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Sometimes the PCs have minions, whether from being rulers or just powerful. Other than the (usually bad) choice to bring them with you into combat or make them all craft shit, the use of these tends to be MTP - often fairly irrelevant MTP at that. So - I figured it was time for an actual system, where you could at least have your minions actually be doing something.

What Is This?
Rules for having minions, getting more minions, and running an organization, for 3E/PF.

Why bring PF into this? It sucks! And anyway, this will all break down at mid-high levels.
Yeah, but it's what I actually have players for. And it all might eventually fail, but it's better than nothing, and I'm only aiming for the level of stability that serves most campaigns - "good enough if you don't poke it too hard".

Why is the money stuff missing?
Because the economy is kind of a clusterfuck in D&D, and while you can sort of bluff past it when talking about a single group of adventurers, that doesn't work so well for running a whole organization that hires mercenaries, has income sources, and so forth. And besides, most discussions about it on TGD go into a black hole of endless arguments. I will eventually try to fit money in correctly, but I'm calling that Phase II.



The Basic Mechanism
You have Agents. An Agent can be one or more creatures, and has the following properties:
* Level - Works like CR, ie. two Trolls are L7, four are L9.
* Capabilities - Any or all of Combat, Social, Stealth, and Information.
* Category - Follower, Cohort, Mercenary, or Thrall. More information on this below.
* In addition, Agents still are what they actually are - Trolls regenerate, flying people can fly, and so forth. We could set up a whole system of keywords here and define how they interact, but for the moment we're just going to take that into account manually.

Each time period (we'll say that's a week for now), you assign each Agent to a task. Tasks have a level, and a type (or types). The basic rolling mechanism is:
d6 + Agent Level vs d6 + Task Level
Assuming you have an agent with the Capabilities for the task. If you don't, use half the Agent's level (or level - 4, if higher). If you beat or match the task's roll, you succeeded. Failure or success by 5 or more is a critical (may have special results for certain tasks).

For a hazardous task, you then roll a second time, with the same numbers. Success/failure on this determines how much bad stuff happened (what that stuff is varies by task). Failure vs critical failure usually matters for this.

Example
You send your squad of ogres (L7 Combat Mercenary) to clear the trade road of bandits.
L6 Combat Task; crit win = no attrition, crit fail = guaranteed attrition; danger: attrition.
Success Roll: [4] + 7 vs [2] + 6 => Win
Danger Roll: [3] + 7 vs [5] + 6 => Fail
The bandits are dispersed, but you suffered 25% casualities.



The Details

Teaming Up
Sometimes no single Agent you have is strong enough for the task, so you need to group them together. There are two ways to team up:
1) Combining for Strength. If you have multiple groups that all meet the capabilities for a task, you can group them together, following the normal CR rules. So you can combine your three L3 Knights into a L6 Knight Squad.
2) Combining for Capabilities. Sometimes a task needs multiple capabilities, and no single Agent has all of them. In that case, you can combine multiple agents that have the needed capabilities, and treat their level as the lowest one.
Example: Spy on the Order of Fubar: L12 Social/Stealth Task. You have Glard the Bard (L13 Social) and Ninja Assassins (L10 Combat/Stealth). You can combine that into an effective L10 Social/Stealth for the task.

Deploying Yourself
You can deploy your own character as an Agent, and you might end up doing so when your organization is small. For this purpose, you count as an Agent of one level higher than your level (to account for the fact that PCs tend to perform above par). If acting as an Agent, you take the risks of being an Agent (such as getting killed on a total casualities result). Hence, you probably don't want to deploy yourself once you have enough Agents to do stuff for you.

Backup
If you have the necessary capabilities (a way to monitor a task in progress and a rapid transportation mechanism such as Teleport), then you can have one or more Agents act as backup. You can send them in to help (see Combining for Strength) before any roll. Agents acting as Backup can't do a task of their own, but one Agent can be assigned as Backup to multiple other Agents (but can generally only help one of them).

Short Tasks
Usually a task takes the entire time period. Sometimes, there are tasks that take a short amount of time, allowing you to assign the same Agent to that and something else. An example would be slaying a dragon whose lair is well known and takes no effort to conceal itself.


Next Time - Types of Agents, new PC stats, and non-agent stuff you might want.

I'm pretty sure (modulo sleepy and drunk) that "d6 + Agent Level vs d6 + Task Level" is the same as "2d6 + Agent Level vs Task Level+7", so you can reduce the complexity there just by bumping your task levels.

This system looks like it's probably too simple for its internal complexities to be the things players would care about.

Perhaps you should write up a couple of tables of strange Success and Danger outcomes, so that the players and DM can entertain theirselves by fleshing out the world using what the outcomes have told them.

"*Roll* Ooh, it looks like that dragon's cave was filled with exquisite ancient paintings. *Roll* But they were destroyed in the battle." Potentially followed by a small discussion about how this affects historian's opinions of you, and/or speculation as to the dragon's taste.

fectin wrote:I'm pretty sure (modulo sleepy and drunk) that "d6 + Agent Level vs d6 + Task Level" is the same as "2d6 + Agent Level vs Task Level+7", so you can reduce the complexity there just by bumping your task levels.

Yeah, that's intentional. I wanted a small curved RNG, and this allows the task level and agent level to be symmetrical. Also, if you're so inclined, the task d6 could be rolled secretly by MC, making it not immediately obvious what the exact difficulty of a task is - information that could be gained by scouting.


Foxwarrior: There's going to be a list of various tasks, with the results for success/fail and safe/fucked, but I'm still working on it. Having some charts for more detail seems like a good idea though, I'll add that as well.

As for the base setup - yeah, it's supposed to be pretty simple. The idea is that you'd do a "deploy agents" phase at the start or end of the game, and you could be controlling a couple dozen agents+, so the individual tasks are minor - the strategy is in allocating who to place where.


That said, if you wanted more detail on the individual tasks, I have a couple ideas about that:
1) Safe/Risky Choice - Since the success/fail roll and the safe/fucked roll are separate, you could have the option to play it safe (subtracting from the first and adding to the second) or go balls out (vice versa). I'm not sure if the ratio should be 1:1 or something else, but that would add some decision to each task.

2) Multi-Task Quests - To make an individual action more beefy, it doesn't have to be just one check. Instead of a composite task, you could have different options with separate difficulties, and optional tasks that decreased the difficulty of the primary one if succeeded at.

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