Roderick Robertson:
> There was a mention 'way back last year about someone (foolishly) allowing a
> player to take "squad of Char-un" as followers. Make sure that each follower
> is mentioned individually, including his skills (ie, don't let someone get
> away with "And his followers Fred, Roger, Bob, John, Ken, Bobby, Billy and
> Squamash." treat that as a "list of skills" as noted on HW pg 18), or each
> follower takes up one "slot" in a List-method character. That should slow
> down too many followers at the start of the game.
If someone were to want to write down "followed by a personal bodyguard of Char-un maniacs", I'd let him. But I'd apply the implicit rule of thumb about relationships: the bigger the related-with entity, the fuzzier the relationship becomes. (Hence I wouldn't automatically let the player treat all 8 of them as followers in the strict, AP-snarfing rules sense of the term.)
> Stack your NPCs with followers as well. Instead of a single Lunar patrol of
> a Sargeant and 6 troopers up against a ravening warband of six heroes plus
> their followers, make it a company with six Heroes with six (or more, with
> the Empire not all units have a 7-man unit structure) troopers each.
Darn straight. I think anything resembling a "squad" is quite an innovation in the first place (of course what's going on here is often an ad hoc abuse of the "file", adapted with more or less success to small-unit deployments, like the dreaded Dawn Patrol Through the Hills, surely a staple of any Lunar-viewpoint game giving the obvious due nods to 'Nam movies...). In some of the more Old School Solar closeorder formations, I reckon anyone with proven male-line descent from Yelm doesn't get out of _bed_ with a least a half-century of his minions to back him up...
David Dunham comments:
> Also, while AP are good, actual target number is better, so they
> aren't as unbalancing as they may appear on paper.
One for one, the above is of course true. But the thing is, with Followers, if you simply treat them as a bag of APs (obviously something one shouldn't do, or be allowed to get away with, for all the obvious reasons, before Doyle Taverner gives out again about what an evil powergamer I am), you get a very very favourable TN:AP exchange rate on 'em. In crude terms, for the same HP cost you can either get an increase of 1 to your TN, or increase your AP by nearly the same again from your personal AP total...
(Just how big an advantage a sackful of APs is a rather hard problem to analyse, unfortunately, since it depends crucially on "bidding strategy". (Yes, I know, _also_ something which in a RPG as social experience and narrative construction process one should deprecate in player-smacking terms, but this _is_ the rules list...) Maybe I'll try and sneak it in as an undergrad research project in genetic algorithms...)
> (When's the last time you saw a Star Trek red-shirt in a scene by himself?)
Red-shirt? Ah, David, you're showing your Generation. ;-)
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