crafting is busted cohorts don't change that the only thing they do is give martials equivalent access to crafting as a caster.
Crafter cohorts also free up feats (and time) for casters.
Use Ultimate Charisma from Everyman Gaming (or the Leadership Handbook, if you want the book completely focussed on leadership alone).
The guidance given is simply unparalleled when it comes to making leadership effective, yet balanced, and the trick is to make the cohort(s) a tool for the GM to enrich the roleplaying aspects of the game.
Simply put, the GM and the player(s) should work together to build cohorts, with ultimate authority lying with the GM.
A player can go for a crafter, but if that crafting wizard cohort has the adventuring bug, he's going to follow along on adventures, whether the player wants him to or not. Or if the crafting wizard gets a message from his family and has to return home across 500 miles of treacherous wilderness (alone or with the party accompanying him...). Or if that crafting wizard has a gambling problem and wastes all of the money the PC gives him to craft items on the gee-gees. Or if that crafting wizard is beholden to a guild and must spend a certain amount of time every month on guild activities. Or if that crafting wizard is a prince and gets sent by the queen off as an ambassador/hostage to a rival nation.
In other words, the most boring/pointless/useless cohort is "Wizardo, the crafter" who does nothing but sit at home doing what the player wants. Far better to have "Ellerand, third prince of the Realm, wizard, gambler, frequenter of brothels, who is the target of an assassination contract".
|
Playing a very strange Pathfinder game online now, it being like an MMORPG rather that an RPG of one single party.
I was hoping to introduce leadership into the game somehow, possibly using the followers as castle defenders when one group attacks another's castle. But we all know how broken it is. I was hoping that perhaps someone knows of a changed version of Leadership we can use instead.
Or perhaps just general suggestions of how to handle it (without just saying no).
I'd say that recruiting followers to defend a castle is precisely what the current Leadership feat is good at and that you would be using it as intended.