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<blockquote data-quote="Gimby" data-source="post: 5190134" data-attributes="member: 49875">There are some other ways of looking at it that may help this disconnect.From designer description and examination of their presentation in the monster manuals (Ogres are a good example of this) minions seem to be primarily an administrative abstraction.&nbsp; Their purpose (much like the mob monster rules from 3.5) is to allow a large number of creatures in a fight while not massively increasing the administrative burden on the DM.Consider then that the minions are simply being represented at a lower time resolution than other creatures - to a high level character a low level creature may take two hits to kill at 95% to hit and it may have a 10% to hit him to do an average of 15 points of damage.&nbsp; We could alternatively represent this creature as a higher level minion which is hit 50% of the time and hits 50% of the time for 3 points of damage.&nbsp;&nbsp; On average, it will take our character 2 attacks to kill the monster either way and they will take on average 3 points of damage doing so.&nbsp; Do you get some odd edge cases? Sure, but you always will do as assuming any system is the physics of the game world.Is it a pretty big abstraction? Sure.&nbsp; IMO though, its of the same order of abstraction as turn based combat or even the existance of hit points.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Gimby, post: 5190134, member: 49875"] There are some other ways of looking at it that may help this disconnect. From designer description and examination of their presentation in the monster manuals (Ogres are a good example of this) minions seem to be primarily an administrative abstraction. Their purpose (much like the mob monster rules from 3.5) is to allow a large number of creatures in a fight while not massively increasing the administrative burden on the DM. Consider then that the minions are simply being represented at a lower time resolution than other creatures - to a high level character a low level creature may take two hits to kill at 95% to hit and it may have a 10% to hit him to do an average of 15 points of damage. We could alternatively represent this creature as a higher level minion which is hit 50% of the time and hits 50% of the time for 3 points of damage. On average, it will take our character 2 attacks to kill the monster either way and they will take on average 3 points of damage doing so. Do you get some odd edge cases? Sure, but you always will do as assuming any system is the physics of the game world. Is it a pretty big abstraction? Sure. IMO though, its of the same order of abstraction as turn based combat or even the existance of hit points. [/QUOTE]

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