NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 8049322" data-attributes="member: 53980">Power attack (-5 att for +10 damage) exists in the game. Along those lines we can conceptualize an ability that boosts 'to hit' in exchange for less damage. Similarly, we could imagine a Reckless Defense ability where you take a steep penalty to HP, but gain a +5 to AC and saving throws. You're less likely to get hit, but if you do that's probably it for you. Using PA, the to hit ability, or RD doesn't inherently change who the monster is. But if I bake those into the stat block suddenly I've fundamentally altered its nature? I don't think so.The minion rules don't numerically weaken the ogre. Remember what I described about the higher order abstraction? That you could take the ogre's offensive and defensive capabilities and condense them into an offensive and defensive value? (4e and 5e literally use this approach to calculate CR/level, which itself is just another higher order abstraction.) We can then recondense the ogre's values from those values in a different arrangement without changing how powerful the ogre inherently is. The information in the system is preserved, it's simply presented differently.I never played 1e (though I am familiar with it) but I did play a lot of 2e which has a similar power curve. Ogres had a reputation at our table as low level party killers. At higher levels, a single ogre wasn't much of a threat at all. Its Thac0 was nothing particularly amazing, so once your front liners got good armor, its ability to hit them was quite limited. Its AC of 5 would be easily hit by a higher level fighter.I'm not suggesting that you can't use an ogre against a lower/higher level party in 1e/5e. You absolutely can. However, templates like boss or minion are useful tools for a DM to precisely adjust these sort of encounters. You can toss an ogre against those parties and get an encounter that is good enough. Using the templates, IME, gives far better results however. The ogre boss gives the lower level party a good fight, rather than just wading through them like an instant death spell on legs. The ogre minion let's the players face off against a horde of ogres without the fight turning into a gridy slog where the ogres have little chance to hit the PCs, but the PCs must nonetheless grind through the mountain of hit points before them.Even if you have an extremely shallow power curve, minions still have a purpose. Feng Shui has a shallower power curve than 1e (IMO) but relies heavily on the use of mooks to convey its intended style of play.Ultimately, I'm not trying to convince you to use minions if you don't like them. If you don't like them, don't use them. I'm not debating whether you should use them; I'm simply arguing for the idea that they are a coherent and useful element for those who do wish to use them.</blockquote>

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