I don't know where the cut off should be, honestly, but two rounds seems acceptable to me. The fact that minions deal average damage and have good defenses for their level but die faster is sort of what makes them minions. I'm in favor of a rule that keeps them from dieing before they've even acted, but after about 3 rounds they stop being minions in my mind and just monsters with fewer interesting attack options.
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Minions and hps
- Thread starter cbbakke
- Start date
The DMG description for minions includes these points (paraphrased)
- Melee combatants between PCs and bank-rank enemies
- Shock troops and cannon fodder
- Fill out encounters
- Go down quickly (as frequently noted in this thread)
- Minions are not intended to be an entire encounter
- The 4 minions : 1 monster rule may not be intended to scale a high percentage of minions in an encounter.
- Minions work better when they delay the PCs from reaching a more threatening target (e.g. artillery)
- Minions work better when combined with terrain depth. That is, artillery is 20 squares away and firing, and the intervening squares are sparsely* populated with minions.
keterys
First Post
One of the inherent problems is that minions are often melee combatants... so if they want to attack at all, they have to group up to a certain extent.
Where at high levels "certain extent" may mean "in the room".
Plus there's not much getting around the warlock and stormwarden popping them for free every round.
Where at high levels "certain extent" may mean "in the room".
Plus there's not much getting around the warlock and stormwarden popping them for free every round.
Nifft
Penguin Herder
Yes, it is. Resist 5 is a threshold. It adds no state.
Temporary HP are a quantity that you must track. They add state.
The number of bits of information per minion has NOT increased in the former case; but it HAS increased in the latter.
So under your system, temporary HP are just plain ignored? That's not what I usually think of as addressing.
Cheers, -- N
keterys
First Post
They are factored in just as much as the hp of the minion. Tracking temporary hp for minions is an extremely poor idea.
So, considering I think the problem occurs when you give a minion temporary hp, not in how to handle them once it's there...
Yes, it's completely addressed. Can you think of any solution that is more logical for handling temp hp for minions?
Perhaps I wouldn't need to, but otherwise I don't see the relevance.
Thank you for being reasonable. My reaction is mostly based on the sillyness of some of the examples put forth, but I honestly don't believe there is a problem. As long as the DM knows how to use minions, and remember that they're more an obstacle than a threat, they work just fine.
How is using encounter powers, stances and movement = little/no effort? Clearly, that party is taking the obstacle that is the minion horde seriously, choosing powers and taking actions to eliminate them before they become a problem.
If your minions are sucking up actions and getting in the way of movement, then they are doing their jobs. They do not need to do damage or survive even one round for this. Just obstructing a charge lane for a turn or getting in the way of a warlock's curse is plenty. If the party is intelligent enough to deal with this obstacle, using powers, movement, actions and such, then good on them! Their DM should step up to the challenge instead of looking for the nerf bat.
But the DM is in control of his monsters.
If he wants no temporary hit points with minions, he does not mix and match minions with creatures that give temporary hit points.
But, this is such a silly corner case anyway. Even if the DM uses creatures that can give temporary hit points:
1) The temporary hit points have to be significantly high to matter. THP 5 +1 HP = 6 total. Our 1st level PCs blew through that most of the time. Only minor damage powers like Cloud of Daggers or Cleave might not break through that in one shot.
2) If 1 minion encounter in 10, the DM throws in creatures with temp hit points, and he has 1 minion encounter every 5 encounters, that's 1 encounter in 50 where it matters at all. Are you telling us that "it's a pain to keep track of" this tiny amount of data 1 encounter in 50?
3) There is exactly one creature in the MM that gives temporary hit points to other creatures: Kobold Wyrmpriest. Sure, more such creatures might show up in later publications. But, the only reason this even came up in discussion is because KotS had a KW and Minions in the same encounter. That's a fluke. The 1 in 10 above could easily be replaced with 1 in 100. Are you telling us that "it's a pain to keep track of" this tiny amount of data 1 encounter in 500?
There are much more flawed rules in the game system that need house rules than this. For as often as this comes up in the game and how often minions wouldn't just be killed in one (or two) shots anyway, minion temporary hit points does not even come close to being on any serious DM radar. It's not worth even considering making a house rule over.
Yes. For as often as it occurs in the game and how often PCs would blow through the temporary hit points anyway, it's no big deal to follow the rules as written. That way, one does not have to remember the special rule that almost never comes up. 15 months from now when it comes up, it's possible that some people might forget your special house rule on how to handle it. They won't forget how temporary hit points work.
You are missing the point completely.
The minion rules are bad from the player's POV, not the DM's.
It is BORING to drop a Cloud of Daggers on a minion:
DM: "What are you doing?"
Player: "Well, I drop a Cloud of Daggers on the minion flanking the Fighter because I know it will kill it."
Yawn. As opposed to doing some other action. The PC does not know it will kill the minion, the player does.
This is also similar to 3.5 Clerical healing. The 3.5 Cleric was expected to use up a standard action to heal, so he did. The 4E Wizard is expected to use up a standard action to auto-kill, so he does.
That's not fun. The reason it is not fun is because it is not a challenge.
The minion rules allow for auto-kill with certain powers and auto-kill is boring.
The fact that minions are paper tigers is bad enough (that too is boring for some players, like cats, some players like to toy with their enemies, not have them fall over when the PC sneezes). The fact that some powers auto-kill minions makes it worse.
And, the convenience for the DM outweighs the fun of the players. The implementation of the minion rules are all about DM convenience, not about monster obstacles. Sure, they are monster obstacles, but that is not why they have one hit point. The main reason they have one hit point is so that the DM can more easily use them (they had more hit points in early 4E design and it was changed to one for DM convenience).
Sorry, but that's lame. That makes for an inferior game mechanic when the DM convenience rules force certain player game decisions.
And, a PC using attacks that do half damage on a miss do NO damage to a minion. That too is a lame rule (added on top of the first lame rule, a snowball effect). The player went out of his way to use up a powerful attack that is sure to damage, except because of the inferior minion rules, it doesn't. If you consider that FUN for the player, you have a strange idea of fun.
Bottom line: The concept of minions is great. It's great to have fodder enemies. The implementation sucks.
