Excerpt: Minions. Go forth mine minions! Bring havoc with your 1 hp [merged]

[Lacyon]

Looking at the devil minions...plate armor+heavy shield only equals a +5 to AC?

You mean, +9 for the grunt, +12 for the Hellguard, +14 for the Veteran, and +17 for the Legionnaire?

Are you trying to give them Dex in spite of their heavy armor and double-counting level bonus as a result, or is there some breakdown of their AC that you're seeing and I'm not?

 

[Mort_Q]

Seems like rolling or not rolling for damage would also be a dead give away.

Isn't rolling a handful of dice behind the screen every round, regardless of whether you use them, a standard DM trope?

 

[Wormwood]

Looking at the devil minions...plate armor+heavy shield only equals a +5 to AC?

Stormtrooper armor.

 

[Phaezen]

You mean, +9 for the grunt, +12 for the Hellguard, +14 for the Veteran, and +17 for the Legionnaire?

Are you trying to give them Dex in spite of their heavy armor and double-counting level bonus as a result, or is there some breakdown of their AC that you're seeing and I'm not?

That is the 4wesome part of the statblocks is that there is no breakdown for monsters, so it doesn't really matter if they are wearing full plate, have mithril scales covering thier bodies or are wearing frilly pink tutus they have the ac that is appropriate to thier level, and the PC's won't be walking around with major armouries in bags of holding

Phaezen

 

[Benimoto]

That strikes me as a particularly unreasonable comparison. Take some monster stats that we actually know about: the goblin picador is attacking at +9 at level 2, and the level 6 legion devil minion is attacking at +11. That isn't a large difference, and they goblin also averages about 5 damage, same as the devil's set damage. And the goblin doesn't break the versimilitude of the game, as he won't explode when a small child standing off to the side calls it a meanie and gets a lucky roll when it throws a rock at its head.

If your point is that you can just use monsters 4 levels lower than a level-appropriate minion, and achieve about the same results, you're probably right. The advantage to using the minions is that, by XP values, you can use twice as many (125 XP for a level 2 goblin VS 63 for a level 6 minion.) With the minions, you'll never have to track a condition like harpooned. And of course, you'll never have to track which creatures have taken damage and how much.

Like the article said, minions are purely there for DM convenience. They exist to allow a certain type of fight scene in a way that doesn't put too much of a drain on the DM's time and resources. They allow you to essentially extend the useful life of monsters. You'll notice in the article that it recommends switching a monster out with minions 7-8 levels after you've fought the original monster. That's exactly when monsters that originally needed an 12 or so to hit now need a 19 or 20.

The sacrifice comes, as you mention, in believability. Of course, all the examples you mention that stretch belief all involve "lucky hits" or natural 20s. It seems to me that you've discovered that when you take one effect that doesn't scale well across levels (natural 20s by weak creatures) and combine it with another (minions having 1 hp) that you run into unbelievable scenarios. That makes sense. You've already stretched believability twice. How elastic do you think that stuff is?

 

[OchreJelly]

I suspect 4E’s version of:
“How bad does the monster look hurt?”
will be:
“Does the monster look like a minion?”

 

[Evilhalfling]

Also, we shouldn't be asking whether the player knows if that goblin is a minion or not. The goblin should be asking himself whether or not it is a minion! Or maybe I'll have my first group roll up characters and then have them enter combat for the first time only to find out they were only minions.

This is the way I had planned for 0-level PCs. With the exception that any hit means that they are now dying, instead of just dead. Perhaps they will also get random damage, cause thats fun.
hmm no difference between ftr and wizard hp that way, maybe defenders will get an (unrevealed) per encounter power (ignore the damage from one hit, you are now considered bloodied, activated automatically of a sucessful hit); leaders may get the same as a daily.

 

[Lizard]

An angry child throwing a stone doesn't deal any damage if you want to keep versimilitude. Otherwise a 2nd edition magic user could be killed by three angry kids throwing stones instead of one. Hell, even a first level fighter in 2nd edition that rolled bad for HP could be killed by children throwing rocks if there were many of them enough if that was attacks that dealt damage.

And it's completely impossible for people to be killed by tossed stones.

 

[Voss]

Minions don't explode when small children get a lucky roll with a rock because _they don't fight small children_.

But they *can*. Thats the problem with the whole concept. If you take a see/hear/do no evil approach, then yes its fine, if you refuse to look at any problems that come up. If you try to have a functional, believable world, it has all sorts of problems when you realize that Evil Priest Bob can send an devilish minion after the prince/princess/small puppy of whatever, and a lucky blow with a vase can reasonably expected to end such fiendish plots 1 time out of 20.

Now, maybe you don't have a problem with it, but I do. I can easily see doing a scenario where a village is attacked, and the village militia is shooting arrows and spears at the attackers. Having them just pop (possibly on both sides) at lucky shots from a bunch of peasants is frankly ridiculous, and isn't something I want in my games.

The DDM goblin's stats shouldn't be used for any comparison. They're based on when attacks and defenses were higher and the hp to damage ratio was far different.

Eh. I grabbed a monster at random from the ones that we have stats for. And I don't really think that the current cards, which came in boxes less than a month ago are that out of date. If they are, and the 4e sides of the cards from the current set are worthless, than WotC owes a serious apology to any 4e customer who made the mistake of buying them.

 

[Lizard]

You mean, +9 for the grunt, +12 for the Hellguard, +14 for the Veteran, and +17 for the Legionnaire?

Are you trying to give them Dex in spite of their heavy armor and double-counting level bonus as a result, or is there some breakdown of their AC that you're seeing and I'm not?

My understanding was that AC=Reflex+Armor.

It's since been explained that the shield adds to reflex defense.

Boy, it would be nice if the sources of armor values were broken out in the description, so that it's easy to see what provides what and calculate the difference if something changes -- i.e, if a shield is sundered or removed -- without having to have memorized the values for shields, armor, etc. Something like "AC 20 +16 Reflex +4 Armor" or "Reflex 18 +4 Level +2 Dex +2 Shield" or the like. Perhaps by the time fifth edition rolls around, this kind of cutting-edge design will be used.