Why I think you should try 4e (renamed)

[Oni]

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?

This begs the question, for any hero standing atop a mountain of dead foes, where any of them individually a worthy challenge? I think the obvious answer to that is no. However there comes a point where enough of them present a situation that the hero can only tackle with considerable risk to himself. I think anytime a task has risk, succeeding at it has value.

Wouldn't it be more fair to measure the worth of a challenge by its totality rather than the strength of its individual parts?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This begs the question, for any hero standing atop a mountain of dead foes, where any of them individually a worthy challenge? I think the obvious answer to that is no. However there comes a point where enough of them present a situation that the hero can only tackle with considerable risk to himself. I think anytime a task has risk, succeeding at it has value.

Wouldn't it be more fair to measure the worth of a challenge by its totality rather than the strength of its individual parts?

I still think that there is a qualitative difference between standing atop a mountain of deceased low-level fighters or a mountain of dead girl scouts, and a Hero would perceive that difference. Even within the subset of non-challenging foes, there are distinctions.

 

[BryonD]

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.

This concern sounds familiar.....
Only it isn't just limited to "normal" vs. "minion".
As was described upthread, a pirate villian is also in an indeterminate state until a Party A steps through the door.

This is great if balanced mini battles are the prime concern of design.

The same issue also applies to the lock on the door the party walks through...

There is nothing wrong with preferring it this way.
But there is also nothing wrong with a preference that these issues play second fiddle to creating the world in a consistent way.
IMO, there is something wrong with disputing that these are two distinct viable alternatives or refusing to accept that someone else may find the alternative preferable.

 

[Oni]

I still think that there is a qualitative difference between standing atop a mountain of deceased low-level fighters or a mountain of dead girl scouts, and a Hero would perceive that difference. Even within the subset of non-challenging foes, there are distinctions.

Like I said a situation should be measured by the totality of the challenged presented. Of course a hero can tell the difference between a situation that challenged him (beating up trained fighters) and one that didn't challenge him (beating up on a bunch of helpless little girls). I'm not sure I see your point though.

 

[jgbrowning]

I disagree -- I fundamentally don't believe that the version of the game world that exists only in the GM's head is actually part of the game. It's prep.

To me, prep is part of the game because the prep is what the game at the table is going to be about, there is no game without prep, even if that prep is just a second. What one considers during prep is guided by the rules of the game, hence, no twin-pistol wielding John Woo action hero in the typical D&D game. As a game get older, these rules create a shared conceptual agreement concerning how the mechanics and the non-mechanics interact. For example, trolls regenerate in D&D. Trolls in other fantasy games don't have too.

Stuff isn't part of the game at the table until it is introduced. After it's introduced, it only matters to the GM whether it was previously extant in his head or improvised, since he's the only one that knows.

I think there's tremendous amounts of stuff that's part of the game that's not introduced at the table. For example, the party saves a farmer from some orcs. In order for the GM to know what the results of that action are, he has to have some sort of framework (experienced or not experienced by the players at the moment) to provide guidance on how to deal with the results of the action in a manner that helps players continue their willing suspension of disbelief.

IMO, creating this framework within which the table top enters and moves about is integral to the actual creation of the game. It's the context for all the widgets and numbers and combats. Without this framework, a roleplaying game typically becomes a type of squad-level wargame.

I see how there's pleasure to be had in building within the "test server" version of the game world that exists only in the GM's head, and that's a popular activity among GMs, but I don't think it ultimately relates to the actual roleplaying game at the table, the thing that gets played.

I think it relates because what's going on in the GMs head when not at the table influences what's going to happen at the table. The game isn't just what happens when GM and players meet at the table, it's also what happens when each person is alone and thinking about the game, IMO. Because they will bring their ideas to the game, creating a framework within which things on the table-top interact.

The reason I keep hammering this point is because I think it's key to the discussion. 3.x is a toolkit that works equally well to play at the table or in the DM's solo version. 4e supports the former much better than the latter. People get upset that it fails to support the latter, I get that, but I really do think that's a separate issue from how the game plays. It's a philosophical issue rather than a logistical one, in other words.

I don't know if I'd say 4e supports table-top play better than 3e, but it does support a different style of table-top play, and it does support that style very well.

joe b.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Like I said a situation should be measured by the totality of the challenged presented. Of course a hero can tell the difference between a situation that challenged him (beating up trained fighters) and one that didn't challenge him (beating up on a bunch of helpless little girls). I'm not sure I see your point though.

Goes down in 1 soft hit = helpless little girl. That helpless little girl may look like a girl, a kobold, an ogre, or a large winged demon. The appearance isn't important, the vulnerability to a pimp slap is.

 

[Keldryn]

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! )

In the Batman example, I don't think it would be unreasonable to rule that the Commissioner and Aunt Harriet are unable to cause significant damage to the minions unless they are armed. If they could, then they wouldn't have needed rescuing. If they need to roll a high enough number to hit the minions' AC when attacking with a weapons, then a lucky but lethal shot feels appropriate to me.

The intent of the minion rules -- as I see it -- is that they are minions because they are a minor threat to skilled, well-armed combatants. If they aren't facing such combatants (i.e. the PCs), then they're not minions. But if they aren't involved in combat with the PCs, then there is no need to apply combat stats to them, as the game centers on the players and their characters' actions, not on what's going on in the background. Some DMs (and players) will object strongly to this approach, but I love it.

The game status of "minion" isn't intended to define what a creature is in objective terms and explain how it interacts with the world when not in the presence of the PCs. "Minion" is a shorthand way of saying that a creature poses some threat to the PCs, but its purpose is simply to slow down the PCs a bit on their way to the real threat and add a bit of dramatic tension. As such, they aren't worth the effort of tracking hit points when the PCs *should* be able to take it down with one hit, if they roll well, but could take 2 or 3 additional hits if the PCs are unlucky and roll poorly.

When DMing previous editions, I'd often just kill off a "filler" monster if it was brought down to 1-4 hit points from a single hit, rather than bother with tracking its hit points and initiative for yet another round. And there were times I purposefully gave a monster very low HP, in the hopes that they would essentially be "speed bumps" and threaten the PCs but go down in one hit. But again, I don't view the rules as an objective set of attributes that govern how the world operates "off-camera." A creature's stats are only relevant to me when they are interacting with the PCs, and I love that the system embraces this philosophy in its design. I can understand why a lot of people will disagree with this and object to the idea that the same individual Ogre could be a level 4 solo, a level 6 brute, or a level 9 minion, depending on what level the PCs are and what purpose said ogre serves in the adventure (please nobody correct me on what the ogre's level and roles are in the MM; I'm just making up numbers).

 

[jgbrowning]

IMO, there is something wrong with disputing that these are two distinct viable alternatives or refusing to accept that someone else may find the alternative preferable.

IMO, there's nothing wrong with anyone's preferences in role-playing. To me it's like one person liking pepperoni pizza and someone else disliking it while liking mushroom and onion pizza. Arguing which is better is kinda like arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Now, discussing if certain mechanics do what they're designed to do and if there are unintended consequences is a bit more interesting. That's game design, and learning how to make things work for my version of better is always cool with me.

joe b.

 

[jgbrowning]

Do you have a post# you can point me to, because I'm not seeing this particular issue addressed anywhere else. I'm seeing a lot of assertions that creatures who die if they take 1hp of damage are too fragile to exist in a world that makes "sense" but nobody has addressed how that jives with the existence of just such fragile creatures in editions without the minion mechanic.

Post #378 where I said "I expect GMs to always exert narrative control to the point of mostly ignoring all rules except those that make players question their suspension of disbelief."

In addition Hussar's post, and my post to him was concerning humanoids which you quoted. Not cats, bat, fungi, and bacteria. In my game, I rarely have humanoids with 1hp, expecting most of them to have died out.

Why don't the smaller things with 1 hp die out? For the same reason they don't in the real world. Simulation is a scale that one needs not go to the far end to prefer.

joe b.

 

[Ourph]

Goes down in 1 soft hit = helpless little girl. That helpless little girl may look like a girl, a kobold, an ogre, or a large winged demon. The appearance isn't important, the vulnerability to a pimp slap is.

You're treating opponents as one dimensional, with hp being the only important dimension. But that's not an accurate representation of opponents.

The stat block for a helpless girl probably looks something like this...

Init: +0, HP: 1, Atk: -5, Dmg: 1hp, AC: 6, Fort: 4, Ref: 6, Will: 4

Whereas the stat block for a 10th level minion probably looks something like this...

Init: +8, HP: 1, Atk: +16, Dmg: 8hp, AC: 25, Fort: 22, Ref: 24, Will: 22

If the only dimension that matters is HPs, then if you pit the little girl and the 10th level minion against each other, it should be a wash. Each opponent should kill the other 50% of the time because, as far as HP go, they have identical stats. But that's not what happens. In all but the rarest cases, the 10th level minion destroys the helpless little girl because, in the end, they're not the same. There are dimensions to monsters that matter just as much or more than the number of HP they have.