In my wishlist: Minions

[UngeheuerLich]

I hope, 5e will work without creating minions of monsters.
I hope there are mechanics (guidelines) how to minionize a monster/allow a monster to switch into minion mode.

fighting reckless, +4 to hit, +4 to defense, but first hit automatically reduces the creature to bloodied. Automatic minimum damage on a hit/encounter powers still available. Fighting very reckless. +8 to all, minimum damage, one hit kills it, encounter powers unusable. This is about a 4e minion.

Solos on the other hand can trade in to hit/defense for extra attacks. This way, you can minionize and solify and elitify every monster in the book, if you believe, this will make the monster doing better against the party.

(I agree, that there may be some creatures that automatically qualify as minion... as there are monsters that should be written up as solos, like dragons, who you usually encounter alone and need special attacks, have more number of attacks and need more hitpoints. Human enemies should never be solos and only sometimes elite. A minion only if they are commoners, Immunity to cats.)

 

[Kingreaper]

Solos on the other hand can trade in to hit/defense for extra attacks. This way, you can minionize and solify and elitify every monster in the book, if you believe, this will make the monster doing better against the party.

Soloifying and elitifying can't be done just by changing numbers. Definitely not Soloifying, Solos need to actually be able to work alone, and that's a design challenge.

Look up things like Boss Monsters if you want an easier way to convert things into effectively-soloesque challenges.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Soloifying and elitifying can't be done just by changing numbers. Definitely not Soloifying, Solos need to actually be able to work alone, and that's a design challenge.

Look up things like Boss Monsters if you want an easier way to convert things into effectively-soloesque challenges.

Hmmh, I am really not sure... i guess giving 4 attacks per round would usually work as a hot fix for most monsters. Maybe they need to become imune vs some conditions.

I believe,in the 4e context it may not work properly... but we speak of another edition. And such a solution would be pretty elegant... even if a monster designed for solo encounters would work smoother, I want to take a simple monster many levels higher and make it a good challenge for my party.
To be clear: If a monster gives xx xp, i expect it to work as an encounter for a group of a certain level. It does not have to be the smoothes, but it should work.

(I actually used 2 level 13 lurker vs my lvl 7 party. Pretty hard stuff, but it was working... smoothly enough.)

 

[Vicar In A Tutu]

I remember when DM'ing 3.5, one of the most effective breakings of disbelief I ever experienced was when players decided to jump off houses and towers, taking falling damage instead of trying to climb down, etc. 'Cause when you have 200 hit points, falling hardly matters. One of my players even specified that he was falling "with his head first", just for the laughs. Needlessly to say, those players never returned to my 3.5 campaign, complaining loudly about a lack of realism. Of course, I don't think they would have liked 4E either, so I don't say this just to bash 3rd edition.

 

[avin]

I'm gonna use them whether or not they are in the official 5e rules. I already use them in Pathfinder.

PF? Heck, I use them since the first day I DMed 3.0

 

[SSquirrel]

It works in 4e, where level 1 PCs are kinda bad-ass, but if you have weenie level 1 PCs (like in 3e), and you don't really get 'heroic' until level 6, then maybe you shouldn't have humans as level 1 minions.

It's really funny to see you say that, b/c the general consensus for 3E seemed to be that a L1 PC was about equal to a L3 or 4 PC from 2nd Ed. The base was raised again in 4E. Looking back at 3E now, 1st level feels kind of weak, but when it first came out it was much stronger than our experience in prior editions.

 

[kinem]

I remember when DM'ing 3.5, one of the most effective breakings of disbelief I ever experienced was when players decided to jump off houses and towers, taking falling damage instead of trying to climb down, etc. 'Cause when you have 200 hit points, falling hardly matters. One of my players even specified that he was falling "with his head first", just for the laughs. Needlessly to say, those players never returned to my 3.5 campaign, complaining loudly about a lack of realism. Of course, I don't think they would have liked 4E either, so I don't say this just to bash 3rd edition.

That's exactly what the massive damage rule is for.

I don't know if the falling damage was 50+ hp though. D20 Modern has a threshold of just 10 damage.

Massive damage only requires a Fort DC 15, but given that he wasn't even trying to land safely based on what he said, and that he was displaying an attitude at altitude, I might have ruled that he auto-fails the save or that even at a lower height he doesn't get the benefit of his hp.

I agree though that even 3.X isn't as realistic as it should be. But it's a compromise between gamism and simulation, as is necessary.

Back when 4e was first being announced, I was excited about it, because 3.X had grown stale. It was bloated with splatbooks and had a number of broken bits, but besides that, it was too much of a numbers game - there wasn't enough flavor (and I'm not talking about having more background stories or descriptive text; I'm saying that mechanics should be secondary to "what would make sense" given that descriptive text), enough stimulation by simulation. It didn't feel real enough, and there wasn't enough room for a player's good ideas to matter more than his bad stats. Even social interactions had been reduced to die rolls!

For that matter, there wasn't enough room for a DM's nasty ideas to matter more than the PCs' good stats and healing magic, either.

Of course, the actual 4e went in exactly the opposite direction from what I'd hoped for. I'm still hoping for the "4e" that we never got.