I don't think they should be restricted in general. Animal companions require handle animal checks to control, summons are short lived, cohorts, followers and eidolons are actual NPCs in my games, so mistreating them makes them more difficult to deal with.
Action economy is a powerful tool, but it's also a tool the GM can use without limits by adding more enemies to an encounter.
In small groups against small groups, a sidekick is great, but so are mercenaries, they are just paid rather than a class ability or feat, but they are well within an adventurer's budget.
the best way to look at cohorts is work out something with the player. at the end of the day its an npc, it has as much power as you want it it have. wether they should be banned or not ithink comes down to the ability of the player to micromaage the cohort efficiently.
I don't allow Leadership unless I feel like running it. A DM should be able to exclude it.
I don't see a druid's animal companion or a summoner's eidolon as a problem.
If a DM can't handle something or doesn't want to deal with it, he should be able to exclude it. A DM should set the campaign up for success and part of that is making sure he is running a party he can handle.
My gm is currently allowing summoner for the first and final (so he claims) time. He doesn't feel that every way in which action economy is increased is an abuse he in fact loves conjurers. He simply finds them to be too powerful for one person to have full control over and much of the custimization available can get ridiculous. Also, apparently its a common banned class, so he says at least.
Cohorts - I don't think Leadership is a feat which is really part of the "game balance" equation. It is obviously more powerful than other options since you get an extra character who at least presumably will cooperate with your PC. This can have a place in games where there aren't enough PCs or in those where the party is missing some specific and needed abilities such as healing. One game I run has two cohorts, but I as the GM designed them myself. They're good little buffers and healers but don't have a lot of big offensive powers. Remember that designing the cohort is the GM's right and privilege should he or she feel so inclined. Anyhow, whether or not Leadership makes sense varies game to game.
Followers - I can't see why followers would cause any problems. In fact, I've often wished there was a feat like Leadership which grants lots of followers but no cohorts and counts as Leadership when qualifying for other feats and abilities. My Kingmaker PC might take such a feat.
Pets (animal companion, mount) - These creatures are often combat capable. They're also essential parts of some classes. A standard Cavalier should really have a mount, after all.
Critters (Summon Monster and Nature's Ally) - Besides bringing a lot of combat power to the table these spells can clog the map with so many critters that the PCs and monsters can hardly move. It can also make the summoning PC's turn take a very long time. I think a good compromise could be to limit the caster to 1 active spell of this type at any time.
Eidolons - Some GMs feel like eidolons are too strong. I don't think they're generally that much worse than a fully tricked out big cat animal companion with a little bit of armor. Opinions will assuredly vary though.
Well summoners and the leadership feat are often banned.
About the summon monster and summon nature's ally, well you could always ban them from your game, but i find them very good for NPC use as well so i am not sure i would ban them any time soon.
Summoning, leadership, roleplaying and paying my way into minions and adventure-support, as well as excessive use of planar binding and planar ally, are my single favorite ways to play wizards, who happen to be my favorite class.
As such you'll find no non-biased answers from me on this topic :)
I think, and still do, that there is nothing wrong with bolstering the ranks of the normal 4-man adventuring group. Be it with an extra adventurer, or 75 level 1 acolytes, on a pilgrimage with their spiritual leader.
Then again, I'm the type of guy who would rather pay 20 mercenaries to attack an orc warcamp with me and my allies, using some of the wealth from our last adventure, than I'd willingly go along with the incredibly dangerous and heroic suicide-attack on the warchief and "hope the rest fight among themselves"-plan.
-Nearyn
Summoner's aren't the problem.
PLAYERS who spend hours deciding what their summoned minions are going to do, flipping through books finding stats, not understanding what Augment Summoning does, rolls each attack/damage individually and not understanding Eidolon build rules is the problem.
Summoner's aren't the problem.
PLAYERS who spend hours deciding what their summoned minions are going to do, flipping through books finding stats, not understanding what Augment Summoning does, rolls each attack/damage individually and not understanding Eidolon build rules is the problem.
Even if the eidolon is build correctly and the player doesn't take very long to decide what to do they can be a pain in the backside for other players because they have too many actions.
On leadership: I would restrict the feat to classes without companion/familiar/eidolon and further to those with a maximum of 4th level casting.
I played a game once with 6 players. One was a master summoner with leadership (the cohort was a cavalier on a riding dog). So in the end it sometimes was the summoner, the eidolon, the summoned creatures, the cohort and the riding dog. Then the other 5 players got their turns (one had leadership, too). So at some times we had 11 combatants action on our side alone. Thankfully the summoner later redconned the leadership feat away.
Leadership is fine provided that the GM understands that that feat doesn't conjure an army or even a cohort. The player merely gains the option of gaining those things.
Action economy IS the most powerful thing in the game, along with ways to circunvent WBL.
The only things I ban/change from a balance point of view, is Leadership feat and 1/2 cost to craft items. I think other pets/companions are also overpowered in the current incarnation of the rules, but I leave them because of flavor and tradition (and because some classes can't be played without them, like summoner)
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Summoners are a problem on several levels; and summons simply take too much time from the game (in addition to being versitile and powerful). So yes, I do believe they should be restricted; and it's been a bad PFS trend to have all of these ways to circumvent the "1 round casting time" on these spells.
For Leadership I've considered limiting the cohort to the PC's level -4 instead of -2. My only concern is that it might make the cohort too fragile to survive even incidental damage from AoEs etc. On the other hand, I'd probably bump the followers up in number and level so that a PC who wants a crew for a ship or something like that can achieve it through Leadership.
@gustavo iglesias - Would you be satisfied if crafting magic items cost 75% as much as buying them instead of 50%?
@gustavo iglesias - Would you be satisfied if crafting magic items cost 75% as much as buying them instead of 50%?
In my game, I made it 100%. Players still took it, because being able to build your own items instead of being dependant of what's available in towns (with the regular purchase limits) is powerful enough. Being able to build custom items (like, say, a cloak of displacement that also work as a cloak of resistance) is enough incentive to spend a feat on it.
As a player, I encouraged our current GM to do it as well, and I took it with my Sorcerer even without the discount. I'm even thinking to take it with my monk (who has Caster Level because of Qinggong archetype), go figure.
Craft Woundrous item *is* the most powerful feat in the game, and it *is* the feat that produce a higher unbalance. Just build a 10th level character, with normal Wealth By Level. Then build the same 10th level character, but pay half cost for his woundrous items, with the same normal Wealth by level. Look at his new AC, attack, saving throws, and damage. It's not hard to find that you now have like 2-3 points extra in each and maybe some extra hit points too. Now imagine a feat called "I'm overpowered", who gives you +2 to AC, hit, damage, and saving throws. That's what Craft Woundrous items do if you allow 50% discount.
So how can players set up their own dojo/village/school/thieves guild? Not to mention it implies everyones selling items at cost and makes item creation feats largely worthless as you may as well just roleplay the effort of buying a particular item.Action economy IS the most powerful thing in the game, along with ways to circunvent WBL.
The only things I ban/change from a balance point of view, is Leadership feat and 1/2 cost to craft items. I think other pets/companions are also overpowered in the current incarnation of the rules, but I leave them because of flavor and tradition (and because some classes can't be played without them, like summoner)
In my own games, when I GM, I give them the followers in the Leadership feat (actually better, since I give them CR1 followers instead of level 1 followers. That's a Level 3 NPC class like warrior or expert, or a level 2 class like fighter or rogue). Several players took it in my last campaign (evil campaign Way of the Wicked) to build assassins guilds, and evil acolytes to do villain stuff. Even without the cohort to take to battle, or the cohort to spend feats to craft magic stuff for cheap, they found the feat worth taken.
As I said in a post later (didn't read yours before I wrote mine), my players still take the crafting feats for the benefit of custom magic items and the benefit of being able to take items who are beyond the 12000-16000 range, which is the best you can buy in a given city, including metropolis. *I* take the feat for those benefits, even without the 50% discount when I play.
50% discount in magic items mean, easily, +2-3 points in everything. That's way too much for a feat. If Paizo would make a feat that reads "you get +2 to hit, damage, all saving throws and fly speed", nobody would think it's balanced. That's roughly what Craft Woundrous Item does.
In many games you can commission whatever items you want from NPC casters who apparently have nothing better to do all month than sit around enchanting items for the PCs. I might not object to a cost higher than 75% if the time to craft items and or the restrictions on crafting while adventuring were greatly reduced. I've never seen a GM offer enough downtime for Craft Wondrous Items to reach the levels you're talking about except in the early stages of the Kingmaker campaign. I guess we're getting way off topic here though.
@Liam Warner - You can hire or just associate with NPCs who aren't followers. I just feel like having a bunch of level 2-3 sailors and such loyal to you might be more fun. For the Mass Combat rules I could even imagine an extension to Leadership for PCs who want to recruit some sort of special force made up of units with PC classes (an army of Paladins, for instance)
In many games you can commission whatever items you want from NPC casters who apparently have nothing better to do all month than sit around enchanting items for the PCs. I might not object to a cost higher than 75% if the time to craft items and or the restrictions on crafting while adventuring were greatly reduced. I've never seen a GM offer enough downtime for Craft Wondrous Items to reach the levels you're talking about except in the early stages of the Kingmaker campaign. I guess we're getting way off topic here though
In my games you rarely see things like Casters who have nothing better to do than being your lackey. So it's valuable, in my campaigns at least. Also, time is not an issue for me. Many Adventure Paths have "clock races", but most of them have breaks between books. We almost never play the "from level 1 to 10 in 6 months of your character life" approach. You might not have every item in exactly the moment you want, but it's not hard to have a couple iddle months when you finish a "chapter" to spend that BBEG's treasure into magic items and then move to the next
Even 25% discount is too much for me. At level 12, you have 108.000gp as expected Wealth by Level. It's 26.000 spent in magic items. That gives you a lot more than any other feat, in my opinion. At level 20 it's an absurd +200k extra gold to spend in magic items
Everything depends no the GM. I am currently giving leadership for free, since I've only got 2 players in the game. Though it's only the cohort, not the followers.
I do ban summoners though, They are a complicated class, that many people makes mistakes with (both GMs & players). SO I'd rather not have the hastle.
My GM decided that it requires a certain amount of time to direct a summoned creature each round. For example, giving a command to one creature is a free action; two creatures is a swift action; three creatures is a move action; etc. You can still manage a lot of creatures but it might be all a PC does in a particular round.
It may well be table variance I've never been in a game with enough downtime to make more than one or two items and even those were honestly rare. Considering the sheer feat expense for a wizard to take item creation feats (unless your just buying one which to me brings it back to being a problem with players rather than feats) your seriously hurting your combat capability and personally I'd rather roleplay hunting up/commisioning the creation of an item I want or leaving it than spending 6-8 feats to build at full price and instead put those feats into other things.
Well, it might be table variance, but when we have needed to comission a magic item (for example, a type our caster can't do, like a ring), we spend *more* time hunting for it than we do with crafting.
Anyways, I'm not trying to convince you. It's my table, and I'm 110% convinced that there is no other feat more powerful than craft wondrous item. Not even close. And without the 50% discount, just the ability to build custom items and make whatever you want instead of buying what is available in the town with the rules, it's worth it. We always take it. With 50% it's worth it, and 440.000gp per character extra at level 20. Which is plain absurd.