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Message: <blockquote data-quote="firesnakearies" data-source="post: 5182051" data-attributes="member: 71334">A brief guide to making minions rock:1.  Use lots of them.  Adding four or six minions to an encounter is usually pretty lame and not very challenging.  If you're going to bother with minions in an encounter, use 15 or 20 or 30 of them.2.  Don't ever have them bunch up.  Spread 'em out all over a big encounter area.3.  Use bigger encounter maps, in general.  This is good advice for 4E whether you're using minions or not.  Whenever possible, have battles take place in large areas, either wide-open maps or groups of linked rooms/hallways.  Fighting in little 30' x 30' square rooms is lame.4.  Bring in more as the fight progresses.  Have a couple of waves of extra minions come in later, from different directions.  Have two or three or five of them go running off for help as soon as the encounter starts.5.  Use minions with a lot of mobility.  High speed, maybe some little power that lets them shift extra or move extra squares.  Or minions who can fly, have climb speeds, and so on.6.  Use minions with ranged attacks.  Even LONG range attacks.  Give your mooks longbows and a large map, and watch the carnage.7.  Focus fire.  20 minions shooting at one guy is going to be a scary day for him.  Those little bits of damage add up fast.8.  Have the minions move around a lot, use cover, break line of sight, hide, and even spend a few rounds if necessary getting into position to attack a vulnerable party member from behind or by surprise.9.  When you do use melee minions, have them do things more useful than their weak little basic attack.  Multiple charging bull rushes from minions can be really effective (opening up the party's defensive line, or getting people into hazards, and so forth).  Multiple minions using Aid Another against one PC to give a huge bonus to some dangerous non-minion creature is good, too.10.  Have interesting and tactically useable terrain, and have your minions take advantage of it.  Platforms and ledges where they can snipe from, and PCs have to expend some real effort to get up to.  Lots of little boltholes, passages, or bits of cover to hide behind.  Pits or traps that they can lure or bullrush PCs into.11.  Combine minions with a good leader creature.  Someone who can give all of his allies temporary hit points, or allow them all an extra free action, or something like that.  Leader monsters become all that much better when they have a LOT of allies around, even if those allies are minions.Sure, having 10 melee minions standing in one big clump in the middle of a plain 30' x 30' room is going to be weaksauce.But try an encounter which takes place on a large forest map, on a dark night, against 30 minions with climb speeds, darkvision, longbows, and trained in Stealth, who all focus their fire on the weakest party member at once whenever they can, and see how scary and challenging minions can be.</blockquote>

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