Let's talk about minions...

[Henry]

I wish there were a minion template I could easily slap onto any monster in the book, personally.

-O

My quick minion recipe:

1. Use the Brute creation rules from page 184 of the DMG, with 1 hit point.
2. Assume average stats, so no adjustments to defenses.
3. For damage, use the minimum damage result from the low normal damage table on page 185 for their level. For example, if it's a 4th level minion, it does 5 damage per hit; if a 16th level minion, it does 8 damage per hit.
4. Include any powers unique to its race, so as to have the true feel of a creature of its type, so pack tactics for gnolls, shifty for kobolds, etc.

I find this comes reasonably close to most of the minion stats in the Monster Manual, though not every minion is dead on. For that matter, all the monsters in the MM were (I'm willing to bet) designed piecemeal as the rules were evolving, so they likely don't all have stats that are completely dead-on.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I share your view exactly!

What may be initially difficult to grasp is that minions only have 1hp when pcs of the appropriate level are around. Once you've grasped that, all of the criticism I've seen so far simply evaporates. It's a great concept.

Wow. Its amazing that a minion ever engages in combat at all. If my hit points went from 50 or more to 1 when an enemy approached I would run like hell.

 

[FireLance]

I'm considering the idea of giving minions 1/4 the hp of a regular monster, then slapping the Minion Weakness property on them.

Minion Weakness
A minion that is hit by a power which has a level higher than its own is reduced to 0 hit points instantly.​

This basically requires the PCs to pull out the big guns in order to get the instant kill effect, but damage on a miss powers could still kill minions if they reduce their hit points to 0 as normal.

Alternatively, if the above is too constraining on the PCs' choice of powers, we could differentiate minions by tier, as follows:

Heroic Minion Weakness
A Heroic tier minion that is hit is reduced to 0 hit points instantly.

Paragon Minion Weakness
A Paragon tier minion that is hit by a power of 11th or higher level is reduced to 0 hit points instantly.

Epic Minion Weakness
A Epic tier minion that is hit by a power of 21st or higher level is reduced to 0 hit points instantly.​

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Great thread!

The way I like to describe minions to those who dislike the idea is: "Things are not minions themselves. PCs of an appropriate power level have the power to treat them as minions."

 

[TheSleepyKing]

When I first read about them, I was a fan of minions. I got their relativistic nature, and it seemed to make sense. But they haven't worked out so well in practice. Thanks to minions, my players always lead combat with (enlarged) dragonborn breath and burning hands, which pretty much clears out all minions instantly. It makes them pretty much pointless, except to give the wizard a sense of usefulness (which she doesn't really have without minions, because she's otherwise mostly useless outside of dailies).

I also find the difference between regular creatures and minions too significant, so much so that it's jarring. One goblin is an absolute tank, taking four or five hits (or more), while the guy next to him drops in one. It all gets a little too metagamey.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

Wow. Its amazing that a minion ever engages in combat at all. If my hit points went from 50 or more to 1 when an enemy approached I would run like hell.

LOL

This is the problem I have with minions. Essentially, minions presume a fundamental disconnect between the PCs and the reality and the game world. Or more accurately, that the world, even the nature of reality in the game world, revolves around the PCs.

In every version of D&D until now, a monster with 50hp had 50hp whether it was fighting the 2nd level town guard or the 12th level PCs. That's because it was considered that because HPs are a representation of luck, stamina, the ability to absorb physical punishment, etc. and as such don't go into some sort of quantum flux just because the PCs show up.

Player: "Does a minion fall in the forest make a sound if there is no PC to hear?"

DM: "Ah, but the premise of your question is flawed because without a PC to hear, there is no minion to fall."

Player:

I do understand minions and I understand them as being representative of 4e's extremely gamist approach to design. IMC the word does exist outside my PCs and a terrible 15th level demon capable of ravaging an entire town in a narrative sense will not be turning into a 1hp soap bubble once the PCs arrive to save the day. If you want your PC to be a real badass, kill some critters with actual HPs not mobs of drones designed to make your PC look good. The whole minion thing smacks of a cheap setup to make people look, mechanically and narratively, more potent than they actually are.



Wyrmshadows

 

[MrGrenadine]

I do understand minions and I understand them as being representative of 4e's extremely gamist approach to design. IMC the word does exist outside my PCs and a terrible 15th level demon capable of ravaging an entire town in a narrative sense will not be turning into a 1hp soap bubble once the PCs arrive to save the day. If you want your PC to be a real badass, kill some critters with actual HPs not mobs of drones designed to make your PC look good. The whole minion thing smacks of a cheap setup to make people look, mechanically and narratively, more potent than they actually are.

I agree.

I'm not opposed the idea of easy-to-kill mooks, but I think they should be used sparingly--as the cannon fodder in a large scale battle, or as the guards patrolling around the wall of a compound the characters have to infiltrate--that sort of thing.

As for the 1 hp, I understand the abstraction, and I understand the goal, but I don't like the execution. Its just part and parcel with the whole "black box" design philosophy, and it leads to all the odd situations that others have mentioned. Hp should mean something whether the characters are in the room or not, or they mean nothing.

In which case, I guess not giving minions any hp, and just declaring them "one-hit kills" would actually make more sense to me. But I still can't wrap my head around a wizard with a dagger killing a demon with one hit.

Ultimately, I think the 1 hp minion takes too much out of the character's hands. The kill has nothing to do with the character's skills, and everything to do with the what the DM wants, and the minion's metagame characteristics. To put the power back in the character's hands, I would give minions normal hp, but give the characters a x10 or x20 multiplier to damage when they hit it. That way, you avoid all the weird "a demon is fighting a rat" corner cases, hp actually means something in the game-world, and characters still get to wade through foes like a scythe through wheat.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

But none of the world really "exists" when the PCs aren't there. Its just like a novel or movie, the whole world ceases to be a concrete thing when the focus isn't on that specific part of the world.

As such, when it comes to HP, it simply represents how likely a creature is to survive/engage in combat during that moment in time. So in one circumstance a human may have 50 HP during one encounter with the PCs since circumstance, story-plot, luck, etc. is different then later on when it has 1 HP because the previous reasons for his HP are different.

So yes, the 15th level Demon can be ravaging the countryside, but he can become a minion since while he himself doesn't become different at all, his circumstances surrounding the conflict does. His HP doesn't change since it was never concrete to begin with.

The townsfolk (who probably couldn't even hit his AC anyways) may be bashed aside and their pitchforks simply prick his side. While, with the PCs the fighter manages to behead the demon in a single blow (now obviously this be a odd encounter if the DM was building it up as a big confrontation).

The minion-rules are rules that should be used only when a DM understands when it is appropriate.

To give another example too, a human can get cut by a knife and survive without a scar but that same knife could be plunged into his heart. In-game that is simply the way the narrative flows, mechanically the first time he is regular the second he is a minion.

 

[davethegame]

Can't resist the urge to show off one of my recent posts here:
http://www.critical-hits.com/2008/08/25/adventure-design-seminar-gencon-2008/

It's a writeup from the Adventure Design seminar at GenCon, which has a really good section on using minions.

After that, I've thought a lot about minions. There are many possible encounters that they create that present interesting choices in encounter design, and I really like the possibilities. I'll try to post about it when I have my thoughts together (though I'm also thinking about a Dragon article about it.)

 

[nightwyrm]

Minions aren't a gamist conceit. Gamism doesn't care how many hp something has. It cares about whether the game is challenging/balanced for the players and hp is only small part of that.

Minions are primarily a narrativist tool. It allows the DM to tell stories where the heroes hack through a horde of mooks, like the Helmsdeep battle from LotR. It allows for stories where the heroes overcome overwhelming odds without it either turning into a cakewalk or an impossible fight.

When I think of monsters getting demoted to minions I'm often reminded of Buffy season 7. In the beginning of the season, even one ubervamp was a huge challenge for Buffy. But by the end, Buffy and the other slayers were hacking through an army of them.