Excerpt: Minions. Go forth mine minions! Bring havoc with your 1 hp [merged]

[Bill Bisco]

Um, that at a quick glance has some SERIOUS problems...If a monster is designed to suffer 4-7 hits (according to the minion article), dependant on role) , then a standard monster at level 20 at its BASE is going to need between 160-280hp. THEN add in the regular HP for level....

Looking at an elite and solo creatures, that's a massive number of HP

Oh indeed, HP levels would have to rise. But HP just like Attack and Defense are relative. If you gain 10 levels and get +5 attack and defense, but your opponent has gained 10 levels and gained +5 attack and defense, your chance of hitting is the same as if no levels were gained.

Granted HP is slightly more complex than that, but not overly so.

 

[Lurker37]

Hrothgar the Mighty has made his name with his great axe, Dragon-hewer. But those who follow the saga of Hrothgar the Mighty have noted a peculiar quirk that Hrothgar exhibits in battle. At times he is seen to discard the axe he values so highly, and pull out a wicked dagger that he calls Minion-Poker. When asked about this behavior by a brave bard over many cups of ale, Hrothgar said:

'What am I, an idiot? I've got an extra 10% chance to hit with this thing, and it doesn't matter how much damage I do!'

The bard almost spills his drink laughing, before planting his index finger squarely on the addled barbarian's forehead.

"Hrothgar, you old fool! With an axe, you can cleave!"

Still laughing at the stunned expression on the barbarian's face, he pushes the old drunk back off his stool onto the floor to sleep off the booze, and turns to the task of composing the song that will make Hrothgar a laughing stock for months to come.

**************************************************************

There - now I've made a completely unfounded assumption about the rules that makes sense to me - that you'll need a certain minimum weapon size to cleave, possibly denoted by the 'heavy' keyword. Gee! Unfounded assumptions are fun! However, as someone has already stated that's all we have to work with at the moment, and it is fun, so I make more than a few myself!

Here are my personal takes on the main objections I've noticed regarding minions so far. These are all my opinion, and I reserve the right to be wrong:

1. They don't work well when you send out just one to do something. The rules we have seen clearly state that you're meant to encounter them in numbers. The minion rules are meant to recreate the experience of encountering large numbers of weaker foes which are still collectively dangerous. It strikes me as similar to the swarm rules - were there similar arguments over how poorly swarm rules modeled a single generic wasp? That argument may be facetious, but I'm trying to illustrate that just because misuse of a rule can have odd results, that doesn't mean it's automatically a bad rule. Especially if you have to break another rule to misuse it in the first place: Minions come in groups.

2. One hit point = < Fragile household item > . This is an argument about the hit point system, threads about which have toppled servers and swallowed small children. 4E is clearly increasing the visible level of abstraction in the hit point system. Complaints about whether this is a good thing are a separate topic, IMO. For better or worse, this increased abstraction is present in 4E, and the minion rules are based on that premise. Obviously, if you dislike the premise then the minion rules will also annoy you.

3. A child could kill a minion with a thrown rock. Said child could also kill a nontrivial percentage of commoners ( and wound much of the rest) with that same rock, if the DM allows it to inflict even a single hit point of damage. If it can kill a human, then it can kill a minion. That's not a flaw in the minion rules - it's a problem with the deadliness of throwing small rocks.

4. Minions should have more than one HP, especially at higher levels. My understanding is that the designers tried that and decided that it didn't work so well in play, because it created more work for the DM - something they wanted to avoid. This seems to be in line with a goal they have stated of making the game more accessible to first-time DMs. Furthermore they state that the goal was for the minions to drop with any solid blow - hence misses doing no damage. In fact, they were originally going to not use the hit point system at all, but playtesters observed that this made them immune to environmental hazards, since there's no roll to hit. The single hit point is a concession to stop people from trying to argue that Minions can swim through lava unharmed.

Furthermore, the rules we've seen so far seem to imply that attacks that only do one point of damage will be very, very rare. Most add the stat bonus from a primary stat, and many involve rolling more than one die. Add magical weapons/implements to the mix, and I can see most first level characters doing a minimum of four of five points of damage even on a poor roll. So the fact that a single point of damage would have been enough to kill them might never, ever actually become obvious in normal play.



My personal opinion on minions is that it looks like they will be a lot of fun if used as presented - a way of providing the PCs with an encounter containing a large number of opponents without it becoming a cakewalk or a TPK, and without making the DM use half a forest and a box of pencils to track each monster's HP. I'm in favour of this because I can think of many, many examples in film and fiction of non-superhuman heroes hacking through the rank and file to get to the real threat. Conan, Aragorn, any character ever played by Errol Flynn...

I can't help but regard D&D now having a way to recreate these sorts of scenes without slowing to a crawl as a good thing. My suspension of disbelief won't break because this mechanic is actually supporting something I have long enjoyed as part of the genre.

In short, I think it will be fun.

 

[NilesB]

So here's my minion question: how often do you all think they should be used? When planning encounters, do you think they should be in 10% of encounters? 30%? 50%? more?

KoTS has by my quick count:
Zero encounters solely with minions.
15 encounters with a mixture of minions and nonminion foes.
8 encounters with all the monsters lacking minionitude.
and one combat encounter solely wit hazards/traps.

 

[Errantocracy]

The problem with these rules is, of course, that they are not idiot proof, something which seems to be of great concern to the idiots.

Minions are a system to present a large group of enemies to the PCs that provide a challenge without overwhelming them, nothing more, nothing less. If that's too complicated for you, don't use them.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'm perfectly comfortable with that level of abstraction, so I'm comfortable with hitting a kobold 3 times before it goes 'down'. What I'm not comfortable with is the idea that is true for these kobolds, but not for those kobolds.

You mean you didn't add class levels to Kobolds?

 

[med stud]

D&D already modeled LOTR in 3.5, the Fellowship just wasn't that high of level.

But if a scalable minion effect was requested I would give the players scaling damage. I might for instance give players a +2 damage bonus per level and give minions a subsequent +2 hp per level, thus a minion 5 levels higher than the player would not be subject to an autokill, but a minion of their level would. This is just one idea of solving the issue, let's play with it and see if we can find other solutions.

That would be a more complex way of achieving the same results. Minions would still go down in one hit and you would have to do more calculations. I can't see what you would gain by that method.

 

[Mirtek]

I suspect 4E’s version of:
“How bad does the monster look hurt?”
will be:
“Does the monster look like a minion?”

The question remains whether the minion status will be something that can be recognized.

Prior to the orc preview art I was inclined to say that the minion status could be guessed by looking at the warriors of savage culures who respect personal progress and not so much by looking at a force from civilized lands (were the leader, dressed in the finest armor and weapons, is as a matter of fact the minion and only leading the force because he's the cousin of the king).

But looking at the orc preview art I say that it will be almost impossible to tell even in savage cultures. Because the orc warrior minion (first row, first orc from the right) doesn't look any less impressive than the orc bloodrager elite (first row, second orc from the right).

So even in savage cultures you can't tell a minion from an elite

 

[D.Shaffer]

*shrug* The 'Minions 1 HP' rule is just DM shorthand for "Minions have HP that's roughly around the average damage the PC's can do with a solid hit of an at will power. It's just 1 HP to make it easier to track." If you REALLY dont like this level of DM shorthand, just replace the 'Minion 1 HP' rule with the average damage the PC's can do.

Minions are there for the DM's who want the fantasy equivalent of Strormtroopers. They're a cinematic tool. If you dont want them, then dont use them. Replace 4 minions with 1 non minion of an equal amount of XP or give them 'real' HP. Dont tell me they shouldnt exist at all because you dont like them. It's like the DM equivalent to badwrongfun in scenario construction.

 

[Voss]

The bard almost spills his drink laughing, before planting his index finger squarely on the addled barbarian's forehead.

"Hrothgar, you old fool! With an axe, you can cleave!"

I don't get it. Nothing prevents him from cleaving with the dagger, no matter how absurd that sounds.


@Mustrum- I never had any desire to DM 3e. None, since watching paint dry seemed a much more entertaining activity. So no, I didn't.

 

[Voss]

So to Voss and Bisco, do you think D&D should be able to model LotR and Conan? If so, how would you do it?

Conan, largely yes, though for both you have to take out a lot of stuff. Magic items in particular have to go, as well as the way magic is handled at times (Magic in that setting is more more rare, almost exclusive to villains or plot-furthing NPCs, and very, very dangerous). But thats largely a matter of genre drift.

But the problems of modeling literature aside, I think 4e (and D&D) does Conan-style fantasy pretty well. The protagonists go from place, killing things and taking stuff. I can see a place for minions in a Conan place game (given the number of people he slaughters in any given battle), but I think its a place where whats entertaining to read isn't necessarily entertaining to play. Hacking through a horde of inconsequential nithlings strikes me as more of a chore than fun. But yeah, it works, D&D is just a little more high magic in tone. Restrict it to fighters, rogues, rangers and warlords and work the enhancement bonuses from magic items into the classes and you're pretty much done. Magic dabbling can be done through the multiclassing feats, and would be fairly rare.

It could be fun, actually. My own campaign setting has more of a Howard/Leiber feel, along with a more Iron Age historical feel. A fallen Assyrian-style empire, a falling Roman-esque empire, and most people are tribal and in small villages at the edges of the empires. No phantom-fungi style monsters, only about a dozen intelligent races (only about half the PH races strike me as viable), and all the anachronisms cut (which admittedly is something of a departure from the Howard material, since he has phalanxs, knights in full plate, and naked men with clubs running around simultaneously)
I keep spellcasting classes, but I may curtail magic items severely


Unfortunately D&D also does LotR fairly well: the party does something inconsequential while the DM NPCs do the actual quest and solve the setting. Again the magic level is a bit high, and spellcaster PCs are out of place, though you can have a couple 'magic' weapons and things, if you're important enough.