NPC Followers/Leadership Question

[zabbarot]

Are the followers provided by Leadership necessarily from NPC Classes? That was the working assumption my group had gone with because of the text of the feat.

The character can lead up to the indicated number of characters of each level. Followers are similar to cohorts, except they’re generally low-level NPCs. Because they’re generally five or more levels behind the character they follow, they’re rarely effective in combat.
We just sort of assumed they should be NPC classes as well.

If they are, would the Adept class with half Soul Binding progression instead of spells be a balanced enough NPC follower for a Binder PC with leadership?

[OldTrees1]

Not all NPCs come from NPC classes. A Wizard the party faces would be an NPC. So would the Commoner running the Tavern in town. So it is possible that followers might be allowed to be non NPC classes.

An adept with half soul binding sounds reasonable for an variant NPC class.

[Yuki Akuma]

In 3e, followers were explicitly restricted to NPC classes. That language isn't in the 3.5 version, so they can be PC classes as well.

Really, make them whatever class makes sense. It doesn't matter much, as they can't progress higher than 6th level anyway.

[zabbarot]

That is probably where we got it from. Just a carry over from 3.0 that we didn't even realize we carried over. Thanks Yuki.