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

[HerntheHunted]

Wouldn't the proper challenge be a 11th level PC? AC of 11th level pc is base + magic armour + level bonus which for Kathra be around an AC of 26?, while her attack bonus is probably around +12?

The Orc skirmisher pretty much hits only on a 18 or higher and gets hit on a 5 or higher...Isn't this the same problem we're trying to avoid by using minions. The fact that lower level critters don't act as good minions (can't really hit the PCs and have weak defense but still require bookkeeping?)

Yep, that´s the point. Mooks should be weak but not entirely harmless and at the same time they should be handled easliy by the DM. Fine and beautiful thing, these Minion rules.

 

[Lacyon]

Point remains -- there's no reason to remove 3e style 'breakdowns'. You lose possibly useful information for no real gain in readability.

This is where we disagree.

Strongly.

 

[keterys]

Light shields are -1, -1 actually.

I suspect the number of attacks that disarm to be absurdly small, if there are any that aren't just stat debuffs instead.

 

[muffin_of_chaos]

Sorry, but I have a lot of trouble with the idea that 4th edition is for people who value not thinking. Thats demeaning to the game, the developers and everyone who plays it.

D&D is not meant to be realistic. It's meant to have a semblance of realism, but ultimately the whole point is to interact in a game patterned after fantasy novels and action movies. Thus, hit points, initiative, arbitrary skill sets, random stats that have no bearing on each other.
I doubt you're thinking about this the entire time you play. But the unrealism is intrinsic.

I want minor monsters who don't utterly disrupt the flow of combat. I have the option of using minions. So do you. But you don't have to. You've heard this plenty of times, but I'm adding my voice to it. They say in the description of minions that they are optional.
Personally, if somehow a minion became important (I would try to make minions sort of incapable of this), I'd just change them into a non-minion. It's as easy as if I had drawn up the thing as a non-minion in the first place. No loss of time or anything.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I still think, that there should be a minion template which holds the xp for the monster constant... so your players actually know what they have to expect... if they met one of those monsters before...

also those legion devils need a lot of space for such a linear scaling... with scaling rules, they could have cut at least half of those stat blocks... the only adjustment had to be: minion damage scales with 1/5 per level...

also it now seems the orc minion stats bonuses were really messed up... i hope it was corrected in the actual book...

 

[Cadfan]

Voss- its not about not thinking. Its about not overthinking. Every edition has had places where the rules didn't model a perfect gameworld. Some editions tried harder than others to attain that "complete world model" effect, and some tried less. 3e tried pretty hard, but by the very nature of the product couldn't reach that ever-receding target (there's actually a logical proof of this). And the more it tried, the more its failure to reach a perfect model stuck out.

4e adopts a different system- model a genre, not a world. And then it tells people "the rules have a thin spot here. Here's a list of ways you should avoid poking the rules, so as not to tear them." That's far better than denying the thin spot exists, at least for me.

 

[Benimoto]

You hit minions from the very beginning, mixed in with credible opponents. That, to me, isn't believable at all. You really could conceivably drag along a pack of children to throw rocks at the minions while you deal with the real threats. When kobold A can take 3 hits with an axe, and kobold B falls to a single pointy stick, I'm going to notice. And I'm going to want an in-game reason for why it happens. And frankly so is my character- Magnus the paladin is going to be wanting an explanation for why some kobolds can take a greatsword to the face while others fall immediately. Is he killing kobold children now? That could very well be against his code of honor...
Sorry, but I have a lot of trouble with the idea that 4th edition is for people who value not thinking. Thats demeaning to the game, the developers and everyone who plays it.

I completely agree. Although at heart, minions are a construct of DM convenience, there's a few easy ways to think of them. First, as you've already hit on, they could be children or ill-prepared monsters. There may be some ethical concerns raised, but I personally like that kind of roleplaying.

Alternately it seems to me that dying after you get hit by a greatsword in the face is the natural state of things, so you could have a campaign where the vast bulk of combatants are, by number, minions, and the regular, elite and solo monsters are the exceptions, like the heroes are exceptions to the general populace. That could make a good "war" campaign.

As a third possible option, the PCs already have such relatively high HP and attack bonuses at first level compared to what they gain at each level, that you could simply imagine 4-6 levels "before" first level, and say that the minions they face now were credible threats at one of those imaginary earlier levels, but are minions now.

You could use any or all of those justifications over the course of several combats. Or invent a different one.

Like I said, it's a little stretch when you use them, and combined with other little stretches, like auto-hitting attacks, that may be too much. As you've hit upon earlier, you can really just replace every 2 minions with a monsters 4 levels lower and achieve probably similar results if you don't want to use them.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Minions don't have to be treated as minions in reference to non-player characters. Treat them as minions only in regard to the player characters.

Or, don't use minions at all; they're entirely optional.

 

[Irda Ranger]

As should surprise no one who read my "Minions are aliens from another game system" thread, I don't fine this Excerpt to be satisfying. Minions are exactly what I expected them to be: an ugly rules kludge for narrative/cinematic purposes. I guess the devs decided "We need Minions", push came to shove, and rather than killing a sacred cow (BAB that advances with level), Sim got thrown under the bus. Needless to say, not the choice I would have made.

What's so painful about this (to me), is that it's blindingly obvious that the WotC devs knew exactly what they were doing too. The only real difference between the various Minion levels is that Init, BAB, Skills and Defenses all advance the same +1/2 level that PCs advance. Am I the only one who sees this as a stupid arms race? Remove the +1/2 advancement from all parties and what you're left with is the exact same result.

The Minion rules are guilty of two sins: (1) they're a kludge patch on top of an unnecessary complexity, (2) they introduce all sorts of corner case errors as a result of having null HP and taking null damage. These two sins have second-order effects as well, such breaking verisimilitude and making Sim world-design impossible. Luckily the transparency of the rules also make the fix an easy one.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Voss- its not about not thinking. Its about not overthinking.

Perhaps what some consider a moment's thought you consider over-thinking? Sadly I do not believe I can think is smaller increments.