2023-12-17 Group Size and Henchman
We had a short session 2023-12-16 due to a small group and the demise of Sora. This left us some time to discuss the state of the game as well as our upcoming Champions game.
Variable Party Size
Because we sort of play in a west-marches style, who ever shows up is who plays, the size of the party tends to vary a lot from game to game. On weeks like the current one, where we had a smaller party, this really limits the groups options. Most of the content is designed around the larger 6-8 person group, leaving the small group with few survivable options.
The solution I think I’m going to propose is that the group should always field 8 characters but this will require some rules adjustments.
Previously we only allowed players to field a single player character in an evening but they were free to use as many retainers as they liked.
The issue with that though was that retainers reduce the amount of experience that the player characters get. This discouraged players from using them.
I think I want to simply eliminate retainers as members of the party and rely entirely on alternate characters to fill out the group. If we always fill out the group to 8 characters the experience will be consistently split 8 ways.
My suggestion will be that we handle the decision of who fields multiple characters with an unofficial round robin approach. Who ever hasn’t done it recently gets first pick at bringing an additional character along.
With this approach of always having a consistent group size, both the players and DM get to plan accordingly.
Henchman
The issue with the above proposal, which essentially does away with retainers, is that retainers serve a purpose in higher level domain play. After characters obtain land, temples or crime syndicates to rule having loyal henchman becomes important.
I’m not quite ready to propose a solution to this problem yet but I see two paths.
- The alternate player characters could swear fealty to the primary characters. This would create a sort of troupe style role playing experience where the player’s small group of characters all work together cooperatively.
- The Henchman could remain NPCs and largely operate off-screen. I’d build out a system where the players send the henchman on missions to support the ongoing story of our game, we do a few dice rolls occasionally to determine the results of these missions. The Henchman would exist but would be almost entirely abstracted away. They’re more like a resource the PC has to cultivate for late game play.
These two approaches would have very different impacts on how we’d experience the game.
I think I’m leaning towards the second approach, henchman stay NPCs.