to playing characters. This was a change for the worse, IMO.


B) If the cohorts died, all of their possessions became group property. This provided a major headache to me, because I had to enforce that the PCs give their ex-cohorts' items back to their families (if they had one) or a charitable cause, etc...
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Reasons why I like cohorts as stronghold buddies:


A) PCs do not carry all of their treasure wherever they go. Leadership provides them with trustworthy hands within which to place their extra hard earned cash.


B) PCs at higher levels need a base of operations. This is especially true at highter levels. (Using someone else's alchemy lab only works for so long.)


C) PCs have enemies. Leaving your stronghold undefended while you go adventuring for three months is asking for trouble. Hee hee hee...


D) The focus stays firmly on the PCs as the central part of the storyline. (Batman as opposed to Batman and Robin)
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Oh yeah...and all of the above is IMHO.

 

[(contact)]

I love the leadership feat, and allow it in my game.

Yes, I have to re-think my encounters, and do extra work . . . and? I'm the DM!

IMC, I allow the player to determine that they want to take followers, but I create and level the NPC. I generally allow the player to run the cohort in combat, subject to my DMs fiat to overrule decisions based on personality.

What's the problem again?

I let my players determine what kind of game they want to play in. If they all wanted to run a more tactical fantasy skirmish type of D&D, fine with me. We'd have a good time regardless.

Now, my players being who they are, we haven't had any drop off in roleplay, and we've had followers and cohorts since day one. You can see how this has worked in Liberation of Tenh campaign. We have had some beautiful role-playing moments with our cohorts.

D&D has concrete examples of what characters can and cannot do. Some groups think it's just great to role-play scenes like a magnetic fighter recruiting a gang of toughs and goons to stage a daring raid, while other groups would fall asleep listening to Carl impersonate Mel Gibson from Braveheart.

I think spending a feat to gain a benefit like followers and cohorts is a great game mechanic, and would never consider letting that ability pass to a player who didn't have to trade some other point of character development for it. Nor would I ever consider leaving it out of the options because it forced me to stretch what I'm doing behind the screen.

 

[Nathan]

I'd stick with 1/2 share for cohorts. Otherwise, you could run the risk of the cohort getting enough xp to leave, once his level is too high for your leadership score. Also, I'd imagine other players wouldn't be happy about giving extra xp to an npc. A good npc, but an npc all the same.

As far as I know, you cannot risk your cohort getting "too much XPs". AFTER aquiring the cohort there needn't be any correlation between your leadership score (or your level) and the cohort's level. For example if your leadership score went down (say due to a charisma decrease by whatever reasons), your cohort wouldn't leave you because of that.

My answer to the actual topic of this thread is: Yes, in our campaigns we're playing with cohorts. They are role-played by the players and not by the DM. They get half the amount of experience points that a PC of their level would get. However, our XP calculation is FR-style, i.e. lower level characters (including cohorts) get comparatively more XPs.

 

[Green Knight]

Well, seeing as I'm planning to play a Paladin in the near future, I'll probably use the Leadership feat to take a dragon mount in lieu of a standard cohort (Forgotten Realms campaign, and I'm thinking of multiclassing into Purple Dragon Knight, so I'll need the Feat).

However, the other day I had a thought for a cohort. How about making the Cohort a Bard? Think about it. Your character has gained some notoriety as an adventurer, so it only makes sense that someone would be attracted to the character and follow them around, witnessing their adventures and telling tells and singing songs about the character. So IMO, that'd be another good use for the Cohort.

 

[Dareoon Dalandrove]

I'm not a dm. Maybe that wasn't clear in my original post. I'm playing a paladin who has the leadership feat. I have never pushed this fact though. Since I have had the feat I have never used it. i have a strongehold and a fighting force to occupy it. I have never rolled up a cohort for my character either. We are coiming to a part in out campaing that I may want to push the issue and "break out the big guns" so to speak. So I just wanted to know how some dms are using this feat and adapting to it.

For those that don't allow it or don't really allow the players to use it i ask, "If your player had a +3 sword could they use that?" In my mind it is the samething. you are not allowing a character to use what they have. If the character took all of his/her men away for their keep, that's their problem if they come back and find it infested with new tenents.