I'm not sure what the problem is the houserule is attempting to solve.
Do you feel that minions without a threshold are too disposable? I mean....that's kind of the point isn't it? Minions are literally just cannon fodder, meant to soak a spell or a few hits, and make the players feel badass all the while. So what if a fireball kills 10 of them....again that's kind of the point, that player will feel great for the rest of the session. If they are dying too quick, just add more!
Sure! Your question is "why not use simple 1 hit point minions and be done with it?" That's simpler certainly!
I have three clusters of answers:
Objections (problems to address)
, Creative Play Encouragement (positive goals to move towards)
, and
Player-Facing Rules (happy side effects). I suspect you have not encountered the same objections I have, but you
might see value in the other categories.
To be clear, I'm assuming the counterargument "minion" is just a monster with 1 hp.
Objections: There's 3 objections I have come across (both from players & from me) in my experiments with minions across 4e and 5e, and this experiment with damage threshold is attempting to address those in a way that opens up some creativity...
1)
"My damage is "wasted" on minions." This was a player complaint – sort of the opposite of
@Clint_L 's feedback about my house rule disfavoring monks – that heavy hitter PCs weren't as valuable against minions. Basically, by taking HP completely out of the equation, players with PCs doing high-damage felt they weren't able to contribute as meaningfully.
2)
All minions go down equally, irrespective of the monster being modeled (i.e. 2 damage takes down the firenewt minion or the ogre minion). That can lead to cognitive dissonance for some players/groups – why is the big bulky ogre dropped as easily as the sinewy firenewt? Similarly, a
fire bolt dealing 2 damage could kill a firenewt minion – and that's working against the expectation we have that "firenewts are resistant to fire damage." This was both a player complaint and my complaint as the GM.
3)
Minion-clearing tactics influenced by meta-game, rather than story. For minions, it doesn't matter whether they roll a saving throw against an effect dealing half damage, so spells like burning hands suddenly are more valuable against minions. They just die. Same thing with auto-damage effects (Magic Missile, Cloud of Daggers, etc). This was my complaint as the GM.
Creative Play Encouragement: All of the above led to a certain repetition of strategy when the players were facing minions. At first, it was novel, but when it became repeated the excitement of using minions quickly lost its luster. In trying to kill two-birds-with-one-stone, I also wanted these "minion traits" to provide interesting weaknesses / workarounds for players that emphasized the minion monster's story, in an effort to break up the repetitive strategies I've seen in past experiments using minions.
Player-facing Rules: Finally, in the back of my mind - not immediate to my project - I was thinking about how my damage threshold minion experiment might benefit longevity of the game on the player side... For example, this "damage threshold" concept could be used as an easier way to manage a PC's conjured critters without making them feel like fragile piñatas.
