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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shroomofinsanity" data-source="post: 8168110" data-attributes="member: 6928120">I can't believe that I forgot Artillery, my brain just lumped them in with skirmisher for some reason. But they were fairly integral to most balanced encounters. I did want to touch on minions a bit more. They I feel serve such an important niche in the combat, and should have been brought directly into 5e also. They let all those burning hands and other AOE characters that chance to feel really cool, without having to downplay the other characters or make the AoE character feel too strong. They also opened up an entire avenue to explore mid fight reinforcements to the villain side without dropping potentially full hp monsters on a hurt or strung out party. I do like your idea of playing with the "1 hit" rule for higher level play, but what I did came from wargame influence I think. Higher level minions essentially had 2 or 3 "wounds" that needed to be depleted to kill them. critical hits would automatically count as double still giving them effectiveness, and not feeling "wasted" on a 1 hp nobody. This also let minions i used later on to have bloodied mechanics if they survived a hit, since the system played so very heavily with that honestly, very cool and instantly understandable mechanic. I also tended to modify the ooze monsters that split, to make them less annoying, by having them break into some number of minions depending on character level, party composition, etc....Ok, so I did not expect to write all that on minions, moving on to an associated topic, I adored the default monsters groups presented in the MM's which can set up an entire story for a type of monster and who/what they hung out with. They also tended to have a tactics session for each and every monster type. I think it is was more effective than the 2 or 3 paragraphs modern monsters tend to get, since it gets right to the bones of how these things lived, fought, and got you into the designer's head, especially for some of the more complex stat blocks on display, knowing when and how they used their various tools.Oh, and I have made so much use in other games of the bloodied, or more precisely, the "bloodied breath" sub mechanic you see on most dragons, where their recharge power immediately recharges and the monster uses it. I like it as a way to keep monsters wily and threatening even when the players have figured out the monster's behaviors. All this talk, I really need to pull out the old books, track down the ones that have been lost over time, and really start running it again.</blockquote>

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