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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 2609145" data-attributes="member: 3051">Most people I know who've taken Leadership have done so for a combat-oriented cohort.  Fighters get a support caster, casters get a fighter who protects them, that sort of thing.  On paper, this is really strong.  You ARE getting a second character to work with, after all, even if he does lag a couple levels behind the rest of the party.  But it's not unworkable, in practice, because of a few different things.1> You don't have full control over that character.  In fact, the rules as written don't give you any actual control over those characters; they're DM-controlled NPCs who just happen to feel loyalty to one individual.  As a general bookkeeping issue IMC we let the players control their own cohorts most of the time, but it doesn't have to be this way, and either way you can't just order the cohort to sacrifice himself for the team.  In Piratecat's Story Hour (over in the Story Hour forum, of course), for instance, they often have visiting players stop in for a session, and those people usually play the cohorts for the day; while this results in some personality jumps, it makes the characters much more interesting.What this means, in practice, is that the party figures out what roles they mainly want to play, then take cohorts to fill in the group's gaps.  No clerics?  Not a problem.  This isn't much different than having players handle multiple characters in the first place.2> They lag at least two levels behind the rest of the party, often more.  This isn't a small difference; I played a Rogue 2/Sorcerer X for a long time, and people on these boards kept telling me how "underpowered" I was by not being at the same spell level as the rest of the party.  Now, imagine if I hadn't even had those Rogue levels... that's what a sorcerer cohort would be like.  For fighter types, you're lagging on BAB and HP.  In either case, your saves are worse.  And how far behind the cohort lags depends on your CHA; to reach the -2 cap, you need a CHA mod of +1 at 7th to 9th level, rising to +5 at 19th level (and you can't get an 18th level cohort, period).  How many people do you know with a +5 CHA modifier, even at 19th level?  If you're level 20, and have a +0 mod, your cohort is 14th level, which is dead meat in most encounters.(This assumes no other modifiers to the Leadership score.  While most players get a plus on Reputation, the -2 for a familiar/mount/companion is also common.)3> Loot is in finite supply.  Any loot that goes to the cohort is loot that the players don't get.  But cohorts don't work for free, either; no NPC, no matter how loyal, is going to put his life on the line alongside you and then stand by while you get all the loot.  No matter what, they still have to be equipped to be effective, which is still a drain on your resources.In my experience, the bigger problem with Leadership is the Followers.  They're just not very useful.  I mean sure, a hundred level 1 followers looks nice, but what exactly can they do?  So most people just write off the followers as a "support structure" and then abstract it from there.  A priest with Leadership just has influence with his church, my Psion with Leadership has high rank in a craft guild, that sort of thing.</blockquote>

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