Fun with hirelings

There comes a moment in every player’s life of dungeon delving where they wonder: “How far would my money go towards sending squads of orcs to do my dirty work?”

The answer, of course, is “not very far”. It’d have to be, or the game would suck. But the idea of hirelings is pretty cool so let’s see what we can do.

Assumptions

You know what they say happens when you assume? You reach useful conclusions based on your initial assumptions that increase your understanding of the underlying systems, that’s what!

Here’s what’s up.

1. We want to limit hirelings as follows:

• A group of hirelings “owned” by a single player is about as strong as an extra PC.
• That group of hirelings costs half of that player’s gold income.

2. Player income is based on this line in the DMG: “Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0- 4 table, eighteen rolls on the Challenge 5- 10 table, twelve rolls on the Challenge 11- 16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table.”

3. Leveling speed is based on this little throwaway in the DMG: “[After level 4] spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level.”

Some numbers

Here’s how CR stacks versus player level, according to Xanathar’s Guide to Everything:

Here’s how much money a player makes per level (thanks to this great post by Martin_DM on reddit):

Maths

The Retainer

Let’s start with the single hireling. We’ll call this the retainer. This NPC represents a special follower that is on almost equal footing with the character. The retainer is as strong as a character and shares in the loot with that character. So any gold that a character receives as their share of the loot is split 50/50 with their retainer.

If we look at the “single hireling” column in the CR table and merge those columns where the CR doesn’t change we get:

Apart from a weird spike at level 12, the retainer’s CR is always one lower than the character’s level divided by 2 (round up).

Hirelings

For regular hirelings we’ll use the “4 hirelings” column. Since we want a full group (equal in strength to a single character) to cost half a character’s expected income, we get:

Which we can average per hireling CR:

Final version

Let’s clean all of this up for the final version:

A hero can choose to either take a retainer along or recruit up to 4 hirelings. A retainer follows the hero and shares in the spoils: half the treasure that hero finds goes to their retainer. Hirelings cost a flat fee in gold pieces per session.

Tweaks

There’s a few final tweaks I would make to round this out:

• Allow the CR4 hirelings earlier, since level 20 doesn’t last particularly long.
• Limit the number of hirelings not to 4 but to the character’s Charisma bonus, for fluff reasons.
• Start the retainer at a slightly lower level so that it can grow to its maximum as the player levels up – at ⅓ of the PC’s level.
• Limit the max CR for hirelings not by PC level but something that correlates to it – for instance faction renown, or the size of their stronghold.
• Since a session is not a real-world measure of time, the DM needs to consider what the average game-time spent per session is. Perhaps a dungeon crawl can take multiple sessions (but only a few hours in game-time) while a journey through the jungle covers multiple weeks in a single session. A seasoned DM can probably guess how many sessions an adventure will take and multiply the hirelings’ asking fee beforehand. This GM would have Robilar’s band of orcs cost 1,200 gp (4 CR ½ hirelings for about 3 sessions worth of Tomb of Horrors exploration).