OSR How much does your party use Retainers, Henchmen and Strongholds?

Oops.

TiQuinn said:

Kinda interesting because one of the things I keep hearing about even modern OSR games is that adventures are geared towards larger groups of 7+ players and to use NPCs if there are fewer than that.

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I've heard the same thing, but I've never seen it in actual play. And as someone who runs OSR (or at least OSR-adjacent) games, it's interesting to me that some folks keep insisting these huge parties are necessary.

Ath-kethin said:

I've heard the same thing, but I've never seen it in actual play. And as someone who runs OSR (or at least OSR-adjacent) games, it's interesting to me that some folks keep insisting these huge parties are necessary.

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A lot of Old School play was done at conventions and other large public events. And a lot of these were at big tables with 8-10 players....maybe more. This is where the big groups come from. Very few groups of friends in a basement had like 8-10 players....you would just make two games if you had that many players.

bloodtide said:

A lot of Old School play was done at conventions and other large public events. And a lot of these were at big tables with 8-10 players....maybe more. This is where the big groups come from. Very few groups of friends in a basement had like 8-10 players....you would just make two games if you had that many players.

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That's what I did back in the day; once I had 7 players I split the game into two groups, and then three (there was some overlap between them, player-wise).

But I've run modules that said they were designed for 6-8 PCs with groups as small as 3 with no trouble. I guess a lot just depends on play style and expectations.

TiQuinn said:

I've been looking at a few OSR systems as of late for a potential campaign, and I still see there's fair bit of emphasis placed on retainers/henchmen/followers, etc and on strongholds. From back in the 2e days when I first started playing, we rarely delved into using retainers or built strongholds because:

A) Retainers meant another character sheet to have to manage, and players usually didn't want to do this, or they'd be forgotten about entirely. At the time, we were a big table - about 7 to sometimes 8 players, so that was one factor. We were also always adding more and more rules to expand the boundaries of what we wanted to do with characters, making the game bulkier. Today, I'm looking for less complexity, not more, so adding extra rules is not likely. If retainers are a key part of play, I want to make sure I highlight that.

B) Building strongholds/domain management was a style of play that not every player was into. One time, the thief character wanted to start their own guild, and got incredibly "INTO IT", while the paladin and cleric players could care less. Again, probably would handle this differently today, but even now, I don't forsee the group I'm playing with wanting strongholds to be a big thing.

However, when looking at fighters in particular, building strongholds is still one of the big crowning features of the class in games such as OSE and other retroclones, as are the use of retainers.

For those who play OSE or any other OSR game that has these features, how often do they come up in your play? Are they crucial to either the classes that feature them (particularly martials), or to the survivability of PCs? Or alternatively, are they holdovers from the wargaming past and not something that I need to wrap my head around in order to make the most of the system?

Thanks for your thoughts!

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not much in the campaign (Curse of Strahd) that I just wrapped up; but definitely will be using more for my next Spelljammer campaign (likely the ship will be the primary stronghold and the crew will be their henchmen). I'll also be referencing the MCDM book a lot for this.

Ath-kethin said:

That's what I did back in the day; once I had 7 players I split the game into two groups, and then three (there was some overlap between them, player-wise).

But I've run modules that said they were designed for 6-8 PCs with groups as small as 3 with no trouble. I guess a lot just depends on play style and expectations.

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I can see larger groups if you are keeping the combat short, and actions quick, but if you throw in retainers who are actively part of the combat, you now have multiple character sheets per player (if that’s how they’re tracking them), and even more characters to track in combat.

I do. I tend to run hexcrawl sandboxes with each player controlling multiple tiers of retainers. Since, in the style sandbox I tend to run, nothing is geared towards a particular level, there are some dungeons that are for lower levels, and the lower level retainers clear those while the higher level PCs do other stuff -- research spells, manage domains, tackle the larger threats, etc. I like being able to split the party up into smaller groups and run multiple stuff at the same time.

thirdkingdom said:

I do. I tend to run hexcrawl sandboxes with each player controlling multiple tiers of retainers. Since, in the style sandbox I tend to run, nothing is geared towards a particular level, there are some dungeons that are for lower levels, and the lower level retainers clear those while the higher level PCs do other stuff -- research spells, manage domains, tackle the larger threats, etc. I like being able to split the party up into smaller groups and run multiple stuff at the same time.

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How does that work in a practical sense at the table? Does the campaign become more of a resource management type of game with players controlling different retainers from a macro level POV or do you shift focus and basically treat the different PCs/NPCs as their own parties and the players shift focus from one to the other? That seems like a lot to manage and control in a single session, for instance - from both the DM side as well as the player side of things.

bloodtide said:

A lot of Old School play was done at conventions and other large public events. And a lot of these were at big tables with 8-10 players....maybe more. This is where the big groups come from. Very few groups of friends in a basement had like 8-10 players....you would just make two games if you had that many players.

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We played all through 1e and 2e with about 6-10 at the table, in a basement game, for years. We never knew any different, and it worked for us. If a couple people couldn't make it, and we had 6, we'd press ahead. If we had 4 or 5, we'd sometimes find something else to do that session, because it was too risky going in that light. It would never have occurred to us to break the group up.

In my experience, 4 player parties is a newish thing. Maybe it came around in 4th, but I skipped that edition. It wasn't my experience through 3rd.

We didn't play with henchmen, though we did use domain play. Henchmen, horses, carts, and such were fodder for our DM to take away from us, so we never used them (we also played an oppositional DM style game, where the DM was out to get us, and we were out to survive, none of this cooperative stuff). Our stories came out of our survival.

I'm running OSE and Beyond the Wall games now, and all of them use henchmen, domains, hexcrawls, etc. If the party didn't use them, they'd be absolutely TPK'd. The game is not "balanced". Encounters are not "easy/medium/hard/deadly". Encounters are not keyed to the power level of the party. You encounter what the encounter table or adventure/module has, and if its too tough, the parties know to run. If its too easy, its too easy. That is the kind of game our group has settled into after giving up on 5e after several years.

I understood that large parties came out of the games run by Gygax early on where there were, reportedly, dozens of players every game. Hence his "keeping proper track of time is essential". If you missed a session, time passed. Every real day that passed was a day "in world". Other parties would empty locations before your group got to them. Parties were expected to be large-ish, and supplemented with henchmen and hirelings if they were small. It was the only way to survive.

Cruentus said:

We played all through 1e and 2e with about 6-10 at the table, in a basement game, for years. We never knew any different, and it worked for us. If a couple people couldn't make it, and we had 6, we'd press ahead. If we had 4 or 5, we'd sometimes find something else to do that session, because it was too risky going in that light. It would never have occurred to us to break the group up.

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Back when I first started playing (2e), there were 7 players for the longest time. Occasionally we’d get up to 8 players. But as we added kits, and then Mayfair Games Role-Aids, and then eventually Player’s Options, the DM started feeling the weight of the extra rules and we noticed the time in combat dragging on.