The Problems with Leadership (3.5/PF/3.P)

[Coidzor]

I've been toying around with some ideas for a Leadership fix or at least some houserules for it, but before I went much further with what I have, I just wanted to go ahead and make sure I'm clear about the bases for most of the issues people, especially DMs, have with Leadership (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/feats.htm#leadership)and similar mechanics such as Thrallherd (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/prestigeClasses/thrallherd.htm)and the Apprentice -> Mentor feats.



Mobbing with followers that either use the volley fire rules or are warlocks/DFAs
Having access to the class features/spellcasting of 90% of another PC through the cohort
Exploiting the crafting system with tons of craft checks to break WBL without using magic of making magic items.
Having an absolutely loyal, nominally free-willed, full sapient minion that's capable of going above and beyond an animal companion or mindless undead/construct servitor
The followers are too few to form into an organization like an army but too numerous for a token group to watch the horses, only seeming to be useful for either some form of exploitation or for a small business of eventually moderate size.
Chaining Leadership/Thrallherd for arbitrarily many followers and a lot of cohorts. (Thank you Leviting, Alex12, & Silva Stormrage for pointing out that obvious omission on my part)
Chaining Dragon Cohort for arbitrarily many dragons


So I'd like to check to see if I've recollected those more-or-less common objections correctly and to see what I've managed to miss that would need to be addressed in one way or another.

I've been toying around with a particular idea based upon the belief that at least one major objection is that cohorts have class features and/or casting. So I was wondering then about what others would think of a Warrior(possibly with a slightly improved chassis) of say level-1, 3.5 version no-ACF Fighter of normal cohort level, or a Commoner of either HD = PC or PC Level+2.

Would any of these still class as broken? Would any of these still be worth a feat to get? Worth a concrete investment at all?

[Leviting]

Is it possible for your cohorts and followers to be thrallherds? Because that could create quite the army.

[Alex12]

Is it possible for your cohorts and followers to be thrallherds? Because that could create quite the army.

Here lies one of the other problems.
Also, providing for your multitude of followers would be difficult.

[Silva Stormrage]

Is it possible for your cohorts and followers to be thrallherds? Because that could create quite the army.

Yep you can have thrallherd and leadership chains. It gets silly really fast.

[Coidzor]

Here lies one of the other problems.
Also, providing for your multitude of followers would be difficult.

Oh, right, chaining. That was a bit silly of me to leave that one out. :smallredface: Definitely putting the kibosh on that.

The wealth/resource expenditure to maintain them does seem to be somewhere in the range of bug but seems like with a bit of codification it could become a limiting feature in the mechanics. Or at least a factor that could be dealt with plainly rather than adhoc'd.

[VoxRationis]

Well, part of the problem is that the DM for some reason feels obliged to give the PC whatever cohorts and followers they want, without even any role-playing to explain why.

[Telok]

In my experience the troubles with Leadership are mainly player entitlement issues and speed of combat encounters.

I've seen Leadership used well by someone in the group founding a small monastic retreat and recruiting monks and healers to staff it. That group ended up with a heal-bot and support cleric to fill a missing party role and a safe place to rest and recuperate between adventures. This is fine, such a cohort does not significantly slow down the game or disrupt things.

I've seen Leadership used badly by someone taking the feat and saying "My spiked chain half-minotaur mineral warrior cohort shows up that evening with the twenty eight artificer followers ready to start crafting." This just leads to issues. It's even worse when they want a spell casting cohort and don't bother to look up all the spells, combat bogs down and the game gets disrupted.

My personal solutions were to go back to the AD&D henchman guidelines. The DM determines who is available and willing to join the party, and under what terms. It is then dependant on the party to recruit an NPC and negotiate the terms under which they will serve the party. Likewise followers must be attracted and will only stick around under circumstances that they find agreeable. Bad pay, high risk, lousy food, and low living conditions are all incentives for desertion. Likewise a stacking penalty during recruitment for each dead/missing cohort is normal, it reflects the rumors circulating about what happened to the last cohort. Further more I disallow Leadership chains by the simple application of a rule: Suitable leaders are unsuitable followers, if they wanted to lead then they would usurp your position as leader.

Whether or not I control the cohort as an NPC or let the player run the cohort is almost totally dependent on the skill of the player weighed against the complexity of the cohort. A fast player with a healer cohort gets a pass, the guy with a grappler cohort who can't remember the grapple rules and doesn't write down his grapple bonus isn't allowed to play two characters.

Then we have what I call the 'Forced Leadership' variants. The most famous is Thrallherd, but a necromancer with Undead Leadership can be just as bad. If the player keeps things appropriately in character and to the power level of the game that everyone else is playing then it isn't an issue. When the player takes the Forced Leadership option because he wants Leadership without the possibility of DM intervention it's a problem. That's when things like daily mass sacrifices and wight fueled apocalypses start derailing everything.

In short, Leadership issues are player issues rather than game issues. A player who wants followers and henchmen to assist them and does not wish to disrupt the game isn't an issue using almost any version of Leadership. A player who wants to play two characters at once and have piles of unnamed bodies attend to his every whim is going to cause problems using any version of Leadership.

[Jergmo]

This is something I wish I'd learned a while ago, as I had a player who relied heavily on the Leadership feat.

The important thing to note about Leadership is the player doesn't actually get to cherry pick what they want in a cohort, or followers. All it guarantees you is a certain amount of dudes of certain amounts of levels who think you're a spot-on enough fellow or lady to follow you to the ends of the earth.

The player doesn't get to choose what they get; but they can politely ask. If you ask for a mage, maybe you get an evoker. Who knows? Chances are most DMs won't give you an IotSV.

You also do not directly control your cohort or followers (again, something I wish I had known, because the player made his cohort into his brother and controlled them both in combat at the time.)

[Lonely Tylenol]

In addition to chaining concerns (which I, admittedly, don't encounter, as a DM of an E6 game where cohorts simply cannot exceed level 5 and take Leadership themselves), the biggest concern that I have is that the feat is simply too open-ended. It doesn't describe exactly what the player gets. It describes how many and how high level the things the player gets are, but never what. This creates a number of issues ranging everywhere from the player micromanaging the cohort's build (essentially having another PC to play with for the cost of a feat) to micromanaging the followers themselves. Players go into the idea of taking the Leadership feat with entirely too much of an idea of what they want in mind... And, on the other side of the coin, DMs typically go into it with entirely too little in mind. Definite rules and limitations on what, exactly, the player gets by default would go a long way to setting definite expectations on what the DM and player can expect out of the feat.

For example, if the rule in place was that the player can only choose NPC classes (those being the adept, aristocrat, commoner, expert, magewright, and warrior) for their cohort and their followers are a random mix of the aforementioned (or perhaps determined by percentile distribution: 60% commoner, 20% warrior, 10% expert, 5% aristocrat, 3% adept, 2% magewright, for example), or if the cohort was limited to the generic character classes (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/genericClasses.htm), or if there was even a table of single-PC-classed options from which the DM could choose or the player could roll randomly, well, at least then clear expectations may be set. They may not be perfect for the power level of the group (at which point they could simply be abandoned), but at least then they would exist.

[Aergoth]

As others have pointed out, a lot of the perceived problems with Leadership are easily corrected by Rule 0 (DM Fiat).

I'm a PF guy so we'll break it down based on the PF leadership feat. Bolded for emphasis.


Prerequisite: Character level 7th.

Benefits: This feat enables you to attract a loyal cohort and a number of devoted subordinates who assist you. A cohort is generally an NPC with class levels, while followers are typically lower level NPCs. See Table: Leadership for what level of cohort and how many followers you can recruit.


So this is the beginning of everything. Even leaving out cheese and what not for attracting a cohort, nowhere here does it specify the nature of the cohort or the followers. The fact that these rules can be used to attract a creature to serve as a mount means that the "generally" is important because it doesn't mean that you must attract something class levels.

The fact that your cohort is specifically described as an NPC does mean that control of the character technically rests with the DM. It makes sense to turn control of this character over to the player in combat, for the sake of simplifying things, but in a purely mechanical sense this is a feat that buys you a character that the DM controls. Followers are likewise non player characters and their actions and reactions should also fall under the purview of a DM.


Cohort Level: You can attract a cohort of up to this level. Regardless of your Leadership score, you can only recruit a cohort who is two or more levels lower than yourself. The cohort should be equipped with gear appropriate for its level (see Creating NPCs). A cohort can be of any race or class. The cohort's alignment may not be opposed to your alignment on either the law/chaos or good/evil axis, and you take a –1 penalty to your Leadership score if you recruit a cohort of an alignment different from your own.

A cohort does not count as a party member when determining the party's XP. Instead, divide the cohort's level by your level. Multiply this result by the total XP awarded to you, then add that number of experience points to the cohort's total.

If a cohort gains enough XP to bring it to a level one lower than your level, the cohort does not gain the new level—its new XP total is 1 less than the amount needed to attain the next level.


So here's the emphasis in the bit about cohorts. The section on creating NPCs specifically denotes the rules for creating non-player characters with class levels. Again, this is a section of the book nominally intended to be used by the DM to create characters controlled by the DM. While a cohort can be of "any race or class" it says nowhere that the player has any direct control over the type of character that he recruits. The player could go out looking to recruit a cohort with martial skill. This means that you could wind up with any combination of race and still have a character with an NPC class (Warrior), or instead of a single class fighter you could wind up with a half-orc barbarian. Or a magus. Or an archery specialized ranger. Since the feat continually talks about NPCs it seems reasonable then to treat the cohort as a specialized type of NPC. The fact that a cohort isn't treated as a party member supports this, otherwise it would modify the total experienced gained as though there was another player character present.


Number of Followers by Level: You 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 usually 5 or more levels behind you, they're rarely effective in combat.

Followers don't earn experience and thus don't gain levels. When you gain a new level, consult Table: Leadership to determine if you acquire more followers, some of whom may be higher level than the existing followers. Don't consult the table to see if your cohort gains levels, however, because cohorts earn experience on their own.


Followers are explicitly stated to be "low-level NPCs". I assume the generally clause is there to allow some more monstrous followers to be attracted. Nothing here states that the followers have any specific class, simply that a number of them can be attracted (as other parts of the feat mention this is explicitly modified by a series of circumstantial bonuses or penalties based on the character's behavior).

The last nail in this coffin is comparing it to other, similar rules. In this case we don't have to look very far. Rangers, Druids, Wizards, Paladins and Cavaliers all have the ability to gain a companion of some sort (animal companions, familiars and mounts respectively). The player is given much more explicit control over the nature of these companions (choice of the type of animal companion, control over feats, the ability to opt-in or out of the class feature in some cases). These creatures don't modify party experience in the same way that a cohort does (presumably because they are technically class features) but the DM is given little or no leverage with regards to how that class feature is leveraged. For all intents and purposes a druid's animal companion is an extension of the player character and pulls from the same pool of resources (money, experience, etc), while a cohort or follower is treated as a seperate character with a seperate (if smaller) pool of resources of its own.

TL;DR, any abuse of leadership, as with any rule, should be shut down by a DM by way of Rule 0. This is the reason that we have a DM and not a computer adjucating tabletop sessions. A person can reason and route around exploits (like leadership chains) while a computer must follow the rules as they are, regardless of flaws or exploits. We are not computers and are never bound by the rules as written.

[Coidzor]

In addition to chaining concerns (which I, admittedly, don't encounter, as a DM of an E6 game where cohorts simply cannot exceed level 5 and take Leadership themselves), the biggest concern that I have is that the feat is simply too open-ended. It doesn't describe exactly what the player gets. It describes how many and how high level the things the player gets are, but never what. This creates a number of issues ranging everywhere from the player micromanaging the cohort's build (essentially having another PC to play with for the cost of a feat) to micromanaging the followers themselves. Players go into the idea of taking the Leadership feat with entirely too much of an idea of what they want in mind... And, on the other side of the coin, DMs typically go into it with entirely too little in mind. Definite rules and limitations on what, exactly, the player gets by default would go a long way to setting definite expectations on what the DM and player can expect out of the feat.

For example, if the rule in place was that the player can only choose NPC classes (those being the adept, aristocrat, commoner, expert, magewright, and warrior) for their cohort and their followers are a random mix of the aforementioned (or perhaps determined by percentile distribution: 60% commoner, 20% warrior, 10% expert, 5% aristocrat, 3% adept, 2% magewright, for example), or if the cohort was limited to the generic character classes (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/genericClasses.htm), or if there was even a table of single-PC-classed options from which the DM could choose or the player could roll randomly, well, at least then clear expectations may be set. They may not be perfect for the power level of the group (at which point they could simply be abandoned), but at least then they would exist.

That's a factor that I was playing around with, but hadn't really thought of in quite those terms. Thank you for that. :smallsmile:

So, reading over the responses I've received it seems other than the obviously broken parts which have similarly obvious ways to close them off, the biggest issues are expectations(and differences between them between DMs & players) about what it entails, nebulousness about what the player actually gets, and how the player/PC interacts with what is received.

I think Pathfinder codified interactions with NPCs a bit more than 3.5(I'll need to re-read that portion of the pfsrd in more depth since last time I only had time for a quick run through), but it seems like maybe that would need to be tinkered with in a bit more depth? I was already toying around with either codifying what was received or setting up a fairly firm list of options. Might go ahead and shoot for the middle of the road and include suggestions for ramping it up or scaling it down further. I suppose that would help address both giving a concrete sense of what is received as well as addressing expectations at least to help give a better common point of origin for expectations by having something written down.