Giving BSF an Army

[HMS Invincible]

I know that older D&D editions ended up with strong wizards, and fighters with armies and kingdoms. What's a good use for this army besides tying up the fighter in paperwork and plothooks? Is it a good reward for reaching mid levels? I could think of a few uses for it, since it would play a similar role as a crappy version of planar ally. In order to not break wealth by level(because the optimized thing to do is to make a bunch of money and turn that into magical goodies for the fighters.) it would have to be charisma or loyalty based army/kingdom.

I know it'll fall short at higher levels, but hey, having a royal guard of low level wizards and rogues would be useful to any high level fighter.

[Fouredged Sword]

I like the idea of giving the fighters a castle + small army and the rogues a guild. Give the wizards a tower and the druids a forest as well.

The more powerful class, the less people they collect. The wizard may have a circle of 5-6 level 10 wizards at 20th level. The fighter has an army of fighters that number in the hundreds (even if they are all level 6).

Keep it in check though. The army stays at home until the campaign starts to be about war rather than the personal goals of the characters. A level 20 character should be able to mobilize an army though. There should be rules that prevent the character from mobilizing the army for minor things like adventuring.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

It seems like a workable idea.

A caster buff b**** too low level to be used in direct combat can help a lot. Sure the casters in his party should be buffing him, but a few low level basics will be nice if the fighter has selfish "friends". even though he's technically depending on a wizard or what have you, it's his wizard not another player's.

As for the bulk of the force, the best way to use them is to secure rescources; choke points, magical locations, mines, farmland, craftsmen etc. Just make sure to put things worth defending in the game.

[Particle_Man]

1st level Warlocks make great follower/archers - they rarely miss and you can vary their invocation choices (or give them all Eldritch Spear if you want them to stay at long range).

[Haldir]

I don't see this as a problem, so long as the DM can handle all the extra characters running around.

[KorbeltheReader]

I wonder if you could use the keep as a balancing factor in terms of out-of-combat utility? For instance, the party wizard has scrying spells, but the party fighter (now count or duke or whatever) has spies and political connections and advisors. The wizard and rogue can use stealth to get into that base, but the fighter can use his status to demand an audience with the leader. A low level attendant can possibly keep him buffed in dungeons and help with 1st-2nd level utility spells.

As people in other threads have said, it's really out of combat where the fighter suffers the most, so this could be an interesting way to mitigate that problem.

[Seerow]

I like the idea of giving the fighters a castle + small army and the rogues a guild. Give the wizards a tower and the druids a forest as well.

The more powerful class, the less people they collect. The wizard may have a circle of 5-6 level 10 wizards at 20th level. The fighter has an army of fighters that number in the hundreds (even if they are all level 6).

Wow poor fighter. Thread starts to give him a buff, and the first thing suggested is to give the Wizard a bigger buff. (And yes 5-6 level 10 wizards will decimate hundreds of level 6 fighters easily; even ignoring all of the huge amounts of utility gained from a half dozen 10th level casters at your command)

[Phelix-Mu]

Maybe give the wizard a tower and an apprentice (1st or 2nd level only).

The fighter should get a small army of accomplished people (5-6th level), but I'd avoid giving the fighter low-level casters that will be more effective than the fighter him/herself. But maybe there is a place for a single caster to help the fighter acquire equipment or self-buff. I'd be tempted to make it more of an artificer setup, kind of like the fighter attracts some talented craftspeople to help him with his army.

You should also, in the case of high-op use, outline whether the player gets to build the followers, are they pre-generated, are they psyref'able/mindrapeable without the throwing of books, etc. At higher op levels, everything is just a double PaO/ice assassin combo away from hideous borking, so it's good to outline just how much of a "resource" these extras are for the player to use/abuse.

[Metahuman1]

Maybe the Casters just never get there's till there epologe and that character is permanently retired? That seems fair to me since they summon/dominate minions as a class feature in core anyway and that is something that every splat published as in some manner built on.

I like the idea of giving the fighter some significantly lower level casters to craft certain items and Cast low level basic buffs on him.

I also like the idea of giving him a level or two of warblade and crusader so that he can use those white raven force multiplying maneuvers to much better effect.

[HMS Invincible]

Paperwork and verisimilitude are a problem here. Making the GM or the player keep track of their underlings would be a giant pain without abstracting it into breaking roleplaying. A good idea I have building in my head is to base it around roles the fighter wants. He gets a generic army to lead full of mooks that fight with generic mix of arms. And then he can train elite "squads" that can specialize into roles that they need. Every other levels, he gets trains better "squads", say a command rank of E-1 to E-9. Now even though he has trained all these squads, he can only mobilize a certain number of them, say 4 per command rank per level. Unless he specializes, by refraining from training certain roles, he can mobilize more "squads" in the roles that he specialized in. Obviously you ban the monk squad, it's the smallest role and the weakest, with only 1 or two good tricks that the other squads can easily replicate. Oh right, he should have a protege, who can mobilize squads for him, but only certain kinds of squads, because the protege isn't the fighting commander. Lastly, he should get bonus squads as his intellect or charisma rises, so that as he ages, he gets better at commanding, even though he's worse off at fighting.

...
I think I made a wizard.