Minions are alien visitors from another kind of game

[Wolfspider]

Am I missing something, or isn't the use of minions entirely optional?

If you want to look at it that way, EVERY rule in the game is optional.

I still think it's valid to discuss the effects of a particular rule, its strengths and weaknesses and ramifications.

 

[Mallus]

If you want to look at it that way, EVERY rule in the game is optional.

Sometimes that's a helpful place to start from...

I still think it's valid to discuss the effects of a particular rule, its strengths and weaknesses and ramifications.

Sure, and I think it's valid to point out that the rules often provide multiple methods for doing things, as is the case here. Minions aren't aren't a mission critical part of the system. More traditional alternatives, in the form of tougher, low-level monsters still exist. This provides an important context for the discussion.

To my mind, there are no ramifications of the minion rules, unless you indulge in the batty overthink that hong's always going on about.

 

[Rex Blunder]

If you want to look at it that way, EVERY rule in the game is optional.

Minions are barely even a rule, though. They're a monster manual entry.

Rules are "there's rule 0 i guess" sorta-optional. If you change a rule, you'll have to explain it to the players.

Monsters are actually optional. The DM has to specifically choose to use them. Omitting to use minions, or carrion crawlers, or flumphs, or whatever else, is noncontroversial, and I've done it with at least 50% of the previous monster manuals.

I still think it's valid to discuss the effects of a particular rule, its strengths and weaknesses and ramifications.

A bad rule is one that provides a worse playing experience for the players. I think very few players are going to find their experience hurt by the fact that they killed some creatures in one shot. Things being killed in one shot is perfectly consistent with both literature and the real world.

For the DM, an orc minion and an orc warrior are creatures of fundamentally different types.

For the player, (assuming the orcs look the same) they're both Schroedinger's Orc, existing in the state of "minion" and "nonminion" until their status is determined by observation (here, as in all good science, observation is done with a giant axe or an explosion).

If you didn't have minions, then with the 4e HP model, you would very rarely kill an appropriate-level creature in one hit, and that would, in my mind, start to damage "verisimilitude" and start to make combat feel samey. I have simulationist tendencies, and leaning towards frequent use of minions.

 

[Dausuul]

The way I see it, minions don't actually have 1 hp. Minions have X hp, where X is the average damage per attack of a PC at the appropriate level. This is then simplified to 1 hp to make life easier for the DM.

 

[Xardinhul]

You know, one of the reasons I like the Minion rules as I've seen them so far is because I feel it better simulates some of the fantasy source material that I've been influenced by. There often seems to be a scenario in the "young farm boy gets thrust into the role of a hero" trope where that young farm boy picks up a sword to help defend his loved ones from some terrible monster and kills it, against what seems like all odds, often in one blow.

The Wheel of Time, for example, has the protagonist Rand picking up his father's sword and managing to use it to kill a trolloc. Trollocs are no laughing matter - they can be about the business of slaughtering professional armies and have been a deadly threat to the border kingdoms for centuries. Yet this hero still managed to kill one at essentially "1st level".

If minions where nothing but essentially "animated scenary" that had no real chance to do damage and no real effect on any particular encounter other than to be killed horribly, I think I might be more inclined to agree that that approach is a little too Exalted for D&D - but the fact remains that a minion can actually scale up nicely to be a threat that cant be safely ignored, even if they can be more easily dealt with than the main antagonist creature(s) in the encounter. And I like that a lot.

Edited: for clarity.

 

[med stud]

I did a test combat with the KotS-characters leveled to level three versus a bunch of orcs. The dwarf ran up to a bunch of drudges, expecting to cleave them to pieces. He had some bad luck with the attack rolls and missed two times in a row. The drudges knocked him to the ground, despite him using a healing surge. Minions are a credible threat.

It takes some time getting used to the concept (particularily the text "HP: 1" glaring up at you) but after getting used to it they add a new dimension to combats. At least in the tests I have ran.

EDIT: Also, if you look at HPs as the number of successful attacks needed to take someone down, you see that the difference between a HP 1 minion and a HP 30 human guard is that the minion takes, for example, one magic missile to take down while the human guard needs to be hit with at average four magic missiles. This means that the guard isn't 30 times more resilient vs magic missiles, it's more like 3-4 times more resilient. The difference isn't that huge.

 

[AllisterH]

Now here's a question then.

Should D&D have minions? If you look at the source material for D&D, (Conan, LotR), they definitely use minions but as pointed out, that's because the character in question has DM fiat backing him.

Should then D&D be able to model the world of Cimmeria or Middle-Earth (there's no such thing as an orc minion to average joe blow) or the activities of the main characters such as Conan and Aragorn (to Aragorn, orcs WERE minions)?

 

[Xardinhul]

Should then D&D be able to model the world of Cimmeria or Middle-Earth (there's no such thing as an orc minion to average joe blow) or the activities of the main characters such as Conan and Aragorn (to Aragorn, orcs WERE minions)?

In my opinion, it models both. A sufficiently high level minion is too strong for the average joe blow - An Orc Minion 6, for example, probably has enough AC to shield it from the febble attacks of the majority of the ill-equipped farm folk that litter the country side. Against a young Aragorn though, it is little else than a minor threat. But it remains a threat - he cant just turn his back on it and ignore it, because hitting it with every swing isnt assured, and it still has the chance to wallop him once or twice before it falls, especially if there are more than one of them.

 

[Kraydak]

More minion silliness: temporary hp.

Temporary hp on minions poses no mechanical difficulty. Either there is a rule we haven't seen that bans temp. hp. (TH) for minions (quite possible), or there isn't one. The lack of mechanical difficulty doesn't imply a lack of conceptual problems.

If there is a rule of no TH for minions, then warlords go home crying. Inspiring massed troops (minions) to fight on (TH) becomes impossible. More generally, we have seen abilities that grant TH starting at lvl 1. Having abilities that don't work on a class of people due to mechanical mis-matches is not pretty, and will be annoying if you are the person who can't protect the person you want to.

If TH are allowed on minions, then as soon as people start giving minions TH the advantage of 1-hit 1-kill vanishes. If you were saying "low hp can be approximated as 1 hp" your explanation breaks down. If minions really had 4 hp but you were approximating them as 1, then with 3 TH do they have 4 or 7? Why, with TH, do minions not take damage on misses: if you give minions enough TH (absurdly many in general), they will be *tougher* than non-minions.

Temporary hitpoints are another mechanic (along with bloodied and damage-on-misses) that minions do not interface well with.

 

[AllisterH]

Then don't use minions Kraydak.

Minions are one of the things that are FULLY under the control of the DM (Besides, even if there was no minion concept, how the hell would you use a standard creature in the scenario below?)