Let's talk about minions...

[cangrejoide]

Wow. Its amazing that a minion ever engages in combat at all. If my hit points went from 50 or more to 1 when an enemy approached I would run like hell.

I am gonna assume you posted this in jest. If by any chance you didn't well consider this:

Its not that their hit points were lowered form 50 to 1, it just means that the player character inflicted 50 points of damage regardless of the actual damage rolled on that hit. That's the nature of minions they are there to die from 1 hit, not just from 1 hit point dmg.

When I first read about them, I was a fan of minions. I got their relativistic nature, and it seemed to make sense. But they haven't worked out so well in practice. Thanks to minions, my players always lead combat with (enlarged) dragonborn breath and burning hands, which pretty much clears out all minions instantly. It makes them pretty much pointless, except to give the wizard a sense of usefulness (which she doesn't really have without minions, because she's otherwise mostly useless outside of dailies).

I also find the difference between regular creatures and minions too significant, so much so that it's jarring. One goblin is an absolute tank, taking four or five hits (or more), while the guy next to him drops in one. It all gets a little too metagamey.

At first I had this problem, but then I realized my mistake: I was designing encounters with stationary elements. What I did to fix this problem was to make the combats more diverse. On some combats I use minions as waves of reinforcements so even if the pcs killed all the minions by the first rounds I can have more minions come in latter rounds. Sometimes not all reinforcement are minions, but real mobs are thrown in. So far this have worked like a charm.

I do understand minions and I understand them as being representative of 4e's extremely gamist approach to design. IMC the word does exist outside my PCs and a terrible 15th level demon capable of ravaging an entire town in a narrative sense will not be turning into a 1hp soap bubble once the PCs arrive to save the day. If you want your PC to be a real badass, kill some critters with actual HPs not mobs of drones designed to make your PC look good. The whole minion thing smacks of a cheap setup to make people look, mechanically and narratively, more potent than they actually are.

Ah, but that terrible level 15 demon is not a minion but at least an elite if your Pcs are around level 15th, but at latter levels when the pcs are confronting Orcus himself that level 15th demon becomes one of the hundred of minions that Orcus throws at the PCs in hopes to slow them long enough for him to escape. If you think of this in terms of older editions using you could say that your level 20th pcs hear tales about a horrible ogre terrorizing the local village, does it matter if the ogre has 25 hit points to the pcs? No, they will just one shot him. So that ogre was there to be killed, that ogre became a minion.

 

[cangrejoide]

Can't resist the urge to show off one of my recent posts here:
http://www.critical-hits.com/2008/08/25/adventure-design-seminar-gencon-2008/

It's a writeup from the Adventure Design seminar at GenCon, which has a really good section on using minions.

After that, I've thought a lot about minions. There are many possible encounters that they create that present interesting choices in encounter design, and I really like the possibilities. I'll try to post about it when I have my thoughts together (though I'm also thinking about a Dragon article about it.)

THis is a very good article, thanks for posting this.

 

[Vanuslux]

I like minions in general, but the implementation could have been a lot better. I think they were a bit lazy when they were working out the mechanics for them.

 

[JeffB]

hundreds[/i]) of foes falling beneath the swing of a hero's sword is a well-established literary convention...

This.

REH's Conan stories are an excellent example.

I like the minion rules. Mike Mearls had some good insight in that podcast recently re: minions, and that's exactly how I see them as well. They are not necc an ego boost but also a hindrance/nuisance in a tactical sense.

The Two Towers battle scenes have plenty of great examples of "minions"- (e.g. the orcs running up the side ramp to to bust through-now the PCs..err..Aragorn has to tackle that threat- he and Gimli mow them down left and right-but they are still a very real threat to breach that wooden gate- minion concept is the same thing IMO)

 

[robertliguori]

I saw those scenes as the Fellowship playing under Saga rules, and gaining a sufficient damage bonus that every hit could drop a foe of orc-toughness.

You want minions? Make characters powerful enough to mow through enemies like a scythe through wheat. Don't make the enemies into wheat.

 

[jdrakeh]

REH's Conan stories are an excellent example.

So are most of the large battles in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. And in film, of course, works like Army of Darkness, Willow, Krull, and pretty much any movie about Vikings (including The 13th Warrior) or the Crusades, make frequent use of 'minion' characters* in their large, climactic, battles.

The Two Towers battle scenes have plenty of great examples of "minions"- (e.g. the orcs running up the side ramp to to bust through-now the PCs..err..Aragorn has to tackle that threat- he and Gimli mow them down left and right-but they are still a very real threat to breach that wooden gate- minion concept is the same thing IMO)

I see that we're on the same page

*That is, characters who are felled with a single blow.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Don't like them ... I don't like the Buffy the Vampire feel of them ... I can't wrap my brain around the idea of a 15th level minion who dies with the thrust of a walking stick thrust at it by a 15th level scholar type while that same scholar could never do the same thing to a 6th level fighter even though a 6th level fighter is supposed to be a weakling compared to any 15th level character. But if this 15th level minion turned its attention on a 6th level fighter everything falls apart ...

IMO minions are a bizarre abstraction that is an attempt to make PCs seem heroic when in fact I haven't seen a problem with PCs looking heroic in over 23yrs of DMing ... There are questions like what happens when a minion punches a minion or what happens when a minion turns its attention to a lower level individual nearby and other questions that can only be solved by handwaving.

One of my players asked me (to paraphrase) during some 4e playtesting "So what if we can take down an army of creatures that die with one hit?" Its a play style neither myself nor my players like because my game presupposes a world that exists outside the PCs and that reality doesn't suddenly shift because the PCs engage it. I think a consistancy of reality is important for a believable setting and immersive game.

I hate minions. Hate them. I agree with everything quoted above. Except I have not been DMing quite that long.

I don't understand how some people don't understand minions. Wyrmshadows post is an example. While he might disagree, his post tells me that he doesn't understand minions.

On the contrary, he understands them fine; your post proves you don't understand Wyrmshadows.

 

[Irda Ranger]

But none of the world really "exists" when the PCs aren't there. Its just like a novel or movie, the whole world ceases to be a concrete thing when the focus isn't on that specific part of the world.

Imagine that the above statement was fundamentally incorrect for certain people. Imagine that for those people it was very important to believe that the campaign world does exist when their PCs weren't around and that things do go on behind the scene. Imagine that part of the fun in playing D&D for these people is not playing out a heroic epic they've already written in their head, but rather interacting with this world in an organic way.

If you can imagine all that, imagine what Minions do to this person's belief his PC's non-centrality to the campaign world. It throws it in the dirt and kicks it, that's what it does.

circumstance, story-plot, luck, etc.

One of these things is not like the others. It's the middle one. Circumstances & luck are knowable by the PC; story-plot is only knowable by the player. For someone who is "in character", story-plot is a null value. It doesn't exist, and therefor justifies nothing.

The minion-rules are rules that should be used only when a DM understands when it is appropriate.

What happens when both a PC and a villager are attacking the same monster? Is it a minion or a monster? Does it have HP or not? Does Schrodinger's cat have an opinion?

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I think we all need to clarify whether or not we care for narrativist explanations for game rules. For instance, I do not. Therefore all of Fallen Seraph's arguments (and others, of course) fall on deaf ears. I hear and understand them fine, but we're just not playing the same game.

 

[Mercule]

Now what's your view on minions?

Pretty much spot on with yours.

A key point is that what's a minion for a 25th level character isn't a minion for a 5th level character. Someone posted a comment the other day about a kid with a rock killing an ogre minion (or something close enough to that) and it made me want to scream. An ogre ain't a minion for a little kid.

 

[jdrakeh]

A key point is that what's a minion for a 25th level character isn't a minion for a 5th level character. Someone posted a comment the other day about a kid with a rock killing an ogre minion (or something close enough to that) and it made me want to scream. An ogre ain't a minion for a little kid.

There's this crazy story about a kid named David and a giant named Goliath that you may want to reflect on