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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MarkB" data-source="post: 4464767" data-attributes="member: 40176">So far, I don't recall seeing anything in the books suggesting that players should know in advance which monsters are minions - even Monster Knowledge checks don't get you information on role or hit points.The way I've played it and seen it played so far is that you find out whether a particular critter is a minion the first time you hit and damage it, after which point you'll be reasonably sure that its similarly-described buddies are also minions. So far, that's made for fun combats where a significant aspect of the first round or two of combat consists of assessing your opponents' capabilities.The Bloodied condition feels, to me, a much less metagamey solution to assessing combatants' health than paraphrasing their health status into carefully packaged assessments like "he's barely scratched" or "he's still standing, but only just" that went on in previous editions, and if you're firm enough to stick with just that binary "bloodied / not bloodied" set, I've found that it tends to encourage players to pay more attention to how much damage is being dealt out to friends and foes, so that instead of asking for a health assessment every other round, they get better at keeping track of things themselves.As for metagame-vs-descriptive ways of indicating "bloodied" status, I'm starting to really appreciate status counters used with miniatures during combat. You get the best of both worlds - the DM gets to describe that bloodying blow and its effects as clearly or subtly as he likes, whilst sliding in a red token under the critter's base, so that the players can see that it's now bloodied, and that their characters can visibly perceive that it's wounded.</blockquote>

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