Minions with 1hp - Can anyone justify this?

[amysrevenge]

Yet when the wizard uses his staff to take an opportunity attack on one, and nicks him for 3 damage and the Angel of Valor Veteran (level 16) collapses at that deathblow, it can be a little more head-scratching.

Of course, it is exciting when someone hits on a 20 (which isn't unreasonable to expect to recuire, for that hit to actually hit).

Remember everyone, that minions don't drop when *attacked*, they drop when *hit*. And for all their "1 hp" they still have level-appropriate defences.

 

[Goumindong]

Nah the housecat is just an innocent bystander angry at being woken up by Orcus's peon.

O.K. So who protested when the housecat attacked and missed that made you roll an attack roll?

 

[Dausuul]

Hmm. Would it be going too far to stretch the earlier assumption that minions only have 1hp when they fight PC's? I don't mind making that quick adjustment. But what happens when an epic minion goes up against Felix or Garfield...? Should I suddenly drop more hp's on them?

I would say that Garfield is not a combatant in this fight. He's not even a minion, he's effectively part of the scenery. He cannot damage anybody.

 

[Kingskin]

Mooks have been pulled directly from Feng Shui, along with Blast powers (meaning magical attacks, not the specific Blast effect in 4th Ed) and broad-archetypes with minor differences between two characters of the same type.
Personally, I think they were excellent in Feng Shui; kept the DMs book-keeping down and allowed players wipe out whole rooms full of gun-toting bad guys like Chow Yun Fat on a good day.
In 4th Ed, they don't seem have been implemented as well. Basically, if your class isn't set up for killing mooks then (it seems to me) that you're wasting abilities by attacking them. I played a ranger for 3 games and found that apart from Twin Strike, none of my abilities were of any use when fighting mooks. This sucks if you find yourself under a mook-pile and with the guy you can actually work against on the other side of the room.

 

[Rith the Wanderer]

Nah the housecat is just an innocent bystander angry at being woken up by Orcus's peon.

The point he was trying to make earlier in the thread is that they are only minions because the PC's are awesome. An Ogre at 5th level can be an important normal or elite creature, but that same ogre at level 25 would be a minion. Minions are minions because its the PC's they're fighting. A Housecat would deal no damage to a minion, ever (unless it was a mouse minion or something that the housecat is that much better than....).

On another note, remember what happened with things that were so low level in 3e, because they were crappy to everyone and not just the PCs? A housecat (with two attacks at +4 and an AC of 14) would kill a commoner (with one attack at +0 and an AC of 10, and identical health to the housecat) whenever he felt like it. Thats ridiculous but it made the most sense when dealing with the PC's. When you allow that kind of weakness to interact "off-camera" you end up with ridiculous combos like a house cat killing anyone who refused to give him milk.

 

[MrGrenadine]

As a matter of order, minions do not have 1 hit point... they are killed by any successful attack. The difference is more than just semantic, especially in discussions like this.

This is one of the best defenses of the concept I've seen. If only the RAW agreed, then the minion mechanic wouldn't bother me so much.

But it does bother me, so my solution:

Minions have normal hitpoints, but characters do x10 damage on any successful hit.

This puts the success vs a minion more in the character's hands, allows the minion to survive a poke in the eye (or a scratch from a housecat), and helps keep hp from being entirely meaningless.

The multiplier can scale per tier, or have any value that the DM thinks is appropriate.


MrG


p.s. Also, the cinematic, large scale brawls that minions afford isn't applicable to everyone's gameworld, campaign or taste. I love Jackie Chan movies, but thats not the game I want to play. They are absolutely NOT necessary, so as others have said--use 'em or lose 'em as you wish.

 

[drothgery]

Now while I understand a high level minion will have crazy defenses and to hit bonuses... if that house cat rolled a 20 and scored a hit (which is after all not *that* unlikely), well, you can see the image there. Which leaves you with the possibility of say 5% of the time house cats (or any creature imaginable that can do 1 damage) able to take out epic demonic minions. This isn't just a silly waste of forum space. Think about the very plausible chance of a bad NPC taking on the PC's in a tavern, and bringing his epic demonic minions with him, only to have one of them taken out by the bar parrot mascot with a single lucky peck...

Hmm. Would it be going too far to stretch the earlier assumption that minions only have 1hp when they fight PC's? I don't mind making that quick adjustment. But what happens when an epic minion goes up against Felix or Garfield...? Should I suddenly drop more hp's on them?

While the specific case (Epic-tier minion vs. small normal animal) is kind of silly (for all the reasons others have mentioned here), probably the biggest problem with minions is dealing with combats where minions are fighting opponents of vastly different power levels (say, the PCs are leading the local militia against a necromancer and his undead army).

If you stat the zombies and militia as minions, they'll drop on one hit from each other, not just from one hit by from the heroes (vs. zombies) or the necromancer (vs. the militia). Whereas if you stat the zombies as minions and the militia as low-level humans/elves/etc., then the militia will rarely hit the zombies, but they'll drop them when they do. That actually might be plausible, but more extreme cases could get silly.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is, other than "don't do that", and possibly arbitrarily rule that when a creature attacks a minion more than, say, 5 levels higher than itself, a natural 20 does not automatically hit.

 

[Goumindong]

If you stat the zombies and militia as minions, they'll drop on one hit from each other, not just from one hit by from the heroes (vs. zombies) or the necromancer (vs. the militia). Whereas if you stat the zombies as minions and the militia as low-level humans/elves/etc., then the militia will rarely hit the zombies, but they'll drop them when they do. That actually might be plausible, but more extreme cases could get silly.

The answer is that when NPCs are fighting NPCs they do exactly what you want them to.

If your players are so anal that they need to know you're rolling, just roll behind your screen and ingore the roll.

Its even easier in this situation because if you have a bunch of zombies and townsfolk you aren't going to want to bother running all of their attacks anyway, you are going to handwave the situation and say "The townsfolk struggle with the zombies, the Baker falls to a lucky blow as the mobs struggle back and forth" then remove a token or two and keep going. The Heroes can then use the townsfolk for flanking, give them bonuses and healing(which you then just describe the effect of during their turn, and move tokens around).

The players are there to be heroes, not watch someone else be a hero. So don't roll for NPC's on NPC violence, handwave it. Just say what happens and get it over with you wouldn't roll if it were off screen would you?[I envision a man sitting in his basement rolling die to see if the goblins capture the barons daughter to determine whether or not the PCs have a plot hook to follow] This is better on so many levels its not funny. Its better for roleplaying because the players have to deal with the situation as you want them too. Its better for wargaming because the players don't have to sit and watch the DM masturbate with all the tokens he has to play with. Its better for everyones time since the encounters go smoother and faster.

In short, there is only a problem because people have forgotten that DnD is about roleplaying heroic fantasy and not a system by which to simulate a heroic fantasy world. No one is going to run a computer model to create and then study the DnD world, rules that figure someone is going to do that are a waste of time, and are another thing that get in the way of the primary purpose of the system. For players to get together with a DM and roleplay.

edit: another easy way to do it would be to set them both as minions and have each side lose a number of guys equal to the ratio of them to us(not including the PCs and non-minions)

So if you fight a force of 25 zombies with 5 townsfolks, the 25 zombies are going to wipe them in the first round they are engaged and 1 zombie will die. If you fight a force with 20 zombies and 20 townsfolk one on each side will die until the PC's or Villains make a difference and one side starts to overcome the other

 

[MrGrenadine]

In short, there is only a problem because people have forgotten that DnD is about roleplaying heroic fantasy and not a system by which to simulate a heroic fantasy world.

Unless thats what the DM and his or her players want to do, of course. Then it is exactly that. Or a system by which to pretend that they're fairy princesses, or talking broccoli, or in a Conan and Gandalf buddy movie, or whatever else it is that folks want to do.

Thing is, D&D used to be a robust enough system to handle any situation and type of play. I hope it still is.

MrG

 

[Mengu]

Nah the housecat is just an innocent bystander angry at being woken up by Orcus's peon.

There is advice in the DMG that you should not try to play out combat among NPC's if you can avoid it. In the case of the housecat vs the demonic minion, you simply say the cat tries to claw the demon, and the heat radiating from the demon's skin is enough to send the cat running with its tail between its legs.

Minions are minions, only if they are fighting PC's, and only if you wanted to make them minions for that specific combat. Everything in combat is designed to revolve around the PC's. If there is a pitched battle going on somewhere that the PC's are merely watching from a distance, DM decides what they see. No dice rolls are needed.