Back when I was a wee lad it was the typical dungeon crawl, to go in with as many retainers as you could purchase and your Charisma stat allowed. So D&D parties were really big troupes (not in the sense of "troupe" style play, the GM ran the retainers, though for the most part they were all pretty faceless, with a few notable exceptions).

Yet somewhere down the line that paradigm changed completely, so that it turned into "the party goes in alone"; I think for my groups its something that happened more or less with the advent of 2e, but I can't be sure, I think that retainers kind of slowly died out as a species in our worlds...

Anyways, I'm sure some of the "Old schoolers" here will jump in to claim that they always used and keep using retainers, blah blah blah but I'm mostly interested in questioning why that paradigm changed, and if people think it was something intentional on the part of TSR, or due to some other social phenomenon and not really the fault of 2e at all, or what.

RPGpundit

This is my totally uninformed opinion. I started RP'ing around 2002, so take it as you wish.

OD&D (Swords & Wizardry) Stat Card (From Memory):

*Random Human Wizard or Fighter
Str 12
Dex 13
Con 15
Int 16
Wis 9
Cha 5
HP probably 3-4.
AC either 10 or 4-6.
(Magic Missile, Prestidigitation, Something)
(Staff, Darts, Robe, Spellbook)
(Weapon, Armour, Shield, 10' Pole, Rations, Caltrops, Flaming Oil, Something, Something, Maybe Something Else)

Now, an AD&D character sheet, on the other hand...

* I rolled the stats, of course. More or less (Invisible Castle rolled them for me)

Quote from: RPGPundit;387431Back when I was a wee lad it was the typical dungeon crawl, to go in with as many retainers as you could purchase and your Charisma stat allowed. So D&D parties were really big troupes (not in the sense of "troupe" style play, the GM ran the retainers, though for the most part they were all pretty faceless, with a few notable exceptions).

Yet somewhere down the line that paradigm changed completely, so that it turned into "the party goes in alone"; I think for my groups its something that happened more or less with the advent of 2e, but I can't be sure, I think that retainers kind of slowly died out as a species in our worlds...

Anyways, I'm sure some of the "Old schoolers" here will jump in to claim that they always used and keep using retainers, blah blah blah but I'm mostly interested in questioning why that paradigm changed, and if people think it was something intentional on the part of TSR, or due to some other social phenomenon and not really the fault of 2e at all, or what.

RPGpundit

I could see 2e having something to do with it.  That was my first exposure to D&D, and the only time we ever really used retainers/followers/henchmen/etc was when I had one thief hit 9th level and got his guild/gang/whatever...I fully developed those guys, to where one of them became a character in her own right.

Pundit,

Uhm for a while there...my Pathfinder group considered of something of a small army. Sure a good portion WERE actual Player characters. But we had one cohort become a PC, and then two more cohorts. It became a vertiable 8 man army in some ways...until Scarwall started to cut down the numbers and we changed locations to peoples home.

I stopped using retainers/hireelings with D&D 3.x, something about limits based on charisma.

With Castle & Crusades though, I went back to using retainers and hirelings both as a player, and in hosted games. Something about imbalanced encounters and Aihrde made me want to have a few extra minions that could take more than one hit a round and spread out the damage to the party some...

Quote from: RPGPundit;387431Back when I was a wee lad it was the typical dungeon crawl, to go in with as many retainers as you could purchase and your Charisma stat allowed. So D&D parties were really big troupes (not in the sense of "troupe" style play, the GM ran the retainers, though for the most part they were all pretty faceless, with a few notable exceptions).

Yet somewhere down the line that paradigm changed completely, so that it turned into "the party goes in alone"; I think for my groups its something that happened more or less with the advent of 2e, but I can't be sure, I think that retainers kind of slowly died out as a species in our worlds...

Anyways, I'm sure some of the "Old schoolers" here will jump in to claim that they always used and keep using retainers, blah blah blah but I'm mostly interested in questioning why that paradigm changed, and if people think it was something intentional on the part of TSR, or due to some other social phenomenon and not really the fault of 2e at all, or what.

RPGpundit

Well I am a vintage gamer, pundit, so take this as you will...my groups have always had on-again/off-again retainer use.  My wife actually employed a pair of men-at-arms who got magic armor, weapons, and other magic items of their own to use as the game went on.

But that's neither here nor there, sorry.  At any rate, I think the idea of running the whole troupe probably went away because DMs were just not up to the task of worrying about how possibly as many as 5-6 retainers per character might be handling the nature of the expedition.  Now before anyone gets their panties in a wad, by "not up to" I mean that it can be a huge plastic hassle for any DM; not that it is a shortcoming of the people who did DM.

Furthermore, the fantasy paradigm(s) shifted over time.  When TSR started eating it's tail (or tailings, if you will...) and started basing D&D products on D&D novels, which in turn generated more D&D novels to base D&D products on, gamers were inflicted more and more with how the people who played the games that the novels became that the supplements became.  If Joe Schlock-novelist writing some dreck for Dragonlance didn't use retainers in Volo's Guide to Elminster's Underwear Drawer, the subject probably didn't come up for players, either.  With that said, classic fantasy didn't seem to have much stock in the "retainer" scene, either.  Sure there were large "parties" of adventurers (see the motley group of escapees from the Master Mind of Mars, or Thorin & Co., or the occasional foray by Elric, Moonglum, and some various cannon fodder), but these groups are by and large staffed with skilled adventurer types.  Very little "And then Aragorn nearly tripped over Thozdane the Linkboy" going on...!  However the idea of sallying forth with a group of porters, bearers, linkboys, etc. is very...how shall I say...not sure, I guess there's a sense of pageantry to it?  Like the knight going to tilt at the lists with a group of pages and armor-menders and the like, except underground.

Besides everyone knows retainers are basically the red shirts of D&D. They die and get replaced after every dragon encounter.

Quote from: Nightfall;387459Besides everyone knows retainers are basically the red shirts of D&D. They die and get replaced after every dragon encounter.

Heh; I wish I could find the stat-cards I did for the two aforementioned retainers.  I think they were probably the only 0-level humans who got paid a gold allowance per loot haul (as opposed to the 1 sp/mo. you had to pay men at arms) and wore +1 chain mail and were outfitted with +1 swords, and carried their own potions of healing and so forth.

Yeah, there was a juncture at which I just quit bothering with morale checks for those two because they were fanatically loyal to the wife's PC, and indeed to the party in general.

Well as speaking purely from my own standpoint, I had my party fighter who took leadership the first chance he got, have his own little army of kids he rescued from the first chapter of Curse of the Crimson throne. Now admittedly two of them did become actual PCs (one shot time and with young kids running these characters) but I kept having them follow Grub (the fighter) around. Dunno if they'd have last after the plague and what-not...but eh.

OD&D is best played as Warcraft than as World of Warcraft.

The most common excuse I recall hearing what that henchmen cost the party experience points; they didn't want the xp pool diluted by including henchmen, particularly since players who liked henchmen benefitted more than those who didn't.

I don't play D&D with my retainers.  That is simply gauche.  What do you take me for?

I started with 2nd, but played a fair share of first. My old groups never used them.

For one, it's unethical for good aligned characters because of two:

All the mooks end up dead after the first round of real combat.

Quote from: The Shaman;387474The most common excuse I recall hearing what that henchmen cost the party experience points; they didn't want the xp pool diluted by including henchmen, particularly since players who liked henchmen benefitted more than those who didn't.

I think this is it and it was probably part and parcel of the general shift from XP being mostly based on GP haul to XP being mostly based on killing shit.

I remember that most of my players hated sharing XP in D&D or MERP. Also, there was the isue of payment, and (in MERP, where they played a band of 'commandos' for the White Council) retainers being really bad for stealth and infiltration.