Just got back from a very short run, had a shower, and now I’m writing up stuff I talked about on the Discord channel for our multi-referee campaign.
I’m going to talk about the followers of your player characters: retainers, hirelings, porters, mounts and pets. They all come along on adventure, unlike soldiers or mercenaries. Those only get used in mass combat.
The number of followers for your player character is limited: 4 + your charisma bonus (1–7).
Mounts (like horses) and pets (like war dogs) also count as followers. Unlike people they don’t expect payment, they don’t gain experience points, and they can’t use tactics.
Retainers are regular player characters: fighters, magic users, thieves, elves, dwarves, and halflings. When they get hired, they are first level characters.
Hirelings are thugs, gangsters, militia men, men-at-arms, body guards and other people not averse to using violence. They are “normal humans”, that is: they have no level. They have 1d4 hit points and THAC0 20.
Porters are torch bearers, water bearers, litter bearers, shield bearers, and so on. They carry your stuff but they don’t fight. They are also “normal humans” – they have no level and 1d4 hit points.
Retainers, hirelings and porters each gets a share of the experience points for killing monsters. If your player character, their retainer, their hireling and their porter go into the dungeon and kill an ogre, this earns them 400 xp divided into four equal shares. As hirelings and porters don’t gain levels, those experience points are lost. Your player character and their retainer get 100 xp each.
Retainers get half a share of the treasure gained; hirelings fight for you and get 1 gold per day; porters get 5 silver per day and don’t fight for you. If the same party finds 300 gold pieces of treasure, this is divided into one and a half shares. Your player character gets 200 gold pieces, your retainer gets 100 gold pieces, and you need to pay your hireling 1 gold piece and your porter 5 silver pieces (half a gold piece).
Retainers spend their money as quickly as possible, turning them into experience points. Since they get half a share, they generally have about half as many experience points as your player character. As experience point requirements double every level, that means they are generally one level below you.
Retainers and other player characters can accept gifts of gold to spend and turn into experience points. This is how you can lift other characters up. You can only accept gifts from people at your level or higher.
All your followers must be the same level or lower as your player character, unless we’re talking about a horse or a war dog (those having two hit dice). Thus, a first level player character can befriend kobolds, goblins, and orcs, but not hobgoblins, gnolls, bugbears or ogres.
Before going on an adventure, one of the player characters can spend 10 gold pieces for town criers and drinks in order to attract 1d6 candidates. For each candidate, roll a d12: 1 – fighter, 2 – magic user, 3 – thief, 4 – elf, 5 – halfling, 6 – dwarf, 7–9 – porter, 10–12 – hireling.
All of this is part of my house rules, Halberds and Helmets, except I now realize that I could use more precise language.
What I’m currently wondering is how to handle this in a multi-referee campaign. We are three referees, with one more working on an adventure of theirs, all running different parts: I’m running Stonehell, @phf is running Barrowmaze, @frotz is running the Flying Dagger Coast. Talking to them about this all helped me think it through because at first I was carrying “single-referee thinking” into a multi-referee setup: I kept thinking that every player only has a single “main” character. But as more referees join the game, people might want to have more “main” characters. That’s why I’m thinking I should drop the “main” qualification and just talk about player characters (full shares) and their followers: retainers (half shares), hirelings (1gp/day), porters (5sp/day), mounts (like horses) and pets (like dogs).
Every session, players pick their player character and bring along as many followers as they like, limited by their charisma (4 + charisma bonus), their level (must be the same level or lower with the exception of horses and war dogs), and table conventions (I like to limit the total number of party members to 10–15).
With this kind of flexibility, if Klea is my favourite character, and Kahina is her retainer, then I can bring both of them along. Since they are both first level characters, I can designate either one as the player character for the session (getting a full share of all treasure found, the other one getting half a share). If Klea is second level and Kahina is first level, Kahina can no longer be getting a full share, unless Klea doesn’t come along. In that case, Kahina can still find new followers before going on adventure, of course.
#RPG #Halberds and Helmets
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You worked on Stonehell yeah?
What was it like working on that book? Can you tell us any stories?
– Oliver 2022-04-14 01:25 UTC
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All hirelings getting a full XP share (that goes unused) seems really very expensive, given the benefit they provide. They reduce the encumbrance of PCs and that’s mostly it. Getting your XP cut in half for having a guy carrying some tools seems rather extreme. Seems to me like it very much discourages bringing any hirelings at all.
– Yora 2022-04-14 06:58 UTC
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But then again, the assumption is that they don’t get any treasure shares and the xp for gold rule ought to make sure that all of those xp go to player characters and their retainers.
I think I do want to dissuade players a little bit and paying 1gp or 5sp isn’t much dissuasion at all. My assumption is that later in the game hirelings and porters play a very minor role anyway.
– Alex 2022-04-14 10:02 UTC
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As for Stonehell, all I remember is this: Michael Curtis was a very nice person to work with.
So really, I hardly left a trace on Stonehell and it’s all Michael Curtis’ work.
– Alex 2022-04-14 10:07 UTC
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How did you connect with the project? His blog?
Has your opinion changed on the info text pages since running it?
Would you have kept the info pages and trimmed the text or changed the four pages per level section format?
– Oliver 2022-04-14 14:11 UTC
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I don’t remember how we connected. I had left a few comments on his blog at the time and in 2009 I joined the One Page Dungeon Contest judges. I guess he then sent me an email? I really don’t remember the details.
My opinion on the info pages hasn’t changed, for now. My players explored the gatehouse and are starting to explore the first level of the dungeon, so there really isn’t much to say, though.
I like the format of one spread showing all four maps per level, a few words, and all the monster stats in short form, followed by four spreads showing a quadrant of the level and the key, including random encounters. I don’t think it needs anything else.
Thus, one level with four quadrants gets five spreads, i.e. ten pages per level. With five dungeon levels you’d get 50 pages. Add an intro, an index, a table of contents, licenses, credits, and you’d still be below the magic number of 64 pages.
Just to be sure: there’s a lot of gaming to be had per level and therefore the two extra info pages per level are not a real problem. But I think you could cut them, plus the valley surface, bandit camp, gatehouse and that. Let’s just get to the dungeon.
– Alex 2022-04-14 16:28 UTC
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As a B/X GM, I should have spotted that it said only monster XP. If I am not mistaken, B/X is very unclear and self-contradicting about the distribution of treasure XP. On one page it implies XP are given proportionally to treasure shares, on another that all PCs and retainers get the same share regardless of treasure splitting.
– Yora 2022-04-14 21:08 UTC
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Yeah, I actually had even fiddlier rules in the past: when a hireling or porter got 100xp they’d gain their first level, or if they got 100xp in a single session they’d gain their first level, and so on. And the rules I had read at the time were very unclear about how it was all supposed to work.
How do you do it?
– Alex 2022-04-14 22:05 UTC