What if: The PCs were hirelings

[JaminDM]

Could this ever work? What would it be like?

[Kid Jake]

I could see it being fun in small doses; though I imagine it'd play out similar to the tale of Joe Wood (or maybe even Paranoia) than any kind of high adventure. Life would be cheap, everything would be terrifying; expect to run away from things a lot.

[YossarianLives]

I would imagine the players would get mad and accuse the GM of running the character employers as overpowered DMPCs.

[goto124]

I read hirelings as mercenaries. Then the employers don't do anything except pay them money.

[Red Fel]

Could this ever work? What would it be like?

A combination of Shadowrun and babysitting.

[goto124]

Sounds like the future IRL.

[Coidzor]

Could this ever work? What would it be like?

NPC classed? Can't level? What were you thinking it'd be like?

Or that they earn payment per diem or are actually taking mercenary contracts and advancing via NPC WBL rather than standard adventuring rates?

[comicshorse]

In what system ? But I've played in a few games where we were basically hirelings. Including a Rolemaster game where the groups motto was 'We're not adventures we're mercenaries' ( after we discovered people seemed to expect adventurers to do insanely dangerous things for the common good)

[ellindsey]

I played in a campaign like this once: all of the PCs were employees of the all-powerful GMPC who was better than all of us at everything. I quit the game after a while. It's just not that interesting in the long term.

[Solaris]

I agree with a lot of the above posters. My first reaction to the question is "Oh look, playing as the DMPC's minions."
I wouldn't recommend going with the model of players being hirelings in a D&D campaign, not unless they're working for a largely absent employer who clearly needs them more than they need him.

[Kid Jake]

Assuming that by hireling the OP meant "Low-level, disposable mercenary." I could see the game working as a series of puzzles and brain twisters as the PCs are basically given a 10ft pole and thrown into a dungeon to play bomb squad while the 'heroes' sit at camp and play cards.

[Comet]

Dungeon Crawl Classics does this. Well, almost.

Give each player two or three farmers, linkboys, shepherds or whatever to play. Whoever makes it through the dungeon gets to level up into a 'proper' adventuring class. Lots of fun.

[JaminDM]

Give each player two or three farmers, linkboys, shepherds or whatever to play. Whoever makes it through the dungeon gets to level up into a 'proper' adventuring class. Lots of fun.

That sounds cool.

[Tengu_temp]

Any game where the PCs are supposed to be sidekicks can be fun as a one-shot (especially if the NPC "heroes" are incompetent buffoons and the whole thing is played comedically), but in the long run it's just not fun, as if feels the players have neither agency not spotlight and are little more than audience for the events playing out in front of them. It's just one of those "guys, wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas that sound interesting on paper but don't really work in practice.

[Yora]

I don't see why it wouldn't work. As long as the campaign is not about the things the heroes do. The heroes should just be some mostly absent people who drag their hirelings to all kinds of places and then disappear to do their own weird things, leaving the PCs behind to fend for themselves in some insane place.

[hifidelity2]

That sounds cool.

I have done this and it is a fun way to start
I however gave the PC’s 20 level 0 village folk each.
The background was that the village had got fed up with being “farmed” by the local vampire and was storming the castle with pitch forks, flaming torches etc
The PC’s ended up with 1 villager each by the end of the slaughter - basically the ones that ran away the fastest. This also gave a coherence of collective guilt to the group.
They went off, adventured and came back at a higher level and took out the vampire at the end

[BWR]

Almost any concept can work as long as everyone is on board with the suggestion. The most important part in any game is to make sure the players have real choices and control over their characters.
You could play this for laughs as terrified henchmen a la Nodwick, who have to put up with their insane employer's ideas. You could play it more like bodyguards protecting the moneybag/prince/idiot nobleman, having to keep their bread and butter safe in possibly ridiculous situations. Mercenaries doing a job, basically straight adventuring with a very easy way to get the PCs where the adventure is. Grooms and stablehands who are unwillingly thrust into situations where they need to excel or die. Almost anything can work.

[Tarvus]

One thing my group tried ended up being a big hit. Having the Players play their own hirelings.

We have a player that has to skip every 3rd session, but thankfully its ultra-consistent with every single 3rd session missed. So as to not exclude him from plot development, 2/3rds of the time we play the regular full party on their high level adventures, and the other 1/3 the party-1 play the lower level lieutenants that protect the PC's home base, complete side missions for them and occasionally accompany the PCs when needed.

Not only does this mean we don't have to awkwardly write out party members during random parts of the adventure, it also lets their stronghold remain a big part of the show and provides some lower level play to contrast the normal campaign. My players seem to appreciate the ability to experiment with some classes and builds they wanted to try without it being too high-risk for the main campaign. If it turns out unsatisfactory, they can just say they were fired or moved onto another contract and turn them over the DM for NPC use later on.

It's definitely been fun deciding how the PC's spend their resources, whether to outfit themselves or their lieutenants. Also adds a new dimension to the low level play as certain options useful to low level PCs become cost effective only if you have access to a high level caster. 3.5 specific examples I can think are things like how 20gp might buy you one flask of alchemist's fire, but with the right caster it nets you 120 auto-proficient fire shuriken. Acid Flasks can be a game changer at low levels, but the expense adds up. However a caster with Water to Acid can create a mess of them at basically no cost to himself (Or infact a saving if he has to outfit his troops for trolls). Certain Eternal Wands go from being convenient items to snag, to being so indispensable we've had characters and strategies built around specific ones. We have pages and pages of ideas that we worked out, that work via economies of scale, but still let you follow relatively closely to WBL. Some end up rather effective - maybe we'll write a guide sometime

Our campaigns always seem to focus largely on the character's strongholds, and we had some dissent over what level band to play at, so this was a well received, and quite organic development.

[Earthwalker]

I can see this working.
If I was to DM something like this I would make the setup known from the start.

Then get the Players to help stat up the party the PCs will be hirlings for, complete with list of flaws for thier employers.

Then they get to stat up thier own characters with benifits to deal with the bosses flaws (benifits that might have other uses)

The Adventuring party would hop around causing trouble with the hirlings in a race to try to minimize the damage caused.

As people have said you would need the players to buy into this.

[neonchameleon]

Could this ever work? What would it be like?

Go track down a copy of My Life With Master.

Because really you've three options that will work.
1: The PCs are hirelings for the initial adventure and the person hiring them dies part way through (or at least Gandalf-dies, but I'd recommend a full death) and our poor half trained and badly prepared hirelings have to complete the quest.
2: The PCs are hirelings and the person hiring them is going to be terrible until they crack and take them out (the basic arc of MLWM).
3: The PCs have a lot of autonomy. They are all effectively a team of special agents for someone who isn't normally in the same city.

[Thrudd]

I once considered starting a campaign this way, to establish the setting as a place where adventuring was a normal profession and it was expected that lower level adventurers are trained by more experienced ones.

It would be more like the first session only, in order to establish what to expect during adventures. Each player would have two or three level one characters that would be the henchmen of a group of 4th or 5th level characters. They would be instructed by their mentors on what to expect, given tips on dungeoneering and tactics, and then during the adventure the party gets separated and the henchmen left on their own or with only one mentor. After the ordeal is over, the mentor party calls it quits, maybe has lost a couple members, and probably some of the starting henchmen are lost as well.

The players then would be on their own to choose their own expeditions, using whatever characters survived the initial adventure. They would have the understanding and expectation that at some point they will recruit their own henchmen, and will also understand that it is a dangerous business that many people don't survive.

[Knaight]

One way I've seen this implemented is in Ars Magica style troupe play - everybody has an entire set of characters, with one particularly notable one, one or a couple less powerful but still notable ones, then access to a common pool of bit characters. Said bit characters can easily be hirelings, and people switch out which characters they're playing every so often, while also changing the entire party composition. Occasionally an entire party of mages will get broken out for something (it's disadvantageous to do so in the long run for several reasons, but when you just need a lot of power now it's exactly what works), occasionally the entire party will be grogs (where everyone is a bit character, and the adventure is probably fairly low stakes and likely has a humorous bent).

This solves several problems. The hirelings aren't hired to some DMPC, but instead to the group of PCs not currently in play, so all DMPC issues are resolved. The use of hirelings is for comparatively short periods of time, so the novelty wearing off is resolved. There are other characters for the PCs, which encourages making the hirelings more interesting and flawed because those flaws aren't there for the whole game, which ironically makes them more interesting to play for longer most of the time. Troupe play is just generally a good way to handle this.

[Slipperychicken]

There was actually an awesome campaign-journal about a similar concept in the 40k setting. The PCs are all human "Guardsmen": the generic ground-troops of the 41st millennium. The campaign is basically about them trying to survive a series of insane bosses and suicide missions. While they have essentially no choice in terms of their ultimate objective (since they'd be shot for treason if they refused), their lack of effective oversight gives them considerable latitude in their ability to solve problems their own way (usually with explosives), "slack off" to avoid being killed during missions, steal needed items, fudge their reports, and generally doing the minimum required to avoid being purged.

Here's a link to the campaign journal.

[Coidzor]

Or is it like a game of Ars Magica where one only plays as the Boots and Grogs instead of the Wizards or their Lieutenants, but may have a Lieutenant to report to that directs their efforts?

[veti]

I like to start a campaign by making all the (first-level) PCs hirelings of some ridiculously powerful employer. It's a good way of introducing them to one another, giving them a common goal and a common enemy (their employer...). Of course the employer doesn't spend more than a few minutes actually with them, that would (a) be boring and (b) from the employer's point of view, defeat the whole object of having underlings in the first place.

"How long it takes for the PCs to definitively renounce their employer" then becomes one of the more interesting game variables. Sometimes they keep coming back for more jobs until they're quite respectably levelled. Other times, they strike out on their own straight away and never look back. It's very much up to them.

[LibraryOgre]

Could this ever work? What would it be like?

I'd say it's a pretty common conceit of low-level games... "You guys, I'm going to pay you to go and do something unpleasant."

Some players subcontract a bit of the danger, hiring other hirelings to do some of the dangerous work. But low-level PCs tend to be hirelings of someone.

[Xyk]

As long as the boss-man is totally fallible, it would work fine I think.

[Kid Jake]

As long as the boss-man is totally fallible, it would work fine I think.

If anything, the boss-man should be needlessly antagonistic.

"Jim, John and James will be armed with 10ft poles; don't be shy now, poke everything. Brenda, you're wearing the meat suit just make sure to sound extra tasty in case their sense of smell isn't very strong. Neil, take a mop so we don't slip in anyone after you guys are done."

[goto124]

1: The PCs are hirelings for the initial adventure and the person hiring them dies part way through,

How about the hirelings themselves killing their masters?

Boss: *falls into trap* Ahhh! Help me!
P1: *pretending* Ahhh! 5 Orcs are attacking me!
P2: *pretending* Ahhh! I fell into a trap too!
P3: *also pretending* Ahhh! An ochre jelly swallowed me!
Boss: What did I pay you guys for... *dies*
P1: ... psst, is she dead yet?

[Thrudd]

If anything, the boss-man should be needlessly antagonistic.

"Jim, John and James will be armed with 10ft poles; don't be shy now, poke everything. Brenda, you're wearing the meat suit just make sure to sound extra tasty in case their sense of smell isn't very strong. Neil, take a mop so we don't slip in anyone after you guys are done."

"Can one of us have a pointed stick?"

"SHADDUP! Where were we? When the carrion crawler lunges at you thusly..."