Recent content by Lanefan

It's passing rare that the PCs run into 20 creatures at once that aren't one-hit wonders even with their full hit points. Last session the party did meet about 30 Duergar all at once, about 1/3 of them were guard types (though out of their armour at the time) and 2/3 were common miners. The...

They don't. If you're rolling their hit points at d8 per hit die a 5 HD adult* Ogre can have 5-40 h.p. + 5 x its Con bonus, which itself can vary but would (the way the WotC editions do bonuses) never be less than +1 and would more often be more like +3 or +4, sometimes more. Thus, the...

Or - put another way - in fields like this where mistakes don't really matter very much, trial and error is sometimes the very best way to learn and at the same time can be the very best way to discover/invent new things.

Good, because I'm not defending it. :) I think minions are one of 4e's poorest mechanic ideas.

Yes it is, to the point where this should pretty much go without saying. Get the mechanical simulation of its physicality vaguely right and the narrative will take care of itself. And yet in a D&D play situation it's very easy to imagine a situation arising where a 10-year-old villager is...

Not sure what you mean here. The dragon's breath weapon does its max hit points in damage, not its current hit points. This is all new on me. Dragons in various media today tend to get nastier as they get more injured, not the reverse. :)

Question: what's the functional difference between giving minions a damage threshold and just leaving them with the hit points they would have had were they not minions? Again, though, what's the functional difference between this and just leaving them their normal hit points?

More often than many DMs (including me!) would like to think, it's fairly obvious when something's being made up on the spot.

They're both Ogres, right? If yes, then there's a bunch of things both in and out of the fiction - in fiction: size, general attitude, appearance; out of fiction: their associated mechanics - that make them Ogres rather than Elves or Kobolds or Humans; and one of those things is their greater...

Relative to people's hit point totals in 1e, breath weapons were nasty enough unless the dragon was young. And "breath weapon" is by far the hardest save category for all classes, meaning there's a good chance that even if you survive some of your gear is going up. I suspect the "4-24 turns"...

In general I agree, but at the same time I don't want it to be 100% guaranteed that the dragon wins that fight; I want the farmers to have at least some small chance of pulling off the upset.

Agreed. Not all of them, though. Any given commoner isn't likely to have been trained in how to use five or six or ten different "simple" weapons, so saying they can each use all of them is a bit much. A commoner, for example, might be able to point a loaded crossbow and shoot it but may not...

Not just sales numbers, but player-base numbers. Look at any of the data provided by online gaming sites* (roll20, Foundry, etc.) and D&D - more specifically, D&D 5e - is often a higher percentage than everything else put together. * - while it would be nice to have data from in-person play as...

Colour coding can be your friend there - only get green d24s, for example, yellow d16s, and so on. I don't at all mind dice of different numbers than the usual six (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20). For any dice of any shape, though, they have to be able to pass a chi-squared test without being given the...

Big ol' dragon in 1e had 88 hit points and an AC somewhere in the negatives (can't be bothered to look it up right now). Those peasants needed a natural 20 to hit. 150 peasants with slings (let's give them proper bullets, so d4+1 damage each) are on average going to roll (let's be generous and...