Player's servants & households?

[Erakki]

Any hints & tips how to handle servants, personal guards and other benefits as rulers? It sounds logical that players have access for those as rulers of kingdom but how to keep this in control without breaking modules?

Like if players decide to take few servants and guards with them for exploring. How many of those they have? With what kind equipments? Do they have automatically horses to all those, etc?

One way to handle this would be to say that if they want to have anything at all they need to spend BP for all hiring of hirelings and their equipments, etc. With impact for unrest & loyalt by doing so.

However that sounds quite strange as clearly there is some people around as city guard and servants in castle, etc. And how to define town guard? How many there is? With what kind equipments? And so on... :)

I have been thinking that some % of total population would be in use of rulers and maybe size of kingdom somehow define "value" of equipments that they have access automatically... so any hints how you have been playing this part of game in your campaings?

[Magus Black]

Leadership is a good start for things like this although its not quite a perfect fix.

You could grant them one part of the Leadership feat (if they don’t already have it), gaining followers (who in this case are not 100% loyal: after all no need to make the Leadership feat obsolete) that fill the positions you mentioned. Though equipment is not really a problem unless your arming them with free magical gear, they would be assumed to have acquired their own or that you have purchased it for them (it should be free either way, since no starting gear is as expensive as house).

…But when you look at wealth by level for NPC’s if the NPC’s in question are level 2 then possessing Masterwork equipment should be fairly justified for it to be free, likewise NPC’s 3 and up could own cheap magic items (most likely weapons or armor), and the higher their level the stronger they get.

Your Mileage May Vary However

[sirmattdusty]

Magus Black wrote:

Leadership is a good start for things like this although its not quite a perfect fix.

You could grant them one part of the Leadership feat (if they don’t already have it), gaining followers (who in this case are not 100% loyal: after all no need to make the Leadership feat obsolete) that fill the positions you mentioned. Though equipment is not really a problem unless your arming them with free magical gear, they would be assumed to have acquired their own or that you have purchased it for them (it should be free either way, since no starting gear is as expensive as house).

…But when you look at wealth by level for NPC’s if the NPC’s in question are level 2 then possessing Masterwork equipment should be fairly justified for it to be free, likewise NPC’s 3 and up could own cheap magic items (most likely weapons or armor), and the higher their level the stronger they get.

Your Mileage May Vary However

This is exactly how my group handles this. Basically a free modified version of the Leadership feat. If they want the cohort, they take the Leadership feat.

[Erakki]

Yes, this could work especially if you use Kingdom size as modifier to simulate impact from size of Kingdom.

I was also thinking approach to say that x% (x = number of cities) of population is in use of rulers as they want. This could provide them something like 20-40 people to use as civil servants or spies etc.

And if they want more servants then they can always increase % by adding more BP for this... or building more cities :)