Handling Hirelings

There was some discussion in Jason Morningstar's AP thread about how to handle hirelings, and Tony never came back to talk about how he's been doing it. Recently I had some thoughts about general rules, which don't really address the questions from that thread, but I figured if I posted my ideas here, that might coax Tony out of the woodwork to talk about it, and also I could get some feedback on my ideas or give others some food for their own thoughts.

I originally posted this on my LiveJournal (http://philaros.livejournal.com/166680.html); I'm leaving out the introductory stuff.

As a player, I've felt frustrated a few times in past games, not really having a good idea what abilities the hirelings have or how to get them to use those abilities on my behalf. So here are a few things I'm thinking.

Following on the model for gangs, hirelings should come defined with a few basic stats and traits, which provide guidance to both the player and DM how to use them in the game. As with monsters, the basic stats for a hireling would be level, hit points (or hit dice), armor, and damage caused by an attack. Additionally, hirelings should come with at least these three tags indicating their traits: class, price, and weakness or failure condition.

• The class trait indicates the basic class moves that this hireling has access to. So a fighter hireling can Bend Bars or Lift Gates, a cleric hireling can Turn Undead and Cast a Cleric Spell, a ranger hireling can Hunt and Track, and so forth. A hireling can be expected to use these abilities as appropriate during the adventure, such as in combat, or the player can specifically order the hireling to use the ability. I think that although hirelings can be higher than level 1 (or can advance in levels through adventure), by default they never have access to the advanced class moves—those are advantages for full player characters.
• The price trait indicates what the hireling needs to be paid on a regular basis for services. It's similar to the surplus trait that followers and holdings have in Apocalypse World. By default hirelings have a price of gold, probably something like 10 gold per level per day. As long as you're meeting the hireling's price, you have access to their class moves.
• The weakness or failure trait—and I'm not sure what's the best name to call this—indicates how the hireling reacts when the price is not met or as a result of a failed Order Hirelings move. It's similar to the want trait that followers and holdings have in Apocalypse World. By default hirelings have a weakness for desertion, and will flee if confronted with a situation beyond their price ("man, I'm not getting paid enough for this!"). Other possible weaknesses include treachery (attempt to secretly betray the players), mutiny (openly rebel), or despair (do nothing but cower and wait until it's over).

Maybe hirelings should have a fourth basic trait, mercenary, indicating that they're only in this for the money. Then there could be class-specific moves that could replace that trait and also change the price: for example, a paladin might get one that replaces mercenary with loyal and changes the price to upkeep (providing food and shelter). Or maybe just a general special move open to all players, Retain Hirelings, that lets them pick an option when attempting to hire hirelings.

Combat-wise, follow the general Apocalypse World rules for NPCs or gangs. (That's all I wrote in my post; essentially, use hit points and taking damage the same way you'd do it for anyone else. But it'd be nice to have a more abstract and easier way to handle that for hirelings.)

Awesome Stuff Phil!
I will be stealing this wholeheartedly, since my guys need a cleric, I mean they reallly need a cleric!

Which got me to thinking...
Perhaps the 'Price' tag is more than just a sum of gold. I mean, that's a threat / adventure hook right there! Perhaps the hireling want something from the players, maybe the DM gets to hold 1-3 based on the skill of the hireling. Everytime the NPC is short-changed with loot, the GM gets to spend their hold on something nasty.

Heh Heh. 'So Tonks, you want to hire a Cleric huh?'
'Yup, I offer them a share of the treasure so long as they stay well back and bless us as appropriate'
'Well you manage to entice Timothy the Lawful Good Cleric to tag along to Mt. Phoenix, but he thinks its an evangelsitic mission. I'll hold 3. If young Timothy feels you aren't living up to your bargain, his God has no qualms about spending a hold so his faithful punishing non-believers such as your wizardy self!'

Well, they're hirelings, right? That's why the default Price is gold. It certainly could be other things though, "preaching/conversion" being a good example: the hireling joins on the condition that he gets to regularly preach his faith to others.

Going by the basis of Apocalypse World, Price wouldn't work quite the way you're thinking. It's not a move, it's a tag, right? The players aren't ever rolling Price, so the DM wouldn't get hold to spend. But the general principle works out similarly. Tonks fails his Order Hirelings move, and: "Timothy insists that yes, now really is the time, when a mob of ghouls is approaching, to hear his sermon on why you wouldn't be in this mess if you were a faithful devotee of Sun-ra. What do you do?" Or, "Ranulf says 'Gee boss, that 10 gold you paid me yesterday sure seems like a measly amount to die for. I'm not going down that obvious death trap of a kobold tunnel!' What do you do?"

That said, maybe it needs to be more like the Hocus's Followers and Fortunes move. So when you get a hireling, make some roll at the start of each session, and on a hit you get access to the hireling's Class ability, but on a 7-9 or a miss you also have to meet the hireling's Price. Going with that method, the Weakness would be something to invoke on a failed Order Hirelings move. Or maybe you just do away with either Price or Weakness, just have one of those traits for Hirelings.

Good thoughts all around. I do think that hirelings need something more, both to clarify what they are and what they can do.

Warning, this post is a bit rambly. This is the kind of stuff that goes in the emails between Adam and I all the time, but Phil's ideas really prompted it, so I think it belongs here:

My instinct is to not allow them all the basic moves of a class. That means getting a hireling is like getting a whole character, at low levels. It's also a little weird, since NPCs don't have moves like PCs do.

Maybe there's a list of NPC moves, to reflect "class," kind of like NPC classes from 3E? So there's a priest move that allows a little healing, an apprentice move that allows a wizard spell, a warrior move that does something fighter-y. Order Hirelings could specifically be to get access to those moves. Kind of like Surplus.

The issue of when to roll Order Hirelings has also been bothering me, and allowing hirelings to have abilities will just make it worse. Currently, it's a little hard to tell when a new Order roll needs to be made. Maybe it's "When you enter a dangerous area with hirelings, or start a session in a dangerous area with hirelings, roll+Cha." On a hit, the move gives you access to the hireling's move in some way. And maybe those moves are predicated on player moves, so the Priest heals extra damage whenever you Make Camp, and the Fighter adds damage whenever you Hack and Slash.

Given that, maybe the Hireling always grants that bonus, the move just decides what other baggage comes along with it.

This does tend to make hirelings a little more fleshed-out as people, which I'm not sure is the goal. So far, I had been thinking of hirelings as a mass of nameless whelps who have no appreciable skills. Cannon fodder, essentially. That's tough to design for in the AW framework. Making each hireling distinct would be much easier to handle, and nail down a lot of the mechanical effects, but it means having a gang of hirelings is not as supported.

Hey Sage,
I like your ideas on Hirelings not having playbook style 'moves'. They are not characters huh?
The logical extension to embed hireling 'moves' (lets call them tags or effects) within player moves is genius. Thus if you are a wizard and you order your man-at-arms to wade into combat and you roll a 7-9, you get to either inflict his damage on your opponents or he defends you and takes the opponents damage instead. On a 10+ he does both. A miss carries the baggage of the move as you suggest, filtered through the hirelings purpose.

Perhaps at the hire and fire stage you can set a price vs skill? Cheap hirelings carry -1 ongoing, whereas expensive hirelings carry +1 ongoing.

Been thinking about this for my own hack, in which the hirelings can really only help you to do a thing you already can. I think for Dungeon World it might be useful to think of hirelings as two sorts of characters:

1) Assistants like apprentices or underling who exist to make you look cool and for the MC to screw you over. For example: "My Thief steals the jewels with the help of the Journeyman Thieves he is training" or "Oh no, they took my apprentice Timmy." Like Sage says Assistants shouldn't get their own moves because they add to or help a player: you use the players move with a bonus to the roll or the effect. (In my hack I say an "Assistant" can add a small stat bonus, adds +1 to damage and can attack the enemy "Assistants".) Think of Assistants like Familiars: they enhance the character but don't replace anyone.

2) Specialists who fill gaps in the characters line-ups, even if this is something simple like carrying the torch. For example Noofy's Cleric problem: without a Cleric the team will have trouble so you can fill this with something more substantial. These should probably have their own moves, even if the player who hired them rolls it, because you need them to be effective.

Need better names than Assistant and Specialist, but I hope you get the idea: look at the point of the hireling and model the moves after this.

That's a good point, wightbred, and something that I've been messing with as I try to write these ideas up for the rules. Currently the rules I just wrote are good for the assistant, but not as good for the specialist.

I'm still pondering what exactly that means for the design, but thanks for putting labels on some ideas I hadn't quite nailed down. The divide between the two, and the need or lack thereof of specialists, is providing some food for thought.

Okay, first, although I did say the class trait provides access to the basic moves for that class, I was really still thinking of the older version of Dungeon World in which each class has more or less a primary move: the fighter can Bend Bars/Lift Gates, the ranger can Hunt and Track, the wizard can Cast a Spell… Obviously even in that version it wasn't quite that clear cut, for example you'd probably want a cleric hireling both for casting cleric spells and for turning undead. But that's where I was starting from, and I think for hirelings that's something you'd want to spell out, that a hireling has a specialist skill that you have some way of accessing, though not necessarily automatically and without cost.

Because I'll tell you, as a player, the reason I want hirelings is to help me handle unusual things that otherwise would just block or kill me. I think I mentioned that in Jason's AP thread but not in my hireling post here (or on my LiveJournal). There'd be a situation like, say, my wizard's been hit with a chaos curse, and to remove it, I've been given a quest that involves hunting down a peryton. Well, that's a trek into the wild to hunt a monstrous animal; I want to get the aid of a ranger. Or there's a known threat of undead skeleton warriors plaguing a trade route; I'm not going off to deal with that without a cleric in tow. [And since after this point I ramble on about a related topic, I'll say here that I do like what you're thinking, Sage, on how to incorporate this.]

What I'm not interested in is having nameless meat shields. I'm a hero! If my party doesn't dare venture forth without expendable pseudo-people, well, we don't deserve the title heroes. But more to the point, consider this. One of the three agendas in Apocalypse World is "Make (it) seem real", and one of the principles is "Name everyone, make everyone human." Dungeon World's agendas and principles are somewhat different and don't include those two specific ones, and that's fine; for the old-school dungeon-crawl feel, you don't necessarily want to make everyone human. But, if you make the hirelings real people, with names and cares and interests, then you open up lots of interesting possibilities. At the most basic level, hirelings become opportunities for the DM to use the moves "Use up their resources", "Put someone in a spot", or even "Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment." But also, when hirelings have names and personalities—even if they don't, in fact, offer special benefits of their class—the players will be more interested and more involved in the game, maybe not all the time, but at least some of the time.

In the first and ongoing Apocalypse D&D game that Tony's running for me and his brother-in-law Gabe, we started out with two men-at-arms hirelings and have picked up both a cleric and a paladin along the way, and they have provided a lot of interesting drama and hard choices for us as players, simply because Tony's played them as named people. I decided early on that my fighter was the fifth son of the local baron, and so the men-at-arms were not just hirelings but my father's soldiers. Suddenly that made me responsible for their well-being, which Tony has gleefully exploited. We found a section of the dungeon that's a lost and corrupted dwarven temple, and our cleric happens to be a dwarf who declares it's his duty to cleanse the temple; do we part ways with him, or aid him? If we'd simply parted ways, would he have been willing to help us out later with healing needs if we came crawling back?

That's where I'm coming from.

That's some great information, Phil. And I tend to agree, but I know some people have used hirelings as "the local militia" or something, and I was pondering if that could be supported too.

Here's what Adam and I are thinking right now:

First of all, we're thinking DW groups should be a bit more like AW Gangs. i.e., grouping enemies shouldn't just be a damage math shortcut, it should actually mean a warband of goblins is a thing, though it can be broken up into individuals. This plays into what's below, because there might be the opportunity for a hireling to be a group.

Hirelings have a level, HP, damage, and maybe armor. They also have a Skill, a Cost, and a Personality.

A Skill is a move or two that reflects a PC class or a useful NPC role, like Adept, Tracker, Priest, etc. Skill moves usually modify player moves, for example adding healing to Make a Camp when you have a Priest. There may need to be some actual moves that players get access to, for things like tracking and picking locks, but they won't work the same as the PC moves.

Cost is what that hireling demands for services. It can be gold, but that's a little boring. Some hirelings may demand honored recognition, arcane secrets, new discoveries, etc.

Personality works a lot like Look does. There's a list of Personalities, you choose one (or make one up, if you feel like it). Things like Surly, Devout, Mischievous, Lazy.

Order Hirelings works like this: When you enter a dangerous area with hirelings, or start a session in a dangerous area with hirelings, roll+Cha. Take -1 for each hireling beyond the first. On a 10+, the hireling provides their Skill, and you owe them their Cost, take note of it. On a 7-9, the hireling provides their Skill only if you pay them their Cost first, including any owed. On a 6-, in addition to anything the GM does, the hireling provides their Skill only if you pay them their Cost first and then refuses to serve you again.

You can only order hirelings of lower level than you.



The one thing that's still bouncing around in my head is: can you order your hireling to go over there and fight that thing while you hang out? If so, how is that handled? Does the GM just make a move?

I think hiring a warrior to defend your wizard is covered, there could be a Defender skill that basically lets you make the Defend move in some way. I'm thinking more about "Hey, we're making camp in this room, can you go next door and take care of those goblins that are still there? They seem pretty easy."

I think hiring a warrior to defend your wizard is covered, there could be a Defender skill that basically lets you make the Defend move in some way. I'm thinking more about "Hey, we're making camp in this room, can you go next door and take care of those goblins that are still there? They seem pretty easy."

Maybe just look through crossbow sights? Or announcing future doom?

....A few scuffled minutes later, a bedraggled and bloodied men-at-arms interupts your meal of roast dire rat. 'Boss, come quick, there was more than a few gobbos! They've got a cave troll!'

Noofy - these are some tasty options.

I think the biggest problem here is that Sage and Adam can only please everyone if the rules cover both the meatshield and the detailed NPC specialist as I know groups that will want either or both. In AW I looked at the rules for gangs and went "hey cool, they do this". But the different expectations I and others bring to D&D make this harder.

My point is: this is tricky one, but keen to see what gold Adam and Sage can come up with from these suggestions above.

OK, I'm just now arriving (late) to this thread. I love all these ideas. I don't have much of a method to how I handle hirelings myself. And I don't think there is any one way to handle hirelings that will satisfy the OD&D aesthetic completely. All the early D&D editions were silent/confusing/unhelpful regarding hirelings, and as a result we've got decades of divergent traditions on how to handle hirelings.

That said, all the stuff about costs, missions, and so on sounds pretty fabulous. I'd love to have those tools in my Dungeon World/ApocD&D game.

I think what's probably called for is some thought about how the hireling rules support the principles of the game, or perhaps reveal new potential principles that we hadn’t thought about before.

Sage's game has "Leave blanks" and "describe everyone" as principles. Gangs are a spectacular tool to achieve just this. A gang is just a blank that the character is directly tied to, and that is full of characters just waiting for the change to step forward and be described. So when the PC orders his un-paid troop of hirelings into the Dragon's Den and rolls a 7-9 on some move, that's when a particular hirelings steps forwards and says something like, "uh, thing is boss, my names Lucio, and I kind of speak for the rest, and we've been thinking..." Gangs are my single favorite thing in Apocalypse World, by the way, both as a player and MC, for this very reason.

"Describe everyone": I think this also means that specialists have names and goals and personalities. This can be super-super simple (leave blanks); in fact simpler is better, I think.

Making the world real is a very important principle here. It means making the hirelings reasonable people. Asking them to do what's reasonable on a dungeon-delving expedition is normal. Asking them to take particularly crazy risks is a move of some sort.

"Be a fan of the characters": as I see it, this principle means that hirelings are not there to do things FOR the PCs, but rather a way for the PCs to do more interesting stuff. This means that hirelings should supplement or modify what the PCs can do, but not do things for them. So you might use your hirelings as a weapon to hack and slash, or you might order them to unite and fight for you. So a hireling should never be framed as an extra move the player has access to, though it might be a move that they use when they want the NPC to do something for them, or to help them. This is just like the moves to make your gang do stuff in Apocalypse World.

Having prices attached to hirelings sounds great! Apocalypse World says "make them pay." This is the way to do it.

Also, hirelings are resources to be consumed! Dwindling resources are a big part of the OD&D aesthetic. Not only do hirelings get killed off, but they run out of spells, get hungry, and so on. "Use their resources" is one of Sage's moves, and here's where hirelings make it powerful.

On both of these fronts, hirelings are something that let the PCs go deeper into the dungeon and survive longer than they would otherwise. This is a good thing.

Looking at hirelings through crosshairs (if your game has that princple) is pretty obvious. Killing a hireling as your move as the DM is powerful. On the one hand, the PCs are relieved that they were not the target. On the other hand, Rembrant just got flayed alive by a nightgaunt right before their eyes! Thos moments are golden, and also a great time for the DM to be evil.

When I use hirelings in ApocD&D, I follow a few simple rules of thumb.
- Each hireling has a simple personality. I use random and generators I've grabbed from the Web.
- I add needs, missions, moods, and so on as the DM principles demand and when I make my move as a result of a failed roll (especially if it’s a roll to order hirelings)
- Unless my principles or moves dictate otherwise, the hirelings do what they're told, within reason.
- Hirelings are always 1 level below PC level (at least), and level up when the PC levels up. I allow hirelings to do 1 class-appropriate thing per day per their level (like a cleric healing or blessing).

Some thoughts from John Harper, Jonathan Walton, and Twyla last night:

-The nameless, gear hauling hirelings that you shove into traps are relics of a deadlier D&D.

-If you want to have people just carry stuff, Parley and money are probably fine.

-Telling a hireling to go into the next room and fight something without you is probably fine as just a time for a GM to make a move. Same as if the players asked what happened in a fight between some random NPCs.


Hopefully I'll have time this weekend to get this stuff written up.

Yeah, the first rule of Apocalypse World "to do it, do it" definitely applies!

Killing a hireling as your move as the DM is powerful. On the one hand, the PCs are relieved that they were not the target. On the other hand, Rembrant just got flayed alive by a nightgaunt right before their eyes! Thos moments are golden, and also a great time for the DM to be evil.

Ahhhh, the delicious principle of 'whenever possible, be an EVIL Dungeon Master'
Muwah ha ha. Love it. Once again Tony I am humbled by your ideas and distillation of what makes both games (OD&D / AW) so awesome.

I too, can't wait to play this weekend! The lads have conned a drunken dwarven Cleric into underphoenixmountain with them and last we heard he's singing bawdy songs with a bunch of gnolls - thinking they are his friends. Not only is he a liability in terms of effective hirelings, he's a great plot hook for adventures and I'm loathe to sight him down my crossbow sights!

Can't wait to see what you come up with Sage. :)