I've played with the 3e/3.5/PF rules more, but it's been around longer. I don't think that's the major factor. I've played enough 4e to know what I'm doing. All of my 4E characters still had longer turns than my Pathfinder characters. Too many options, conditions, interrupts, etc. It's hard to avoid.
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D&D 4E Is Pathfinder Combat As Slow as 4e?
- Thread starter Stan Shinn
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I've played with the 3e/3.5/PF rules more, but it's been around longer. I don't think that's the major factor. I've played enough 4e to know what I'm doing. All of my 4E characters still had longer turns than my Pathfinder characters. Too many options, conditions, interrupts, etc. It's hard to avoid.
Why on earth would your players even know the monster would normally be a "minion" (which is a strictly in-game term) and now they aren't?
I mean, yeah, it shoves the metagaming into the players face, if you tell them you're doing that.
Also, if you don't like giants as minions don't make giants as minions my god I'm solving problems left and right.
Anways minions own be it in 4e or 3.x.
Well, if they hit a hill giant once and it goes down, do I really have to tell them it's a minion? Of course not. If it goes down in one hit, they know it's a minion. I don't have a problem with the minion rules to a point, but once you are saying "x" minion and it sounds like an oxymoron, like hill giant minion or 30th level "insert weird demon name here" minion, it does start to get too silly and metagamey for my tastes.
I don't really get what you're saying.
You claimed that changing a minion creature to no longer be a minion "shoved the metagame into the players face." I don't understand this. How would your players even know the hill giant they're facing used to be a minion?
Incidentally, as someone who enjoys the heck out of 3.x, it already has minions. When you're level 15, hill giants drop like flies. The only difference is that the actual standardized minion rules let the minions actually act as a threat.
They wouldn't, and that's not what I have a problem with. A hill giant should be a hill giant. It shouldn't be a level 10 brute when attacking a village of commoners and suddenly transforms to a level 10 minion when fighting adventurers. I also have a problem with something ten ft tall weighing 1000 or so pounds having 1 hit point. You may not have a problem with this, and that's fine. It just doesn't suit my tastes.
It doesn't transform, and it doesn't have "1 hit point."
When attacking the village, it's essentially without stats. It exists as a narrative function, unless you're going to seriously grab your dice, stat out the village, and actually roll that combat in your free time, and I'll assume most people will not.
Stats are based on when and how the are used - otherwise they wouldn't exist in the first place. A monster's stats purely in limbo are meaningless. What matters is how they reflect or act on the game itself. Stats by their very nature are an artificial game construct.
Everything in D&D is a narrative construct - an "item" that exists to interact or be interacted with in a different set of systems. A hostile creature is a narrative construct that is meant to be interacted with in some sort of encounter, be it sneaking past them, fast talking and fooling them, or fighting them. The minion is the same type of narrative construct, with the difference that they represent a very minor threat (while still representing a threat - again, stats exist to be used ) rather then a moderate one.
Combat is the same. In every edition, from Gygax's first notes, HP has been an abstraction of narrative - the abstraction of "health." It has never been pure physical well being; after all, we're surviving being "hit" by a sword. Combat, equally, is an abstraction - you aren't just full attacking and then standing rigid like a chess piece, you're dodging and weaving and blocking as the fight goes on. Again, the enemy survives despite us scoring a "hit" on them. The "hit" and "HP" and "AC" and all of that are abstractions we use because frankly a super realistic combat game would be far, far too much of a hassle. So the orc takes one "hit" at level 10 but three "hits" at level 1, yet we can, I think, agree that it's absurd for anything to require more then one "hit" when you're supposedly running them trough.
The minion is little different - the only difference is that one monster needs several "hits" that can come from multiple sources while another needs one that has to be a direct "hit."
DaveMage
Slumbering in Tsar
Shazman - if you can find it, there's a post by Joe Browning from a while back (year ago?) that (IMO) brilliantly defined the 4E system vs. past D&D systems that explains why minions absolutely make sense in 4E and do not in prior editions. If you can find it, I think it would shed a light on things.
Joe's post clarified for me in an instant why this aspect of 4E has no appeal for me.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
The idea of minion giants doesn't bother me as much as the 4e minion rules do. Take that 4e minion giant and the high level party's lower-level henchmen and followers one-shot them as well or nearly utterly fail to hit. "Minionize" them a 1e-3e way by giving them only 1 hp per die and maybe a lower Con (for 3e) and they still give the lower level henchmen a decent fight while being easily mowed down by the high level party.
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