Let's talk about minions...

[D'karr]

While I can understand the idea of mowing through humanoids like you where a human threshing machine is very much conan. But this idea goes wonky when you start to introducing Friendly NPCs into the combat. Which is something we will frequently do. Either they are people we have recruited to aid us, enemies of our enemies, former advisaries that we have shown mercy on, or perhaps simply grateful townsfolk.

While I will admit rping out every npc v npc encounter is a special sort of insanity, when they are both for and against in a given combat it causes problems. Which kind of cuts down on a lot of what I liked to do in D&D./

I don't know, I watched Frank Frazetta's Fire & Ice just a few weeks ago and the fight with orcs as the NPC hero is climbing up the side of a hill is pure mook madness. And it felt awesomely D&Dish.

In the Fellowship of the Ring, when the party encounters the Uruk-Hai and the hobbits are taken. That is another scene of pure mookish madness. And once again it feels very D&Dish to me. Legolas using an arrow to skewer a minion as he is loading his bow and then using the same arrow to shoot the next one is completely D&D.

So I guess that minions are different strokes for different folk. I think the problem with minions resides more in the presentation than in the mechanics. If the DM describes the mook being eviscerated by the cloud of daggers, does it matter if the CoD only did 3 points of damage or if it did 300? It is mostly irrelevant because the effect would be the same. Minions are mostly the untrained masses sent to present a speed bump to the heroes. As such they are just that, a speed bump.

They work great for my game.

 

[Imp]

I don't know, I watched Frank Frazetta's Fire & Ice just a few weeks ago and the fight with orcs as the NPC hero is climbing up the side of a hill is pure mook madness. And it felt awesomely D&Dish.

But that's missing the point – NPC help isn't necessarily in the form of big dang heroes, but other warriors, peasants, cavalry, the dude you're trying to save from the orcs (but who might nevertheless survive a few rounds), whatever, and when minion/regular monster divisions are as stark as they are in 4e that can make things pretty weird.

I am a little conflicted on minions. The concept is nice as a narrative device.

 

[D'karr]

But that's missing the point – NPC help isn't necessarily in the form of big dang heroes, but other warriors, peasants, cavalry, the dude you're trying to save from the orcs (but who might nevertheless survive a few rounds), whatever, and when minion/regular monster divisions are as stark as they are in 4e that can make things pretty weird.

I am a little conflicted on minions. The concept is nice as a narrative device.

If you've been fighting a Solo Monster with 100's of hit points and have been whitttling him down. Is is anticlimactic if the Wizard's Cloud of Daggers brings him down by doing 3 hit points?

My point is that the abstraction is all in the metagame. If the DM is describing everything in the metagame to the players in game mechanics terms, of course the game is going to feel differently than if he is describing it in the realm of the characters.

Saying, "You just hit that minion with your Cloud of Daggers, it doesn't matter how much damage you did, he goes down." Is definitely not the same and does not evoke the same reactions as saying, "Your cloud of daggers burst into the area your enemy just moved to. Tiny slivers of cuts turn into a torrential gush as he falls to the ground lifeless."

One is just, meh. The other brings the scene to the player's imagination. If the enemy was not a minion but a Solo that had already been hurt, the first description would still be, meh...

So it doesn't matter if the attack would have come from a PC, an NPC Hero or an NPC hireling, the description is what brings the game to life, not the mechanics.

 

[wedgeski]

But just like Astral has Angels, and the Elemental Chaos has Archons, the Prime Material has Heroes. They the mortal incarnation of the Prime Material's Moxie, and as they grow their power to tap into the Moxie of the Prime Material also grows. This is the source of both magic and magical-like martial exploits.

That is really, really good, and may well be worth a yoink.

 

[Scribble]

And by a "sound hit" you mean if you roll 32 dmg? What if you roll a 1 and they still die? Does that make you feel like a hero?

No... By "sound hit" I simply mean you overcame their AC. You hit them.

For someone with Moxie, that's where the Moxie power steps in. Someone with Moxie turns that "sound hit" into Just a flesh wound! Or the arrow that lands right below the hero's crotch*. So the player deducts some HPs (Moxie) from his character.

Someone with no Moxie just dies.

*It's important to understand though this looks simply like a missed AC the difference is, how the character reacts. The right below the crotch shot is a HP shot because the character glances down and gives that OMG THAT WAS CLOSE! startled look... Without that it would have just been a miss.

I quoted you above just to make clear we don't disagree on what HP are. We agree on that. Where we part ways is on whether or not it's okay for some people to have an integer between 1 and <infinite> for that value and others to have a null value there. I (and Wyrmshadows, Exploder Wizard, and others) say it's not okay. It really bothers us. Creatures with apparent life, breath and the ability to attack you but no Moxie are like creatures with height and weight but no momentum or inertia. It's just weird, and it sticks out like a sore thumb to us.

Shrug... What can I say? I attempted to do my best to give an explaination... If in the end it doesn't work for you... It doesn't work for you.

Dig it.

I was actually thinking about this last year, back when WotC was releasing their new cosmology and cosmological history. I was thinking "This is cool. But how do PCs fit in? What makes them PCs?" I decided, just for myself, that if Primordials are the Supreme and Free Willed agents of the Elemental Chaos, and Gods are the Supreme and Free Willed agents of the Astral Plane, then Dragons must be the Supreme and Free Willed agents of the Prime Material. They tap into the Moxie of the Prime Material like nobody's business.

But just like Astral has Angels, and the Elemental Chaos has Archons, the Prime Material has Heroes. They the mortal incarnation of the Prime Material's Moxie, and as they grow their power to tap into the Moxie of the Prime Material also grows. This is the source of both magic and magical-like martial exploits.

Sounds like a cool campaign backstory...

Any time.

You got Moxie Irda!

 

[Wolfwood2]

Minions are weak creatures that have traded hitpoints for Defenses. It's really that simple.

Look, the relationship between hitpoints and AC (and other defenses) has always been a little shakey, right? A goblin swings a sword at your PC and fails to beat your AC and that's a miss. If the goblin swings a sword and beats your AC... but only does 2 damage out of 65, then that's also a miss. It's a miss that knocks off some of your 'cool points', but in terms of the game world the goblin sword didn't plunge deep into your PC's chest. At most it nicked him a little.

If minions were built the same way as other creatures, they'd have weak defenses that PCs would almost never miss and a small pool of hitpoints. The drama wouldn't be if your PC hit them, but in if you rolled high enough on damage to take them out. Either way you're rolling to see if you take them out, but making the roll a to-hit roll is (judged by D&D creators) to be more exciting and allow an advantage to PCs who favor attack over damage.

In the context of the game world, a goblin minion with AC 18 and 1 hitpoint and a "regular" goblin with AC 10 and 10 hitpoints look exactly the same. In each case, your heroic PC will take them out in 1 or 2 attacks.

 

[F5]

Minions have been a sticking point for me since I saw how they worked in 4e.

I love the concept. I love the narrativist element of mowing through waves of weaker, story-backdrop enemies. There's all kinds of precedent in fantasy literature of all stripes. I grok this.

But the implementation bugged me. I kept coming back to that toddler with the well-aimed rock vs. the Legion Demon. I came to this conclusion: Minions's should NOT be a creature type. They should be a Status Effect.

As a result of acquiring Minion status, a creature can only do minimum damage to the character or characters imposing minion status on it, it can use no encounter or recharge-based powers (other than those inherent to its' race) on the minion-maker, and dies to one hit from the minion-maker.

Thus, there would be no "dedicated" minions in the MM. Any creature could be a minion in the right set of circumstances...possibly even becoming a minion in the course of an encounter.

Making minion-hood an effect that can be imposed on a creature by a PCs actions (even if that action is just "being a lot higher level") seems to work better to me, than hand-waving and saying "Well, this ogre WAS badass, but he's a minion now. Different stat-block, unless you;re a toddler with a rock. Then he's the old way". My way, the ogre is still badass...to everyone except the PCs. It has the same stat-block, it just applies differently to some

 

[wally]

Consider the case of one Szartharrax, a young white dragon who has just slaughtered a band of wannabe heroes on their first adventure. These fools barged into his lair but then froze in their tracks as his frightful roar reverberated through the chamber. The fighter leaned right into his breath weapon, and their puny swords and spells barely scratched his dragon scales. One week later, a power archmage swings by and enslaves Szartharrax, compelling him to fight in his evil army. In the Final Battle, he flies in a squadron of young dragons opposed by a single human warrior floating above the walls of the city. Szartharrax soon learns that this gleaming foe completely ignores his frightful presence, and his claw-claw-bite fury doesn't even make contact with the human's otherworldly glowing plate armor. He quickly finds that if he goes all out on the attack, he has a reasonable chance of striking, but only for a modest (and constant) amount of damage. Alas, this all-out attack leaves him vulnerable, and this 22nd level paladin has slain many dragons in her career. She strikes just so with her +5 vicious greatsword, a single blow neatly severing the head from a dragon that, in this battle, was just a level 21 minion.

Okay, my problem is that I looked at this from a different side. Say the dragon fought a group just a little less powerful than it. After a long combat, the dragon had taken a lot of damage, but won. Some of the damage was from being physically hit by weapons, which drew blood, some from exhaustion, and so on...It took it weeks to heal.

It then gets involved in the fight with the paladin. Said paladin did show up with a sword, that may have been rather powerful, but the dragon had taken many hits in the previous battle, so thinking it can take a few hits, it flew up to attack. The paladin pokes the dragon in its eye with its thumb. Uh-oh, the dragon is dead.

Hard to wrap my head around that one.

-wally

 

[Gort]

The paladin pokes the dragon in its eye with its thumb. Uh-oh, the dragon is dead.

Hard to wrap my head around that one.

-wally

Player: I poke the dragon in my eye to kill it. I roll unarmed, I hit! I kill it!
DM: Don't be ridiculous. The dragon is annoyed and attacks you. Take 10 damage.

This sort of comes under the same heading of "the heroes always arrive just in time, assuming they actually make an effort to arrive quickly and don't try to deliberately flaunt the intention of the system."

Also, why do you sign your posts? I can see who you are from your username on the left.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

In the whole simulation/narriative debate, people (such as Scribble and Charwoman Gene above) seem to confuse what the simulationist types are looking for, with realism. HP are not realistic, and everyone knows that. What the sim side wants is concrete, internally consistant mechanics. The narriativist side has no versimilitude problem with ditching consistancy for a better story. That's all it comes down to.

Now... to make minions obvious to the players, or not? What are the drawbacks of each approach?

Please refrain from assuming what I am confused about. The sim side wants concrete, internal consistent mechanics? They don't exist. I WANT to be a true simulationist. I would love to see a game capable of explaining in a consistent way how magic and combat works, but this is a game. The level of subtlety and compelxity never makes it and interferes with the other aspects I like. Once it is clear that pure sim is not satisfactory, I retreat to a healthy balance.

D&D will only work in a pure sim way if you rebuilt it from the ground up as such. 3.5 is a decent starting point, but you have a lot of abusable issues that world-lawyers will exploit.

I dismiss my own sim inclination a lot because they come from the same aspberger's leanings that fuel my obsessions with real world road and rail systems, and I recognize it as mental masturbation. Your own sim proclivities may be wildly different.