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Since leadership made it into GM Core, I was hoping it would be fixed to provide a little more fun, with a nod towards what was intended when first created. It was supposed to provide an option for gathering useful allies and creating a PC’s organization. Although it still operates to make an organization, that becomes more a lesson in spreadsheet tedium to document all the lower-level noncombatant NPCs—not what most people want to do in their RPGs. These NPCs, even the higher-level lieutenants, are not strong enough to help the PCs in combat. I am guessing the subsystem was designed to get away from players taking the 1st edition leadership feat so they have an army of followers, thereby unbalancing game play in combat, or allowing an army of scroll and potion creators. However, I think it is possible to have both these things under the subsystem.
I want to see what people’s experience with the leadership subsystem has been. Do you think it needs to be changed or does it work for the needs of your group? How have you used leadership in your game? Do you have ideas of how it should be used? How can it be altered to be more interesting?
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It's a good way to crew a ship or infiltrate a community or event.
It's a good way to crew a ship or infiltrate a community or event.
Yes, that's a very good use of a spreadsheet of NPCs from your organization. That might breathe more details of life into the list of characters, so for certain scenarios or situations that would work. However, that still relegates your noncombatant NPCs to the background.
That being said, those are opportunities I'll look for regarding my one player's organization. Anything to breathe more life into the organization!
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I don't want such a feat back myself. Most of this can be handled with roleplaying rather than a feat adding numbers that will never lead to a balanced feat, especially if everyone in the group takes the feat. I don't really enjoy as a DM letting one player take something other players can't have because someone already took it. Better to leave such feats in the past due to the problems such feats create and let a player RP henchmen with a DM adding them in if they feel they can handle it.
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The base leadership system are purely narrative guidelines, not hard and fast mechanical rules. All it does is give you a representation of how big the PCs can club might be at a baseline. They are meant to be a back drop and way to introduce plot hooks. This is explicitly said at the tail end of the system as well. You don't need to follow them exactly if they don't suit your purposes. Paizo didn't in the one published adventure I saw use them.
If what you're looking for isn't a narrative backdrop that only comes up during downtime, but instead an NPC who helps during combat, then just think through what that means for balance and story. There's not hard and fast rules around this because there are too many variables. It isn't a simple as setting a certain level gap between the PCs and the NPC. An NPC built like a barbarian three levels below the party will not land hits against an enemy three levels above the party. But if they are built like a bard, their courageous anthem or dirge of doom is equally effective regardless of relative level.
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You don't need to follow them exactly if they don't suit your purposes. Paizo didn't in the one published adventure I saw use them.
If you're talking Quest For the Frozen Flame then that was a REALLY bad and ham handed attempt to force in a subsystem that didn't apply at all.
Primarily because the PCs were NOT in a leadership position, at least not for the first 2 books (haven't made it to the third yet). And PC levels were NOT what was causing the Following to shrink and grow.
It was an incredibly silly thing for Paizo to put into the AP. Totally ignored in the game I'm playing, totally ignored in the game I'm running.
PC levels doesn't have anything to do with leadership. The subsystem suggests the organization keep pace with PC levels, but explicitly calls out that that's just a suggestion.
As someone whose run the entire AP, I thought leadership applied just fine in Frozen Flame. Fundamentally as steelhead mentioned, the subsystem is just an org chart you use to track anybody the party recruits and that's all you need for Frozen Flame. The issue is more that leadership is a boring system.
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Fundamentally as steelhead mentioned, the subsystem is just an org chart you use to track anybody the party recruits and that's all you need for Frozen Flame. The issue is more that leadership is a boring system.
I wrote a longer reply and then realized that we're largely in agreement. I'd add "useless and misapplied" to "boring" and "just an org chart ... use to track".
The IDEA that it may be interesting to grow the following and keep track of who is recruited is a fine idea. But that doesn't need a system to do and the leadership system is a poor fit if you DO want a system.
But for some reason you're NOT tracking the Following but instead tracking the number of people personally loyal to the PCs and for some reason there are 10-13 people loyal to the 1st level PCs when the AP begins, growing to 28-36 by the end of the first book. I guess you're SO impressive that people have lost their loyalty to their House and the Following and instead become personal groupies because <Reasons> ??????
I wouldn't so much say it's a bad fit as an unnecessary one. The "rules" are so vague and flexible they can be used pretty much how however you want. I don't think they added much to Frozen Flame, but I only finished book 1 so far. The hexploration felt more like a bad fit; that felt actively detrimental in book 1.
My experience with the leadership subsystem was as a GM encouraging a PC to gather an organization of followers in Extinction Curse. The followers provide a nice information-gathering network but the subsystem is rather boring. The story aspect of it is fun as the bard of the circus has gathered a group of people (including a few in the circus and many outside of it) who align with his religious ideology — the monkey god of Vudra. There hasn’t been any opportunity to highlight the organization yet, except to provide a contact for buying a few rare items in Absalom. I’m trying to figure out other ways to use leadership, hence this thread. Have any people used it outside APs in their home games?
The leadership subsystem itself is really just some guidance on how big an organization should be and what level its members are typically going to be. It's not really doing much else out of the box, at least not the version in GM Core.
The thing is that yeah, they're not going to help you in combat. They're not really intended to. The PCs are special, they're not the average people walking around. Especially once you get past level 10, there just aren't many people of that power in Golarian. Amassing a bunch of followers of similar power would narratively just not make a ton of sense.
One thing I don't like about it is that it assumes your organization only attracts people with some levels once it gets big, which seems off to me. There's no real reason why the first person you recruit couldn't be level 3 if the circumstances warrant it... and while the system does mention you can do that, as soon as you do half the table is basically already irrelevant.
This isn't something I don't get much use out of because of that. It doesn't come up in a lot of campaigns, and when it does, aside from some general guidance on potential size numbers and such, I don't really need anything here to do what I want and will not really follow it strictly anyway.
As for the old 3.5 style leadership feat... that was busted as hell and was among the most widely banned feats in the game. If you could take it, it was very rarely not the best option.
For those interested in a more robust model for leadership, you can check out Blades on the Dark. I'm not sure how to translate it to Pathfinder, but it's a nice balance point between codified mechanics and narrative flexibility.
Another idea I've toyed around with is having a campaign where growing and taking care of your organization or community is the only way to get XP.
I was also thinking about how troops as minions for PCs would work. Probably not very well since they clog up the battlefield so much.
The base leadership system are purely narrative guidelines, not hard and fast mechanical rules. All it does is give you a representation of how big the PCs can club might be at a baseline. If what you're looking for isn't a narrative backdrop that only comes up during downtime, but instead an NPC who helps during combat, then just think through what that means for balance and story. There's not hard and fast rules around this because there are too many variables.
But there are some rules about this. Your point about many variables - especially when NPCs are built as PCs - is certainly valid. However, Paizo has rules about NPCs in combat as allies of the characters, at least from the perspective of creatures. There's been a lot of complaints about the debuffed summoning in 2E, but that seems to set a reasonable baseline for allowing NPCs in combat. Then the question becomes, "how to make your followers viable without overwhelming the tactical grid?"
One thing that could work is essentially giving every player the Beastmaster (or Familiar Master) Archetype except instead of animal companions they're people. My party kidnapped a kobold at the end of the beginner's box and I made her into a reskinned cat companion (technically I gave them the choice of Trapmaster to represent her making traps for them or Beastmaster, but they chose her as a minion) and the player love her to bits. Just give them the respective Beastmaster feats on the backend and design all the minions yourself as they acquire them, let them swap out if there's more than 1 per player. Best not to let them take normal ACs though, or the maps will get packed.
This seems very promising and was along the lines of what I'd been thinking. However, I had thought the Reanimator or Undead Master archetype would work well for switching out or reskinning minions and making them living NPCs from the leader's organization. Interestingly, the undead master draws on feats from the Beastmaster archetype so that's a good indication that either using one of these or creating my own archetype might work. The upcoming Commander multiclass dedication could have some interesting ideas for poaching as well.
is there a larger scale battle subsystem?
Doesnt have to even be a full scale war battle but could be a way of running a scene for each party member and a band of NPCs they recruited.
A warband subsystem like that could work off of the hexploration rules as a base for movement of a warband and visability but use specific subsystem rules for resolving checks and making progress. i could see warfare lore, survival, RK, eye for numbers coming to play in this kind of subsystem.
Maybe use the culmulative HP of the player and NPCs as the warband HP.
Give some warband spells for each tradition that are more like rituals geared for either long distance magic or warband wide buffs and debuffs and make success of the ritual tied to the four tradition based skills arcana occult nature and religion.
This could be pretty cool to run.