Balancing combat with Retainers?
TLDR: Do you count retainers as heroes for the purposes of malice generation and encounter value?
One of my groups is getting into the higher levels, and a few of them have been getting retainers. Now, they've had one retainer for a long time (adventure reward), and I basically treated it as if he weren't there as far as malice and EV. One of my players has pointed out that if they did count for malice and EV that it would probably be better to just ditch him since his contributions to the hero side wouldn't be worth the extra difficulty on the monster side. Now that my party has three retainers, I'm starting to wonder if I should keep ignoring them.
The rules say they should count for EV, but the retainer rules don't mention malice and the malice rules don't mention retainers. So fellow directors, I'm wondering how you rule this for Retainers, and what do you make of my player's idea that retainers aren't worth the extra combat difficulty?