Friends, Hirelings, and Side-Kicks

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by restlessgriffin

You do realize Leadership is a REQUIRED skill for Knight and Holy Warrior!

You do realize it's a 12 right? So likely to fail in combat or stressful conditions.

And no one else has it as a required skill, so better hope you have either a Knight or Holy Warrior if you're deciding that Leadership is the only way to convince NPCs to do what the PC's want...


And if you check through the other Proffesions, no one (except Bards) really get any social skills above a 12 to start, which means they are meant to be rather terrible at social encounters, which aren't meant to be common in DFRPG.

Which is why when I'm not running "generic" DFRPG I give out more points to be used for buying more social skills, or simply making the few they get, slightly better.

That was the entire thrust of the first three sentences I wrote.

If players have control of NPCs/hirelings, why would they EVER increase Leadership.

There are other reasons (Rallying Cry comes to mind), but mostly, and I say this from experience, make social skills broadly more useful (and required) or your Players will still just ignore Leadership. Trust me, if you run DFRPG the way it's meant to be (and so far you aren't doing anything off-book), PCs won't care about boosting tertiary Skills like Leadership, unless "being a leader of men" is the Character's shtick.



I allow anyone to buy any of the social skills at chargen (not just with their 5 Quirk points, but like I said, I give out more than 250 points for a bit more customization, or I use something more akin to Delvers to Grow instead of porffession templates), so to make Born War Leader have some more utility (it's a pretty subpar advantage, few Players want it or buy more of it) I allow it to treat Leadership like Diplomacy. So if a PC has both, then they can never make things worse by making a Leadership Reaction Roll. Also I add the Soldier skill to my games and have BWL add to it as well. I also use Tactics at the start of every fight to give advantages to the side that wins the Tactics roll* and I use Strategy to assist with planning long journey's or if the PCs actually try to plan out a mission before jumping into it.


* I've toyed with different things like adding to one side's Initiative, giving out bonus uses of Luck or Serendipity, etc. Otherwise a lot of these skills end up playing third fiddle and never get increased.