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

[Irda Ranger]

Minions don't have to be treated as minions in reference to non-player characters. Treat them as minions only in regard to the player characters.

Or, don't use minions at all; they're entirely optional.

Treat the cause, not the symptom.

 

[Kraydak]

Voss- its not about not thinking. Its about not overthinking. Every edition has had places where the rules didn't model a perfect gameworld. Some editions tried harder than others to attain that "complete world model" effect, and some tried less. 3e tried pretty hard, but by the very nature of the product couldn't reach that ever-receding target (there's actually a logical proof of this). And the more it tried, the more its failure to reach a perfect model stuck out.

4e adopts a different system- model a genre, not a world. And then it tells people "the rules have a thin spot here. Here's a list of ways you should avoid poking the rules, so as not to tear them." That's far better than denying the thin spot exists, at least for me.

My impression is more that that WotC went: "our groups/play-testing groups don't try for corner cases, therefore we can simplify the rules a lot". The problem is that if your simplifications result in ugly corner cases, then the net result may well not be simpler. What is worse is that as a design strategy, it makes life easy for the developers, but harder for the DM (who gets to shoulder all the problems when players deviate from the design).

I am seeing many "simplifications", that in groups I play in would derail the game by triggering corner-case problems. Minions are one of them. What is really sad is that you could rewrite minion-rules in a way that loses very little simplicity but gains a lot of robustness (going from 1hp/nothing on miss to several hp/extra damage on hit ends up simple when you want it, but can seamlessly shift to a more complex rule set if needed). Robustness of a rule set, even if it costs simplicity, can easily be more playable, but the cost/advantage ratio will be very group dependent. 4e's rules as I have seen them so far makes me feel that the play-testing was inadequate, due to inadequately aggressive/antagonistic/whatever term you want play-testing groups. (note that adequately and actually in the above are two very, very different things)

 

[MrMyth]

Point remains -- there's no reason to remove 3e style 'breakdowns'. You lose possibly useful information for no real gain in readability. (I'm going to have to presume there's no such thing as 'flat footed' in 4e, so that you always have your dex bonus to AC)

Whoa - have you seen the new statblocks in the MM? You can fit 3-4 statblocks in the same amount of space taken up by a 3e statblock, and as far as I can tell, you still have pretty much 99% of the needed information for all circumstances.

Even outside of readability (and I do find the new statblock clearer), I very much like how much content this means they'll be able to fit into the MM. That, at least for me, is a very significant real gain.

 

[Rex Blunder]

In my opinion, minion rules are a logical extension of a good rule of game design:
"Complexity should be proportional to the interest of the players."

For instance, most mass battle rules do not track hit points of individual soldiers, because no one is interested in the fate of any individual soldier. PCs or important NPCs shouldn't have their fates determined by these rules because the players care about the outcomes: therefore an actual D&D encounter might be in order.

Same thing with minions. No one (including the DM) cares much about any of the horde of charging mooks. Therefore, they can be run with simplified rules. This allows a different scale of battle to be run - somewhere between the four-on-four that 3e did well and the hordes of a mass battlesystem.

The BBEG and his lieutenants shouldn't be minions, because defeating one should feel like an accomplishment.

If anyone particularly cares if an angry child gets lucky and offs one of the demon hordes, then I guess minions are not appropriate for this battle. (although I maintain that CATS, STALE PASTRIES, and A STONE THROWN BY AN ANGRY CHILD do 0 damage).

This may mean that minions are never appropriate for Andor, Lizard, Derren, Voss, or El-Remmen, because that side effect bothers them.

Personally, I agree with most people on this thread: the believability cost is less than the benefit of being able to expand the scope of possible battles.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Treat the cause, not the symptom.

I do. I play D&D as a game and story. I don't need the rules to be world-sim fuel.

 

[Thasmodious]

And frankly so is my character- Magnus the paladin is going to be wanting an explanation for why some kobolds can take a greatsword to the face while others fall immediately.

No Kobolds can take a greatsword to the face. Neither can humans, orcs or anyone else. HP are, and always have been, an abstraction. They do not reflect "greatswords to the face". Being reduced to 0 hit points and dying reflects "greatswords to the face".

Whenever I think about 4es minions, my mind pulls up the image of Aragorn stepping away from Frodo and turning to face a horde of Urak-hai coming over the hill at Parth Galen. How many of those died to one blow from Aragorn or the others? But one killed Boromir and nearly killed Aragorn in a tense, brutal fight. Perfect example of a fight with minions to me. PCs getting to slay right and left, bodies piling up, tense fights, the horde is still enough of a threat to accomplish their goal for the encounter (find the halflings!).

 

[keterys]

One alternate solution for those who want it - set a damage threshold for minions. Below that threshold, minion shrugs off the hit. Over that threshold, they die.

You might want to change how Cleave works, though. And presumably any daily at all would kill minions then.

 

[Lizard]

No, they can't (at least, not unless the DM just enjoys poking at corner cases of the system). When Evil Priest Bob sends a devil to abduct the toddler Princess Jane, it's not a minion relative to the princess, so if for some crazy reason dice are involved in the fight at all, the devil's not statted as a minion for that fight.

I don't run NPC-on-NPC fights unless they're VERY vital (two people are duelling and the PCs really care about the outcome but, for some reason, can't directly intervene), but I do try to check for quasi-believability, so the players won't be distracted by red herrings.

For example, if the Lord High Commander Of The Realm, known to be a great warrior, is allegedly killed by two ordinary kobolds, the PCs would be right to not accept this at face value -- it doesn't happen in D&D, period. So if I want a princess kidnapped, if she's a child or a commoner, then, yeah, a minion can do it -- assume she won't roll a 20 before the minion has her in GM Discretion Land. (A Hero system in-joke, sorry.) Indeed, following the normal rules of these things, if there's one devil, it CAN'T be a minion. So goes the narrative flow.

OTOH, if the princess of the realm is also a powerful figure, in game terms, then I expect the kidnapping entity to be one which could reasonably defect her before she could escape, summon guards, and so on. You don't need to roll out the entire fight; you do, in my mind, need to "finger in the wind" the conflict so that it's plausible by game rule as well as storytelling logic. The thing about being a DM is, you have an unlimited toolbox -- you can send ANYTHING to kidnap the princess, so why not pick something which makes internal sense as well as driving the plot forward?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

As should surprise no one who read my "Minions are aliens from another game system" thread, I don't fine this Excerpt to be satisfying. Minions are exactly what I expected them to be: an ugly rules kludge for narrative/cinematic purposes. I guess the devs decided "We need Minions", push came to shove, and rather than killing a sacred cow (BAB that advances with level), Sim got thrown under the bus. Needless to say, not the choice I would have made.

What's so painful about this (to me), is that it's blindingly obvious that the WotC devs knew exactly what they were doing too. The only real difference between the various Minion levels is that Init, BAB, Skills and Defenses all advance the same +1/2 level that PCs advance. Am I the only one who sees this as a stupid arms race? Remove the +1/2 advancement from all parties and what you're left with is the exact same result.

The Minion rules are guilty of two sins: (1) they're a kludge patch on top of an unnecessary complexity, (2) they introduce all sorts of corner case errors as a result of having null HP and taking null damage. These two sins have second-order effects as well, such breaking verisimilitude and making Sim world-design impossible. Luckily the transparency of the rules also make the fix an easy one.

the more i think about it, the more it makes sense... maybe it would have been enough to let the hp, damage and skills scale with level... (or the DCs fall)

but, scaling attacks and damage make sure, low level monsters are no threat for the average PC. If you don´t scale every encounter exactly to the level, but have fixed encounters, PCs may feel more and more powerful when they advance... partly because of their scaling bonuses... lets see how it works out.

 

[Lizard]

Light shields are -1, -1 actually.

I suspect the number of attacks that disarm to be absurdly small, if there are any that aren't just stat debuffs instead.

Why?

Ripping the weapon out of a foe's hand is a CLASSIC cinematic maneuver. It's precisely the kind of swashbuckling high action 4e is supposed to simulate better than 3e. I've seen it used to great effect in the campaign I'm running currently.

If rules simplification trumps fulfilling the purpose of the rules, there's a fundamental design failure.

(In the case of minions, I admit the point is moot, since I don't think any 4e powers fails to do damage, so your disarm would kill the minion. But against other foes, disarm/sunder is very visual, very dramatic, and very useful, so it would be a shame if they didn't exist in the rules due to worship at the altar of simplicity for simplicity's sake. I guess we'll know in, oh, two weeks or so.)