Retainers fell out of favor for me personally in the late 80s and it wasn't until my own player-resurrection about 15 years ago that I brought them back. I think that had something to do with the fact that in the early days we tended to have a high PC death or retirement rate: we simply tended toward slow progression, low-level play. We also ignored level-appropriately scaled adventures. We mixed Isle of Dread, Castle Amber and Dungeonland(!) in one campaign, Rahasia and Pharoah and homebrew diplomacy adventures, BattleSystem and Night's Dark Terror. Now, we didn't do that stuff a ton but that, combined with the fact that we would use pre-generated characters for long module strings, we almost always played the game with the assumption of retainers for torch and treasure bearing, as well as pools to replace unalived PCs quickly.
We were actually more protective of some of our favored retainers than our own characters: (Dorf, Biff, Bamf, R.I.P.) and I think maybe one time that I can recall ever went through the rigamarole to resurrect a PC. Remember those Last Will and Testaments on the AD&D character sheets? We always listed our best retainer to take over everything. (We did not, however, distinguish between the henchmen and retainer NPCs. Some hirelings got paid in treasure shares, some henchmen were on retainer. We were nothing if not sloppy.)
Retainers fell out of favor for me personally in the late 80s and it wasn't until my own player-resurrection about 15 years ago that I brought them back. I think that had something to do with the fact that in the early days we tended to have a high PC death or retirement rate: we simply tended toward slow progression, low-level play. We also ignored level-appropriately scaled adventures. We mixed Isle of Dread, Castle Amber and Dungeonland(!) in one campaign, Rahasia and Pharoah and homebrew diplomacy adventures, BattleSystem and Night's Dark Terror. Now, we didn't do that stuff a ton but that, combined with the fact that we would use pre-generated characters for long module strings, we almost always played the game with the assumption of retainers for torch and treasure bearing, as well as pools to replace unalived PCs quickly.
ReplyDeleteWe were actually more protective of some of our favored retainers than our own characters: (Dorf, Biff, Bamf, R.I.P.) and I think maybe one time that I can recall ever went through the rigamarole to resurrect a PC. Remember those Last Will and Testaments on the AD&D character sheets? We always listed our best retainer to take over everything. (We did not, however, distinguish between the henchmen and retainer NPCs. Some hirelings got paid in treasure shares, some henchmen were on retainer. We were nothing if not sloppy.)