Stephen McGinness wrote:
> In other systems I'd be heavily penalising through treasure and
experience awards but I'm not sure how you balance out the followers
thing....<
Well we have a fair number of followers (in fact I think that every
character has at least one follower), but we have not had real
problems. In fact we have big advantages to followers, some I can
think of:
- Facing reasonable numbers of opponents. As a narrator it enables
me to give the opposition reasonable numbers, rather than explaining
why the other side only has two guys partolling the tula etc. This
applies to permanent followers and those assigned a player for the
episode.
- Missing skills. For example, our groups only healer is a follower.
- It also allows players to participate when the encounter does not
play to their strength's. Charles's Issaries character can
participate in a fights because he has a couple of guards for the
rough and tumble. Of course your followers are never as good as you (-
8/-10), and everyone still needs parts of the episode where their
hero can shine, but it makes it easier to give everyone something to
do in most of the scenes.
The trick as ever is to balance the heroes and the 'villians' in APs
and ability. They can either be roughly equal ( a fair fight), or the
villians get more APS but lower abilities (the screaming horde) or
the villians have lower AP but higher skill (the lone swordmaster).
Sometimes of course you want unbalanced opponents <g>
We tend to ask for relationship roles when followers are asked to do
something extraordinary.
And odn't forget it can cut both ways. I have an ally who is so far
away in current game terms that he is useless to me, yet I
spent 'words' on getting him. Swings and roundabouts...
Ian Cooper