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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D'karr" data-source="post: 6019662" data-attributes="member: 336">IMO attempts to "unminionize" minions miss the point of why minions exist in the first place.Minions are designed for ease of use.  Tracking HP on a minion is a waste of effort and goes against their design intent.  The entire point of minions is that they require no tracking.On the DM side they are designed to be easily expendable, and not add any work to the function of running them.  Tracking HP is a pain in the ass if you put 20 standard enemies on the board.  It is trivially easy if you put 20 minions on the board because you don't worry about HP.If the purpose is to make minions more "deadly" then go ahead and roll damage for their attacks instead of using average damage.  This does, however, add quite a bit of overhead if you have 20 minions on the board.Instead of meticulously tracking HP use 2 hit minions.  First hit bloodies them, which ends up "triggering" some special abilities with PCs that do effects on bloodied enemies.  Second hit kills them.  Or use one of the existing minion capabilities where they roll a save on a hit and stay alive if they make the save.Before deciding to alter a specific mechanic it is important to understand why it exists in the first place.  Minions exist specifically to be easy to kill, still provide a challenge at any level, and require no overhead.The only major change I have made to the minion mechanics is in their numbers.  I use 6 minions per standard monster instead of 4 at heroic tier,   8 minions at Paragon, and 10 at Epic.Creating an "intermediate" creature between minion and standard might serve a purpose but that particular purpose should be defined before going to the trouble of creating another "role".  Wouldn't it simply be easier to downgrade a standard so that it still has interesting things to do in a combat but dies in 1-2 hits?One of the many "good" things about 4e Monster Design is that each monster, "racially", has interesting things that make it different from another monster of the same level.  For example kobolds are shifty, and goblins make you chase them when you miss.  In previous editions a goblin and a kobold were mechanically the same except in how the DM decided to run them.  Kobolds might have been trapmakers and goblins might have been born liars.  Mechanically there really was no difference.  4e went ahead and made sure that different monsters, mechanically, and thematically ARE different.I would highly recommend that an "intermediate" monster role also have interesting things to it.  If all it will do is attack with a basic attack, then it's not interesting.  Any creature can do that.</blockquote>

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