On your adventures, the DM might reveal that you’ve befriended a special character called a sidekick, who joins your party. This appendix presents the game statistics for sidekicks, of which there are three types:
Expert, an agile and exceedingly helpful jack of all trades
Spellcaster, a magic-user who can cast spells to harm your foes or heal you and your friends
Warrior, a martial companion who specializes in striking your foes or defending you and your allies
The DM will either tell you which type of sidekick to use or let you choose one. It’s up to you and the DM to decide who controls the sidekick in play.
You’re a Dungeon Master, and your party has grown to love one of your NPCs and wants to invite them to help on their adventures. Or, you’re a player and you’re in search of hirelings to help you out as you explore the infamous Tomb of Horrors. When you’re just playing a single adventure, using an nonplayer character stat block from appendix A of the Monster Manual like guard or scout for an NPC is just fine. If you expect a character to tag along with the party for a while and want them to grow over the course of their adventures, then sidekicks are the perfect way to model these NPCs!
Sidekicks were first introduced in Dragon of Icespire Peak, the adventure included in the boxed set D&D Essentials Kit. In that set, there are three types of sidekicks: the expert, the spellcaster, and the warrior. They start at 1st level, just like characters, and can advance up to 6th level—a limitation likely imposed because the boxed set itself only advances the characters to 6th level. However, these rules will also appear in updated and expanded form in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. Sidekicks have actually undergone a major revamp in Tasha's! This subsystem is now so robust that you could play entire sessions of D&D with sidekicks as heroes, if you wanted—but they also work perfectly for their original purpose of supporting the main characters on their adventures.
This article is a quick run-down of the sidekick rules as they’re presented in Dragon of Icespire Peak and how they've evolved in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.
How do Sidekicks Work?
Sidekicks are split into three types: the expert, the spellcaster, and the warrior. These sidekick types are all based on character classes from the Player’s Handbook. The warrior is clearly based on the fighter class, with features like Second Wind, Improved Critical, and Extra Attack plainly drawn from the fighter’s repertoire. Likewise, the expert is inspired by the rogue class, with features like Cunning Action and Expertise making them skillful opportunists. Finally, the spellcaster is the most divergent of the three types of sidekicks. The spellcaster must choose a role, which lets them draw spells from a specific class’s spell list.
Just like spellcasting characters, it’s hard to deny that spellcaster sidekicks are the most complicated type of sidekick to create. A little help from the D&D Beyond spells tool, which lets you sort spells by class, by level, and by almost any variable you can think of, will make choosing spells for your sidekicks a breeze. The full sidekick stat blocks and leveling rules, along with some sample sidekick personalities, can be found in Dragon of Icespire Peak. In Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, sidekicks can now be based on any stat block in D&D, so long as the original creature has a challenge rating of 1/2 or lower! If you want to make generic humanoid sidekicks, the basic Expert, Spellcaster, and Warrior stat blocks from Icespire Peak are still perfect. However, perhaps you befriended Guthash, the giant rat from The Sunless Citadel, or Meepo, the kobold from the same adventure. Now they can easily be your sidekicks and level up throughout your adventure!
Acquiring Sidekicks
How many sidekicks can join one adventuring party? I’d recommend not having more sidekicks than characters in your party—or in other words, no more than one sidekick per player character, and I’ll explain why below. Beneath that generous limit, though, go wild!
The only question then is: how do you go about acquiring a sidekick?
Characters gain sidekicks as the Dungeon Master’s story and the character’s action permit. This often happens when the DM has an NPC who they want to join you on an adventure, or when the characters want to take an NPC under their wing. Using the characters mentioned above, making Meepo a kobold expert or Guthash a giant rat warrior who follows the character who was nicest to them during the adventure is a great idea! Alternatively, if the characters are the sort of folk who would heartlessly add cannon fodder to their party, and don’t want to put their beloved NPCs in harm’s way, they may seek out mercenaries in town. It’s up to the Dungeon Master to determine how much such hirelings’ services cost. A good rule of thumb is for a mercenary sidekick to charge 1 gp per level per day for levels 1 through 4, 5 gp per level per day for levels 5 through 10, 20 gp per level per day for levels 11 through 16, and 50 gp per level per day for levels 17 through 20. Some mercenaries might be willing to work for lower wages in exchange for a fair cut of whatever loot they find.
Running Sidekicks
The goal of sidekicks is for them to be simple and easy to run. Why? One obvious reason is that the fewer creatures a Dungeon Master has to deal with at a time, the easier it is for the game to run smoothly. Just like a computer with too many tasks open at once starts to lag, a Dungeon Master juggling too many creatures, spells, and personalities starts to slow. Sidekicks using relatively simple rules helps alleviate this problem.
But what if there were an even better solution?
What if the players ran the sidekicks?
After all, the sidekicks are on the players’ side. Some of these characters may even have a close relationship with the characters—they may be friends, or family, or someone who owes them a life debt. Even if this sidekick is just a hireling they met at a mercenary outfit back in Baldur’s Gate, one of the characters is playing their salary. Let that player, whoever they are, control how the sidekick acts in combat. Just like Robin is there to support Batman, let the player decide how the sidekick supports their character.
As mentioned above, the simplicity of the sidekick will help keep the player’s mental load down, too. It’s just one extra action to keep track of—and since the sidekick acts on their own initiative, that player won’t forget to make them act on their character’s turn. It’s easy to call out that the sidekick’s turn is on deck, so that their player can prepare for what they want to do.
Playing Sidekicks As Heroes
One fascinating use for sidekicks is how easily they can be used as fully fledged heroes! If you're an experienced Dungeon Master introducing a new group of players to D&D, you could do worse than to let them all play pregenerated sidekicks with simple class features, rather than going through the challenge of character creation for the first time! Because sidekicks were designed with minimal complexity in mind, the expert, spellcaster, and warrior classes are useful for new or younger players. Heck, if you want to play D&D to focus on roleplaying and less on mechanics, these simplified character classes could suit your needs, too!
On the other hand, if your party has acquired a lot of sidekicks over the course of their adventures, it can be interesting to play a "below decks" episode as the sidekicks while the main characters are out adventuring. This is a great idea for a one-shot if one of your usual players is missing and you don't want to carry on without them. What do the sidekick characters usually do while the main cast is saving the world? Maybe their adventures are just as thrilling, but no one ever notices because the heroes are the ones who usually get all the accolades. Best of all, the simpler rules for sidekicks means that players can jump right into playing these characters, without pouring over their statistics to figure out how they work.
Note: We don't currently have feature support for the sidekicks rules, as presented in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. We will be building a proper system to handle sidekicks in a flexible manner. Thanks for your patience, we're hard at work creating tools that will make your D&D-playing experience easier!
Have you used sidekick NPCs in your game before? What other advice do you want to hear about how to run sidekicks? Learn all about sidekicks and more in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, available for pre-order on the D&D Beyond Marketplace!
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James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
Our dev team is hard at work implementing sidekicks into the digital toolset! They all appreciate your patience as they work out the bugs.
Dang. Some of the sidekick class features are really good.
Multiclass sidekick when? (Joke)
As crazy as it sounds. I feel like a pixie sidekick would be stronger in combat and have more utility than any character I have ever dmmed for.
Sidekicks are to close to characters. They needed to be closer to followers from Colville's S&F. We are now going to be plagued with players who want to play sidekicks or multiclass into the sidekick class and its going to head ache for years to come. Just like NPC classes.
Actually it's pretty difficult, due to several bugs with homebrew. When leveling up the current sidekicks get incorrect saving throw values and are very hard ot customise. This new sidekick system is long overdue and should have been fixed by DnDB long before Tasha.
I love that Wizards added sidekicks to provide some structure around key NPCs. In my campaign with my kids, they're always picking up "pets" along the way, and I've been having to just manually figure out how to scale them appropriately with the party (one has a direwolf and the other a fox as their primary sidekicks). Now I can easily give them creature companions built around the ruleset.
I'm also really excited that DnDBeyond is building out this functionality. It'll be cool to link sidekicks to characters and have some sort of mini character sheet for them that I can easily manage. Hope they take their time and build it well; can't wait!
Don't forget that sidekicks are optional like pretty much all the Tasha's content. Just don't allow them as a DM if you want to focus on the characters. I think that putting some structure around sidekicks was a great idea. It helps support the management of my NPCs in my campaign and gives them more flavor, making for more memorable friendships and alliances.
The sidekick that I am running for my party is General Kug, a bullywug guard-turned general and commander of the forces my players have assembled. Level 6 Warrior, with the bullywug statblock.
I've been playing LMOP with my seven year old daughter for a while, there were two sidekicks until about level three, then I had one of them loose a leg to Venomfang, so now that sidekick is responsible for managing the Phandalin town guard and rebuilding Tresendar Manor...anyway, the sidekick is great for beefing up a player in small teams, but it's also great for driving narrative with small kids. We both will play the sidekick pretty seemlessly. I will RP the sidekick to make suggestions, or have ideas, or ask questions. Usually things that are obvious to most players, but a young girl might not realize. Like, "Ummm...my PC, I am kinda scared to call that cave full of orcs and an orge to come out because they are under arrest. What's to stop them from just killing us both?"
It's not official rules, but I like the follower rules given in MCDM's "Strongholds & Followers". Matt's explanation on his youtube channel was also very insightful. It inspired me to make even simpler rules for the 'lackey' in my campaign (Kalli in the Oracle of War) that joins the party any time one of the players can't make it to a session. In any case, the basic philosophy is that the lackey in party play is meant to help balance encounters, but not take center stage. The players should always be the heroes.
So for me Kalli (the "lackey") is an archer with normal(tier 1)/silvered(tier 2)/magic(tier 3+) arrows and similar daggers for hand to hand and 13+(tier of play) AC. They roll 1d20+(tier of play) for all skills and saves. I pick one of the six attributes that the lackey gets +2 for skills/saves with. The lackey is assigned to one of the players and acts on that player's turn in combat. I (the DM) control the "move" action of the lackey, keeping it in a striking position but out of danger on the controlling player's turn as much as possible. If the controlling player attacks with their character and hits (or a single targeted enemy fails a save), the lackey also scores a hit, adding 1d8+(player level) non-lethal damage against the same target (lackeys don't crit). If the player didn't make an attack roll, they make an attack roll on behalf of the lackey (1d20+2+tier of play) and can assign the damage to any target the lackey can see. For each level of the players, the lackey gets a "heart container". For each die of damage/healing (mostly aoe) they would take they gain/lose a "heart" and I don't bother to track HP any closer than that. Enemies prefer to target a PC as long as they have a different logical target than the lackey. The lackey has a "flash of brilliance" once per tier per session. The party can decide to use the "flash of brilliance" to ask the DM to have the lackey do something exceptional, such as getting a 15 on any d20 roll or adding a d8 to any damage/healing roll. Lackeys are too modest to accept magical items or other attempts by the players to buff them up but too self important to carry luggage for players. Lackeys are reasonably good at planning what they need for travel and have just enough food and water for themselves but not enough to share. While lackeys throw in an occasional quip, they are not great conversationalists, they fail at investigation, perception or insight, and the player team can't get the lackey to do any INT/WIS/CHA skill check outside of a "flash of brilliance".
So basically in terms of stats for a DEX based lackey:
Tier 1 (level 1-4) Kalli: Hearts=level, AC 14, Skill/save+1 (attack/dex skill/save+3) damage 1d8+level piercing, 1 flash of brilliance per session
Tier 2 (level 5-10) Kalli: Hearts=level, AC 15, Skill/save+2 (attack/dex skill/save +4) damage 1d8+level piercing (silvered), 2 flashes of brilliance per session
Tier 3 (level 11-16) Kalli: Hearts=level, AC 16, Skill/save+3 (attack/dex skill/save +5) damage 1d8+level piercing (magic), 3 flashes of brilliance per session
Tier 4 (level 17-20) Kalli: Hearts=level, AC 17, Skill/save+4 (attack/dex skill/save +6) damage 1d8+level piercing (magic), 4 flashes of brilliance per session
are we going to be able to build sidekicks using beyond?
I haven't forgotten, and there are examples of being done well are around (See S&F) as mentioned. But take a look at the post above mine. That sentiment is only going expand. NPC classes in 3rd did similar things.
I want my bladesinger to take on an apprentice. I thought I'd take the spellcaster sidekick and give them a few bladesinger abilities to make it fit better.
As Stratix mentioned I would love D&D Beyond sidekick creation even though it means utilizing monster statblocks to start from. I have some NPCs in my game that I'm using as sidekicks and they have full classes, but I'd love to trim them down. However it's problematic to do that online.
Edit: Nevermind. I found my answer in the TCoE support thread. I look forward to this being added.
Will there be an option in D&D Beyond to add a character sheet for Sidekicks? For example, add them to a campaign and my encounters?
No artificer or monk sidekicks? The mage and warrior don't substitute neatly.
I've been using sidekicks for my current campaign and it's great! Two of them are girlfriends and another is a young kid they found with a group of hags. Not only does it totally round out the party but it gives me tons of opportunity to create additional bonds with the party members.
So let’s say I have a thug (warrior) sidekick and then this guy/girl gets to level 6 and gets the multiattack but he already got it because the thug has a multi-attack so would that mean it gets canceled out. Another example ,you get apprentice wizard (Spellcaster) sidekick does that mean that he combines the to spell slots for his NPC sheet and the sidekick spell slots?
I'm just going to add another voice to the crowd of those wanting Sidekicks as full character sheets.
I NEED sidekicks as character sheets because my players are aged 7-11 and they need the simplified classes.
I made a quest and I will give my players 2 NPCs to help kill monsters and does that have anything to do with the article?
I have a blink dog named "Wink” as a warrior sidekick to my Battlemaster fighter. He’s saved the casters in the rear many times.
I was playing as the UA warrior SK so it will be a little sad to lose the Danger sense. The hardest part is getting them a decent AC so they can stay at the front lines. Thankfully, my DM let me get some studded leather barding for him. He has 20 Dex now so a 17 AC isn’t too bad to cover the squishies in the rear.
Sometimes if my character isnt nearby I ask another player what they would like Wink to do. Then I have him do that. I try to make him feel like he’s the party’s SK, not just mine.