D&D 5E (2024) How Many HP Should 5E 2024 Minions Have

[Tigris]

This has turned into an interesting thread. SO many different ways of doing minions, and people seem to be REALLY married to the system they like best.

Well you can do minions in any way you like, the question is always just what you want to achieve with it.
Originally minions had the 2 purposes I quoted:

1. Allow the mass fight fantasy
2. Allow to easily run many enemies

With a 3rd indirect point being:

3. Make combats varied

So from this we get:

• Having more than binary states goes against 2
• Being able to hit an enemy but not kill it goes against 1
• Having high damage attacks matter goes against 3

If you have different goals this can varry:

• If you just want illusion of choice of having "minions" you can go the PF2 way as they do with "elites" just in reverse. Just call CR-6 level enemies minions and be done with it.
• If you just want the flavour of many enemies but same behaviour as normal enemies, make them mooks with HP and damage tresholds and damage carrying over (like 13th age to some degree)
• If you want spellcasters to feel good/ make martials feel bad, make it 10 HP an amount which casters with area attack spells easily can do but martials can miss
• If you want martial characters to feel good and limit power of casters: Require 1 successfull attack roll. (not saves!)
• etc

 

[Reynard]

Well you can do minions in any way you like, the question is always just what you want to achieve with it.
Originally minions had the 2 purposes I quoted:

1. Allow the mass fight fantasy
2. Allow to easily run many enemies

With a 3rd indirect point being:

3. Make combats varied

So from this we get:

• Having more than binary states goes against 2
• Being able to hit an enemy but not kill it goes against 1
• Having high damage attacks matter goes against 3

If you have different goals this can varry:

• If you just want illusion of choice of having "minions" you can go the PF2 way as they do with "elites" just in reverse. Just call CR-6 level enemies minions and be done with it.
• If you just want the flavour of many enemies but same behaviour as normal enemies, make them mooks with HP and damage tresholds and damage carrying over (like 13th age to some degree)
• If you want spellcasters to feel good/ make martials feel bad, make it 10 HP an amount which casters with area attack spells easily can do but martials can miss
• If you want martial characters to feel good and limit power of casters: Require 1 successfull attack roll. (not saves!)
• etc

I thought I made my goals here pretty clear in the OP: I want the PCs to feel awesome while mowing down enemies that actually pose a threat (for the brief moment they are alive anyway). The real threat is the General and her Warhorse, but if the PCs ignore the knights they will get cut to ribbons.

So I want to use CR4 or so enemies that have a decent chance of hitting and damage the PCs, but who go down fast. But I don't want the wizard to clear the field in a round, either. Obviously, a good part of that will be positioning and setup, but here's the rub: I don't know when or under what circumstances this fight is going to happen. That is up to the players.

So I am just looking for a simple but effective minion rule. Low or even 1 HP seems like it will work best for my purposes, although I do like giving them something like "undead fortitude" as mentioned above.

 

[Mort]

I thought I made my goals here pretty clear in the OP: I want the PCs to feel awesome while mowing down enemies that actually pose a threat (for the brief moment they are alive anyway). The real threat is the General and her Warhorse, but if the PCs ignore the knights they will get cut to ribbons.

So I want to use CR4 or so enemies that have a decent chance of hitting and damage the PCs, but who go down fast. But I don't want the wizard to clear the field in a round, either. Obviously, a good part of that will be positioning and setup, but here's the rub: I don't know when or under what circumstances this fight is going to happen. That is up to the players.

So I am just looking for a simple but effective minion rule. Low or even 1 HP seems like it will work best for my purposes, although I do like giving them something like "undead fortitude" as mentioned above.

The "undead fortitude," was a one off for me that worked well, will probably use again. I think it will nicely model the "stronger" minion and add a level uncertainty (though you can actually get a reasonable idea of how long the baddies will stay up, you know the players average damage and you can set the Con save where you want it from there).

But, normally, when I use minions, I just use regular 4e minion rules but in 5e. Basically the monster is the same (so a threat) but has 1hp so dies fast (though never on a miss effect).

I've also used swarm/mob mechanics as some above have suggested - but that doesn't seem as fitting as the regular minion mechanic for your scenario.

 

[ECMO3]

In tonight's session, it is very likely that the PCs (11th level) are going to end up fighting A LOT of Knights of the Realm and their commander. The Commander is a Legendary character and rides of stone golem horse, but I want the PCs to feel awesome so I am planning on making her soldiers minions. That is, CR3 or 4 enemies with just a few HP so the PCs can mow them down.

The question is how many HP should they have. Initially I figured just 1 (any hit would take them out) but I remembered there being a few wonky spells that get OP fast that way. I figure I want a single attack from one of the characters to likely take a knight down, but maintain the possibility that a terrible damage roll could flub it. So maybe 8?

Note: I am running on Fantasy grounds so I am not worried about book keeping. The VTT does that part for me (I also have every enemy roll their own initiative, and have initiative rerolled every turn).

What do you think? How many HP would you give minions for level 11 characters? WHy?

Thanks!

I like the way MCDM did minions. They have hit points, for soldiers I would say around 15-20, however 1 hit kills them regardless of damage and any extra damage carries over to another one within reach or within range for a ranged attack

So if your minion has 16 hit points and you do 1 point of damage that minion dies. If you do 16 points of damage same thing -that minion dies. If you do 17 or more points of damage you damage another minion in reach after you kill the first, if you go past full hit points it kills that one and damages a 3rd. This is only for attacks, AOEs and saves work the same as before.

So if your Barbarian attacks a 16hp minion and does 40 points of damage he kills 2 and damages a 3rd for 8hps provided 3 are within reach. If the wizard then pulls out his dagger and stabs the injured minion for 2 points he dies (even though he still has 6hps left).

 

[Charlaquin]

I thought I made my goals here pretty clear in the OP: I want the PCs to feel awesome while mowing down enemies that actually pose a threat (for the brief moment they are alive anyway). The real threat is the General and her Warhorse, but if the PCs ignore the knights they will get cut to ribbons.

So I want to use CR4 or so enemies that have a decent chance of hitting and damage the PCs, but who go down fast. But I don't want the wizard to clear the field in a round, either. Obviously, a good part of that will be positioning and setup, but here's the rub: I don't know when or under what circumstances this fight is going to happen. That is up to the players.

So I am just looking for a simple but effective minion rule. Low or even 1 HP seems like it will work best for my purposes, although I do like giving them something like "undead fortitude" as mentioned above.

So, just to clarify, you want them to go down in one hit, but you don’t want AoE damage to be able to take out large numbers of them at once? Are you ok with AoE damage taking out a few of them at once? If not you could just make them immune to AoE damage, problem solved. Otherwise, the “undead fortitude” style effect could certainly work. Personally, I would be more inclined towards giving them a damage threshold (there’s precedent for this in the rules for damaging objects, if that matters to you), and also give them the equivalent of the Rogue’s Evasive feature - they take no damage from successful saves and half damage from failed saves.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

In tonight's session, it is very likely that the PCs (11th level) are going to end up fighting A LOT of Knights of the Realm and their commander. The Commander is a Legendary character and rides of stone golem horse, but I want the PCs to feel awesome so I am planning on making her soldiers minions. That is, CR3 or 4 enemies with just a few HP so the PCs can mow them down.

The question is how many HP should they have. Initially I figured just 1 (any hit would take them out) but I remembered there being a few wonky spells that get OP fast that way. I figure I want a single attack from one of the characters to likely take a knight down, but maintain the possibility that a terrible damage roll could flub it. So maybe 8?

Note: I am running on Fantasy grounds so I am not worried about book keeping. The VTT does that part for me (I also have every enemy roll their own initiative, and have initiative rerolled every turn).

What do you think? How many HP would you give minions for level 11 characters? WHy?

Thanks!

4E take was that Minions have 1 hit points, but never take damage on a miss. In 4E, spells also always were made using attack rolls. 5E is back to saving throws or attack rolls, but you can basically handle it the same way: If the Minion makes its save or is missed by an attack, it doesn't take any damage from it.
The big benefit of the 1 hit point rule is that you don't need to track those minion hit points. Some spells that deal damage +plus a condition also auto-kill them, so the condition doesn't need to be tracked, either. That reduces the GM's overhead considerably.
Sources of automatic damage in 4E always kill Minions.

A variant could be that you treat "weak" hits (however you define them, misses, succesful saves, no-attack hits) as turning a Minion bloodied, and a bloodied Minion dead. That requires a bit more tracking, though, but not as much as tracking exact hit point counts.

Alternatively, you could set the hit points to something like [expected ability score at that level+3]. At Level 8, you might have a Strength or Int of 18 with ASI, and many typical attacks will add that +4 modifier to the attack, plus roll one or more die, so most attacks would kill them, but some oddball spells or special effects might not.

 

[Reynard]

I ended up doing 12 HP with the fortitude ability based on a Con save. It worked pretty well, but no massive fight with tons of mooks ever materialized because the party went the super stealth route and only had to fight a few guards before escaping with the target hogtied and unconscious.

 

[Charlaquin]

I ended up doing 12 HP with the fortitude ability based on a Con save. It worked pretty well, but no massive fight with tons of mooks ever materialized because the party went the super stealth route and only had to fight a few guards before escaping with the target hogtied and unconscious.

Interesting! 12 HP feels like a lot to me, especially on top of undead fortitude. On one hand I’m glad it worked out anyway, but on the other hand I would have been very curious to hear how it went.

 

[dave2008]

Doesn't the Forge of Foes (or whatever it was called) have rules for 5e minions? Maybe @SlyFlourish can give their thoughts

 

[Professor Murder]

I would say have minions be able to take 2 typical hits, or be dispatched by a single critical. In effect, give em about 10+HP