Evilhalfling said:
Celebrim the damage looks way too high, at 9 damage, 2 orc minions would wipe out a low level party, PS's template damage looks better.
If the party was low level, why would you need minion mechanics in 3rd edition? A 1st level character in 4e edition is roughly as powerful as a 3rd level character in 3rd edition. At these low levels, of course individual 'minion' humanoids - or any sort of humanoids - are a serious threat to characters.
If you want to run a minion style encounter for a 3e party of level 3 or less, throw a handful of humanoids with the commoner class and simple weapons at the party.
For a party of 4th to 6th level, a horde of 1 HD creatures is perfectly reasonable in 3rd edition without the need for special rules (albiet, the EL calculated by the rules for such an encounter doesn't reflect its actually lower challenge so tweaking XP awarded is advised).
It's only at around 6th level and up where you would need minion style rules for 3e because its only at these levels that weak 'drop em in one hit' type creatures cease to be an interesting challenge. Therefore, my suggestions were designed for a DM who wished to continue to feature hordes of orcs, goblins, or other low level humanoids as opponents for the party long after they would normally be rendered obselete.
In 3e the usual way of doing this is to add additional class levels, but this has some drawbacks:
1) The creatures get more complicated.
2) Thier are side effects.
3) The creatures stop feeling like mooks, because they can survive several hits.
4) The combat has more bookkeeping, because you have to track hit points.
5) Your world is now explicitly populated with hordes of high level characters.
6) If capable of threatening your party, the creatures are generally too powerful to use in a large horde.
Those were the problems I was attempting to solve.
If those aren't the problems you are experiencing, and instead you have problems with large numbers of creatures at very low levels then you are better off moving to 4e because the root of your problem is more systematic than can be designed around with some changes in monsters.
another important change is converting the critter to 1 attack, I ran a battle with 99 lemures vs 8th level party, last year, it would have been so much easier if they only had 1 claw attack at a higher bonus.
As a DM, I would find a battle between 99 lemures and an 8th level party so boring, that rather than rolling any dice I would treat the whole horde as a moving terrain feature and deal a small random amount of damage (1d6-3, minimum 0 for example) to any PC engulfed within it.
