Henchmen

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1

I was wondering if you could expand a bit on the henchman pay rules.

The way I read it originally was that if you get 100 gp from an adventure, you give your henchman 15, and you keep 85 I have also heard people advocate for the idea that for every 100 you keep you give them 15.

With the first method, if you had an 18 charisma and 7 henchmen, you would need to give them 105 gp for every 100 gold you found, so that seems unlikely, unless we are assuming that the 18 charisma would make up for lower pay.

That said, is it fair to give your fourth level henchman the same share as your normal man henchman? Doesn’t seem quite right there, either…

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

2

Henchmen get an 0.15 share. That works out to your second method.

You can Alex’ more detailed explanation here: http://www.autarch.co/forum/hireling-15-minimum-0

3

Also, regarding 4th level henchmen: keep in mind that the treasure share is in addition to the henchman’s base pay, which is level-based. So the higher-level hench does get better pay, overall.

4

You get 1 share, and your 7 henchmen get 0.15 share each - 1.05 total; or, roughly, you get half the gold and your henchmen split the other half.

5

Hm. We have been playing it the first way (you get .85 and the hench gets .15) in order to keep shares fair between players. Our solution to the Char 18 and 7: henches problem is that you leave one of your henches at home and only pay out 90% of your income. Haven’t run into any issues with this so far (well, except an unreasonable willingness to let your henchmen get killed so you don’t have to pay them out of your share, but other than that).

6

In general, henches brought by anyone in the party contribute to the party’s success. However, you could do this instead, which would restrict the “GP Punishment” for extra henches to the PC who brought the henches, but wouldn’t get into math weirdness at 7+ henches.

  1. Each PC has 1 share. If there are 4 PCs, each share is 25% of the hoard.

  2. Each PC and henches have sub-shares; the PC has 20 sub-shares, the henches 3 sub-shares each. The share is divided by the total number of sub-shares, and split out appropriately.

For example, Alice (+3 henches), Bob (+1 hench), Catherine (+2 henches), and David (+8 henches) acquire a hoard worth 1,000,000 gold.

Alice splits 250,000 gold with her henches. The total sub-shares is 29, which means (rounded) 8,600 per share, so Alice gets 172,000 gold, and each hench gets 25,800 gold. The remaining 600 gold is put into the Team Alice Swear Jar for incidental expenses.

Bob splits 250,000 gold with his single hench (23 sub-shares): 10,869.5652173913 gold per share. Bob takes 217,391 gold and 3 silver, and his hench gets 32,608 gold, 6 silver, and 9 coppers. This leaves one copper over—Bob is an accountant in real life, so they track the sub-copper portion separately to be awarded to the appropriate party upon earning a complete copper. Bob puts that copper in a special pouch.

Catherine splits 250,000 gold across 26 sub-shares: about 9,615.38 per share. She takes 192,307 gold and 6 silver, and rounds the copper in the henches’ favor: each hench gets 28,846 gold and 2 silver.

David splits 250,000 gold across a whopping 44 shares: about 5,681 gold per share. David gets 113,620 gold; each hench, 17,043 gold. The remaining 36 gold is put into a special fund Team David keeps for Wednesday Night Penny Gambling.

7

jedavis, I think you and your players are misunderstanding the idea of fairness in dividing loot. If player X brings 7 henchmen along with him to go into the dungeon and the other 3 PCs don’t bring any, then 12 people, not 4 are taking the risks needed to acquire the loot. Its not unfair to the other PCs that those henchmen then receive a share of the loot. The way you are running it now is very unfair to the PC who is contributing not only his own efforts but also the efforts of the henchmen (at his own expense) towards acquiring the loot. In the situation I detailed above, that character would be bearing 2/3 of the risk and would be receiving only 10% of the rewards. Personally if this were the case, I’d probably have my henchmen bump off the other PCs for being such jerks.

From a role-play perspective, it may be an important consideration in your campaign that before taking on more henchmen or joining the party on an expedition, that the PC negotiate a share of the loot for his henchmen. This would give you additional flexibility to reward henchmen greater shares if they are going to be more heavily relied on during a particular dungeon crawl than another (e.g. maybe the cleric gets a 50% share for the dungeon full of undead, but only 15% when the dungeon is full of traps)

8

Thomas posted while I was writing. I would like to point out that even with the model he suggested, players with more henchmen are assuming a greater part of the risk of adventuring while receiving a smaller part of the loot.

9

Mm, perhaps. The problem out-of-game with that model, though, is that if the bard brings seven henchmen and everyone else brings none, the rest of the players are (very) mad a the bard because his turns in combat take absolute ages, and everyone else gets bored. This happened once, and while it was not to the extremes of 8:1:1:1:1, it still got to the point where the group decided as a whole to not permit any single player to bring more than 2 henchmen or war dogs into the dungeon, in part to keep organizing the marching order reasonable and in part so they actually got to do something rather than sitting on their duffs waiting for the bard’s army to act. Since we have six players, we still tend to end up with upwards of 12 people going into the dungeon despite this restriction. In some sense, then, the structure of the way we’ve been playing henchman pay is simply a reflection of our group’s general opinion of People With Too Many Henchmen - namely that they’re bothersome and should be penalized.

That said, I may mention the ‘standard way’ to them. How much they decide to pay their henchmen is a policy question for them, not for me (as long as my 2d6 keep rolling high for hiring rolls). The henchmen don’t care if their .15 share comes out of their employer’s pocket or the party pool.

10

If they get bored and angry your random encounters are not deadly enough… :stuck_out_tongue:

11

Yeah I cannot imagine my players being upset by large groups oh Benches… they all view them as integral to the party’s success and is one of the ways a high Charisma character contributes!

12

Oh, no, I do my best - the one time the bard brought in five henchmen (which led to the institution of this rule) I managed to kill four of the five (and two other PCs and one of their henchmen). But my players are… short-sighted and contentious on this and other issues. I encourage them a little, because I do quite like getting to kill them, and I do quite not like waiting fifteen minutes for them to figure out a marching order for thirty people.

(It did not help that the bard’s hench retinue was comprised almost entirely of level zero men, first level clerics, and low-level thieves, all of whom had terrible stats and were regarded quite reasonably as useless XP leaches by the players of the wizards and the front-line fighters)

13

My party has so many henches I had to make a spreadsheet. They haven’t had a problem with boredom, though. I think if “waiting” got too long, we would just alternate between henches.

14

There was a forum thread somewhere that was talking about using different methods of initiative in order to prevent long waiting periods between players. Having all of the henches go on the player’s initiative could be pretty rough, but if you alternate in some way between players controlling henchmen, its far less of a problem.

15

What we ended up doing for init was a single die roll for controlling player and the it and all henches add their individual modifiers. So the bladedancer might have a good+2, his fighter hench have a -1 and the mage a and+0 so if a 5 was rolled they’d act on a 7, 5, 4. It works pretty well and keeps things easy to handle.

16

Hm. We still roll individual init for henchmen and warbeasts.

17

12 rolls a round just got to be too much work to track.