I had heard that Veteran meant you could take Special Abilities from other playbooks, without any particular limit. It has been working great so far, but the one strange case my group found is Blood Brothers. It seems strictly better than upgrading an existing Cohort with the Thugs type, or upgrading Thugs with any other type. Is there a cost I’m not seeing, or is that just the min-max always better choice?
I had heard that Veteran meant you could take Special Abilities from other playbooks, without any particular limit.
I had heard that Veteran meant you could take Special Abilities from other playbooks, without any particular limit.
You have to be there, fighting with them.
(to get the +1, that is. But that’s half the ability. Don’t forget that the other half is just an upgrade, and you get two of those for an advance, but only one special ability)
?
Benjamin Davis Actually, creating a cohort, or adding a type to one, normally costs 2 upgrades, which is equal to a special ability (you either get 2 upgrades or one ability.) So if you have one Cohort it is equal, but if you have more than one, that feature alone is worth more than 2 upgrades.
So it does! I’d misremembered that.
Yes, this is strictly better than upgrading a cohort (assuming you want the Thugs type). But don’t forget about the fiction: being Blood Brothers has a lot more implications than just having a bunch of underlings who are good at fighting. You may not want to deal with those implications.
I’ll have to agree with Jakob above. While it is mechanically superior, the fictive consequences can be much steeper. And not just between the PCs and the Cohorts, but between the Cohorts themselves. When the Red Sashes kill all but one of your ramshackle group of thugs to send you a message, he’s far more likely to accept that you are far to busy for revenge at the moment, then if they were Blood Brothers.
That makes sense, and will actually make a great trade-off in my current campaign, where they are Shadows who have so far avoided killing anyone.