Follow Me, Ye Weary

Question: In your experience, are Followers useful at all? If so, in what ways are they useful? As fighters? As an extra set of hands? As an extra source of purviews and Legend? As set pieces there mainly for fluff reasons?

Followers are really what you make of them. They can be super effective in the roles you choose for them if you choose wisely and recognize their limitations, or they can be entirely useless if you chose them to do something that becomes irrelevant or you wanted them only for window-dressing. Every PC with Followers chooses and designs them differently, so they seldom resemble one another when all's said and done.

I'm not sure how everyone around here runs Followers, so it's probably a good idea to point out that we don't do it by the book (I know, you are all so shocked). In the original rules, Followers could not be enhanced or grown from their original forms at all, and the point system governing them was so restrictive that it was impossible for them to be really useful for combat purposes. Followers who were super badass at Legend 2 would become merely helpful backup at Legend 3 and totally useless thereafter, which was hardly much fun for those who wanted to spend points on them, so we have Followers advance in power along with their owner, gaining Legend and stats as they go along. Some people do this by giving out XP for the PC to spend on the Followers, but we prefer to just upgrade them as the STs and then give out their new stats, since it's simpler that way and we like the PCs themselves being the only real people who get to make bold character choices with XP.

Followers can be incredibly useful; at the moment, Folkwardr is rolling deep through Ragnarok with his team of sun-powered giants, and while they can't take on a Titan Avatar on their own, they're more than useful for plowing through the gruntwork while the PCs go head to head with the big cheeses. Followers can't be all things all the time, however, so they're not really any use when it comes to social situations or advice (though they can be admirable fetch-and-carries if necessary). On the flip side of the coin, Eztli's Follower is her son Chicahua, and being a Legend 4 or so toddler he's not a lot of help at the moment and is mostly staying at home; at other times, however, he's a hilarious source of entertaining antics and even political machinations that his mother doesn't even notice happening (and, we discovered the other day, he's more than capable of murdering a small giant if she's not watching him carefully). He'll be useful in a different context than combat, because he's not primarily a combat-oriented Follower.

Really, as a player you have to decide what you want Followers to do and then sit down with the Storyteller and figure out how to build them. If you want them to be primarily fighters, they probably won't be much use at anything else; if you want them to be primarily a posse of political advisors or courtiers, they'll probably only be really good at that, and if you want them to be small-scale wizards with magical backup talents, they probably won't have anything else to fall back on. They're not PCs; they don't get to be really well-rounded and fleshed-out. Your Birthright point expenditures matter, too, and the more points you spend on them, the better they'll probably be at whatever you want them for - you can't expect a one-dot Follower to be as badass as a five- or even three-dot one, after all.

In the end, working out with a Storyteller what you want them to do and be, and trusting that Storyteller to make sure that will work out, is all the complex Follower tinkering you really need to do (and Storytellers, if your players have Followers, remember them). We've seen every flavor of Followers in our game, from useless deadweight to helpful aides to badass combatants and all the options in between. Followers themselves are as flexible as any other Birthright; whether or not they're useful for anything depends completely on the creativity of the player and the mindfulness of the Storyteller.