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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lurker37" data-source="post: 4232364" data-attributes="member: 9522">The bard almost spills his drink laughing, before planting his index finger squarely on the addled barbarian's forehead."Hrothgar, you old fool! With an axe, you can cleave!"Still laughing at the stunned expression on the barbarian's face, he pushes the old drunk back off his stool onto the floor to sleep off the booze, and turns to the task of composing the song that will make Hrothgar a laughing stock for months to come.**************************************************************There - now I've made a completely unfounded assumption about the rules that makes sense to me - that you'll need a certain minimum weapon size to cleave, possibly denoted by the 'heavy' keyword. Gee! Unfounded assumptions are fun! However, as someone has already stated that's all we have to work with at the moment, and it is fun, so I make more than a few myself!Here are my personal takes on the main objections I've noticed regarding minions so far. These are all my opinion, and I reserve the right to be wrong:1. They don't work well when you send out just one to do something. The rules we have seen clearly state that you're meant to encounter them in numbers. The minion rules are meant to recreate the experience of encountering large numbers of weaker foes which are still collectively dangerous. It strikes me as similar to the swarm rules - were there similar arguments over how poorly swarm rules modeled a single generic wasp? That argument may be facetious, but I'm trying to illustrate that just because misuse of a rule can have odd results, that doesn't mean it's automatically a bad rule. Especially if you have to break another rule to misuse it in the first place: Minions come in groups.2. One hit point = < Fragile household item > . This is an argument about the hit point system, threads about which have toppled servers and swallowed small children. 4E is clearly increasing the visible level of abstraction in the hit point system. Complaints about whether this is a good thing are a separate topic, IMO. For better or worse, this increased abstraction is present in 4E, and the minion rules are based on that premise. Obviously, if you dislike the premise then the minion rules will also annoy you.3. A child could kill a minion with a thrown rock. Said child could also kill a nontrivial percentage of commoners ( and wound much of the rest) with that same rock, if the DM allows it to inflict even a single hit point of damage. If it can kill a human, then it can kill a minion. That's not a flaw in the minion rules - it's a problem with the deadliness of throwing small rocks. 4. Minions should have more than one HP, especially at higher levels. My understanding is that the designers tried that and decided that it didn't work so well in play, because it created more work for the DM - something they wanted to avoid. This seems to be in line with a goal they have stated of making the game more accessible to first-time DMs. Furthermore they state that the goal was for the minions to drop with any solid blow - hence misses doing no damage.  In fact, they were originally going to not use the hit point system at all, but playtesters observed that this made them immune to environmental hazards, since there's no roll to hit. The single hit point is a concession to stop people from trying to argue that Minions can swim through lava unharmed. Furthermore, the rules we've seen so far seem to imply that attacks that only do one point of damage will be very, very rare. Most add the stat bonus from a primary stat, and many involve rolling more than one die. Add magical weapons/implements to the mix, and I can see most first level characters doing a minimum of four of five points of damage even on a poor roll. So the fact that a single point of damage would have been enough to kill them  might never, ever actually become obvious in normal play. My personal opinion on minions is that it looks like they will be a lot of fun if used as presented - a way of providing the PCs with an encounter containing a large number of opponents without it becoming a cakewalk or a TPK, and without making the DM use half a forest and a box of pencils to track each monster's HP. I'm in favour of this because I can think of many, many examples in film and fiction of non-superhuman heroes hacking through the rank and file to get to the real threat. Conan, Aragorn, any character ever played by Errol Flynn... I can't help but regard D&D now having a way to recreate these sorts of scenes without slowing to a crawl as a good thing. My suspension of disbelief won't break because this mechanic is actually supporting something I have long enjoyed as part of the genre. In short, I think it will be fun.</blockquote>

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