Let's talk about minions...

[Irda Ranger]

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.

So, in other words, the Minion rules give the DM the authority to say "Hey, everything you did was by the rules, but I don't like it. It doesn't fit the narrative I'm trying to set up here. Now get your sword out and attack him for real this time."

Note the highlighted text. That's my main beef with Minions. They're the DM's way of deciding ahead of time what kind of story is going to be told. It's fine as long the PCs play their role, but the second they step out of line it's grossly apparent what's going on. Minions only work when PCs "behave" and do what they're expected to do.

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 DM."

I know it's rude to say "FIFY", but I think the above is more accurate. There's no "system", just people at the table using an agreed upon method of cooperatively playing a game. The "system" does not have intention; only the DM and the Players have intention. When Hroethgar the Barbarous attacks minions with his pokey-stick he is defeating the "intention" of the DM.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

i know it's an explicit violation of board rules to say "fify",

fify

 

[CountPopeula]

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?

They don't have die. They just have to fall down. I think that's a big part of it.

But, and this isn't really aimed at you, but the thread in general, if you're willing to concede the point that the minion rule (and the game as a whole) isn't written for your style of play, then what is the point of saying it's a bad rule on the grounds of, basically "I don't like it."

It may be fundamentally flawed in a game that demands the game rules be the game science, but D&D 4th edition isn't designed to be played that way. If you want to play it that way, no one is going to say you're not playing "right," but I will say your tastes will be better suited with a different system that suits your style of play.

 

[Cadfan]

I know its just spitting into the wind, but I'd like to add, once again, that criticizing the minion rules because a hypothetical DM or hypothetical future product might make some enormous dragon into a minion and like TOTALLY break suspension of disbelief is like arguing that the regular monster rules aren't balanced because a homebrewer or a future WOTC product might, hypothetically, stat up Cthulhu as a first level controller with 20 hit points and an AC of 12.

 

[Henry]

I know it's rude to say "FIFY", but I think the above is more accurate.

fify

Guys, let's please try to get along.

 

[Henry]

I do have a question about minions: Suppose you dislike minions having that 1 hit point, and you decide, "OK, I'm going to give them a small pool of hit points so that the average striker type hero can nail them in one shot, but it takes a bit for some weak commoner to kill them." So you give them say 10 or 15 hit points. Striker can kill them with a really well rolled basic attack, or two average hits.

Now, you have a dozen minions on the table, for that cool mass fight, that no commoner can kill in one, two, or maybe even three hits. NOW you have to track hit points for all those easy to kills. Maybe the heroes roll extremely low a few times on several minions; in this case, you're doing exactly what most DMs do in 3e, you're tracking a dozen columns of small numbers for creatures in the game, making tick marks until they die - or sticking scraps of paper under 12 minions, players revising them every time they hit until the enemy is dead. Most of us seem to have "the mook who WOULDN'T DIE" stories from games we've run.

Is it really worth the extra bookkeeping just so you don't have to justify that one minion could kill another minion with a poke in the eye? To me, it isn't, because the group isn't sending minions up against other minions; when I am doing that, I'm doing it as a backdrop, and the actions of the PCs are what I'm focusing on.

 

[Cadfan]

Is it really worth the extra bookkeeping just so you don't have to justify that one minion could kill another minion with a poke in the eye?

It absolutely isn't worth it. At least not to me. But I do have a problem with powers that player characters have that are themed as being little more than pokes in the eye. That's why I go for the Resist All X solution, though I wish I could touch it up a bit.

 

[cangrejoide]

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

Really? Is this your best example against minion use?

This has nothing to do with minions, this is just a bored player acting OOC and silly to sabotage the mood of the adventure.

So, in other words, the Minion rules give the DM the authority to say "Hey, everything you did was by the rules, but I don't like it. It doesn't fit the narrative I'm trying to set up here. Now get your sword out and attack him for real this time."

Note the highlighted text. That's my main beef with Minions. They're the DM's way of deciding ahead of time what kind of story is going to be told. It's fine as long the PCs play their role, but the second they step out of line it's grossly apparent what's going on. Minions only work when PCs "behave" and do what they're expected to do.
.

If you don't trust your GM why play with him at all? And you said it correctly it's a "cooperatively playing a game" , a player doing silly stuff to break the inmersion is not cooperating with the game. A player acting like the previous example or your 'barbarian pokey stick' example is not only defeating the "intention" of the DM, but defeating the intention of the game.

I refer you to my 'sig'.

 

[Hussar]

Just to bring another sort of minion rule into the discussion, what do people feel about the Mob template that was introduced in the DMG II? Essentially, you take a large group of mooks, turn them into one monster and they all die when they run out of that pooled hit points.

Is that a better way of dealing with mooks?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Just to bring another sort of minion rule into the discussion, what do people feel about the Mob template that was introduced in the DMG II? Essentially, you take a large group of mooks, turn them into one monster and they all die when they run out of that pooled hit points.

Is that a better way of dealing with mooks?

It's a different way, and I say it's also useful for different purposes.

I might still see that I want to use the mob-rules in 4E - the idea of a rampaging horde of monsters or a panicked mob would work well with the 4E swarm rules, I think.

Minions give the feeling of a (albeit minor) accomplishment - you hit an opponent, and he drops down. That's a feeling merely saying "10 points to the mob - you cut down one of the guys" doesn't give you.

This is also nice for those scenarios where you (both the DM and the players) want to drop a guard in one hit (a typical movie scene).