Does Anyone Ever 'Recast' Monster Roles?

[keterys]

I have a specific example where I wanted to use minions of solos...

End of the epic campaign, you're going up against Tiamat, and there are _flights_ of adult dragons of the various colors that she brings against you. Maybe you start with 2-5 of each color, and add several more each round to the combat

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Eh, my feeling is that skill bonuses will RARELY be an issue. If you're minionizing monsters there's little reason for them to do much in the way of using skills. They might do an AA, or throw a heal check on an ally, but it is hard to see why any of those things should get harder, and it doesn't matter much if they get easier in general.

I can imagine my players noticing skill weirdness when the occasional opposed check comes up. (I snuck up on this dragon with a mediocre roll at 1st level, but a mediocre roll isn't good enough ten levels later?!) But 99% of the time, nobody would notice but me.

Doesn't make me not want to do something about it, though.

I think it is pretty rare to have a solo pulled all the way out to minion. It implies that said solo wasn't all that unique since presumably you'll be using a bunch of them, and I'm not sure why I'd use a solo that was rather common. I guess it is POSSIBLE, just seems like a very corner case. At that point I'd think most of the explanation is more "Oh, one of those, quick kill it! Oh, splat, he didn't even get to use his tentacles..."

Personally, I don't necessarily equate the solo caste with unique monsters. A lot of unique monsters are encountered as solos, but that doesn't preclude uniques from being lower castes nor everyday monsters from being solos. (The link I posted earlier is an everyday solo.)

 

[Evilhalfling]

I'm having a lot of fun with this in my current story arc -

Gnolls, once level 5-8 now lvl 11 minions
Barbarians, once level 3-6 , now lvl 10 swarm (15 barbarians fill 8 squares)
Frost Giant: level 14. I toned down his defenses&hp, but left attack and damage at a higher level.

Frost Giant was great! - 1 hit frequently bloodied the fighter, when he got 2 hits, without healing between them the fighter went down. The party killed him by closing a portal on him (he was past bloodied, but the PCs dragged the unconscious fighter ahead of him as bait.