D&D 5th Edition XII: Peasant Militias Can Defeat Smartphones?

[Icewraith]

No real government I know of has ever elected to solve a problem using five quirky sociopaths.

You mean like when you give a group of researchers a DARPA grant?

What about a Special Ops team?

Or alternatively, you're not thinking big enough. Consider the United Nations (although I'm not sure if they actually solve problems).

I would like as much consistency as possible if the next D&D is going to be worth buying, if the optimal solution to any combat encounter is "draft and equip a peasant army" that's going to bother me a little. If there's some debate about whether or not a dragon should be able to kill any army, a sufficiently powerful wizard must be able to kill an army (I think). Awesome wizards defeating entire armies is a thing that happens in campaign setting backstories, at least a few times in FR for starters.

Also, a wizard decimating an army is usually an opportunity for the artist to really show their stuff off.

[Raineh Daze]

You mean like when you give a group of researchers a DARPA grant?

What about a Special Ops team?

I believe you've missed the 'quirky sociopaths' bit out. You need a good reason to pick five nutjobs from unreliable backgrounds over a sizeable military force, or even just the best knights you have paired with the court magician and chaplain.

[Icewraith]

And the reason is that the conventional military force might not work or have already been defeated, but the five nutjobs don't think like normal people, can't be anticipated like normal people, and have special skills (archetypally demolitions, science, supervillainism, or superior physical combat) that normal people don't have the inclincation or natural ability or circumstances to acquire.

Look, the ten or twelve best knights in the kingdom are pretty good, but if you're going up against a dragon Boris the Berzerker can beat any five of them with one hand tied behind his back, and he will do just about anything if you offer him enough shiny objects. Your court magician is your court magician because magical talent is powerful and uncommon, ditto with your chaplain/priest that's important enough to be in your court (assuming divine magic is a thing). That's three of your five right there. If you do send your knights the only one who should have a shot at coming back is the captain of the guard or the awesome rookie and maybe one or two of the strongest guys in the bunch- ideally anyone named "Wedge". Maybe the other guy you should send is your master of assassins (you do have one right?), since he's a tough old bastard skilled with treachery, poison, and silence; and the only one with a mind twisted enough to have a shot at out-thinking the traps and wards the dragon has set in his lair.

This is assuming that you're King by virtue of birth alone, and not that your ancestors are a line of mighty warriors or powerful wizards and you yourself should be part of the dragon-slaying group (can we call it a party yet?).

I mean, you can bring your honor guard if you like but everyone knows they should get toasted in the opening rounds to prove how tough the dragon is. You might as well paint their armor red with black trim and send their salaries to their widows now. Make sure the paint job includes the insignia of a delta or arrow with a ring around it for good measure, and make sure the device is on the left side of the breastplate, maybe 3/4ths of the way up the ribcage?

[BayardSPSR]

You mean like when you give a group of researchers a DARPA grant?

What about a Special Ops team?

Or alternatively, you're not thinking big enough. Consider the United Nations (although I'm not sure if they actually solve problems).

None of those sound anything like any PCs I've ever heard of. And to be honest, you don't really get any governments going to any of those asking them to single-handedly solve specific problems. Relying on Special Forces alone to win a war, for example, would be an exercise in futility. And you don't assign a task force of an evolutionary biologist, a nuclear physicist, and a contract lawyer to cure cancer and expect them to do it.

Now that I think about it, I could imagine PCs acting as the United Nations - but they'd have to draft a lot of peasants to get there.

My question right now is this: what, exactly, are the mechanics by which the PCs will draft their hordes of peasants in 5e? It's clearly going to be critical that these rules function well, or the game just won't be balanced.

[Raineh Daze]

*SNIP*

You're not helping the case for sending independent adventurers rather than just the competent elements of your court. Oh, and they can also rely on material support and having a number greater than, say, five. Seriously.

'In fiction, they all die to show how dangerous the dragon is' will generally not be the reasoning used by a ruler of any description (doesn't even have to be a king with the way the feudal system works) to pick who goes to slay the damn thing.

I also have no idea why you'd have someone with a title like that. If you have assassins around rather than just using handy criminals, you are going to cause yourself trouble.

[Stubbazubba]

I believe you've missed the 'quirky sociopaths' bit out. You need a good reason to pick five nutjobs from unreliable backgrounds over a sizeable military force, or even just the best knights you have paired with the court magician and chaplain.

This does seem familiar...

World Security Council #1: This is out of line, Director. You're dealing with forces you can't control.
Nick Fury: You ever been in a war, Councilman? In a firefight? Did you feel an over abundance of control?
World Security Council #1: You saying that this Asgard has declared war on our planet?
Nick Fury: Not Asgard. Loki.
World Security Council #2: He can't be working alone. What about the other one? His brother.
Nick Fury: Our intelligence says, Thor is not a hostile. But he's worlds away, we can't depend on him to help either. It's up to us.
World Security Council #1: Which is why you should be focusing on phase 2, it was designed for exactly...
Nick Fury: Phase 2 isn't ready, our enemy is. We need a response team.
World Security Council #1: The Avengers Initiative was shut down.
Nick Fury: This isn't about The Avengers.
World Security Council #1: We're running the world's greatest covert security network and you're gonna leave the fate of the human race to a handful of freaks.
Nick Fury: I'm not leaving anything to anyone. We need a response team. These people may be isolated, unbalanced even, but I believe with the right push they can be exactly what we need.
World Security Council #2: You believe?
World Security Council #1: War isn't won by sentiment, Director.
Nick Fury: No, it's won by soldiers.

The answer might just be that your kingdom's army is repelling an invasion of Orcs, the great warrior eradicating an infestation of Kobolds, and your magicians are trying to seal away The Snarl. Or maybe your court magician has thought of thirteen thousand excuses for why he doesn't want to face the dragon in mortal combat and instead of listen to all of them, you just decided to hire someone a little more gung ho about this kind of thing. The obvious counterpoint is that if your court magician and chaplain and the general of your army are not hardened veterans willing to go into this fight, why would they ever rise to prominence in D&D-land? The equally obvious answer is: They wouldn't. But you have to explain how your party ends up doing it instead somehow, so maybe those resources are too valuable to risk? Who knows. The point is there are a million logistical reasons why you wouldn't want to send a gigantic, expensive army or your highly valuable, irreplaceable court resources to curb-stomp a threat when you can just pay this handful of vagabonds waiting to create trouble in a tavern to go do it for far less with a decent enough chance of success. Kingdoms make choices based on predicted ROI, not optimized rates of total success. Things have costs, and smart rulers pay attention to them.

Adventurers don't have to be the optimal tactic for every kingdom-level threat so long as they are by far the most convenient one. Kingdoms, or any nation-state for that matter, are seldom, if ever, run efficiently. That should not be the assumption.

[Icewraith]

I was being a little bit facetious on the sociopath thing, but my point is more that totally normal and mentally balanced people don't tend to acquire tremendous skill, incredible natural ability, or amazing power. Either the acquisition of the ability or the consequences of having it change them. It doesn't have to be a lot in most cases, mind you, but it's there.

The people fulfilling these really important positions might not be perfectly stable but they're there because they're the best you can find or afford as king. If there wasn't centralized government to fund their temples or support their magical research or provide prisoners to torture or order to maintain; one of them might start a kingdom or be a (gasp) adventurer!

Also, "Master of Assasins" sounds cooler than "Chief Spy", "Royal plot-foiler" or similar. His job is also to worry about the other country's assassins or anything else that might try and kill you, so a Dragon is certainly in his jurisdiction.

Special forces don't win wars necessarily, but they do infiltrate the enemy fortress and open the gates/blow up the defenses for the rest of the army. You might not cure cancer with the aforementioned group, but you could round up your best physicists, logicians, and mathematicians (Often the really completely brilliant people in these fields are there precisely because they don't see the world quite the same as regular people) to do something like crack the enemy's "unbreakable" code cipher or develop a superweapon to so devastating the opposing nation has no choice but to surrender. Governments don't necessarily hire stable people, they ideally hire the BEST people who are still stable ENOUGH.

[Kornaki]

The obvious counterpoint is that if your court magician and chaplain and the general of your army are not hardened veterans willing to go into this fight, why would they ever rise to prominence in D&D-land?

Because they picked and chose their fights that they could win instead of rushing into every 50/50 to the death street-fight that they could get their hands on?

I mean, come on, the chaplain? He goes around preaching about god and curing wounds, you can't think of a single reason he might be reticent about eating a face full of dragonfire?

[DeltaEmil]

The dragon is munching the chaplain's sheep, literally and figuratively.

So it's time to bust dragon kneecaps and summon an angelic horde to clobber the dragon, while the BMX Knight pops a hoofsie or does whatever death-daring BMX horse-riding skill tricks one does to distract the dragon.

Angelic Horde, come forth.

But currently, it's peasant horde, come forth.

[Icewraith]

If his creed's the "protect the weak and innocent" type and he wields the divine power of his god, he ought to be raring to go. If he thinks he's not up to the challenge maybe he knows a champion of his order who might be. If he knows the favor and funding of his church in the king's realm depend on his being useful to the defense of the nation, then yes, he should be ready to help tackle the odd dragon or orc horde that threatens the stability of the throne.

Edit:

On the plus side, we've found a setting and system where the 3.5 Bard would be absolute god-tier. Nobody is better at attracting and granting absurd combat bonuses to an arbitrarily large mob of commoners.

[Zeful]

and it should, because 4e leaving out "real" necromancers and summoners was a major mark against it for many people

Except minionmancers either are too effective, or they abjectly suck. Because there's no way to scale the rest of the party around the utterly shattered action economy that the minionmancer breaks simply by existing. So what would you rather have: A summon that essentially replaces you as you spend your actions on his abilities rather than your own, or a bunch of mook summons that only exist to be stomped on by your enemies and provide essentially no benefit?

[Raineh Daze]

Except minionmancers either are too effective, or they abjectly suck. Because there's no way to scale the rest of the party around the utterly shattered action economy that the minionmancer breaks simply by existing. So what would you rather have: A summon that essentially replaces you as you spend your actions on his abilities rather than your own, or a bunch of mook summons that only exist to be stomped on by your enemies and provide essentially no benefit?

Can I have a mob template for my undead horde?

[Kornaki]

Can I have a mob template for my undead horde?

There's an app for that

[Raineh Daze]

There's an app for that

iPhone, Android, or other?

[Flickerdart]

iPhone, Android, or other?

PalmOS.

[MukkTB]

I'm pretty sure that both a world where a peasant army is a threat and a world where a peasant army can't hope to touch the heroes even if the heroes start dancing in the middle of the ranks have interesting implications.

To be honest I've had my fill of being such a badass that the people (NPCs) around me can't even begin to weather the **** I get into regularly. It wouldn't be terrible to try worrying about the peasant army for a change. On the other hand, that doesn't feel very D&D to me. Its some grittier game.


On a side note it is quite fun being worlds tougher than the random low level NPCs one encounters on daily business. Especially the ones prone to talking smack and giving **** right up until some big monstrosity rips its way out of the ground next to them and bites off their heads. I encounter a lot of unhelpful NPCs on my travels. The last one got eaten by a T-REX after we got into an argument about my killing the zombies that were undermining his fort.

[Frozen_Feet]

You're not helping the case for sending independent adventurers rather than just the competent elements of your court. Oh, and they can also rely on material support and having a number greater than, say, five. Seriously.

Those "competent elements of your court" are your adventurers.

Seriously. Adventurer is a person who goes on adventure. When the king, his court magician, court chaplain, spy and three most trusted knights decide to go and slay the dragon, they become adventurers.

In older editions, "independent mercenary" phase was at level 1 when you were still no-bodies! By the time you hit level 9, you were supposed to be one of those kings or queens, with a court all of your own! Having dozens of retainers and leading armies of your own was part of the game.

Like I said: there was a reason for why early editions assumed you started in unconquered backwater boondocks, where no organized armies or kingdoms really existed. There was a reason why all those dangerous monsters default to living in ancient ruins, deep caverns, untamed wilderness and other places far from civilization.

Complaining about wise kings with strong armies acting like wise kings with strong armies should is completely missing the point. It's starting from the middle of the story. Literally. Think of Lord of the Rings, for start. Fellowship starts with a bundle of hobbits fleeing through the woods; by Return of the King, Aragorn is leading armies and Gandalf is his royal councilor, and half of the afore-mentioned hobbits have essentially become knights.

The thought that small bands of adventurers should always be solution to a problem is blind to conventions of D&D's own genre!

[SiuiS]

If peasants are more effective than PC's, the fancy tactics wouldn't really help. That's why it would be an issue.

Uh, no. Because I just showed how fancy tactics turns 5 guys into a peasant blender. 100 peasants!
1 fireball!
59 peasants!

Peasant Armies ARE NOT ESTABLISHED AS MORE POTENT THAN PCS OR EVEN PROFESSIONALLY KITTED KNIGHTS. That was just DISPROVEN and therefore cannot be the basis of a problem presented. The problem is false.

Not to mention that there's nothing to stop the peasants doing the same thing. After all, they've probably just slain a dragon and can afford to arm their survivors with whatever they want.

Sure there is; logistics. A fireball doesn't care about shield walls. A shield wall reduces your peasant army to 50 arrows which is even more survivable. Unlike the peasant army, the PCs can fall back and regroup effectively. The shielded cleric can advance and pop armor-ignoring save dependent energy. So can the wizard if fireball is too much trouble. Unlike the peasants the fighter can wing and kill two guys at once. A fighter or barbarian or cleric or paladin in melee range can have an unimpeachable AC against the commoner's +0 and cleave through them anywhere from two to four at a time, more if the divinity uses an are smite technique.

Read the damn rules on what Pcs can and NPCs can't do before comparing them. It's right there! I've even brought it up already! You know how many Attacks against a fighter in melee range using two weapon fighting the peasants get? 8. To the fighters two+two guaranteed hits using expertise. Or hey want to use ranged and fall back? The PCs win that game because they can circumvent line of sight and potentially line of effect.

No, it's not "you have +38 armor and DR 15/—" but it is still a decided advantage.

Took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about...

He made one of the statblocks himself, and took the other one from a setting book, I believe.

Ah. I missed that.

I have always been of the opinion that dragons should be very rare, nigh invulnerable, eldritch terrors. I get that this is d&d & a party is going to want to face a dragon @ some point, but flooding the world w/ them in different categories seems to rob them of potency. Defeating a dragon should be a work of ingenuity & plot, im not sure you SHOULD be able to stab them in the hit points. If all you want is to test your character building prowess & fight a big lizard, we have drakes, and linnorms, and sea serpents. A dragon should be something special, something you really dont know if your long time character will walk away from

Then only use the legendary template dragons. Your campaign is preserved and it doesn't take tools away from others.

Now that we established that a peasant conscript army is the most dangerous thing in 5e

Bull****. We've established the opposite, and this who chamber "someone said it so it must be true" stuff needs to be stamped out.

Well, it's the design principle. It's intentional that everything your character can do, everybody else in the world can do too

We haven't seen that established at all. For all we know, NPCs may actually default to "lose versus PC". It's not a simulation. They are actually taking steps to move away from simulations.

So I'm probably alone on this, but I think we're over analyzing the situation a bit here.

I like Bounded Accuracy. It mostly prevents the game designers from writing an endless series of fiddly +small number abilities/Feats/magic items/etc, which I hate. It keeps the math simple. It keeps the math intuitive, in that you have a reasonable idea of what +1 to something really means (roughly 5%). And most importantly, it means that my character, any character, has some chance of success at anything I might reasonably want him to do - if my 10th level Fighter wants to try and Trip an enemy there's a good chance he can do so even if he hasn't invested in 3 different Trip related Feats.

Truth.

I agree that the arguments about armies vs dragons are hypothetical and won't appear on your average game table.

That said, 5E is still not good at what it's intended to do. It would seriously bother me if a character who has invested resources into being good at something is still routinely beaten by a character who has not:

What is this routinely beaten?

my dextrous elven ranger will often be beaten at stealth checks by the clumsy dwarven barbarian,

Why? That's a 25% difference outside of skill dice. Not only is the elf succeeding 50% of the time given DC 15, and the dwarf failing all but 25% of the time, but comparing them? How often will the elf roll below ten while the dwarf rolls above fifteen at the same time?

and the fighter isn't all that much better at melee attacks than the wizard is, even at high level.

Bull**** again. The fighter is hitting with advantage and doing somewhere around 35 average damage to the wizard's normal attack at 1d8 If he's lucky.

Stick to actual facts, guys. Please?

Because they picked and chose their fights that they could win instead of rushing into every 50/50 to the death street-fight that they could get their hands on?

I mean, come on, the chaplain? He goes around preaching about god and curing wounds, you can't think of a single reason he might be reticent about eating a face full of dragonfire?

The chaplain doesn't get to heal wounds at all. He's a normal guy with the Proest background. A cleric is a war-front Templar.

Those "competent elements of your court" are your adventurers.

Seriously. Adventurer is a person who goes on adventure. When the king, his court magician, court chaplain, spy and three most trusted knights decide to go and slay the dragon, they become adventurers.

In older editions, "independent mercenary" phase was at level 1 when you were still no-bodies! By the time you hit level 9, you were supposed to be one of those kings or queens, with a court all of your own! Having dozens of retainers and leading armies of your own was part of the game.

Like I said: there was a reason for why early editions assumed you started in unconquered backwater boondocks, where no organized armies or kingdoms really existed. There was a reason why all those dangerous monsters default to living in ancient ruins, deep caverns, untamed wilderness and other places far from civilization.

Complaining about wise kings with strong armies acting like wise kings with strong armies should is completely missing the point. It's starting from the middle of the story. Literally. Think of Lord of the Rings, for start. Fellowship starts with a bundle of hobbits fleeing through the woods; by Return of the King, Aragorn is leading armies and Gandalf is his royal councilor, and half of the afore-mentioned hobbits have essentially become knights.

The thought that small bands of adventurers should always be solution to a problem is blind to conventions of D&D's own genre!

Yes.

[TuggyNE]

Why? That's a 25% difference outside of skill dice. Not only is the elf succeeding 50% of the time given DC 15, and the dwarf failing all but 25% of the time, but comparing them? How often will the elf roll below ten while the dwarf rolls above fifteen at the same time?

About one eighth of the time, in case you're curious.

[Kurald Galain]

About one eighth of the time, in case you're curious.

I'm pointing this out because it's something you'll see in gameplay. When the DM asks the whole party to roll (e.g.) a stealth check, the players call out what they have, and it's instantly obvious who has the highest result. If this consistently isn't the stealthy elf ranger, then said character may quickly get a reputation for being loud and clumsy.

Now this is fine in a beer-and-pretzels humoristic campaign, but it is not fine in an epic fantasy storyline. This leads me to conclude that 5E works best for slapstick settings, where people are expected to randomly fail all the time for the sake of humor.

Note that this is often used as intentional game design. The system for White Wolf is written so that you usually succeed at most tasks, because your character is supposed to be badass. By comparison, the system for Call of Cthulhu is written so that you often fail, because the intent is that you're a weak mortal playing with forces beyond your ken. Likewise, the system for Paranoia is written so that you fail all the friggin' time, because it's funnier that way.

[SiuiS]

I'm pointing this out because it's something you'll see in gameplay. When the DM asks the whole party to roll (e.g.) a stealth check, the players call out what they have, and it's instantly obvious who has the highest result. If this consistently isn't the stealthy elf ranger, then said character may quickly get a reputation for being loud and clumsy.

Now this is fine in a beer-and-pretzels humoristic campaign, but it is not fine in an epic fantasy storyline. This leads me to conclude that 5E works best for slapstick settings, where people are expected to randomly fail all the time for the sake of humor.

Note that this is often used as intentional game design. The system for White Wolf is written so that you usually succeed at most tasks, because your character is supposed to be badass. By comparison, the system for Call of Cthulhu is written so that you often fail, because the intent is that you're a weak mortal playing with forces beyond your ken. Likewise, the system for Paranoia is written so that you fail all the friggin' time, because it's funnier that way.

Two things off the top of my head, before I take a rabies shot and stop frothing.

1) this happens all the time anyway unless you're into brinksmanship. The difference between two graceful elves (thief and wizard) hiding at early levels is about 10%. I've never been in a game where starting with +10 or more didn't unbalance the game, except where there were already other issues present.

2) white wolf (nWoD) games are balanced on 3 dice, about 50% chance of success. It promotes tension. He ability to game the system comes from the designers saying "if you game the system you're an idiot because you're missing the point" and not really tightening the rules.

[Tehnar]

Two things off the top of my head, before I take a rabies shot and stop frothing.

1) this happens all the time anyway unless you're into brinksmanship. The difference between two graceful elves (thief and wizard) hiding at early levels is about 10%. I've never been in a game where starting with +10 or more didn't unbalance the game, except where there were already other issues present.

I've never been in a game where a large modifier difference (or a large difference in success rate) between different characters was a problem, in a certain area.

It shouldn't happen all the time, that a character that invested little to nothing is just as good as a character that invested a lot in the same area. At least in non slapstick games.

[Frozen_Feet]

Since no-one else seems to be interested in doing math comparison, could someone send me Next statblocks for concripts, men-at-arms and knights comparable to those I used before, along with at least one dragon? I'd like to do a comparison using actual playtest material, but I don't have access to any at the moment.

(It should be rather trivial for any of you to make a similar comparison based on my example, if someone else wants to give it a shot.)

[Tehnar]

I was planning on doing that tonight, if I can't find peasants statted out, Ill go with goblins or kobolds or something similar.

[Morty]

The way I see it, it's the job of both the GM and the players to make sure the PCs have a reason to solve the story's plot instead of ignoring it or handing it over to someone else, whether it's a more powerful character or the local authorities. The setting shouldn't be bent into a pretzel to make sure the PCs are always the only people who can actually solve problems.

[Raineh Daze]

Uh, no. Because I just showed how fancy tactics turns 5 guys into a peasant blender. 100 peasants!
1 fireball!
59 peasants!

Peasant Armies ARE NOT ESTABLISHED AS MORE POTENT THAN PCS OR EVEN PROFESSIONALLY KITTED KNIGHTS. That was just DISPROVEN and therefore cannot be the basis of a problem presented. The problem is false.

I did say 'would be'. Didn't say it was a problem, just why it would be it they're more effective.

Am I the only one who wonders about the discrepancy between 'must live away from people to not die' and 'is obliged to routinely terrorise the countryside'?

[1337 b4k4]

Am I the only one who wonders about the discrepancy between 'must live away from people to not die' and 'is obliged to routinely terrorise the countryside'?

No real discrepancy here. A ruler's domain might encompass many miles of land (minimum 24 under the older rule sets) only a small amount of which would be under the direct shadow and protection of the castle. Further out on the borders of the domain, villages might have a local bureaucrat and might have a constable if its large enough, but it's mostly going to be farmland and at least half a days ride from the castle if not further. The dragon lives in the wilds beyond the borders and flys in for a free meal of cattle and sheep before flying out again. When your a subsistence farmer, it doesn't take many cattle deaths to "terrorize" you.

[obryn]

To put it another way, if D&D Next is good at what it is intended to do (be a fun game about adventuring in small groups of heroes) I'm fine with whatever the "logical implication" of those rules might be for the "real world" - no matter how screwy and wrong they might be.

Yep, with you here 100%. I think this whole dragon vs. peasant thing is one of those side-effects that arises when you expect the rules of your game to account for every event in the world, as opposed to the important ones the people at the table are participating in.

-O

[DeltaEmil]

The problem arises when there will be hirelings and follower-rules, and Mearls seems to intend to recreate his OD&D-Heartbreaker, where people lead hordes of paid mercenaries into the dungeon and stuff.

I personally don't mind that a horde of peasants could defeat a dragon, but it's important to know if D&D 5th edition does want that kind of game or not, and it should be honest and upfront about what kind of fantasy type it wants to emulate.

The peasant horde vs. dragon situation is a cornerstone that needs to evaluated.

[BayardSPSR]

The problem arises when there will be hirelings and follower-rules, and Mearls seems to intend to recreate his OD&D-Heartbreaker, where people lead hordes of paid mercenaries into the dungeon and stuff.

I personally don't mind that a horde of peasants could defeat a dragon, but it's important to know if D&D 5th edition does want that kind of game or not, and it should be honest and upfront about what kind of fantasy type it wants to emulate.

It looks to me like you're answering your own question. If the designer wants to make a game about hirelings and followers, that's probably what he's going to make; that's what the game he makes is going to 'want' to be.

The entire 'peasants vs dragons' argument is just a facetious way of looking at the fact that the rules are already trending towards the direction of quantity having a quality all its own.

I'll say very clearly here: there is nothing inherently wrong with that being the game's focus. It's been that way before.* Personally, I think it makes it interesting and sets it apart from all the more narrative-oriented games that have come up in the next few decades. I'm actually pleased to see it trying to be more than just "3.5/4e but more marketable", which was my initial fear. It also means that parties will matter more than the did in 3.5, where the purpose of the party was the cheerlead for the caster at higher levels.

Let me remove the sarcasm from my earlier "question over the mechanics to conscript peasants with". What hireling rules have we seen so far? Do they work well, and are they balanced? Based on the stated intentions, this may become very important.

*Edit: Hireling/follower-focused, I mean.