Tony Vargas
Legend
Cute variant. I like it - you could call it "imploding dice."
It actually /doesn't/ 'defeat' it because a minion has a pretty decent chance of surviving an attack by a PC anywhere near it's nominal level (about 10 above its 'real' level), even though PCs can do /damage/ on a miss with things like Fireballs and Reaping Strike, because it has a special escape clause: "missed attacks never damage a minion."
Of course, they do 'in the fiction' - I mean, the Reaping Strike that rolled 22 and 'missed' and did 4 damage would have, had you been running the minion in it's 10-level-lower mode, 'actually' /hit/ and did 1d10+14 damage or something (say we're back on the 40 hp Ogre), which wouldn't have killed it. But, the DM is simplifying this encounter, by ignoring hits to less than 25 AC, and not tracking damage, so the little damage nudge of Reaping Strike (even on a natural 1), and the theoretical damage on a 'hit' of AC 16-24, isn't not happening (it could be visualized or not as the group sees fit), it's just, for convenience, not being tracked.
That's all minions are, really, an alternate-resolution way of keeping a much lower-'level' monster useable in a higher-level encounter. It's not like D&D has never used alternative resolution mechanics.
Something that challenges unexamined or long-accustomed assumptions, thus must be dismissed as automatically 'wrong,' since daring to considering it could lead to disequilibrium?
This is true prior to the infamous July pre-Essentials update, in which magic missile was re-written to use an effect line, it had remarkable ripple effects, causing numerous items and feats to be re-written to /try/ to deal with the fact the Wizard now had an auto-damage 'basic attack,' and it was never really fully handled before errata went out of style at WotC.
Post-Essentials, though Lanefan has a point: the same, say, 12hp damage Magic Missile that pops an Ogre Minion and 15th level, barely nudges the exact same Ogre run as if it were in a 5th level combat. The 10 point AC difference means nothing to it. One of the many implications of the new/Old eMissile that wasn't fully thought through an properly errata'd.
All for the sake of 'bringing it into line with the classic spell.'
(And that was Mike Mearls, setting the direction for 5e, right there.)
Heh. In the LotR movie L one-shots a Mammoth, G is like, "that still counts as one!" Hey, L, a minion's a minion, however many squares it takes up.
In 1e AD&D. An attack that 'hit' could produce no wound, /at all/. That was the rationale for saving successfully against, say, a poisoned blade, and dovetailed nicely with the rationale for PC's not growing to titanic size as they accumulated HD. Contrarily, the logic of D&D AC meant that attacks that 'missed' would frequently make contact - even solid, forceful contact - with the target, and merely fail to ablate hps. In the case of a /very/ large creatures with 'thick hides,' for instance, you might literally make contact with it, do visible damage to it's hide, but that damage might, in the context of it's hugeness, not translate to even a single hp - thus a 'miss.'
The idea that every hit in AD&D caused a real wound, and every miss was a clean wiff, is just lazy thinking. Gygax went on at length about the bizarre assumptions and mental gymnastics required by the abstraction of hps and 1 min rounds.
Not in the exact way, but both are certainly roleplaying games, both are nominally evoking some sort of fantasy-genre, and certainly have resources to manage. I mean, 4e is 'different' in being /balanced/ in the sense of rough resource parity among the PCs...? But I don't see how that's entirely irrelevant to Lan's statement alluding to small chances of bad things happening possibly impacting said resource-management mini-game.
With one important proviso ...
...you had to hit each minion to kill it. In 4e, saving throws by the targets of magical & poison attacks were inverted to mathematically equivalent attack rolls by the attacker. A simplification that streamlined play (which I really noticed on returning to saves the first few weeks of HotDQ, because a player would use an attack cantrip, and we'd have to see if they needed to roll to hit, or I needed to roll a save) and made it overall more consistent. Many spells, like the classic fireball, did half damage on a miss (DoaM!), and so did some weapon attacks, neither to any particular controversy at the time.
But, during the Next playtest, saves came back, and kept 1/2 damage, but even the slightest suggestion of retaining the same privilege for weapon attacks ignited a firestorm (save: 1/2, don't know if MM made it or not). Also, come 5e no minions. Afterall, it would be appalling and 'wrong' for a poor monster to have no chance of surviving a hit!
Indeed, if there had been 4e-style minions in 5e, they'd've needed a special quality: a minion is never damaged when it successfully saves (it wouldn't need one for surviving misses, because there's no DoaM). So when you fireballed a bunch of kobolds, some of 'em would likely survive.
Instead, we get the polite fiction of BA applying to saves bonuses & DCs, low-level foes potentially making successful saves vs fireballs without needing to roll natural 20s - and dying instantly from the 1/2 damage.
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I'm also fine with minions 'dying' because they flee, surrender, collapse in panic - or can't bring themselves to cross a wall of flame, say. The mechanics are that the minion who takes any damage is done, exactly how can fit the narrative however. 
