How's about free recruitment?

[Centalore]

Like, what if you find a bandit or something on the road. Let's heal him and have an option where there's a chance where you can recruit him. When you succeed he'd say something like, "Sure, after all the (Faction name) never treated me well anyway." And you'd get a -2 faction rep with the faction you've recruited him from. When I played on my friend's computer (mine keeps crashing) I found 2 dying sand ninjas and 1 Jounin with a truckload of traders leaving the scene. Of course the people you're recruiting must never have tried to attack your before also. Otherwise someone would exploit this by luring them into the towns and getting a number of guards on the poor Bandit group. A total of 3 may be recruited like this at a time (for RP reasons: the 3 (faction name) members would revolt against you because of their former affiliation or they all attack each other because of different factions) I apologize if this has already been suggested.

[swillo]

As stated in other posts, there is a simple dialogue mod that you can make to have them give a join option when you put them in a cell. So you can heal them take them back to base and put them in a cell and they will have the option to join you.

Or with out the mod you can put them in a slaver cell and then pick the lock. there is like a 25% chance that they will join you after that. You need to help them escape first and that can tend to turn the town you are in against you, so be careful.

[philthymcnasty]

From what i have talked to with komatsu, this will be a thing later on, they are currently working on it.