5e GMs - Why or Why Not Wandering Treasure?

[Sadras]

The ability to avoid damage is not relative to, nor does it have to be tied to the ability to cause damage. So literally, as I said it above. Minions are not as skilled at avoiding harm.

Your 1hp Ogre (a minion) not being as skilled at avoiding hard as your 20hp goblin is a problem though - in the way Saelorn was referring to.

 

[Kobold Boots]

Your 1hp Ogre (a minion) not being as skilled at avoiding hard as your 20hp goblin is a problem though - in the way Saelorn was referring to.

Not necessarily. It depends on what the "boss" in that fight is and how setting a minion ogre would support the story, or ruin it.

I mean, I can come up with a equally ridiculous example to make a point too. A dragon minion for example, but you'd never see it in actual play.

 

[pemerton]

Your 1hp Ogre (a minion) not being as skilled at avoiding hard as your 20hp goblin is a problem though - in the way Saelorn was referring to.

What's the problem?

In the 4e MM the lowest level Ogre minion is 11th level. And the highest level goblin is a 4th level elite. That ogre is liable to be cut down by paragon heroes. That goblin is a powerful foe against heroes of low heroic tier.

I've played both scenarios. There was no problem.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In my opinion it just requires some elastic thinking (and only mentioning this as an aside as no one wants another HP thread).

Your 1HP minion is not as skilled as the 20 HP goblin. HP are a part of the game reality and the reality says that HP is the ability to avoid harm, not take damage. Minions for whatever reason, are numerous and they aren't as able to avoid harm as a more skilled person.

They could have tried harder to get that across, if that was their goal. You could sell HP as skill-at-avoiding-damage, if the rest of the system was built around it. It does rely on the fundamental assumption that one good hit is all it takes to kill something, though.

And to be fair, that's a reasonable-enough assumption for human-sized (or smaller) enemies. To be honest, the whole minion problem didn't really jump out at me until I was fighting frost giant minions, around level 14 or so. The types of attacks I was using, which wouldn't have been enough to fell a standard goblin at level 1, really shouldn't have been able to kill a giant in one hit. If there had been a rule that only medium-or-smaller creatures could be made into minions, then that would have prevented a good amount of criticism.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Hiya!

For a few years now I've been using my own "special DM helper tables" that I created when we first started learning how to play the "Dominion Rules RPG" (www.dominionrules.org ; free PDF rules, uses only d12, and is pretty much a Target Number type system). Anyway, I wanted to just keep using only d12. But I wanted a reason to use two or three (flashbacks to Mazes & Monsters, where the Maze Controller, Daniel, gives a little intro-adventure spiel then ends with "Your fate...[opens hands to show 2d12]...is in my hands...let us begin").

Anyway, I created a system I call my "HMC" or "Hot/Medium/Cold" method. Three d12's, one is "Hot" (say, a red or orange colour die), one "Medium" (white, grey, brown), and the last "Cold" (blue, purple, dark green). The tables are laid out so that I roll my HMC dice and simply cross ref. One of the biggest tables is for my "encounter area stuff" (a location the PC's decide to 'look into' or otherwise stay a while). The Hot die indicates the potential level of Treasure. The Medium die gives me the Contents of the area (not treasure!). The Cold die gives me more specifics on the thing that was the Contents focus. So in this way, if I get 3/2/9 (H/M/C), I get: "Low Treasure, Special Contents, Physical Transform is the 'effect' of the Special". Or if I roll 7/11/3, that's "Average Treasure, Beast Contents, Challenging Special". All of these results are nice and loose, letting me fill-in-the-blanks so to speak. Here's the table if anyone is interested in what I'm talking about: https://dominions-of-alstigar.obsidianportal.com/ <-- go to "Media Library" and scroll down to "Trifec_d12_EncAreas.png").

I have used this with 5e (and may other games, actually), and this one table can be easily used with some of my other, more specific, HMC tables (I have them for things like Landscape, Beast Specific Encounters, and others that I haven't put up on the Obsidian Portal site above...just checked; I do have 3 of them up there, actually ).

I did NOT use any sort of 5e rules methods to do this, however. So there are no DC checks on the part of the player to "find treasure". If that is all you were meaning with the OP, then I guess "No" is the answer. I'm not against the idea, just that I would rather have control over the results more so than the Players or Players dice rolls.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

I like your 3d12 room improv table, very handy.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I'm a big fan of the basic idea of random treasure tables, harkening back to 2e days.

I dont set any treasure in my adventures apart from the occasional magic item. The adventure will instead just say 1 x Carry Loot, or 1 x Trinket & Curio, 1 x 5 HD Lair Treasure, or 1 x Potion. If the PCs get to the location and earn the reward, I roll on the table to find out what they get. The tables are here if interested (p.136-158): https://lowfantasygaming.com/freepdf/

I do something similar with monster too. There are never 4 orcs in a room. There are 2d4 orcs. As GM I dont know how many there are until the players make it relevant to know how many there are.

 

[Blue]

i just give the peons a typical amount of HP for their status and let them get mowed down per the rules. i dont need special pools or hit point spread or bypass that suddenly manifests itself in certain fights and vanishes at other times.

if the 11th level group can mow thru the dozen or two dozen 2nd level guys thats great... i dont need to have a whole new set of rules for it. While that rout is happening the adults in the room or the keep are doing stuff and that is likely going to matter more than the splattefest - so really the "threat" of the mobs is the time spent.

The problem is that the rules don't let you "mow through" low level people. Question - if you have two attacks and are facing 20 goblins, what rule lets your 3rd tier character "mow thru them all" in 2-3 turns? None, because you at most hit & kill one per attack. And there's no options like Cleave from earlier editions. That's where a rule to let you deal epicly with hordes of minions can be a tool in a DM's arsenal. That's what the 13th Age mooks rules allow you to do.

This was one of my problems with 4e minions as well, they had the worst rules (including doing "popping" attack that did minuscule damage but was enough to kill equal level mooks) but missed the "mow down hordes" archetype that was what missing from the rules.

Even AD&D 1st had a somewhat buried rule (in the DMG?) that when faced with hordes of weakness a high level fighter should be able to kill as many as they had levels.

Again, as a tool there is nothing saying a particular DM needs use it. But it's there for those that want to.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The problem is that the rules don't let you "mow through" low level people. Question - if you have two attacks and are facing 20 goblins, what rule lets your 3rd tier character "mow thru them all" in 2-3 turns?

To be fair, a turn is only six seconds long. If you can kill a dude every three seconds for an entire minute, then that's easily on par with anything Conan does. It only seems like you aren't as effective, because Conan is acting in real time, and we're slowing things down in order to roll dice.

Besides, in most circumstances, everyone in your party will be killing 2-3 dudes every turn; so you probably will get through all 20 within 2-3 rounds.

 

[5ekyu]

The problem is that the rules don't let you "mow through" low level people. Question - if you have two attacks and are facing 20 goblins, what rule lets your 3rd tier character "mow thru them all" in 2-3 turns? None, because you at most hit & kill one per attack. And there's no options like Cleave from earlier editions. That's where a rule to let you deal epicly with hordes of minions can be a tool in a DM's arsenal. That's what the 13th Age mooks rules allow you to do.

This was one of my problems with 4e minions as well, they had the worst rules (including doing "popping" attack that did minuscule damage but was enough to kill equal level mooks) but missed the "mow down hordes" archetype that was what missing from the rules.

Even AD&D 1st had a somewhat buried rule (in the DMG?) that when faced with hordes of weakness a high level fighter should be able to kill as many as they had levels.

Again, as a tool there is nothing saying a particular DM needs use it. But it's there for those that want to.

"How many drones are in that stck?"
"A s-load!"
"How many drones in a s-load?"
Counting stack.
"Eleven."

Ever since that day SFB game day back in the early 80s, eleven has been called that.

But I missed the mow down equal one character killing a dozen in 2-3rds memo.

I also missed dnd being a solo game.

I believe I even made the point that in my now down, the key threat from the monks was loss of time. The time was the point of the encounter, the risk, the challenge.

It seems like you want an encounter that pretends to be epic but offers no risk, no threat and takes no time and requires no special abilities like say fireball or hypnotic pattern from an EK.

Not a definition of epic I am familiar with.

So, not s rule I see needed for games/systems I play.

As always GMs and players should use rules that fit their needs and if "epic" sneezes dropping "epically" an "epic" number of no-risk but "epically"menacing minions then that's what you should add as house rules or find and use others systems for more "epic" games.

Me, I can't figure how 20 goblins could last 2-3 rounds against a tier-3 party (or what the party would not by -step them given the "epic" powers at their disposal - barring the setup being cover, hiding etc in which case the "epic" now down wasnt the scene design anyway.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm curious, what better ways are you envisioning for the creations of mooks or minions?

For ordinary creatures like orcs or goblins or wolves there can be low-h.p. ones, but not just one h.p. because a one h.p. orc would simply not survive to adulthood. (in my view hit points remain with a creature whether or not there's PCs around, so if an orc minion has 1 h.p. now it has 1 h.p. all the rest of the time)

But 1 h.p. minion giants or ogres or full-grown dragons are just beyond the pale. Even the weakest of these creatures is going to have a decent number of hit points plus a reasonable constitution.

Now I suppose sometimes you could have the party meet some of these that had recently been in another fight and hadn't all recovered yet, thus some currently have very few h.p. left - but doing this every time would get old fast.

Swarms and mobs are very much created along the same way i.e. gamist, as was reflected in the recent zombie horde thread where everyone was offering very much "non-realistic" approaches of dealing with a zombie horde.

I missed that thread - probably just as well.

The 5e Lair and Legendary actions are also very much gamist creations to replicate a thematic action sequence and threat level.

Some of those are at least vaguely explainable as a form of "home field advantage", though others aren't so much.

I do not see why the minion 1hp mechanism gets picked on for being particularly gamist considering that hit points are really plot points.

I pick on it because it so blatantly violates internal consistency within the game world. A one hit point giant will die the first time it rough-houses with its brother in the playground. A one hit point dragon will kill itself while learning to fly unless it gets it perfect the very first time.

If everyone in the game world including PCs only had 1 hit point I'd have no problem with minions - they'd fit right in. But that's not the case - PCs and skirmishers and elites and all sorts of other creatures have the natural hit points for their race/constitution/class, while minions stand out like a sore thumb.

Lanefan