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I had an idea for a new ttrpg class. One that would fit in pretty tidily in something like ADnD.
The Employer(the boss, the capitalist?)
The class literally specializes in hirelings. Their class abilities are related to money and it allows them to pay more hirelings. These hirelings are then used to take all of their risks in the dungeon.
This idea is evil. I have thought up a Bad Idea.
Typically this falls under 'minion' classes - distinct from 'animal companion' classes in that the goal is having more than one at any one time, and them generally being disposable.
Necromancers have the leg up on most versions because their forces grow stronger as the enemy forces die, and bodies are plentiful when DungeonFucking.
The non-dead variety typically leans towards the 'Leader' archetype, a sort of field commander or leader of some kind of warband. Anyone with a good enough persuade stat can actually get this done in many systems, and many even have rules for it (which then typically makes the storyteller hate the system just a bit more, because it's clearly broken and not intended, but there are often a surprising amount of rules for it.)
In the vein of the Employer/Boss/Capitalist, my first thought is the Overlord, per the game Overlord; you are an Evil Overlord, and your little goblin/kobold/other diminutive replacable creature that spawns out of a hole in the ground are simultaneously an extension of your will, your meat shield, your weapon, your dick, and even your literal distant hands.
I think there's even a version of this in Cyberpunk (iirc in Cyberpunk RED), somewhere in the Fixer/Businessman types, I think there's an 'I'm Sending Hired Goons Instead Of Going Myself' ability, which is fucking hilarious to me.
Cyberpunk RED Mentioned. I must Post.
I've been putting time in with that class. I'd say the tables for managing Team Member loyalty are pretty solid, but they're no more than the sort of tables for managing hirelings you'd see in BX. Heck, the idea that new team members start with 1 loyalty is nothing new either. What is kinda neat is that Team Members make their loyalty check every time they're asked to do a task, so they need to be regularly stuffed with perks, compliments, and paid time off in excess of the d6 or they're going to faff around. In that way there's more a focus on being a "Good Boss" (which is loaded with some assumptions but Tal's Cyberpunk is always loaded with assumptions) than a fixation on straight punishing obvious problem behaviours with hirelings that can be solved by not having the player interact with hirelings. In effect it's still like you jump through some consistent hoops to get your minions behaving as an extension of your PC, though.
The stock image is deffo getting the Company Bodyguard and hiding behind the nearest dumpster, but I did an experiment with an Exec who's a woodchipper in combat with a bodyguard there to bolster action economy and that's pretty fun.
Ah love having an experienced player weigh in!
See I saw there was a crafting class and immediately broke the game a bit. I was getting absolutely insane gear right out of chargen because I could guarantee the craft after like 3 rolls of upgrades.
With starting cash I could outfit my team members with gear so decent we kind of went against the paradigm of struggling newbies and launched straight into over competent runners. Like, starting with the +12 skeletal graft since we had a cybernetics surgeon on team.
Very fun. Not many DMs can handle running for me b/c I play the system on paper to play in the world, and like 90% of DMs don't.
They goofed. They gave you the techie's limit break: having several weeks of consecutive downtime.
I feel you tho, RED's very much that sort of system, balanced by having a lot of frictions put in place so the power curve doesn't get overwhelmed. The problem is it's a pretty terse ruleset, so it doesn't always come out and explain the conditions it wants to be run under. It fizzles when a certain amount of progression is hit but it also takes a few campaigns to understand its rhythms so you can let players accrue stuff gradually, which aint great when it's also a system that really loves pitching long term goals and antagonists through the lifepath system. I say this out of love for RED, but I'm using RED as a launch pad to engage with more rulesets that might have, like, one aspect it's going for
It wasn't several weeks, and it wasn't consecutive, plus, most of the upgrades and crafts I was doing were Premium items, so a day at most per item, and a lot of the team items were Upgrades, making it way faster and cheaper all-told.
I didn't end up starting with the massive strength cybernetic, but set it up as a goal once we scraped together a safe week or two to try for fabricating it.
I'm also a bit of a shit - I hate the part where 'it fizzles when a certain amount of progression is hit', because that means I spend most of the game clambouring to get equipment and rarely getting to enjoy it, only to have one big run where I might get to use half of it, and then the game's over.
I like getting ahead of the curve with the rules, and chafe real hard when I can't.
But also, we've digressed enough from the OP topic, and I'm sure EarthShaker doesn't want to keep seeing notifs of CPRed talk. XD
You're not wrong about it fitting tidily into AD&D. There's an optional class playing in that space already - The Trader. It was a weird thief that earned XP for closing big deals and got a bunch of special followers at level 10.
Being a Dark Sub special class, it would almost certainly be way the hell overpowered in a regular campaign setting haha
Considering how important followers and hirelings were in the early editions I'm not surprised that I 'invented' something that already existed for thirty years
For what it's worth, yours actually seems more interesting to play than the Dark Sun one. There's more fun in having a Darkest Dungeon manager class in a group than having to pause the game so the one player gets their fantasy accountant's books in order before you actually visit the dungeon.
