crazy idea about Leadership feat in PFS


Pathfinder Society

1/5

1 person marked this as a favorite.

First, I know the feat is banned. And why it is banned.

But nonetheless, this popped into my head.

What if the Leadership feat only allowed you to choose from the list of pregens?

With some restictions:
* you may only bring your follower along if the table isn't full
* it must be the same follower for every adventure that PC goes on unless
* if the follower dies, you must choose a different class
* the follower does not gain its own chronicle sheet, xp, gold, items or anything else the PC gets.

So, what is the reasoned discussion on this? (Besides PFS doesn't allow Leadership.)

Grand Lodge 4/5

It wouldn't scale to higher levels (unless it did: when your character reaches 7th level you may use the 4th level version of the follower, at 12th level advance it to 7th level).

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** RPG Superstar 2014 Top 32

2 people marked this as a favorite.

With summoned creatures, eidolons, raised undead and animal companions, we have far too many entities on the board on the player side. There's absolutely no reason to let somebody add a PC-strength entity to the board for a mere feat.

Silver Crusade 2/5 RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

While Andrew is definitely correct, I could also see some merit in this idea. You would only be able to use it if there are less than 6 players at the table, and it would be kinda fun to have one of the pregens following you around between scenarios. Handing Seoni a scroll or wand to use on you as a Fighter could be very useful as well.

5/5 5/55/55/5

Players with the feat might want to chase off the 6th player then.

Liberty's Edge 4/5 5/5

And if there are multiple PCs with Leadership?

(Sorry, I just can't see this working.)

4/5 5/55/55/55/5 **** Regional Venture-Coordinator, Central Europe

And what happens if there are 5 Players and all have Leadership? Does that mean a table with 5 PCs and 5 cohorts? Or is only player allowed to use its cohort? And how does it get decided which player?

I am sorry, but Leadership is something rarely used in home campaigns, and IMO it should not be allowed in Organized Play in any way.

Silver Crusade Venture-Agent, Florida–Altamonte Springs

Nils Janson wrote:

And what happens if there are 5 Players and all have Leadership? Does that mean a table with 5 PCs and 5 cohorts? Or is only player allowed to use its cohort? And how does it get decided which player?

I am sorry, but Leadership is something rarely used in home campaigns, and IMO it should not be allowed in Organized Play in any way.

What happens is very long combats going into adventures where the combats get longer anyway...

1/5

Starglim wrote:
It wouldn't scale to higher levels (unless it did: when your character reaches 7th level you may use the 4th level version of the follower, at 12th level advance it to 7th level).

That was my thinking. Basically, you may use the highest level pregen that your leadership score allows for.

1/5

Nils Janson wrote:

And what happens if there are 5 Players and all have Leadership? Does that mean a table with 5 PCs and 5 cohorts? Or is only player allowed to use its cohort? And how does it get decided which player?

d

Good question. My off the cuff answer is that you allow up to the table maximum. If that puts the table over six then none of the cohorts get to go. Instead, they all go as a group to get coffee for the venture captain.

Silver Crusade 5/5 5/55/5 **** Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria

Leadership ( I dare the THE most banned feat in home campaigns) is as written just way to good, for the cost of a feat getting a familiar type creature is really as much as you can reasonably expect.

We already have rules concerning combat pets etc. with this a character could have an eidolon, summons and a cohort. That takes up way to much time.

The Leadership feat also has a couple of factors that would be pretty hard to track in an organized play campaign.

Leadership as written kinda expects you to outfit your cohort, that would be pretty much impossible if you use the pregens.

Depending on your level, another player in the very same scenario might actually be playing one of those pregens (if not the same one), that would marginalize that character even more.

And one of the bigger reasons, you are actually a kind of follower yourself, you are a Pathfinder agent, and your agency is quite limited, you don't have a base of operations, the society does.

No sorry, but this really doesn't work either from a narrative point of view, or from a mechanics based approach. Leadership is just way to cheap and even if you were to allow that feat, the cohort is a very special Npc, the GM has a lot of control over it... which would lead to mountains of table variation, especially once the GMs start checking your previous chronicle sheets for ways to reduce your fame.....

I seriously doubt, that the campaign leadership would force this kind of headache on themselves (and I am pretty sure that plenty of GMs would complain).

Dark Archive 5/5 5/55/5 ** Venture-Captain, Germany—Rhein Main South

I personally like this feat very much in homegames BUT there is no way this feat could be used in Pfs.
First there are already enough Characters on the PCs side that the opposition is outnumbered nearly every time bevore you add in Animal Companions Eidolons or the army of summonings.
Second you cant use the feat if everyone gets the cohort because this would double the number of PCs (and believe me if this feat si allowed nearly everyone will take it.
Third this feat requires very much bookkeeping and this is something i (as a GM) hope to never happen because we have enough bookkeeping in Pfs already.
So as much as i like this feat (and one of the few reasons not to dump charisma) i can not see one Reason to allow it in Pfs. There are soem Options that are banned I would like so see in the campain sometimes but leadership is none of them.

Shadow Lodge 4/5 5/5 RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 8

2 people marked this as a favorite.

Original idea OP! I'll definitely be sniping this as an option for homebrews in the future. Makes thatNPC Codex even juicer.

Lantern Lodge 3/5

Andrew Shumate wrote:
There's absolutely no reason to let somebody add a PC-strength entity to the board for a mere feat.

In my experience, those pregens are nowhere near PC strength. Not even in the same universe. YMMV.

Silver Crusade 5/5 5/55/5 **** Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria

Lormyr wrote:
Andrew Shumate wrote:
There's absolutely no reason to let somebody add a PC-strength entity to the board for a mere feat.
In my experience, those pregens are nowhere near PC strength. Not even in the same universe. YMMV.

Take a look at the ACG pregens, they are better than a number of badly optimized characters, I have seen played.

4/5 *

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Here's the essence: PFS is for players. Every NPC at the table takes away from the people playing the game. Yes, I know the person who has the NPCs would have fun, but if they want to play a solo game, they don't need PFS to do it.

It really doesn't work for Organized Play.

Shadow Lodge 3/5

Even with those restrictions, you'd likely find every second player would take the feat.

5/5 5/55/5 ** Venture-Captain, Germany—Hamburg

First problem I see there is "you may only bring your follower along if the table isn't full". Either the player playing the character with Leadership will want to chase off the 6th player, or that player will have one sompletely useless feat for that scenario.

Also, as already mentioned, players taking Leadership would flood the table with indivisuals who all get to act during combat. Oh, and NPCs get to act ouside of combat as well because they can act and some of them have a lot of social skills trained.

Sebastian Hirsch wrote:
And one of the bigger reasons, you are actually a kind of follower yourself, you are a Pathfinder agent, and your agency is quite limited, you don't have a base of operations, the society does.

That's actually not a good point. PCs can have followers, but only those from the Field Guide, who don't have a character sheet but obly grant a certain bonus. But they're followers nontheless. Second, PCs can have a base of operations. They can own a farmstead, an Absalom Townhouse, a ship, a shop, or even a private island.

An idea that comes to mind could be this:

Leadership

Choose a character class you don't have levels in. You get one class ability available to characters of that class with a class level equal to your total character level -2. Your effective class level for the purpose of using that class ability is your total character level -2. If you ever gain levels in that class, you must choose a new class and class ability for this feat.
In addition, choose one skill you have ranks in. You get a +2 bonus on skill checks with that chosen skill.

(This basically represents an NPC using one of his class abilities and aiding the PC with one skill, but otherwise being non-existent.)

Note: I'm not saying that should be considered in any way. It's just a wild idea that just popped out of my mind, based on a home game I run myself. One of the characters in that game has the Leadership feat, and since I'm just too lazy to keep record of an actual character sheet for that NPC, I just have him use his most important class ability on the PC's turn.

Silver Crusade 5/5 5/55/5 **** Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria

Andreas Forster wrote:


Sebastian Hirsch wrote:
And one of the bigger reasons, you are actually a kind of follower yourself, you are a Pathfinder agent, and your agency is quite limited, you don't have a base of operations, the society does.

That's actually not a good point. PCs can have followers, but only those from the Field Guide, who don't have a character sheet but obly grant a certain bonus. But they're followers nontheless. Second, PCs can have a base of operations. They can own a farmstead, an Absalom Townhouse, a ship, a shop, or even a private island.

Fair enough, I just though that Pathfinders lack the agency required of a leader, after all they player characters are basically soldiers and experts in something like a military organisation.

They seem to lack any real choice, in the kind of missions they receive (of course they have a element of choice within those missions).

Of course since the leadership has a much worse chance to be introduces into the campaign, than all the previously banned options...

Andreas Forster wrote:


An idea that comes to mind could be this:

Leadership

Choose a character class you don't have levels in. You get one class ability available to characters of that class with a class level equal to your total character level -2. Your effective class level for the purpose of using that class ability is your total character level -2. If you ever gain levels in that class, you must choose a new class and class ability for this feat.
In addition, choose one skill you have ranks in. You get a +2 bonus on skill checks with that chosen skill.

(This basically represents an NPC using one of his class abilities and aiding the PC with one skill, but otherwise being non-existent.)

Note: I'm not saying that should be considered in any way. It's just a wild idea that just popped out of my mind, based on a home game I run myself. One of the characters in that game has the Leadership feat, and since I'm just too lazy to keep record of an actual character...

Seems like a nightmare to balance, but you could base it on the eldrtich heritage line of feats. Some class features like "spellscasting" and sneak attack would be almost impossible to balance, especially considering that sneak attack generally stacks and we have plenty of classes with that particular class feature.

1/5

Avatar-1 wrote:
Even with those restrictions, you'd likely find every second player would take the feat.

Living Arcanis allowed the feat. In the 4 or 5 years it was available to PCs I only saw 2 people take it.

LA also had the advantage that if your PC died, you could continue playing the cohort as a full PC at whatever level the cohort was.

Still,only saw it twice.

Silver Crusade 5/5 5/55/5 **** Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria

The Terrible Zodin wrote:
Avatar-1 wrote:
Even with those restrictions, you'd likely find every second player would take the feat.

Living Arcanis allowed the feat. In the 4 or 5 years it was available to PCs I only saw 2 people take it.

LA also had the advantage that if your PC died, you could continue playing the cohort as a full PC at whatever level the cohort was.

Still,only saw it twice.

Without doing more research on that campaign, other than what wikipedia has, it seems like the campaign had a narrative focus, in PFS we already have players/classes that tend to break scenarios, this option might broaden the gap between the various levels of system mastery.

That said, assuming the would decide to test your option, I would assume that the pregen would count as a player when it comes to things like 4 player adjustments. Other players (especially those playing pregens with the same level as your cohort) might not appreciate you increasing the difficulty of the scenario.

Shadow Lodge *

Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

I think this is a really clever idea. I don't think it would be game breaking at all, given the low level of the cohort relative to the main player. (A level 4 tagging along in a 7-11 -- HAHAHAHA!)

But I don't think it will ever happen, and I think that the amount of energy that would be required by campaign leadership to make it happen would be better spent elsewhere.

Shadow Lodge 4/5

If I recall correctly, Living Greyhawk allowed leadership. Cohorts took up a character slot at the table and were factored in to the APL. Preference was given to real players of course, so they couldn't be used at a full table.

Silver Crusade 4/5

1 person marked this as a favorite.

If leadership were made legal, I would expect to see something along these lines.

A cohort is considered an animal companion for the purposes of counting combat and noncombat animals.

Followers are considered noncombat animals, and follow the same restrictions.

A characters leadership score is not modified by the leader's reputation (or the two tables that follow it if they don't count as part of the leader's reputation calculation). The leadership score can still be modified by other sources, such as the battle herald's improved leadership class feature.

Your cohort is not a permanent companion, but instead chosen at the start of a scenario. The cohort is chosen from the NPC Codex from the NPC classes chapter with a character level equal to or lower than your leadership score (to a maximum of your class level -2).

Followers are chosen from the same selection, but are permanent additions and not chosen at the start of a scenario.

A cohort comes with the gear listed in their entry, except they always have 0 gold (and 0 platinum, silver and copper for clarification), and always carry a Wayfinder. The gear they come with cannot be sold. They may be given gear at the start of, or during a scenario, which is returned to the player at the end (the same as if an item was leant to another player).

The selected cohorts alignment is changed to match your own, and is considered to be a member of the Pathfinder Society and also shares your faction. A cohort is controlled by the player (GMs have enough to do).

And for some possible extra disincentive...
Should a cohort die during the course of a scenario and not be brought back to life, they PCs reputation is damaged. Any prestige points awarded to that player at the end of the scenario are reduced by one.

And a couple of examples of some possible variations to the above for a little fun.
A 9th level lawful good divine caster with a lawful good deity and a leadership score of 7 or higher may enlist the aid of a Hound Arhcon for a scenario at the cost of 1 prestige point.

A 10th level chaotic good female human, half-elf or elf with a leadership score of 8 or higher may enlist the aid of a Unicorn for a scenario at the cost of 1 prestige point.

Shadow Lodge 4/5

I agree, this is a pretty crazy idea.

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** RPG Superstar 2014 Top 32

I don't think that Leadership is appropriate for this campaign. We already have trouble balancing scenarios due to the wide range of potential characters - making a party even better by throwing random Kyras into it is going to make things even worse in that regard. There are plenty of PC options out there - more than the vast majority of home games that I've played or ran - there's no need to focus on adding this one too.

Dark Archive 3/5 **

3 people marked this as a favorite.

Having watched people use Leadership to create "my personal buff machine" in previous OP campaigns and actively discourage another player from sitting at the table so they could have their dedicated buff machine just no. Please no.

As everyone has pointed out, there are a half dozen very easy ways to get companions that are balanced(ish) into one's class. Creating a whole new rules set to make Leadership "friendlier for OP" is also not really a good use of the limited resources Pathfinder Society has.

I'd rather see that time invested in con/holiday boons, faction cards, and scenarios.

Scarab Sages 5/5 5/5 *** Venture-Captain, Washington—Spokane

The only problem I see with this possibility is:

* you may only bring your follower along if the table isn't full

I can foresee too many problems at the table if the Leadership feat is allowed with the restrictions as stated in the original post.

First and foremost, what bdk86 states on the active discouragement of another player to the table so they can have their cohort. Another along those same lines is priority given to real players will only encourage those who want to play with a specific group of people to increase the discouragement of another player to join the table.
With animal companions, mounts, summons, and eidelons; adding cohorts to the mix will only increase the chaos for the GM but has the potential to take the fun away from some of the other players. Balance issues...do I need to continue?

Please, for the love of the gods, I would rather see more time invested into other things to improve the campaign than make Leadership work.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

You're definitely right in the "crazy idea" department.

Lantern Lodge 5/5

I know this is a bad idea, because the only reason I can possibly contemplate not taking this version of Leadership as a feat is so I can say "I DO have one character that doesn't have it" when I'm accused of having it on every one of my characters.

BYOB, bring your own bard? Yes, please.

Sovereign Court 1/5

bdk86 wrote:

just no. Please no.

very this

Shadow Lodge 4/5 Venture-Lieutenant, Florida—Jacksonville

Me? I'd like to see a way to get more 'vanity followers'. More table clutter doesn't appeal to me. I've known the horror of a two summoner table..

2/5 5/5 *

The only way I could see leadership being allowed in PFS is if it was completely overhauled in ways that integrate with the scenarios and provide numerous but very circumstantial bonuses. If I were a dev (which my gaming groups are all breathing a huge sigh of relief that I am not) I would probably change leadership to improve the effectiveness and morale of friendly NPCs, specifically those who are following the party. Even outside of PFS I'm very hesitant to allow things that turn an RPG into an RTS. Here's my stab at what i would change leadership into:

Leadership: Prerequisite Character level 7

Any NPCs following the party with level less than or equal to your level + Cha mod get bonuses as though affected by the Inspire Greatness bardic performance as long as they can hear or see you. Only 1 NPC may be affected by this bonus at a time, and this may not include pregenerated characters added to increase the party to its appropriate minimum size. NPCs who would be considered friendly towards you are always considered to be helpful towards you instead.

Example:
Horn of Aroden

When commanding an army, your leadership score increases by 3 (Per the mass combat rules).

Example:
Assault on the wound

You may use diplomacy as a day job.

4/5 5/5 Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Tampere

Where would this new version of Leadership be published?

If it's online in the FAQs or Additional Resources, you know not all people will read those. They'll just see Leadership listed as legal and run it the way it's run in home campaigns, and then either be disappointed or throw fits when they find out the truth. So would this get published in the Guide or something, to make sure it reaches the largest possible audience (although we all know not all players read the Guide despite it being mandatory)?

Liberty's Edge 4/5 5/5

Rei wrote:

Where would this new version of Leadership be published?

If it's online in the FAQs or Additional Resources, you know not all people will read those. They'll just see Leadership listed as legal and run it the way it's run in home campaigns, and then either be disappointed or throw fits when they find out the truth. So would this get published in the Guide or something, to make sure it reaches the largest possible audience (although we all know not all players read the Guide despite it being mandatory)?

In the highly unlikely event of this going ahead, I imagine it wouldn't be called 'Leadership' (to avoid confusion) and it would be published in a future PFS-related (or cohort/teamwork-related) book in the Player Companion line, then included in Additional Resources as normal.

4/5 5/5 Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Tampere

Paz wrote:
Rei wrote:

Where would this new version of Leadership be published?

If it's online in the FAQs or Additional Resources, you know not all people will read those. They'll just see Leadership listed as legal and run it the way it's run in home campaigns, and then either be disappointed or throw fits when they find out the truth. So would this get published in the Guide or something, to make sure it reaches the largest possible audience (although we all know not all players read the Guide despite it being mandatory)?

In the highly unlikely event of this going ahead, I imagine it wouldn't be called 'Leadership' (to avoid confusion) and it would be published in a future PFS-related (or cohort/teamwork-related) book in the Player Companion line, then included in Additional Resources as normal.

So technically speaking, even then Leadership wouldn't be legal. ;P

(Disclaimer: I do not support the idea of legalizing Leadership. I'm just pointing out things.)

Community / Forums / Organized Play / Pathfinder Society / crazy idea about Leadership feat in PFS All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Pathfinder Society