At what point do players know they're fighting Minions?

[KarinsDad]

Well yeah, but my point is, when you hide it, it better be for a better reason than 'mystery is good'. When the big reveal is 'surprise, it goes down in one hit' that's an anti-climax, and anti-climaxes are not exactly the best way to resolve the majority of monsters in a given encounter.

I can tell by reading this that you have always at least hinted minion status to your players.

You have never encountered a player moving his miniature up to a group of bad guys and being pleasantly and totally surprised when he drops two of them with Cleave.

You are so concerned with your POV that you consider a really fun game element that comes out of the blue as anti-climatic instead of what it really is. I've tried both. I know what I prefer. You should try the sushi dude. You might actually like it.

 

[Nifft]

Does anybody have a cool skinning of Dungeoneering?... I hate the name of that, I retain strong anti-dungeon attitudes

In my old 3.5e campaign, I renamed Knowledge(Dungeoneering) to Knowledge(Dark Arts). It was all about Aberrations, Oozes, and the kind of icky stuff you find in the lair of insane Wizards. It was more about recognizing the taint of the Far Realms, since that was more of a campaign theme than "dungeon ecology".

At this point, I'm convinced that both the challenge of determining which enemies are minions and the value of knowing which enemies are minions are overstated. Do whatever you want; unless you have very strong opinions either way (and remember, they are your opinions) I doubt it will make much of a difference to your game.

IMHO the "tactical mystery" element is kinda fun... once. So players get a free pass to recognize Minions if they've ever met this minion type before.

It's similar to how I handled AC (and SR) in earlier editions: once the PCs hit by 1 (or miss by 1) a critter's AC, they got to know that critter's exact AC. Since there's a 10% chance for any given attack to "reveal" the AC, it took on average 7 attacks to get that info, which was about 2-3 combat rounds, or fewer if the Ranger decided to unload on one target.

Similarly, for my minions in 4e, they get explicitly revealed if:
1/ You've tangled with these critters before, or
2/ One of them hit you ("you feel a lack of randomness in this critter's damage!"), or
3/ You hit one of them ("the foot-soldier crumples beneath your mighty blow!").

So, I expect 2-3 rounds of "tactical exploration" fun, followed by 3-4 rounds of "informed tactical combat" fun.

Cheers, -- N

 

[KarinsDad]

Similarly, for my minions in 4e, they get explicitly revealed if:
1/ You've tangled with these critters before, or
2/ One of them hit you ("you feel a lack of randomness in this critter's damage!"), or
3/ You hit one of them ("the foot-soldier crumples beneath your mighty blow!").

So, I expect 2-3 rounds of "tactical exploration" fun, followed by 3-4 rounds of "informed tactical combat" fun.

Yup. This is the way to do it. I drop #2 in my game since I do roll damage for minions, but this is the basic idea.

 

[keterys]

I think at the point where your minions potentially take multiple hits to kill and roll their damage, that we're not really talking about the same topic any more

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I
Similarly, for my minions in 4e, they get explicitly revealed if:
1/ You've tangled with these critters before, or
2/ One of them hit you ("you feel a lack of randomness in this critter's damage!"), or
3/ You hit one of them ("the foot-soldier crumples beneath your mighty blow!").

So, I expect 2-3 rounds of "tactical exploration" fun, followed by 3-4 rounds of "informed tactical combat" fun.

As an aside, I have played it the way Nifft sets out, and I must say that there was nothing "fun" in trying to sniff out who the minions were - rather (for me, anyway) it made the game feel even more meta-gamey and grindy, what with several rounds of sniffing around for minions using at wills before the players anybody was willing to break out their encounters/dailies. So it ended up feeling like we were just tacking on a couple of rounds of fiddling around before the "actual battle" started. The "unfun" was likely added to by our lack of controller (or indeed, any multi-target powers, really).

Doesn't mean other groups might not like it, but for myself hiding minions without a way to sniff them out via skill use did not promote fun - its kind of like how I feel having a series of pit traps with no way to discover them other than falling in them wouldn't be much fun either.

That said, I do realise that this is definite YMMV territory.

 

[Nifft]

As an aside, I have played it the way Nifft sets out, and I must say that there was nothing "fun" in trying to sniff out who the minions were - rather (for me, anyway) it made the game feel even more meta-gamey and grindy, what with several rounds of sniffing around for minions using at wills before the players anybody was willing to break out their encounters/dailies. So it ended up feeling like we were just tacking on a couple of rounds of fiddling around before the "actual battle" started. The "unfun" was likely added to by our lack of controller (or indeed, any multi-target powers, really)

Yeah, I could see that if you don't have any area or close powers, this approach might not be for you.

On the other hand, it's not like you're actually adding rounds -- since you have no multi-attack powers, you would need to stab every minion, One. By. One. no matter how you handle the encounter. And you'll be doing that with at-wills, but it will grind towards the end of the encounter, rather than adding 1-2 rounds of at-wills to the front.

Basically, it sounds like using a whole lot of minions with your no-multi-attack group would suck (for you) no matter how they were presented.

Cheers, -- N

 

[jbear]

Does anybody have a cool skinning of Dungeoneering?... I hate the name of that, I retain strong anti-dungeon attitudes

How about 'Adventuring' ?

 

[KarinsDad]

Basically, it sounds like using a whole lot of minions with your no-multi-attack group would suck (for you) no matter how they were presented.

Yup. The sole advantage would be that no Encounter or Daily powers would be used against a minion. Other than that, it's still pretty much suckage, especially if the dice suddenly go cold. Then, it can really stretch out as the DM and players do 14+ or so creatures attacking for multiple rounds with the PCs getting 5 individual attacks and the NPCs getting 9. Those first few rounds could stretch out for a long time. At least with area or close powers, the odds of that happening are lessened.

 

[NMcCoy]

I frequently have at least some trick to my minions - a damage threshold to bloody instead of kill them, for example. Earlier this week I ran an encounter with minions that exploded and turned into other minions when hit.

Minions can also be quite dangerous if they have some tactical synergy. I also had a two-phase encounter: the first part was two standard level+1 monsters. After they were defeated, an elite and four minions showed up (all stock creatures) - and routed (and nearly wiped) the party.

Minions can be interesting in their own right, without needing to play some sort of "where's the minion" shell game with them.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Well, luckily he didn't use a whole lot, but rather typically 2 or 3 minions mixed in with 4-5 regular monsters.

And yes, I do realise this that this is likely a perception issue, but the battles where it took a while to find out who the minions were did seem to drag compaired to others, and the first few rounds did seem kind of wasted as we couldn't really make any tactical decisions until we knew.

So, at least for me, in the group I played, not knowing was less fun than knowing.