Henchmen and Hirelings in Under the Giant's Shadow

Sunday was the first session of Under the Giants Shadow where the human PCs made use of the "human dungeoneering" power: they hired and brought along henchmen. 

Each of the races in my B/X variant has a racial power that is useful for adventuring - Dwarves have Cavesense (follow trail back* + usual dwarf underground detects). Elves have Elfsight (improved detect secret doors and illusions). Halflings have keen ears (improved hearing at doors/resisting surprise). Humans have Naturally Social, which means not only do they NOT have any reaction penalties for other races (as all the others do), they get to reroll one Henchmen action each round. I felt this was a good balance of a dungeon delve special ability. It's taken over a year for the people with human PCs to make use of it. 

Now, part of this is because the players have been super-secretive about their venturing under the Giant's Shadow to loot one of the destroyed cities there. They suspect that once what they are doing becomes public they will face pressure to stop OR their success will generate competition. In this they are not wrong, but it has made it very difficult for them to get help. (It's also forcing them to make a commercial trading business to hide where their money is coming from; they now own a mule farm... which means by extension they own donkeys and horses and it all gets complicated.)

But another part of it is the psychology against Henchmen that's rooted in post Hickman Revolution play. As the guy playing one of the Dwarves who has been playing since the 1E days said, "Every time I hire a henchmen to do something for me it feels like I'm denying myself the chance for my character to do a cool thing and handing it to this NPC." 

When I was a kid playing B/X and AD&D we never used henchmen; from 1981-1984 it seemed like too much work to have to run the additional characters, and we didn't have a lot of structure to those games. Post 1984 when I started playing with someone who was already running for sweeping plot arcs (and then we did some Dragonlance, and we were all theater kids into our character psychology), having henchmen as back up characters, or anything that smacked of decentralized power, just wasn't comme il faut. 

Since Under the Giants Shadow is specifically leaning into the Exploration and Shenanigans pillars of D&D and not as deeply on the Role Playing and Combat pillars I wanted explore how they would work in play. Making it the human special power would help, I thought. Hopefully after this the players will start to see their value. Unfortunately the three human PCs have Charisma scores of 7, 8, and 10, limiting how many Henchmen they can have in play and how loyal they are. 

The UtGS rules are built for x in 6 chance, so monster armor classes are None (8), Leather (11), Chain (14), Plate (17) or Adamant (20), which are 4-in-6, 3-in-6, 2-in-6, 1-in-6, and 0 in 6 chances. So Henchmen attacks can be handled with a single die roll - d4 if they are not a combat oriented Henchman, d6 of they are - and the damage of their attack equals the die roll. Does this mean every time they do hit someone in plate armor they do 6 damage? Yes, but its also super simple so there you go. 

Finally, Magic-Users can skip the rules for finding and hiring normal henchmen all together and summon and bind creatures to work for them. This process that takes as much time and resources as trying to get conventional henchmen, but their summoned creatures can be incredibly dangerous for everyone. These creatures roll d8 or even d10 in combat, letting them tear through even Adamant armor for potentially massive damage, but they also have an (unknown to the Magic User) maximum number of times they can roll higher than a 6 before the binding snaps and the summoned creature turns on you and your allies.

The Magic-User player thought long and hard about this, but ultimately she opted against it for now. Instead they traded a magic item with inconvenient-for-them side effect to a horseclan leader who wouldn't be bothered by it to get a trio of his men to assist in cleaning out part of the dungeon. Each of the human PCs had a fighter type henchmen with them, and it made the "4 PCs vs 1 Acolyte + 12 Berserkers" fight something they could (and did) win. The 3 human PC players got into having the bonus d6 attack rolls from the Henchmen, and being able to reroll the miss from their one Henchman each should they occur. Never mind the Henchmen soaking up attacks from the berserkers - a huge advantage. 

Is this something they're likely to do again? Time will tell, but as a test this worked great. 

Decentralized Power in Character Design part 4

Last post on this (probably) but I wanted to discuss how and why I dealt with this in Gaslamp Romance. The last problem with giving the PCs skilled NPC assets is the damage it can do to niche protection. Now of my players had picked Gaslamp Melodrama where all of them were potent sparks with resources angling to advance their agendas then I wouldn't worry about it since 90% of character differentiation in that is personality and the remaining 10% is edging out one another in skill rather than displaying clear niche dominance in them.

Instead we're in a game setting where niche dominance - this character is best known for X, this one for Y, and this one for Z  - which is the usual structure for an RPG. When you let PC A be best known for having a team of people who are experts in X, Y and Z it undercuts the other players - eve if they are individually better than player A's team it still deforms play at the table. I've seen this happen and it's not pretty.

Now, if those NPCs are experts in B, C, and D that's fine since it doesn't break into anyone else niche. But the solution I ended up with for Gaslamp Romance was that for the PCs the henchmen were skille in...whatever the PC is expert in. For example Nadia, who is a highly skilled spy and gunslinger, is able to quickly recruit other skilled spies and gunslingers. She can get allies to pitch in for a firefight or to help her gather information but she can't get a master chemist or airship engineer or something else and use is as a reliable part of her character's abilities. They help her be better at what she's already good at, which keeps her from overshadowing the other players.

(Note that she can have contacts with people with different skills, but they are totally GM controlled NPCs who can be inaccessible, distracted, unreliable and so on. That makes them so much less reliable that it's better to rely on the other PCs who have those skills.)

A second advantage to this design is it means I can combine it with the low granularity of the game mechanics to just use Nadia's stats for her recruited allies. There's a penalty applied based on the level of the quality being used to recruit so only the highest qualities will produce recruits on the PCs caliber, but there's an elegance to it. The player knows what the NPCs are capable of because they are both narratively and mechanically extensions of their PC.

Anton, the other PC with a decentralized quality, has a group of soldiers, none of whom are nearly as skilled as he is. But when all 6 of them act in concert they match him. In combat that this lets Antone attack one foe and have his men launch a volley against the other and effectively double his attacks. Or have his men in three groups of two to take 3 more actions at a larger penalty.This gives the player a lot of flexibility, especially outside combat where dice rolls don't matter - the men can scatter to collect their gear, buy supplies and contact transport and in very short order the PCs are ready to move without shilly shallying around on the little stuff. Yes, we likely would have elided over the little stuff in play with 'and then you do the little stuff, barely making your sailing time', but having Anton's PC, or an extension of it, do it for them makes him look more capable. And that's a good thing.

Decentralized Power in Character Design part 3

To recap, my conjecture is that decentralized power for PCs (i.e. power outside their immediate bodies) faded for a while due to desire for character immersion coupled with a desire for simulation. I expect the GM not wanting to handle dozens of NPCs that the immersive-driven player no longer wanted to handle had something to do with it. In fact, mechanics has a big part in bringing them back, at least for me.

Some steps back were pretty easy - having players spend character resources to get iconic/signature gear that works better than normal and can't be permanently lost was common in supers games but worked its way into others (Earthdawn's magic item system was built around linking you to your magic items in a way that both made them more powerful as you got more powerful and forced PCs to research the setting background for plot hooks...alas like much of ED it was a little too complicated for casual play; Feng Shui lets gunmen and martial artists have signature weapons they can't lose, etc.). That's all to the good, but it's not quite the same as having the power a of a local lord with a mass of troops that 9th+ level fighters got in early D&D.

Several games do let players buy rank in organizations and higher levels of resources for their PCs, but usually make control of those organizations cost prohibitive and find ways to minimize what resources can do (because hiring a team of mercenaries to take point on your battles is what _villains_ do...). A revelation for me was the Big Eyes Small Mouth system for Organizational Ties, where control of powerful groups was in reach for players - mind you those powerful groups were sometimes student counsels and the like depending on the game - as were groups of flunkies. In the playtest for Silver Age Sentinels Org Ties these really came into their own, where for the cost of a mid range energy blast you could make your character, say, Director of SHIELD or in charge of Wakanda.

Yes, these still required GM buy in (a surly GM could then try to force you to buy a countries worth of flunkies and massive resources and tons of agent level fighters) but it put the idea of playing a character who controlled a large, powerful group back in reach of the players. The idiom of the game still required that, like the Steranko Nick Fury or Christopher Priest's take on Black Panther, that the hero lead from the front, but that helped bridge the gap between immersive play and massive resources.

Later games, like FATE, reduced everything into Aspects that can be invoked in play, and that aspect could just as easily be 'Lab of scientists and flunkies' as it is 'genius scientist' as both let the PC do sciency stuff. That's even better in some ways as it pulls everything back into a single mechanic.

Which is what I was trying to go in Gaslamp Romance. I'll talk more on Monday as to why I did what I did for that and how I hope it will work.

Decentralized Power in Character Design part 2

As I commented Monday it's sometimes a bit of a jump for people to accept decentralized power (power that is not inherent to the characters' body) in role playing games. This is a little odd, since the original RPG had one stat - Charisma - that was dedicated to decentralized power and all of the character classes, but fighters especially - transition to that as a focus after name levels. 

I'm of course referring to henchmen, hirelings and eventually followers. The ability to hire people to come with you on adventures - people that barring morale checks were initially under the players control - was a major one in early play, and the game explicitly transitions fighters to commanding territories and armies once in the double digit levels. That the player would command resources outside of their PC and their gear was assumed.

However as more and more people played the game that decentralized power decreased. Like many game groups mine didn't do much if anything with henchmen and hirelings. Part of that was wanting to engage in more immersive play (and hence not be working the numbers for a henchmen and hirelings in addition to our PC) and part of it was either not understanding or not wanting to engage in higher level political play. D&D didn't help because non-fighters, and magic users specifically, accrued ever more personal power as they advanced past 9th level and never really entered the political realm of play that fighters held. If you _liked_ the dungeon/wilderness adventure paradigm then Wizard and Cleric were the classes to play after 9th level, which you can see in the number of high level Mary Sue wizards wandering around the early published campaigns. 

The first game (that I know of) that did anything with restoring decentralized power was Traveller, which had a chance of your PC starting play with existing political power, a ship or large amounts of cash, but aside from the rank those weren't permanently part of the character. You don't see that until Champions comes out and people can purchase powers with a limitation that makes it a device they can temporarily lose but always get back. Likewise you can 'buy' allies and contacts, but they are not guaranteed (relying on a random roll to appear in many cases) and controlled by the GM. Even with that the idea that the player would wield _reliable_ power through others - having troops to command, spies under their control etc. – faded away from game design. You can particularly see this in interations of the GURPS rules where even their Supers designs fought tooth and nail against the idea of Signature Gear even up through the early 2000s.

The reasons for this movement are twofold in my opinion: first was the desire for more immersive character play, and having to control other people breaks away from that. The second was simulationism: since in real life no one completely controls someone else there was the urge for more ways to insert GM control. I’ll look at these a little more later. 

Decentralized Power in Character Design, part1

A few years back it occurred to me that the best way to build the three main PCs in Star Wars _on equal points_ is as follows:
Luke: high competent in most areas, strong piloting skills, either have a game mechanics where newbie PCs advance faster than others or have a pile of points set aside to justify rapid advancement.
Han: strong in most skills, plus points for purchasing loyal super strong sidekick (whom Han's player would control) and kick ass smuggling ship.
Leia: high competent in most areas, strong in social and knowledge skills, plus points for purchasing the entire Galactic Rebellion, which (Leia's player would control).

That's right, Leis' player controls the rebellion. Of course she does. Like any good pulp hero she's both in charge and out on the front lines doing the most important tasks - like stealing the plans for the death star, or leading the assault on the force field generator, or making the executive decisions around fleeing their compromised hidden base.

This is part of the general theory that in a high trust game, especially with experienced players, the GM should place as much control of the setting onto the players hands as possible. Yes, it's easy to run a Star Wars game where the PCs are agents of the rebellion who are given missions to execute, but there's a lot to be said for letting the players dictate the course of events. That's how we run d20 Fantasy Games, for example - Ed Greenwood commented on the need to lay out a dozen or so adventure hooks across the general vicinity so the players have real agency - if they decide to skip Waterdeep and head south due to rumors that the red dragon killed off the sword coast left behind a hidden but now abandoned hoard in Calimsham then so be it. (Just have a few 'on the road to the adventure' plots lying about to occupy them on the way there while you build the horde out from the single sentence you started with.)

The trick here is to start thinking of the parts of the characters under a players control as not just their physical person, or the person and their iconic gear, or the person, gear and one or two close allies but their entire spheres of influence. As I'll discuss over the next few posts that's can be a difficult transition to make.