Leadership

[VoxRationis]

How have people handled the Leadership feat at your own tables? Do you typically allow players to stat up their own cohorts and followers, or do you stick them with characters as you deem appropriate, finding already-established NPCs of appropriate level to become the players' henchmen?

[Krobar]

We do kind of a mix. The player taking leadership explains what he wants, and the DM builds the character accordingly, taking into account the game, the players, the characters, balance, etc.

[OldTrees1]

I treat Leadership as paying a feat for an affiliation with a group of your own design (so they do get to create the cohort & followers). However the group is largely independent from you and has only minimal impact on the foreground.

Two examples

Dean of the Black College:
Have a protected location for a phylactery
Have a steady but limited supply of corpses for animation
Have the social status of a Professor on sabbatical


Guildmaster of a Thieves Guild:
Can purchase items from and sell items to your home town at a distance (distance depends on your guild)
Can make skill checks as if located in a different city with increasing penalties for distance and uses
Your guild will also watch your back with passive skill checks but these passive skill checks share the penalty above

[sleepyphoenixx]

I let the player specify race, class and alignment of their cohort. The rest is built by me, as are the followers in their entirety.

[Beheld]

I tell people they aren't allowed to take Leadership.

[flappeercraft]

Player can take it normally and design his cohort and followers. Although I run a cheese campaign currently so it might not be wise to follow my advise on a regular campaign as for all I care my players can get a Human Druid Beastmaster with Leadership and every other feat being Wild Cohort in addition to Gestalting and taking Paladin for the mount and ranger for another animal companion plus a dip in wizard for a familiar

[Mordaedil]

I'm playing a noble wizard prodigy who is going into master specialist who are sort of treated as college teachers in the setting, so I will also be taking the leadership feat at the same time to establish that I am a teacher and my followers are my class that I am teaching magic and my cohort is my assigned bodyguard/family butler sent by my family to protect me.

Our group minotaur is the fleeing potential chieftain of his tribe and I imagine if he decides to return to leading his people, that will be his turn to take it.

[weckar]

It seems odd to take a feat to facilitate (or circumvent) the plot. If you are put in a position where you need to lead you'll likely do just fine without the feat in most cases. The cohort is the only true benefit.

[Mordaedil]

It seems odd to take a feat to facilitate (or circumvent) the plot. If you are put in a position where you need to lead you'll likely do just fine without the feat in most cases. The cohort is the only true benefit.

In my case, I did it to work with the DM to have it make sense, but the actual details just happen to fit into how we plan for the narrative to work out. If I decided to not go the leadership route, I would just be an instructor with no students roaming the land waiting to earn experience to retire and teach in the academy itself. We worked around the idea that I wanted Leadership feat separately.

I do tend to work with my DM a lot though.

[Crake]

At the tables I play, we do things quite the opposite. If there's an NPC you quite like the company of, your character is good friends with, and you want them around on a more permanent basis, you can take leadership and have them as your cohort. So leadership is more of a reactive feat, rather than a proactive feat. We don't allow leadership as a means to get a second character purely of your choice and design.

[Mordaedil]

That is how I used to think we'd do it before we sat down and decided on a few things.

The thing about D&D though is that all the planning in the world could change at a moments notice and while my plan for now *is* to go that route (because it's what she's been building towards naturally) the adventures we have could alter this outcome. It depends on what happens in between now and then.

Maybe she, against all odds, figure she'd rather become an eldritch knight and go down that route. The above is the plan, but things can change.

Like I was originally going to go transmuter/master specialist/archmage, but after reading manual of the planes, I suddenly wanted to try a route of a planeshifter instead. I'm not entirely set in stone for what I'll do, but planning ahead a little bit means that I have a plan to fall back on if nothing else informs my character on what path to take.