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

[hong]

Good deal, I hope an actual look at the rules in the books themselves don't invalidate that implication. Although it also looks like you can only cleave into One additional foe, which it unfortunate.

On minions.. another thought... if a minion dies on any successful hit, does that mean that if the Fighter backhands a minion, it dies? I mean that's just... too much for me to swallow right there.

It falls over, stunned and out of the fight. Haven't YOU ever wanted to punch a troll in the face?

Remember that 0 hp == either death or KO'd, depending on what you want, and presumably, what the DM wants.

 

[hong]

Haven't YOU ever wanted to punch a troll in the face?

Shut up, you lot.

 

[Blackeagle]

Although it also looks like you can only cleave into One additional foe, which it unfortunate.

Well that's all you could do with cleave in 3e. My guess is if Great Cleave is in 4e, it'll be a separate, higher level power.

 

[Dausuul]

On minions.. another thought... if a minion dies on any successful hit, does that mean that if the Fighter backhands a minion, it dies? I mean that's just... too much for me to swallow right there.

A minion dies if it takes 1 point of damage. A backhand to the face is not going to do 1 point of damage.

Now, a successful unarmed attack would take a minion down, though presumably not kill it (since it's nonlethal damage). But an unarmed attack isn't a backhand slap; it's Indiana Jones laying out some Nazi grunt with one punch.

 

[IanArgent]

But an unarmed attack isn't a backhand slap; it's Indiana Jones laying out some Nazi grunt with one punch.

Quite well illustrated in any of the Indy movies, actually. Indy generally drops the minions in one hit (in at least 1 instance I can think of, he gets 3(!) minions with one attack - Last Crusade, the 3 guys lining up to have a go at him on the tank, whom he drops with one shot from a Luger. This apparently surprises him enough that he discards the Luger in case its power becomes uncontrolled...). But when he gets into a fistfight with a non-minion enemy; the fight goes on (literally) for minutes with both Indy and the bad guy literally trading punches, knocking each other down, bloodying faces, etc. Nonetheless, Indy has to honor the threat of the minions.

There's a couple of chase scenes in these movies where Indy is running from the bad guys who have firearms and are sending hails of fire at him, which barely miss, or are blocked by structural elements of the buildings, etc. In 4E D&D terms, these are not misses. They just aren't hits of a sufficient damage to take him below 0 HP. His running, dodging, and weaving is tiring, to be sure, and eventually the shooting will catch up to him. (By which point he's turned the tables or done something so clever/stupid that the encounter ends).

D&D has always seemed to me to be aimed at the "pulpier" end of things (with Eberron being the extreme case). It would be an excellent system to run, say, the Belgariad and Mallorean in (really any of Eddings' series, given the similarities of all his worlds), or any of the Riftwar sagas (which are faily clearly modeled on D&D even if the urban myths about the source of the stories aren't true). And from where I sit, 4E D&D looks much better for this kind of thing than 3ed was. A D&D game is, in general, all about the PCs. There are systems/worlds where this is not the default assumption (WoD being the primary example, but you could make an argument about Shadowrun as well). I don't have to go to Hong Kong action flicks to see mooks, I can draw out of the works inspired by and the works that inspired D&D without having to pick on D&D novels. Enemies have value even in a situation where they will drop out of the fight due to one good hit - the PCs may need to stop the minions from dropping other minions, the minions may have enough combat prowess that as a group their attacks can threaten the PC, etc

In most of the fights in these kinds of novels, the protagonists know going in or shortly after the battle starts that some of their opponents are going to be dropped by one hit, and some have the skills/luck necessary to mix it up with them for a time. It doesn't break my suspension of disbelief (admittedly a pretty strong suspension to be reading these books ) when I see this narrated.


Finally - back to the glass window - a glass window has 1 HP because D&D doesn't have fractional HP. The situation is not transitive; any attack that can deal 1 HP will break the glass window, but an attack that will break a glass window may not deal 1 HP. Anyone can be killed by a 1 HP attack, if it happens to hit them when they have only one HP. It happens that some creatures, being more skilled/lucky than the rest, are rarely (if ever) at a point when an attack will catch them unaware enough to do that last, critical, hit point. they dodge aside at the last minute, their god smiles on them and the dagger slips on a rib instead of sliding through to puncture a lung, etc. All HP are not equal; some are more important than others. In 4E we actually appear to have 2 "important" HP - the one that sits just in front of the "bloodied" condition, and the last one before 0. And the one before bloodies isn't all that important in a physical sense, as it can be replaced by someone else yelling at you to "shake it off", or even your own attempts to shake it off. (We do have a slight oddity in that even if you're unconscious and bleeding to death, someone can still yell at you to "pull yourself together", and you will; I may make a tiny house rule to say that at 0 and below you are out of the fight and dying; but not necessarily unconscious, just unable to take effective action. If you are inspired, you can get back up and keep fighting - I'm not in any sense a simulationist, so this doesn't bother me)