Why I think you should try 4e (renamed)

[Fifth Element]

That's one of the problems with minion-type rules. Batman should be able to plow through common criminals, but if the common criminals are such that a feebleblow butterfly can do the same, does it really make Batman seem all that powerful?

Indeed, context is important. Perhaps that feebleblow butterfly can get lucky and score a hit to kill a minion (note it would have to do at least 1 hp of damage, since hit points are measured in integers; 1/1,000,000 of a hp has no meaning). Batman, of course, can hit the minion with one Batfist tied behind his back.

I would also suggest that a butterfly would not cause any damage, unless perhaps it a vampiric dire butterfly. And since minions require at least 1 hp of damage to take down, the butterfly can't do it.

But we can move back to the much more reasonable example of an untrained peasant, who can take down this minion if he gets lucky on his attack roll. But do we really think he's going to look like Batman? Let's say he gets lucky and hits and kills a minion right off. The remaining minions then attack the peasant, and kill him. That's the thing about minions; they come in bunches.

Batman, on the other hand, downs at least one on his turn, and then soaks the damage he would take on the minions' turn. He then proceeds to take out a couple more each turn until they're defeated. He's taken some damage, but nothing a healing surge or two won't cure. The peasant, on the other hand, is still dead.

Batman takes out two dozen minions, and walks away. The peasant takes out one minion, and then promptly dies. Do you see a difference? Because I see a difference.

 

[Raven Crowking]

That's because there is no hit point damage below 1.

Is that a rule or your house rule?

So you haven't fixed it.

Until now, it wasn't broken.


RC

 

[Barastrondo]

AFAICT, the crux of the argument you are responding to is that minions change the context of the "ogre" you are facing, so that your ability to hew it in half ceases to have any real meaning.

But the opposing viewpoint (which is mine) is that the minion rules are a way to represent the context (which is that ogres are not a significant threat to you at upper levels, though they can still cause problems in numbers). It all depends on whether you see the rules as the context, or whether you see them as something to use to reinforce the context.

That's one of the problems with minion-type rules. Batman should be able to plow through common criminals, but if the common criminals are such that a feebleblow butterfly can do the same, does it really make Batman seem all that powerful?

You keep using this term "feebleblow butterfly." What kind of Mothras do you live near that a butterfly capable of doing 1 HP worth of damage is considered feeble? You live in Australia, don't you?

Likewise, the Horta may kill minion Red Shirts left and right, but does this actually give Captain Kirk any real reason to imagine that it is something to be worried about, if he knows those Red Shirts are minions?

I think there's a grave discrepancy in perception here. I don't think Captain Kirk "knows the red shirts are minions" at all. I think Captain Kirk thinks of them as human beings, and if he's a pretty good captain, he might even know most to all of them by name. The player may know that they're not going to help him out much in this fight, but as far as the character is concerned, this is trouble. Similarly, the player may know that taking out minions may not be the world's greatest representative of what a Horta (whatever that is) can do, but he may pay attention to what his character sees, the context that is defined by the entire encounter, and develop an estimate from there.

I mean, I dunno. My players may be egregiously new-school in thought (though most of them started with the red box, as did I), but when I had a cave fisher snip a guy in half like he only had one hit point, they reacted as though their characters would. I can only assume that the perception that "minions make everything seem less dangerous" is not universal.

But doesn't the minion mechanic throw a spanner in PC measurements of themselves vs. other creatures? I'd think the minion mechanic decreases the accuracy of group power judgments when facing opponents as opposed to increasing accuracy of that judgment. For example, we PCs brutalize minion ogres, face a tough fight against non-minion ogres, and are outmatch by uber-ogres, but which one are these ogres in front of us?

In my experience? The players pay more attention to their opponents as a way to figure this out. It does help that I have an expansive miniatures collection by now that gives them extra visual reminders (the ogres in ratty hide singlets are probably minions, the heavily armored ones are probably not), but I'm not reliant on them. It encourages me to put more description into the antagonists ("the ogre with the eyepatch," "the ogre with the breastplate covered in reliefs of screaming faces," "the skinny adolescent ogre"), and if I don't provide enough, my players ask.

This applies to everything, of course. Raiding the Temple of the Horned Ape to rescue the girl? The players generally take it that the robed and armored high priest is not a minion, but that the eight shirtless cultists in kilts are likely kind of disposable. The characters take everyone as a threat, but they dispose of the lesser ones in proper cinematic fashion.

I'd assumed one of the reasons why minions were made was to increase the uncertainty of power judgments.

I dunno, maybe, but I don't really see much point to it myself. The narrative benefit of having "the rabble" is excuse enough. Interestingly, I've found that as players get more used to the mechanic, they frequently drop the minions first — knowing that minions are still a threat with their aiding another and flanking and such, and reducing the number of attack rolls made against them each round. There's also the tendency to use encounter powers to wound one of the more dangerous combatants and drop a minion or three at the same time off-handedly. It provides a great natural dramatic escalation to the battle. If the minion rule doesn't work for people at all, obviously this wouldn't either, but man, we're having great fun.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The idea of hit dice being a biological factor of species (kobolds are the 1/2-HD humanoid, goblins are the 1-1 HD humanoid, and the ecological niche that gnolls fill in the world is the 2 HD space between hobgoblins and bugbears) isn't one I subscribe to. It was useful back in the day, but even then you had different humanoids that line up in power level for the simple gaming purpose of letting players measure their increasing power level against them.

A humanoid does not need to remain at a fixed HD simply due to species. I agree on that point. With added toughness/training a humanoid can become a much tougher fighter than the racial statistics indicate. Weakness for a given species is easily done by assigning lower hp values per HD. Thus a 2hp goblin is a wimp, a 7hp goblin is tough for a goblin without special training and a 42 hp goblin is a badass with several fighter levels.

If you strip away all the context and just say "What is an ogre?", some people's definition will include 4+1 HD. But if that's not how things are defined as the player characters would see them, the PCs not being aware of the hit die mechanic, then the utility of having ogres be 4+1 HD in particular is fairly negligible. The practical effect is that PCs can measure themselves against ogres and know themselves to be outmatched, face a tough fight, or able to brutalize the poor oafs. But fixed hit dice, level and role is not the only way to achieve that practical effect. And I tend to favor solutions that lead to more elegant and engaging combats.

I don't see a problem with a base ogre being 4+1 HD as a measure against the typical human being 1HD. The "minion" ogres might have 5 or 6 hp being the weakest of thier kind. This makes the weakest pathetic ogre on par with a rather robust human in terms of staying power which feels about right to me.

If that's how you see it, sure. I prefer to make use of the minions rules, though, because it's more in keeping with how I see mythic heroes operating. The rules can now more accurately keep track of how we see the fight playing out in our heads.

If you enjoy the minion rules, use them and happy gaming. We found them amusing at first but have become annoyed with them. While the minions permit scenes from fiction to occur within the game, just remember that the characters in the fiction were not being played by real people who get to see the underlying mechanics supporting thier acts of heroism.

What if Aragorn got to the bottom of the hill at Amon Hen, looked back at all the carnage he had created and saw only cardboard cutouts lying on the ground? Would he feel that his accomplishment was worth anything?

But I come from a land where context is the coin of the realm. Absolutes tend to break down and start rusting the moment you start applying various contexts, so they are more idle carnival curiosities than state treasures.

When anything and everything morphs depending on context you get a world without substance.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Batman takes out two dozen minions, and walks away. The peasant takes out one minion, and then promptly dies. Do you see a difference? Because I see a difference.

Sure there's a difference (and nice description, btw). Like I said, I don't think minion rules are bad, per se, but I think that they can cause problems.....like when Batman goes to rescue Commissioner Gordon and Aunt Harriet from Two Face's minions, only to discover than not only can the Commish take out minions as well as Batman can, but so can Aunt Harriet!

There are better ways to model Batman's prowess, IMHO, that don't cause this problem to arise.

(And, in a ruleset that encourages the GM to utilize common sense, I don't think this problem would necessarily arise with the minion rules, either! )


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

But the opposing viewpoint (which is mine) is that the minion rules are a way to represent the context (which is that ogres are not a significant threat to you at upper levels, though they can still cause problems in numbers).

Assuming that all ogres are now minions, this would be accurate.

It all depends on whether you see the rules as the context, or whether you see them as something to use to reinforce the context.

Cool.

If you are saying that the DM can and should use common sense to adjudicate rules in order to reinforce the contextual meaning of the game milieu, we are on the same page. Now, if you could please say as much in this thread (http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...ealing-dm-who-takes-things-too-literally.html) I would appreciate it.

You keep using this term "feebleblow butterfly." What kind of Mothras do you live near that a butterfly capable of doing 1 HP worth of damage is considered feeble? You live in Australia, don't you?

Canada. But I think your 1 hp minimum is a house rule. Or can you tell me where to find it in the RAW?

I think there's a grave discrepancy in perception here. I don't think Captain Kirk "knows the red shirts are minions" at all. I think Captain Kirk thinks of them as human beings, and if he's a pretty good captain, he might even know most to all of them by name. The player may know that they're not going to help him out much in this fight, but as far as the character is concerned, this is trouble.

This is, I think, the crux of the problem. The player has to know how the character perceives the threat. But the basis for player knowledge is shifted. Captain Kirk's player may have the good Captain go "OMG! Horta!", but unless the same player also views the horta as a threat to CK, a great deal of the visceral thrill is gone. IMHO, at least.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time. Will anyone bother to make "Retro Clones" of 4e 25 years from now?

There are some things about 4e that I realy like, but there are so many more things that turn me off.

 

[Ourph]

Honestly, I rarely had 1hp creatures in my worlds in prior editions and at a much lower % than indicated by the raw dice. I'd just kinda assumed most of the 1hpers in the world had already died off, resulting in only a few 1hpers being around.

Really??! In 3e all bats, rats, tiny vipers and toads have 1hp by RAW. Assuming there is some consistent ratio, animals smaller than bats, rats, tiny snakes and toads should all have some fraction of a hp (how many hp does a normal mosquito or a butterfly have?). Are you saying that in all of your games, every animal smaller than a house cat was on the verge of complete extinction? Were city sewers devoid of rats? Were swamps devoid of clouds of biting insects? It must have been nice for adventurers not having to worry about fleas in their bedrolls or lice in their helmets.

For that matter, were diseases completely absent from your worlds? If a creature as big as a rat has only 1hp and it's therefore impossible to imagine it surviving to any significant number in a world that "makes sense" then bacteria, viruses, fungi and other single-celled organisms must be 100% extinct, right?

 

[Scribble]

I don't see a problem with a base ogre being 4+1 HD as a measure against the typical human being 1HD. The "minion" ogres might have 5 or 6 hp being the weakest of thier kind. This makes the weakest pathetic ogre on par with a rather robust human in terms of staying power which feels about right to me.

To me it just means more numbers then I need to keep track of on the game table.

If you enjoy the minion rules, use them and happy gaming.

I agree to each his own. If you don't enjoy them don't use them.

What if Aragorn got to the bottom of the hill at Amon Hen, looked back at all the carnage he had created and saw only cardboard cutouts lying on the ground? Would he feel that his accomplishment was worth anything?

The other day I had a fly buzzing around the office. When I finally got it, all it took was one swap from a rolled up paper, but when I was trying to just ignore it... Oye- I couldn't get any work done. I'd start doing something, then sure enough... bzzzzzzzztttttt and I'd totally lose my train of thought- Drove me nuts!

Minions like anything else in the game are just a tool in the toolbox. If you use it poorly, the outcome is going to look like Homer Simpson's spice rack. If you use them well, however, then despite the ease at which they can be taken out, Minions add dimension and extra tricks to the fight.

Think of them like a weapon or armor. By themselves these things aren't much threat. But when wielded by a skilled warrior, now they become something you can't ignore.

For instance there are some monsters that can sacrifice minions in order to regain HP or cause some sort of effect to happen. If the PCs don't take out the minions first they'll suffer that effect. Sometimes there are monsters that gain AC bonuses when allies are around. Minions are great for that scenario. If the PCs ignore the minions, then the big baddie is that much tougher to deal with.

After all a pawn can only move forward one square at a time, and can only take other pieces diagonally... But I've seen people checkmated using pawns.

But in the end, if you don't enjoy this kind of stuff... Well then yeah minions I guess just ain't your thing.

(Personally I like to give the PCs minions from time to time as well.)

When anything and everything morphs depending on context you get a world without substance.

Shrug, again to each his own. I find the rules don't have much of an impact on the substance of my games. (And in fact I get annoyed when they try to overstep their place.)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Is that a rule or your house rule?

Well, the weakened condition for example allows damage to be reduced to half. The rules do not say that this means you get to do .5 points of damage. There is no instance where you ever have hit point damage that is less than 1 point.

Hit point damage is always represented in a positive non-zero integer.

So yes, you might be right. Maybe soon, we will get a monster that deals 2.5 or 0.5 points of damage Until we see that, I assume that it's a rule.

 

[LostSoul]

Here are my experiences from play:

We were running the modules and we decided not to pick up the next one; I'd start building the campaign world we were kicking around in.

I went in with a few goals for design: I wanted the world to challenge the players, I wanted to maintain some internal consistency (in order for players to be able to plan ahead), and I wanted to be fair and impartial about it.

This is when I suddenly understood "Gygaxian naturalism" and lamented the loss of No. Appearing and Frequency listings in the MM. I lost my 1E books a long time ago so I stole from OSRIC or something like it to populate monster tribes.

I had a lair full of human cultists - mostly low-level bandits. I used the 2nd-level human bandit for the MM at first. When we got into combat with these guys the PCs were 7th or 8th level. It was pretty lame. They couldn't hit the PCs but they had too many HP.

I figured I'd change them into the 7th level human minions for next time.

That's now my rule of thumb; add four or five levels, make them minions. Once they are minions they stay that way. (Kobold Dragonshields would "max out" at 7th level.)

A cheap fix, perhaps, but it maintains enough consistency for me and allows the game to proceed.