Prestige Class - Noble Scion

[Evan Riggs]

lvl 2
Greater Leadership (Ex)
At 2nd level, a noble scion gains the Leadership feat as a bonus feat. He can recruit a cohort up to one level lower than himself. At 10th level, he can recruit a cohort of the same level as himself.

How many cohorts does the PC get.

My player believes thanks to an email between himself and Jacobs, that he can have 3 cohorts.

take the leadership feat is granted the leadership feat and the servant gained later on at 9th or 10th.

How many actual cohorts are gained via this prestige alone and can the player still take the leadership feat?

[dragonhunterq]

You can't take a feat more than once without a specific ability allowing you to (usually in the 'special' line of the feat itself).

This ability modifies the maximum level of your cohort (level -1 then equal level) it doesn't grant you additional cohorts. Nothing in the ability modifies the core leadership rules limiting you to 'a cohort'.

That said a link to the conversation would be helpful.

[CWheezy]

Noble scion gets infinite cohorts.

What if your cohort was also a noble scion

[Deighton Thrane]

Was just about to say, sounds like someone's trying the infinite minions trick.

[Andre Roy]

It is indeed 1 cohort that is gained by leadership. However you can have multiple (and weaker) followers...which might be what the player is thinking about.

[David knott 242]

The Noble Scion prestige class does enable you to gain the Leadership feat more than once (the first time by normal level advancement or by conversion of a previous feat such as Torchbearer, the second as a bonus feat from the prestige class), but normally you gain no benefit from having a feat more than once (with exceptions being called out in the feat text).

This is exactly the same as a Ranger selecting the Endurance feat before 9th level and then gaining it as a bonus feat at 9th level.

In either case, you have a redundant feat that gives you no benefit and will want to retrain one instance of that feat (the one you selected voluntarily) for a feat you can actually benefit from.

In theory, you could gain an infinite chain of cohorts at level 15+ provided that they are all 10th level Noble Scions, but what is the point of accumulating so many useless idle rich types?

[Zahir ibn Mahmoud ibn Jothan]

The rules are pretty clear on this:

PRD wrote:

If a character has the same feat more than once, its benefits do not stack unless indicated otherwise in the description.

Leadership provides no such caveat in its description, so you can't gain two cohorts from having it twice.

[Davor]

He gains one cohort, and only 1. The cohort can be of a higher level at 2nd level Noble Scion, and this benefit increases at 10th level.

That's it.