The question is whether they are cohorts or fellow party members and whether it matters at all to the story and the game.echoVanguard wrote:Isn't the ability to have cohorts who command troops effectively identical to the ability to command troops? Just sayin'.K wrote:various generals doing the actual commanding
echo
It's the same difference between being a Fighter who buffs himself and being a Fighter who gets buffs from the party Wizard. It doesn't change the story at all where you get the buffs, but as a game the difference is huge. Having to rely on a Wizard to buff the Fighter will make the Fighter feel small in the pants and buffing himself will feel great even when the mechanical and story effect is exactly the same.
It doesn't change the story if Team Evil is a party of evil BBEGs who each contribute skills to the running of an evil empire. It doesn't even change the story if one of the BBEGs is the "party leader" and gives orders to the rest of the Team Evil party while sitting on a goth-metal throne.
It does matter if two players sit at a table and one guy gets to command the troops and accomplish story goals with those troops and another guy gets to open portals to other universes and accomplish story goals by doing that. Their divergent skill sets means that the portal guy wants the army guy to come along so they can conquer stuff on other worlds.
It's just an artifact of DnD rulesets that has made "having an army" a MTP ability that gets handed out whenever the DM decides that someone needs it, and I could easily imagine a ruleset where "having an army" is a cornerstone to telling a number of kinds of stories that DnD has traditionally sucked at telling.
Giving characters different skill sets is Rule 1 in avoiding May Sue-ism and all of the source material follows it. There is a reason that Davren Basheer, a Great Captain, leads Rand al'Thor's armies and Durza leads King Galbatorix's armies, and that's because being a powerful spellcaster and a leader of armies is just too cheesy.
