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AstraelOrannis

May 19, 2013, 09:45 pm

Quick thought on one of the most heavily banned feats in PF.

LEADERSHIP

PC is a wizard.

Talks DM into letting him invest and open an "Arcane Guild" in a location in (insert city name here). Also talks DM into letting him populate the guild with all of his followers... close to 75 at this point... in order for them to study the basics of magic...

What I want to know is if there is ANYTHING in the rules preventing the Followers from:

becoming lvl 1 casters.... or at least can hold a wand.... basically gets a single level 1 magic missile spell or other lvl 1 spell daily....

I know 75 single magic missiles only do 75d4+75 damage if they work.... but that is still 75d4+75 damage.....

And yes... this is complete and utter DM harassment and deserves a "Rocks Fall Party Dies".

Jason S

May 19, 2013, 09:52 pm

First of all, if he wants followers, you need the Leadership feat and there are clear rules for that.

Second, it's hard to get line of sight with more than a few of them.

Third, one invisible opponent plus one AE spell equals a lot of dead wizards.

It's just a matter of time really. My players are terrified of taking an army of low level NPCs with them for that very reason. They'll just get slaughtered eventually.

I'm sure he would have trouble attracting other wizards to follow him after that too. They might join the guild, but adventuring is out of the question.

Thomas Long 175

May 19, 2013, 10:05 pm

He'd be better off leaving them home to craft incessantly, and attempting to make large sums of cash off of that.

proftobe

May 19, 2013, 10:16 pm

The fact that followers unlike cohorts are supposed to be NPC classes. So that army of people are in his guild but they ARENT your followers. Your followers are either experts warriors and commoners who follow him or aristocrats who take his advice as gospel. The closest he could come are adepts and they would be really bad press for a "arcane school" if almost all of the students were low end shamanistic casters instead of wizards.

EWHM	May 19, 2013, 10:17 pm

As a GM, I don't particularly mind a PC having followers. What I'm utterly unwilling to tolerate is gaining them through a feat or any other sort of metagame resource. Instead, you're free to hire henchmen, cultivate groupies (let's face it, you become almost by default the equivalent of a 'rock star' as a fighter or bard or the like by 4th level or so, even if you're not trying to do so, and by 8th level in almost any case), build organizations, etc if you're looking for minions. But you don't get to build them or directly control them (unless you've had them as top tier minions for years and built their loyalty to you to pretty much fanatical). Think the Conan books for a good example of this sort of thing.

Ashoten

May 19, 2013, 11:11 pm

Well sounds like this player has a specific goal in mind. Go ahead and ask him what he wants to do with 75 first level wizards. Then you will know what to plan for and how help him fulfill that goal.

If his goal is something a little silly like "I want to have all 75 wizards cast magic missile standing in a block formation" then it would be a good idea to tell him that they are going to die very quickly against any formidable foe with AOE attacks and need to rethink their strategy.

If he wants them to do serious research on spells or make items for him then make it clear he is going to need to spend time at the school teaching them himself so they are competent, or more conveniently he can hire some NPC wizards as instructors to oversee things. Of course going by the chart for leadership some of his followers should be around level 5? He could take the time to train those higher level dudes to be wizards and then they could train the others.

Regardless of your approach you are going to need to determine the intelligence scores of his 1st level followers. This might eliminate more then half of them from becoming wizards in the first place. The average non-heroic character is going to have lower intelligence. Here is link to an resource chart for NPC stats.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/creatingNPCs.html

It seems a standard arcane non-heroic NPC has an int of 13 so at least some of them should qualify. I do not know what would be a reasonable percentage to roll to determine how many of them would be arcane NPCs.

Make sure to show him the numbers and how you got them or even roll it in front of him(you might need to do this outside of normal game time so the other players do not get bored). Then let him use them according to the rules for item creation and/or spell research. But by making him work to train them both in time and money should give your player a sense of accomplishment when they help him craft some cool stuff in half the time.

There is a possible way this could break the game however. If he somehow trys to justify all of them using the assist bonus together at the same time. At least in 3.5 stacking assist bonus is broken because it is allow to stack as much as you want. But I think it can only apply in combat? Here is link to the Aid another maneuver.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/combat.html#_aid-another

hope this helps a little.

Icyshadow

May 19, 2013, 11:28 pm

AstraelOrannis wrote:

Quick thought on one of the most heavily banned feats in PF.

LEADERSHIP

PC is a wizard.

Talks DM into letting him invest and open an "Arcane Guild" in a location in (insert city name here). Also talks DM into letting him populate the guild with all of his followers... close to 75 at this point... in order for them to study the basics of magic...

What I want to know is if there is ANYTHING in the rules preventing the Followers from:

becoming lvl 1 casters.... or at least can hold a wand.... basically gets a single level 1 magic missile spell or other lvl 1 spell daily....

I know 75 single magic missiles only do 75d4+75 damage if they work.... but that is still 75d4+75 damage.....

And yes... this is complete and utter DM harassment and deserves a "Rocks Fall Party Dies".

Are you the DM? If not, the rocks should only really land on your character.

You should ask the player of the Wizard off-game what his intentions are instead of jumping to conclusions.

VRMH	May 20, 2013, 05:47 am

AstraelOrannis wrote:

What I want to know is if there is ANYTHING in the rules preventing the Followers from:

becoming lvl 1 casters.... or at least can hold a wand.... basically gets a single level 1 magic missile spell or other lvl 1 spell daily....

Followers don't gain any levels, so they can't "become" anything. Some might be Adepts, but Magic Missile isn't on their spell list.

AstraelOrannis

May 20, 2013, 08:08 am

Ashoten wrote:

Well sounds like this player has a specific goal in mind. Go ahead and ask him what he wants to do with 75 first level wizards. Then you will know what to plan for and how help him fulfill that goal.

If his goal is something a little silly like "I want to have all 75 wizards cast magic missile standing in a block formation" then it would be a good idea to tell him that they are going to die very quickly against any formidable foe with AOE attacks and need to rethink their strategy.

If he wants them to do serious research on spells or make items for him then make it clear he is going to need to spend time at the school teaching them himself so they are competent, or more conveniently he can hire some NPC wizards as instructors to oversee things. Of course going by the chart for leadership some of his followers should be around level 5? He could take the time to train those higher level dudes to be wizards and then they could train the others.

Regardless of your approach you are going to need to determine the intelligence scores of his 1st level followers. This might eliminate more then half of them from becoming wizards in the first place. The average non-heroic character is going to have lower intelligence. Here is link to an resource chart for NPC stats.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/creatingNPCs.html

It seems a standard arcane non-heroic NPC has an int of 13 so at least some of them should qualify. I do not know what would be a reasonable percentage to roll to determine how many of them would be arcane NPCs.

Make sure to show him the numbers and how you got them or even roll it in front of him(you might need to do this outside of normal game time so the other players do not get bored). Then let him use them according to the rules for item creation and/or spell research. But by making him work to train them both in time and money should give your player a sense of accomplishment when they help him craft some cool stuff in half the time.

There is a possible way this could break the...

Thanks, this answers my question. I am the DM in this one, small homebrew game, and the wizard PC is a "classic" soon-to-be big badguy and betray the party... i gave him creative license and this is what he came up with, just wanted to see if it was possible so i could take care of the mechanics and begin.

I appreciate the help.