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<blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 4230989" data-attributes="member: 1003">As should surprise no one who read my &quot;Minions are aliens from another game system&quot; thread, I don't fine this Excerpt to be satisfying.&nbsp; Minions are exactly what I expected them to be: an ugly rules kludge for narrative/cinematic purposes.&nbsp; I guess the devs decided &quot;We need Minions&quot;, push came to shove, and rather than killing a sacred cow (BAB that advances with level), Sim got thrown under the bus.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Am I the only one who sees this as a stupid arms race?&nbsp; Remove the +1/2 advancement from all parties and what you're left with is the exact same result.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; These two sins have second-order effects as well, such breaking verisimilitude and making Sim world-design impossible.&nbsp; Luckily the transparency of the rules also make the fix an easy one.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Irda Ranger, post: 4230989, member: 1003"] 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 [I]the exact same result[/I]. 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. [/QUOTE]

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