Leadership and Handle Animal


Pathfinder Online

Goblin Squad Member

I can see where these could be awesome, or fail terribly. The leadership feat would allow for solo players to have a much easier time of things, as well as anyone who want's to have followers. But how to run the AI, how to choose what types of 'minions' to choose between, etc. More trouble then it's worth?

Handle Animal I could see working similar to creature handlers in SWG. It's already set up to tame creatures, train tricks, train mounts, combat train mounta and fighting pets, all sorts of things. How would that factor into the game? Will our mounts all have to come from people with animal handle skills if we don't want to buy the old nags from the Fort? That could be all sorts of nifty.

Goblin Squad Member

Kard Warstein wrote:

I can see where these could be awesome, or fail terribly. The leadership feat would allow for solo players to have a much easier time of things, as well as anyone who want's to have followers. But how to run the AI, how to choose what types of 'minions' to choose between, etc. More trouble then it's worth?

Handle Animal I could see working similar to creature handlers in SWG. It's already set up to tame creatures, train tricks, train mounts, combat train mounta and fighting pets, all sorts of things. How would that factor into the game? Will our mounts all have to come from people with animal handle skills if we don't want to buy the old nags from the Fort? That could be all sorts of nifty.

IMO Leadership of NPCs, is a bad idea,

1. It is a counter to the goal of increasing meaningful human interaction.

2. It basically can only feasably fall into so rediculously strong everyone has it, or incredibly useless. IE you take leadership to protect yourself from bandits on your trip from X to Y, you are ambushed by 3 bandits... but wait they also took leadership, and have their own packs of minions as well... purpose negated. Or they throw in enough things to make it work well, and some sort of guard (say followers cannot take offense in PVP ambushes). Now your standard convoy is 2 PCs, with as many followers as leadership allows them on both the person and the others.

Now all world combat of all forms have to also be scaled up to handle parties that are also made up of people with minions... thus soloing is still the same difficulty as before because everything has been scaled up anyway.

The only game I've seen followers half work is basically DDO, to which when the AI happened to work right, they allowed people to instantly fill in the remaining slots in 5 man dungeons or so, and clear them with 2 or 3, admitted much harder because AI's were still notably worse than even bad players. But that doesn't really work well in an open world non-instanced environment, where the party size isn't set to X people.

Goblin Squad Member

That's true, it may not actually give any bonus numbers wise, but being able to have your own merry band or your own bandit crew, it 'could' be done very neat. It wouldn't be about power, it'd be about the benefits of a neat feature for people to enjoy. Yes everyone could learn it, but to do that their NOT learning something else. It all takes time, and there's no way to get it done faster. People planning out their characters will create enough diversity that I don't think everyone would get it, unless of course it wasn't balanced.

Just think of it from a in-character perspective. You log in and stroll around town, and find out a caravan left about 10 min ago headin' to who knows where. You zip over to "The Seedy Stooge" and hire a few of the boys to help you take on this caravan. You choose from among the npc's currently in the tavern, do your stuff, and then keep them or let them go and get new ones later.

Remember, you gotta pay wages for these people, equip them, etc. You gotta work your butt off to make it truly worth it, and once you get to that point... well you learned that instead of how to wear heavy armor, so it better be good!

I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, just trying to look it at from all sides.

Goblin Squad Member

I think leadership should come into play on the level of camps, settlements, and sieges. It shouldn't be used to have followers that will follow you into every single encounter other than perhaps a single squire/herald/apprentice. It would be interesting to see paladins with squires that help them suit up and perform other useful functions, or a wizard with an apprentice who can cast their own feeble spells and gets stuck carrying most of the wizards gear/doing simple tasks for them, but I certainly don't want to see NPCs take the place of party members.

Goblin Squad Member

I wouldn't either, if they do build followers of some type, I would hope they wouldn't be 'powerful' like Druid or Ranger companions should be. They could be stuck at lvl 1 forever for all I care, just having them to play around with would be fun.

Goblin Squad Member

Kard Warstein wrote:
I wouldn't either, if they do build followers of some type, I would hope they wouldn't be 'powerful' like Druid or Ranger companions should be. They could be stuck at lvl 1 forever for all I care, just having them to play around with would be fun.

You could potentially make them pretty tough as far as companions go as long as they required you to invest enough training into them. But in general I agree. I would rather have them around for utility purposes. Without serious investment in their training I think the ideal way to make them function is that they turn tail and run/hide till the battle is over as soon as they feel threatened enough.

Lantern Lodge

I think just like the feat would be good. You get 1 cohort who eats some of your exp (leveling up skills time) and needs you to pay for their everything. The followers and stuff you get can be just in helping with whatever settlement you belong too and/or improves your crafting shops with all the little folks.

So my suggestion is that picking or getting rid of a cohort is a big thing that can only be changed with great difficulty. But if you take one it slows your training time by a percentage and it doesn't count towards treasure so you have to split your treasure to keep it geared up. Depending on the exact cost most will go be social and keep their training time high but some might pay the cost to keep the minion.

I would say that you can choose it at 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th, 17th, and 20th levels and if you pick it you can't change or lose it until the next checkpoint is reached, making it a big decision with lasting consequences. Much easier to balance this way.

However if chosen the cohort should have many options and maybe can be changed out for something else of equal level as before. So a necromancer can have undead for a cohort, or a sorcerer could have a summoned helper as one, or a wizard with an apprentice, etc.

Goblinworks Executive Founder

To maximize player interaction, why not make the cohort a PC?

Lantern Lodge

That should be an option that doesn't require a feat for one and two it means finding a person who may or may not want to do things your way.

Getting an AI to follow your tactics and desires is easier then living people, is always available when you feel like playing with no prep or planning required, and makes it easier to follow your own path when things get difficult.

Personally giving bonuses to training newer players is a bonus I support, but I also support the idea of having a single AI companion with suitable cost. I don't have many online friends, and I don't in general like the methods of dungeon crawling that many people use, so finding people that I want to group with for a dungeon crawl, is extremely unlikely.

I like to encounter people out in the world and often revive dead people when I find them, or to join a group for crafting, etc, but when it comes to combat and dungeons, I want to play my particular style (smell the roses, look at the artwork, carefully plan a trap, etc). People generally don't play that way, and I generally don't agree with the tactics they use not that I the command presence, or the right, to tell others how to do it.

Goblin Squad Member

DarkLightHitomi wrote:

I think just like the feat would be good. You get 1 cohort who eats some of your exp (leveling up skills time) and needs you to pay for their everything. The followers and stuff you get can be just in helping with whatever settlement you belong too and/or improves your crafting shops with all the little folks.

The biggest thing I see as a difficulty in co-horts, is a limiting factor. Most class skills etc... will have a limiting factor of being significantly less effective in armor or with weapons not designed for the archtype, that is the intended limiting factor to keep a 20 wiz/20 ftr, from drastically outpowering a pure 20 ftr. With that limitation in mind, a cohort is hands down the very obvious bonus to get after the first 20. After all, it's power by deffinition pretty much has to stack regardless of your current equipment, archtype etc... If it doesn't, well something is weird there.

No matter what, I cannot think of a way an independent assist being added can be anything but a very solid move forward, when the intention is a pool of skills that is miles wide, a few inches deep.

Short of a mostly inactive cohort who is usually afraid to help when the player is active. At a significant consistent upkeep cost etc... it could be plausible to have it balanced. As a huge 1 time cost... it will never be close to balanced though a high cost in getting a new one, after the first is killed could also work.

Lantern Lodge

Aka, is always useful for any player, but it comes with a cost, it will take you 2.5 yaers to get 20lvls, take a cohort and it will take much longer. Players will improve beyond that bonus by being social and having a group that leaves their exp alone.

Me I have Asperger's, being social is not my forte, it is not a focus of my gameplay. I may be unusual in that regard but there are plenty of solo players out there, they should have options as much as the social players.

With my suggestion, social players benefit by not taking the feat and solo players benefit by having the feat.

Edit: my suggested cost was the penalty to your exp (skill training time) and the need to split your treasure with the cohort not counting towards treasure drops.

Goblin Squad Member

DarkLightHitomi wrote:

Aka, is always useful for any player, but it comes with a cost, it will take you 2.5 yaers to get 20lvls, take a cohort and it will take much longer. Players will improve beyond that bonus by being social and having a group that leaves their exp alone.

Me I have Asperger's, being social is not my forte, it is not a focus of my gameplay. I may be unusual in that regard but there are plenty of solo players out there, they should have options as much as the social players.

With my suggestion, social players benefit by not taking the feat and solo players benefit by having the feat.

Until 2.5 years in when the social players are essentially as powerful at any one thing as they can be, and thus the only direct power increase is very obviously the co-hort, at that point it is nothing but a direct power increase.

So lets say I am a rogue. 2.5 years in I master the rogue skills, and thus have a choice, between starting on ranger, most of the skills will not work, or will work very poorly with my rogue weapon, or getting a co-hort that will add to my damage regardless of my class, weapon etc... of course I am going to take the co-hort. Of course I am obviously going with the co-hort.

I also am seeing a lack of reason the developers should go out of their way too much on the solo, when they've pretty clearly shown that maximizing human interaction is the primary goal of the game.

In general group play does suffer when solo play is focused on. Why because everyone soloing tends to remove themselves from the players looking for groups, as a result grouping starts to become more difficult, and more group players also move to the solo camp, making grouping harder, driving even more of the groupers to the solo camp, until the grouping camp is the obscure thing people do with a handful of RL friends. That is the way pre-cap WoW went, every perfect world MMO went, runes of magic, pretty much every MMO I've played that's been released in the last 6 years, which is a large part of why I don't even bother playing most anymore.

Most older school MMO's don't fall into this camp, ragnarok online, nexus, even DDO put strong focuses on grouping, where soloing while possible, is 1/10th the speed. Despite being ancient games, getting a group rarely takes more than a minute, despite the games being ancient, and having extremely low populations.

Solo friendly and group friendly are indeed by definition mutually exclusive, games that cater to "both" playstyles, realistically don't. One is generally inferior and the other becomes an obscure niche, played by 10% of the population or less. I for one am looking for something different than the 99% of games that already cater to this playstyle.

Goblin Squad Member

I was thinking back to SWG, the way you could get storm trooper or commando 'faction' pets. They were useful, but costly. They had a decent AI with basic pet commands like attack, defend, stay. Since everyone could get these either from the handle animal skill (pets) or the leadership feat, it would be purely player choice with a built-in balance of being available to all.

A newer comparison might be the necromancer pets utilized in GW2. Weaker, but useful due to abilities.

Goblin Squad Member

DarkLightHitomi wrote:

That should be an option that doesn't require a feat for one and two it means finding a person who may or may not want to do things your way.

Getting an AI to follow your tactics and desires is easier then living people, is always available when you feel like playing with no prep or planning required, and makes it easier to follow your own path when things get difficult.

Personally giving bonuses to training newer players is a bonus I support, but I also support the idea of having a single AI companion with suitable cost. I don't have many online friends, and I don't in general like the methods of dungeon crawling that many people use, so finding people that I want to group with for a dungeon crawl, is extremely unlikely.

I like to encounter people out in the world and often revive dead people when I find them, or to join a group for crafting, etc, but when it comes to combat and dungeons, I want to play my particular style (smell the roses, look at the artwork, carefully plan a trap, etc). People generally don't play that way, and I generally don't agree with the tactics they use not that I the command presence, or the right, to tell others how to do it.

I agree with you as long as we are still talking from the perspective that a cohort is not a replacement for a player. It's an NPC servant almost that helps your characters in various tasks or offer limited assistance in combat.

Most players aren't going to want to tighten the straps on their paladin buddies armor, or bear their banner into battle. They aren't there to help the wizard carry his scrolls and components, or the rouge their traps and tools. Cohorts should perform useful tasks that enhance your character's image and roleplay experience as well. They should be there when you log in and follow you until you log out every time.

Maybe players should have the options to do things a cohort might for their master, but the system should not count on them for it. It's kind of fun to have a servant sometimes. Most people in games don't want to be servants. They want to play a major part, and build their own story.

If anyone disagrees... Please submit an application to GL, I always have openings for someone who wants to RP a servant or apprentice. ;)

Goblin Squad Member

I would love to be a knight with a squire, or a wizard with an apprentice, or a cleric with an acolyte. But I would also like to be a fighter with a cleric companion for heals, or a wizard with a fighter for defense, etc. I don't think cohorts or followers should be specific based on the player's class, but they should be NPC's with various skill sets that you can hire in-game to be your companions. Depending how you treat them etc. depends on how well the perform and how much money they demand for their services.

Goblin Squad Member

Kard Warstein wrote:
... [cohorts or followers] should be NPC's with various skill sets that you can hire in-game to be your companions.

This seems to go against Ryan's stated goal of maximizing player interaction. Decius mentioned this above, too.

There are a number of costs associated with grouping with other players: they might not do what you expect; they might be trying to go at a pace that's faster or slower than you're comfortable with; they might not know how to play their character effectively; they might spend time telling you to play your character differently; they might want to socialize considerably more or less than you do - and a million other things.

With all of those inherent, unavoidable costs in place, I think it's going to be counterproductive to add new effective costs to grouping by, for example, reducing the cost of soloing.

From a thread on Looting and Salvaging:

Ryan Dancey wrote:
This is not a game where you want to be playing solo...

Goblin Squad Member

Kard Warstein wrote:
I can see where these could be awesome, or fail terribly. The leadership feat would allow for solo players to have a much easier time of things, as well as anyone who want's to have followers. But how to run the AI, how to choose what types of 'minions' to choose between, etc. More trouble then it's worth?

They brought hirelings into DDO. Granted that's very much a themepark MMO. What I have personally found is that if you are careful about giving the right orders at the right time to your hireling (or if you pay Turbine points then to your multiple hirelings) then hirelings rate, in my mind, on the useful chart below a good player but above a stubborn and/or foolish player. That's right, as poorly written as the hireling AI is, it's actually better written than most player AIs ;)

Lantern Lodge

I think they can be made to be less effective then player's and if they stay at low level then at 20th level they wouldn't be enough to have for combat but might still be fun for RP or to serve as a distraction.

Same with minion like summon monster or create undead, only a they don't dissappear at the end of a timer. At 20th level casting pet spells last long enough to effectively be permenent anyway. So with a major cost for a minor to moderate benefit that can be achieved in some other cheaper fashion anyway, seems just fine if properly balanced

Felt the qualifier was useful. But it also denotes that I believe that it can be done correctly or incorrectly. And I don't shy away from things just because of possible failure.

Goblin Squad Member

DarkLightHitomi wrote:
I think they can be made to be less effective then player's

We have to have goals, right?

Goblin Squad Member

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I like the idea that if you don't have a cleric... you simply do not have a cleric. If you don't have a rouge... then you do not have a rouge.

Adding any NPC that can help make up for the lack of a class in your party, no matter how crappy, makes having a player of that class that much less useful. That hurts player interaction, and this is a sandbox. Getting that perfect party combination is not the main point anyway.

NPC's cohorts should serve a very simple purpose. Enhancing RP, and adding more options in how to play your character. They should serve to either complement your main archetype, or serve roles not filled by any player archetype.

I am 100% against any leadership system that has you using cohorts as substitutes for archetypes the party lacks. No matter how poor of a job they do at it.

Lantern Lodge

Good, then we agree in part.

Goblinworks Executive Founder

I was thinking of PC cohorts- a cohort attached to your character, using your skill training time, that can be played by any player whom you designate (including yourself).

Sort of an insurance policy- If we need a rogue but don't have a rogue main handy, it would let anyone jump into the rogue cohort.

I don't think it's a candidate for launch feature, but as something to reduce the bar to entry for new players it might have merit.

Lantern Lodge

There would be no point in spending a feat for that though so it shouldn't be refered to as "cohort" unless they don't use the feat. The idea isn't too bad but sharing training time is unlikely, and I'm not sure I would ever want to do that for something I can't solo (I don't have fancy computers to multibox with and certainly don't want to try playing 2 chars with no AI)

Goblin Squad Member

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NPCs are a hack for games designed around certain party assumptions, to fix the player experience when the assumptions fail.

I'd rather fix the assumptions. (better yet I'd rather just avoid the empty server problem that breaks the assumptions in the first place).

Goblin Squad Member

Andius wrote:
If you don't have a rouge... then you do not have a rouge.

Next you'll be asking me to leave my mascara and lipstick at home - unthinkable!

Goblin Squad Member

Blaeringr wrote:
Andius wrote:
If you don't have a rouge... then you do not have a rouge.
Next you'll be asking me to leave my mascara and lipstick at home - unthinkable!

Nice.

Lantern Lodge

I certainly agree with not making any party assumtions, or using cohorts to fill in specific roles.

Still would be nice to have a follower, even a weak one, for fun, a walking inventory bag, and for unusual tactics that no one else wants to help you with. Simply make followers using the same guidelines as summoned monsters or animal companions, only because of the semi-permanency they cost more in terms of player resources. And they only survive death if you cast a rez type spell on them. (hmmm, reincarnate would be fun, to bad no one will use it even if provided, except on animal companions or cohorts)

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