Thoughts on Henchmen and Hirelings

I’ve often wondered why henchmen and hirelings are not stressed more in adventuring. Everything seems to revolve around a party of four to six intrepid adventurers braving the unknown. At the same time, things like wondering monsters and random encounters have seemed to fall by the wayside as well. For me, henchmen and hirelings always were an integral and fun part of the game. I’ll admit that when I was younger, we did tend to treat these folks as cannon fodder and throw them under the bus with abandon (heh, that does bring back some funny memories). However, as we matured in our play style, they enabled us to adventure longer and farther as we had more resources to draw upon and survive random encounters. When playing with my last group, we initially did not utilize any hired hands, but it soon became apparent that it would be prudent to do so unless we wanted to limit the adventure to one encounter and then stop to lick wounds. I’m not quite sure why current designs shy away from this (of course it could all be just a misperception on my part). Especially with the current statistic obsessed incarnation of the game, it seems that this aspect would be much more highly stressed over the four player model (I guess folks view them too much as XP sinks).