Adding soldiers/mercenaries into the PC party?

[Mojake]

My PCs will be getting some soldiers soon after helping out a king. They will join the party, have their own small backstories and be unique in their own little ways. I expect they'll die so I won't take a long time making them good.
How do I integrate these into the party and into combat?
The campaign will eventually get to the point where the PCs will have their own army (that's just the way my questline is going) but I want to get them into the swing of commanding NPCs.

If anyone has any tips about the whole affair; RPing, loot, xp, anything please share. Also any similar experiences.

Thanks guys and gals. :smallsmile:

[awa]

the big problem with large numbers of npcs is that they slow down combat.

I have had decent luck with doing it fairly abstractly for example lets say you have 20 npc warriors, have the 20 npc warriors fight a roughly equivalent force off screen while the pcs kill the leader and his body guard.

[BowStreetRunner]

First, have you looked into Heroes of Battle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_of_Battle) and the Miniatures Handbook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniatures_Handbook)? These are both relevant to what you are proposing.

Second, whatever else you do you need to lay down NPC behavior rules. Since most DMs will hand off running of the party NPCs to the players (or else face multi-tasking meltdown), it is important to restrict the NPC options. While PCs get to do whatever the heck they want, NPCs should be more predictable.

For instance, NPCs will always focus their attacks on the nearest enemy who poses a threat first (not enemies who are unconscious, helpless, or fleeing, etc.). Healers will generally hold ready actions or delay so they are available to provide healing when it is needed. Meat-shields will stay close to the casters they are protecting and not run off after enemies. And so on...

This is intended to avoid having the PCs spend a lot of time trying to decide what the NPCs should do. If a PC is able to issue an order to an NPC in-character, fine. But when a PC is not directly providing instructions to an NPC, the NPC actions should be able to be chosen quickly so as not to bog down the action. Besides, they are NPCs, not heroes. The complex strategy stuff should be left to the PCs.