In my current game, we just finished a multi-session adventure back in town with a fair amount of loot. There's three Joe Schmoe/Jimmy McRedshirt type hirelings with the group and we decided they should get a half share of gp/xp. This amounted to something in the neighborhood of 400 gp. Quite a big pile for 'ol Meatshield Mcfarlane and his pals! Now, the question is: is that 1 gp=1xp rule true for these normal dudes? How could it be? They don't level up. Or at least, I don't want them to. For them leveling up would mean becoming first level, but most of the PCs are still first level and it doesn't feel right to have the PCs and the hirelings on equal footing like that.
Then I was reminded that there ought to be some morale rolls in here between adventures. My first inclination was to give them a bonus to the morale roll because of the gold earned, but instead I think they should get a penalty for each comrade that died. There were 4 other hirelings who died along the way. If there's a -1 for each death, it seems quite likely that these guys will cut and run en masse. That sounds good to me. In my experience, hirelings are either faceless mooks who get no respect from the players or the players love the hirelings as much or more than their PCs with no middle ground. These guys were solidly in that first category.
Maybe the combination of giving Hirelings a half share of gp with the -1 to morale rolls per death with get these poor folks some respect.
They'll only earn xp if they're classed characters, and if a PC dies the player can take over a hireling and give him or her stats and a class if they dont have those already and convert their gold to xp then, so the new PC doesn't start at 0.
