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

TwoSix said:

My minion approach is to give them a pool of communal hit points. So 20 soldiers for an 11th level party might have 300 hit points (15 HP per soldier). Whenever an attack lowers the communal pool by 15, that soldier goes down. But it requires a successful attack to actually make the soldier drop. An crit on a soldier doesn't make an unrelated soldier drop elsewhere.

I also have them make a communal save against area effects, and damage from AoE stacks. If 5 soldiers take 25 damage from fireball, the communal pool takes 125 damage. It makes minions very vulnerable to AoEs, which seems appropriate.

Click to expand...

Mob rules!

TwoSix said:

My house rule is slightly different (I think, I haven't read Draw Steel!) in that killing all the minions requires both a successful attack on each minion and the depletion of the entire communal pool.

Click to expand...

Gotcha, DS! has overkill which is a pretty standard feature of “minions as heroic awesomeness fodder” design.

The mob rule works fine, IMO.

zakael19 said:

Gotcha, DS! has overkill which is a pretty standard feature of “minions as heroic awesomeness fodder” design.

Click to expand...

I have done that, if they're really "crushable fodder" like kobolds. But I use these rules pretty often for 3-4 similar creatures, like a group of 4 ogres, more for pacing and ease of tracking than anything. It's easier for me track one pool of 200 HP than 4 different stacks of 50.

2 hp per CR, minimum of 1.

Reynard said:

I really like this idea. Have you used it in play? If so, how did it work in practice?

Click to expand...

I never used it as a DM, but I have as a player. Low-level area of effect spells (like burning hands) become very efficient, and so do AoE class abilities (one of the players could teleport, dealing low damage to every creature within 5 feet of the place he teleported from). Spirit Guardian spell was very efficient against 1-hp mooks then, and it’d be even better now with 2024 rules. Some spells that potentially affect many creature but limited to a hp budget (sleep spell in our case) became OP.

All in all, it was very easy to dispatch of minions, especially for spellcasters. 1-hp minions favours multiple attacks and AoE spells, I hesitate to say disproportionately so, but in a way typical D&D isn’t used to. Our rogue was pretty inefficient against them until we remembered that everyone can fight with two weapons, and that it didn’t matter that damage was crap. Then i also realized (playing a barbarian/fighter multiclass) that I’d be more efficient with two butter knives than my greatsword.

It did force us to review our strategy, but I think I would be easy to abuse. DM just rolled with it because it was toward the end of the campaign, but we haven’t use 1-hp minions since.

[edit] I failed to see the post you were replying to was the one about undead fortitude feature. @Mort idea is indeed interesting

I use either mob rules or existing lower level monsters and give them a bonus to and/or advantage their attack mod and a bit of extra damage by maxing out damage. I kind of liked the concept of 4e's minions but at higher levels they just felt goofy to me. I've also set up situations where I limit how many can effectively attack at once, meaning units come in waves.

For example, depending on how many enemy troops I want I might use warrior infantry. They have AC 13, HP 9 and pack tactics so they have advantage to hit. But since they're only CR 1/8 I'd consider also increasing their attack bonus from +3 to say +6 and max out damage so instead of 4 it's 7. If you go up to even a CR 1/2 Tough, suddenly you're looking at 32 HP, even if they are easy to hit.

A lot just depends on how much you want to track individual HP or if you want to use mob rules until they're whittled down and so on.

I've played about 75 sessions of 5E with characters in Tier 3 and Tier 4. DMs complain about how high CR monsters don't hit hard enough (which is facts) but it's also true that low CR monsters don't go down fast enough. For example, you would think that a CR2 ogre would go down quickly to a high level martial. Probably not. They have 59 hit points. Yes, they might drop in one round to a smiting paladin or a fighter using action surge. But most other classes will spend 2 turns grinding down that ogre. And do the fighter and paladin actually want to use their limited resources on a monster that might not even be able to hit them? Probably not. And yet what's the point of being a high level martial if you can't wreck a clan of ogres single handedly?

This is a long way of saying I think there are two ways to build "minions", and I think both should be used.

Challenging high level players means that "minions" need to have fewer hit points, but more damage output and higher to hit bonuses. Here's how I do that...

Attack bonuses are +3 per tier of the player, at minimum. This is a simple formula I can keep in my head. For 11th level characters, I would increase the attack bonus of the ogre to +9.

For damage, I take the static damage and 1) keep it the same, or 2) multiply it by the tier of the player. Using the ogre as an example, their great club does 13 damage. So I would either keep the damage at 13 or increase it to 39, depending upon what I need to build an appropriate encounter.

For hit points, I either 1) keep the same, or 2) divide by the tier of the player. This ogre would either have 59 hit points or 20 hit points.

Putting it all together, I can use this formula to build two different types of ogre "minions".

The first would have +9 to hit, do 13 damage, and have 20 hit points. This is a true minion--cannon fodder. You could throw 5 to 10 of these at a Tier 4 martial.

The second would have +9 to hit, do 39 damage, and have 59 hit points. This is an upleveled ogre. They are a meaningful threat to a Tier 4 martial but will go down in 1 or 2 rounds. Two or three of these can challenge a Tier 4 martial for a short period of time.

Hope this is a useful contribution to the conversation.

Probably just cut existing HP by 75-80%.

Ironically minion rules would buff spellcasters.
AoE
Scorching ray
Spellfire spark
Eldritch Blast

Ifi gowith 1hp minions, how should I calculate their level for encounter building? (NOTE: I use the A5E MM table.)