Why I think you should try 4e (renamed)

[ExploderWizard]

This is absurd. The designers at WOTC did not design the minion so that it can stroke the egos of players or PCs. They represent the mooks of the world that come in waves (like so many movies, books, etc) and the heroes mow through them.

Do you honestly believe it was made to help the poor poor egos of players with controller PCs?

Gimme a break...

Not for the sake of ego so much as to justify the existence of the entire controller role. Announce a game and declare no minions will be used and see how many controllers are in the party.

 

[Barastrondo]

Rather than diving from one fad or fashion into another as into a cult, always in Year Zero, can we not preserve the full richness of our shared and growing heritage?

Certainly, but let's always remember that if one is requesting some respect for the validity of one's choices, it helps to show some respect for the validity of other people's choices in that very same sentence. There are reasons to play a new game, or a new edition of any game, other than "fads," "fashions" or "cults." Sometimes a new game simply gives you a play experience you enjoy more, and it doesn't matter what the people outside your group think.

That's the crux of why there are new games and new editions in the first place. If the original version of D&D was all things to all people, we wouldn't have had a wave of derivative fantasy games like Tunnels & Trolls or Palladium Fantasy or Arduin back in the day, much less roleplaying games that take place outside the pseudo-medieval fantasy format like Paranoia, Toon, Shadowrun, Vampire, etc.

This is not a negative thing! It's like the influx of new restaurants into an area that give people more options about where to eat. Now, that can have some negative effects on a given group if, for instance, you'd be happy eating good old-fashioned comfort food every week at the same restaurant, and now your friends are more likely to want Chinese or Italian or sushi or Thai. But overall, it's good that more people get a chance to indulge in their favorite food because there are more choices out there.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I've renamed the thread to make the title less argumentative and to reflect the subject which the original user started more clearly.

edit: Not my intention to put words into the OP's mouth though, sorry if it came off that way. Please feel free to edit it back to something you want (as long as it isn't argumentative).

 

[AllisterH]

Not for the sake of ego so much as to justify the existence of the entire controller role. Announce a game and declare no minions will be used and see how many controllers are in the party.

I think that _might_ have been true if you're just playing PHB1 and the only "controller" is the wizard.

But now with the existence of the invoker, druid and the upcoming Psion, I'm guessing more people play those classes since they are fun in of themselves.

re: Racial abilities

I really do like how two things in the 4e version of monsters.
a) The low level foes all feel distinct since each race gets its own schtick. Basically, it makes them memorable and distinct a la the classic troglytde (sp?) and you can then still have different types in the same race.

b) Providing more than one detailed entry for the "fodder" races (i.e. the gnolls, orcs, humans, goblins etc of the campaign world - basically the races where the BBEG gets his grunts from). I've always found it a failing that given there was an assumption you would be using lots of the same fodder races, the MMs didn't provide sufficiently detailed entries for the different types. The Monstrous Manual (2e's hardcover) seemed like it was going that way at times but there wasn't enough follow up for me (just changing weapons and HD doesn't make an unique entry)

re: Sandbox play and lethality.
Rechan nails it from my PoV. What I noticed IME, players weren't even willing to go into strange and new places since just hoping for the parley option is a sure way to make a new character (all dependant on how nasty the DM was of course)

 

[ggroy]

That is exactly my point. The minions exist simply to provide a fire that controllers must put out. If these artificial constructs didn't exist then controllers could be replaced with more strikers.

Back in the days of 1E AD&D, most of the people I knew who played lower level magic users typically played them like a sniper during combat until they ran out of spells. Then afterward they would switch to another weapon, such as a staff or dagger, to defend themselves if any monsters got close enough to strike them.

The one obvious scenario I can think of offhand where a 1E magic user could be played like a 4E style "controller" for crowd control, would be a scenario at higher levels (ie. level 5 and above) where the magic user could fire 3 or more magic missiles at once with each magic missile directed at 3 or more different monsters. If the small crowd of enemies were monsters with a low number of hit points, they would go down relatively quickly.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Not for the sake of ego so much as to justify the existence of the entire controller role. Announce a game and declare no minions will be used and see how many controllers are in the party.

I am pretty sure I would still play one, and I would expect my character to be very useful.

Bigby's Grasping Hand or Illusory Ambush are not Controller spells aimed at dealing with Minions. Heck, not even Thunderwave is.

 

[Kzach]

Discuss via email, not in the thread. Thanks.

 

[jgbrowning]

Take your example of the 9th level fighter killing a level 2 kobold. I think we can all (or at least a lot of us) agree that baring some very special circumstances, a lowly kobold is not supposed to be a threat to a level 9 character. The level 9 character should also be able to kill the kobold quickly and easily. 4e does handle this. The minion approach is not some weird "fix" imagine by some random people on the internet, but instead, it is a new tool to simulate the increased power of a player character.

Remember, combat in D&D is abstract. Hit point damage can mean a lot of things. So it doesn't really matter that a kobold has 36 hit points when you meet it at 2nd level and only 1 when you meet it at 9th level. That is just the reverse of your damage out-put increasing and it yields the same result.

The kobold with which you struggled at lower level (you needed 4-5 hits) is very easy to kill at 9th level (1 hit).

Minions actually don't work the way described above because that kobold minion would still die in one hit from that 1st-level party that just came in through the other door in the room.

The minion concept is entirely indefensible outside of a meta-game argument designed to promote increased opponent numbers to facilitate a combat system highly-focused upon advantageous movement and multiple variations on movement constraints while providing a illusion to the player of a sense of power and might. The minions concept falls solidly into a type of role-playing in which reality is based upon the PCs power levels.

Monsters in 4e exist in some Heisenbergian state wherein their "normal" or "minion" status solely depends upon the level of the first party to step into the door. Once that state is fixed by party A, when party B enters the room, the "role-playing handwave" of why minions make sense is destroyed: their existence is solely a reflection of PC power.

joe b.

 

[ggroy]

One way to make minions more formidable, is to significantly increase their defense stats such that there's only a 20% chance (or less) of hitting them, while still only having one or a low number of hit points. They could be the guards which actively obstruct the players from entering a room.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

EDIT - Never mind this post.