Minions with 1hp - Can anyone justify this?

[Dausuul]

On the one hand I think 'give the PC's a chance to wipe out something in one hit' and on the other hand I'm thinking '1hp for a 20th lvl minion... and the bartender in town has like 15?!??!'

Can someone justify to me why I should keep minions to that measely 1hp? In fact, why use minions at all? Why not just replace them with real creature (take away 4 minions add a real one like the DMG says (I believe))?

Before you guys rush in, can anyone tell me in both mechanical combat terms why I should keep them, and *also* how the hell do you explain this in a roleplaying or 'realism' sense? (note that 'realism' is different from 'realistic' and we all know D&D isn't supposed to be 'real' blah blah let's not go there).

*PS, my own DM who's running KotSF has already decided to give minions more than 1hp because 'it makes no sense' but he has almost no clue about the rules at all for 4th edition so his opinion is 'questionable' at this point.

The claim that minions are somehow unrealistic never ceases to amaze me. Minions are the guys who can be killed with one solid hit from a deadly weapon. Like... y'know... REAL HUMAN BEINGS. What on earth makes them unrealistic? Now, if you were complaining that non-minions - who are somehow impossible to kill without several rounds of beating on them first - were unrealistic, you might have a point.

In game-world terms, minions are guys who lack the fighting skills to go one-on-one with the PCs. Individually, they're easy meat for a player character of their level. They aren't going to make an endurance contest out of it - at best, they get lucky for a round or two, then the PC breaks through the minion's guard and it's lights out. Compare that with a normal monster, which is canny and skilled enough that the PCs can't usually drop it without a few rounds of softening-up first.

En masse, however, minions are dangerous. A martial artist may be able to disable or kill an untrained opponent in seconds, but will still have trouble against a mob.

(It's important to keep in mind that monster stats are designed to reflect how they interact with the PCs. They aren't the universal laws of the world. A minion does not die if attacked by a housecat.)

As for a mechanical reason to use minions? Well, if you want your PCs to face off against a mob, it'll take bleeding forever if the mob is made up of normal monsters. And that forever will consist of the PCs relentlessly slogging through monsters they miss only on a 1, while the monsters wait for the lucky 20. Minions solve the problem. They're very easy to keep track of and their attacks and defenses are good enough that you aren't guaranteed to hit them and they aren't guaranteed to miss you.

 

[Ninja-to]

Minions are a convenience, a way to allow a dm to run many guys with little effort, and a chance for players to really strut their stuff. They are not so that Bobo the clown can kill the legion of the damned.

I think I'm putting this in my sig.

 

[fba827]

You could relace 4 minions for 1 'normal' enemy as you mentioned.. just keep that it changes tactics.

more minions = more chance for a PC to provoke an OA, harder for a PC to retreat, harder to get in to flanking position (i.e. postional strategy is more of an issue)

more 'normal enemies' = longer surving enemies and more "all PCs pile up on the guy" (thus, less positional strategy, more attacks and counter attacks)


Also keep in mind that
1) No one has a glowing hp bar above their head denoting their total, so you are breaking some realism by making a concious awareness of the 1 hp

2) minions are designed to be the little mob-like cannon fodder. They have other abilities (for instance, they take no damage on a miss even if the miss would otherwise deal damage)

3) They have high defenses and high to hit and high damage, equal to encounters of their level, thus, they still pose a threat. They just need "to be dealt with" to get to the main baddies

4) The intended reason is so that PCs don't spend forever on mobs before getting to the BBEG but at the same time, the mobs still need to pose some threat.

5) Every action-oriented book/show/movie has some scenes where the hero is fighting through a bunch of enemies, taking them down with a single kick/shot/sword swing ultimately getting to the main bad guy that takes more time to deal with...

6) it's not so much that the minions are "so weak they only have 1 hp" but rather "the minions are a threat to the PCs but they aren't skilled enough to last long against the PCs' suprior experience..."


As far as KotS, I would advise against raising the hp of mobs (esp if the DM doesn't yet understand 4e rules -- but once he has a better idea of the party and their capabilities, then, sure). Because KotS is so combat intensive, increasing minion hp means 1) much harder fights esp the ones that are already very strong TPK potentials 2) and also make encounters much longer (there is already a lot of hack and slash dungeon crawling, if the players don't like that, making the minions stronger will only make the session much more annoying


Anyway, just my two cents on the topic.

 

[Ninja-to]

(It's important to keep in mind that monster stats are designed to reflect how they interact with the PCs. They aren't the universal laws of the world. A minion does not die if attacked by a housecat.)

There are some very good points being made here and I totally understand now how they're useful. I'm very curious about the quoted post here though. Is this actually stated somewhere in the core books or is this an assumption?

 

[Klaus]

On the one hand I think 'give the PC's a chance to wipe out something in one hit' and on the other hand I'm thinking '1hp for a 20th lvl minion... and the bartender in town has like 15?!??!'

Can someone justify to me why I should keep minions to that measely 1hp? In fact, why use minions at all? Why not just replace them with real creature (take away 4 minions add a real one like the DMG says (I believe))?

Before you guys rush in, can anyone tell me in both mechanical combat terms why I should keep them, and *also* how the hell do you explain this in a roleplaying or 'realism' sense? (note that 'realism' is different from 'realistic' and we all know D&D isn't supposed to be 'real' blah blah let's not go there).

*PS, my own DM who's running KotSF has already decided to give minions more than 1hp because 'it makes no sense' but he has almost no clue about the rules at all for 4th edition so his opinion is 'questionable' at this point.

Every attack that hits a minion was a very well placed attack (and remember that minions are as hard to hit as any other creature): a strike to the head, a decapitation, a wooden stake through the heart, whatever. When you hit a minion, regardless of what you rolled, you hit it where it mattered. Compare this with a 100hp goblin. Even if you roll a critical hit with your longsword, you'll deal 10, 12 points of damage. So even if you rolled a natural 20, the attack was still a grazing strike.

 

[Gargoyle]

There are some very good points being made here and I totally understand now how they're useful. I'm very curious about the quoted post here though. Is this actually stated somewhere in the core books or is this an assumption?

Looking at the books, I don't see it. Minions are mentioned in the DMG and MM, and nothing mentions that they are statted from the Player Character's point of view. However, nothing talks about minions outside of the context of a fight with player characters either.

That's because 4e only simulates the encounters you intend to run, and doesn't try to simulate what happens "off-camera". It's the fundemental difference between this edition and all past editions. The way ability and skill check DC's are calculated, the way encounters are set up, all of it is in the context of a fight between player characters and the bad guys. For example, spellcasters don't have huge spell lists, only the spells the player characters will see are listed.

The evidence isn't in a single quote in the core rules, it's intrinsic to the content of the entire ruleset. While this truth is implied rather than spelled out, it becomes very clear if you keep reading the books and run a few games.

 

[CountPopeula]

*PS, my own DM who's running KotSF has already decided to give minions more than 1hp because 'it makes no sense' but he has almost no clue about the rules at all for 4th edition so his opinion is 'questionable' at this point.

I wouldn't get too attached to your characters, I hear a lot about TPKs in KotSF already. Making minions tougher, specifically, making them not go down to one hit, means the PCs are going to be vastly outnumbered. If he removed 3 out of every four minions, then you'd be okay, but... then you're just not using minions.

 

[Lurker37]

The trick to understanding minions is simple, but counter-intuitive.

The MM does not contain Minions because you can encounter them 'in the wild'.

The MM contains minions to allow DMs to build encounters quickly.

You see, Minion is NOT a creature type.

It's an encounter mechanic. It allows you to multiply an enemy into four enemies without making the encounter a TPK.

In 3.X DMs used low-level monsters in a similar fashion, but this really didn't work well because these low-level creatures had trouble hitting or hurting the party - they really weren't a threat. Minions have level-appropriate defenses, attack bonuses and skills, so the party does have to take them seriously, but they're weak enough to be defeatable. (The no damage from misses is there so their defences still mean something). Because four minions take the place of one normal enemy, they need to do about 1/4 damage, and drop in 1/4 the number of solid blows a normal enemy requires. Normal enemies drop in about four hits, so minions drop in one hit. The easiest way to ensure this without introducing a complex system is to say 'they have one hit point'. i.e 'the first solid blow drops them'.

So technically, minions are just the new way of throwing lower-level enemies into the mix. You explain minions the same way you explain throwing lower-level enemies of the same base creature type or race in. They may be weaker, or the hastily-trained cannon fodder militia sent in with low-grade equipment to soften the enemy while the well-trained troops with the expensive equipment stand back. They may be the runts of the litter, or sickly, or simply unlucky. They may be green troops without battle experience, or maybe they've overconfident because they've only really fought peasants etc, not hardened adventurers who can take a hit and fight back. Perhaps they're in some sort of battle frenzy, attacking wildly but leaving themselves wide open for a fatal blow if the PC can just time it between their swings. Or maybe they're all at an early stage of their training, and while it's good enough for terrorising peasants any experienced combatant (such as the PCs) can see the potentially fatal openings that could be exploited with just the right sort of feint...

In other words, the justifications for minions are as diverse as the DM's imagination. Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is that an encounter contains minions using minion rules because the DM wanted the players to enjoy a battle where they faced superior numbers and were victorious, and have that victory mean something, rather than have the party say 'well, we were never in danger'.

 

[Regicide]

Theres really no good reason for it. That one monster would have 1 HP and the monster standing beside it that looks nearly identical could have hundreds really makes no sense. They should have just made it a template to change monsters to in the rare case that a DM would want to hand players tons of free XP for having the wizard toss an AE instead of ramming them down our throats as a common play mechanic.

 

[Runestar]

At level 1 I had a group of PC's defend a breach in a city wall against 101 Skeletal Minion.

It looked and felt epic.

But wouldn't it be like living a lie? I mean - wouldn't it feel better if you one-shotted those skeletons because you actually did enough damage to kill it in one blow (eg: the skeleton has 30hp, but your fighter can deal 40+ with a single blow), and not because it has only 1 hp, and that it would be keeling over the moment you so much as sneezed on them?

It seems to appear great on the surface, your party can now mow down tons of mooks with relative ease, like LoTR. But look deeper and the underlying truth is that you KO'ed them only because the game mechanics specially made provisions to allow for this, and less so due to your own merit.

To me, it just seems like rules abstraction carried 1 step too far. I suppose the only consolation is that they stopped just short of giving us balor minions or something...