Forked Thread: Let's talk about minions...

[That One Guy]

Forked from: Let's talk about minions...

However, I actually am not 100% into how minions work in 4e. I imagine that it is a compromise between more complicated rules. Some things that I've experimented with in games are the idea of damage threshold minions and... fake damage. Threshold is that a single attack has to do a certain minimum amount of damage to fell a particular minion (Accidentally the anti-cloud of daggers). Fake damage is even if an attack misses against a minion, it still is described as a hit. Actual damage is a direct hit and kills it. An abstraction of this rule would be to give minions an actual hp value. When a roll would be a miss, they are given damage as a hit to that hp value. When they are actually hit by direct hit from a skilled opponent, the enemy then goes down instantly. I think this might be moving towards a middle ground.

I have an idea for a middle ground, but it involves charts and excessive complications that'd probably be much less fun of a compromise than the phantom damage variant. I guess I could throw that into the house rules section...

So, just sorting of throwing down the phantom damage variant... just in case anyone digs it. Anyway, I want to generate a discussion for creating minion-like enemies that

1) Are pretty easy to run.
2) Are fun in the same easy to kill ProPC ProStory fashion.

So, besides the phantom dmgv, I'll throw in something else pretty much ganked from oWoD [sblock](and probably nWoD too). If anyone has played it before... pretty much give minions two boxes. A decent hit would be a lethal damage or two. A poor damage roll would be a bashing hit. Etc. I'm going to try and explain what I mean for anyone not familiar (any help in this would be rad and appreciated). Basically, for when you have a minion and draw a number of boxes estimating how many decent hits he'll have to take before dying. I'd suggest two. If an attack hits and rolls a damage of only 1 or something, draw a single / through the box. If a second damage roll comes up make that / a X. When both are X's, the enemy falls. If an attack had been Not a 1 originally, it would have been a single X. If the first hit was a 1, but the second wasn't, then the enemy would be X /. Basically, one more hit of any kind would kill it. A critical hit would pretty much be an autokill (Agg really doesn't convert well...). That was really long and probably not that swell of an explanation. I'm bad at doing this without drawing. Sorry.

Now, an expansion to this boxdamage concept would be boxes per level. A level 1 minion would have 1 box. A level 2 - 2, and a level 15 - 15 boxes. A solid (non-1 damage roll) hit would deal a number of boxes relative to the PC's level. A ~1 character would do one X to a level 15 minion per hit. A <1 NPC would probably do about / per solid hit (kid w/ rock scenario). But, a level 10 character would do 10 X's per hit, and thus need two hits to kill a 15 minion (assuming they weren't poor damage rolls).

Powers that deal X[w] would probably just do X... X's. Maybe not the best fix, but I think it'd work.
[/sblock]

...wow... I hope that made sense. If it did, how does it work for people? It's meant to help build a bridge between simulation and narrative, but still capture the ingame feeling of a minion.

 

[VenezuelanWiz]

If all you're going for are minions that need to take a solid blow [i.e. a striker doing average damage, a controller doing max damage, etc] just take the monster's level and lower it by 2 from the party. I did it with goblins, cause I wanted a few goblins since I feel they are too powerful as written, but didn't want them as weak as minions.
I made them all level 0 or -1, and they had about 8-16 hp. The Rogue in the party was one-shotting them, whereas the other party members had to roll well to kill them off.

Hope that helps,
Cheers

 

[FireLance]

How about this idea for a middle ground: give minions 1/4 the hit points of a standard monster (about 2 + 1/4 Constitution score + 2 x level), and then add the following property:

Minion Weakness
A minion that is hit by a power which has a level higher than its own is reduced to 0 hit points instantly.​

This rule enables PCs to one-shot minions, but they would have to pull out their big guns (higher level powers) to do so.

Alternatively, instead of (or in addition to) basing minion weakness off power level, you could base it on the level of the magic weapon or implement used to attack, so a rock would not be able to kill a minion immediately, but a +6 vorpal sword would, even if the character used it with a basic melee attack.

Or, you could base it off the level of the character making the attack, so a 30th-level character would be able to kill minions on a successful attack with his bare hands.

 

[BendBars/LiftGates]

I like the Minion Weakness ability. I would even say that a minion goes down if it's hit by a power with a level equal to or greater than its level. Simply put, minions are only used to picking on lessers, and they're poorly equipped to deal with a credible threat (appropriately-leveled PCs). And we still want 1st level PCs to have fun with minions.

One problem that I can see coming up is what happens when a monster fights a minion. I don't mean to bring up the old "minions in a bar fight" debate, but monster powers don't have levels, so there suddenly becomes a question of what happens. You have to decide for yourself if you want other monsters to one-shot minions, to slog through their (reduced) hit points, or to just refuse to write rules for this and throw all deterministic control at the DM.