Let's talk about minions...

[El Mahdi]

I love the concept of minions, and I'm even sticking with 3.5E! I'm not switching to 4E, but there are a lot of concepts, and some mechanics, that I have ganked and houseruled for my 3.5 games.

I see the minion concept as very transportable between systems, and an extremely useful tool for creating a certain "feel" in a game. As soon as I heard this concept, I immediately visualized every swashbuckling movie I've ever seen. Take the Three Musketeers for instance; when the heroes fight the cardinals men, it's always a parry or two, then stab or slash the "minion" and down they go - but the fight with the cardinals leutenant is usually an epic dance of wirling blades, of parrys and counterattacks, until after a prolonged fight, the bad guy goes down. Minions make this possible and let the heroes really show how they aren't just a commoner with a little bit of skill with a sword (or other weapon or magic of choice). You can even create the feel of struggling, novice heroes by taking minions out of the picture at low levels (that 0 level feel).

It's a brilliant concept, yet very simple. So simple that I'm angry I never thought of it on my own.

 

[El Mahdi]

I wish there were a minion template I could easily slap onto any monster in the book . . .

Personally, I don't really feel I need a template. Essentially all you need to do is give them 1 HP, or alternately, just use the concept of "one hit, one kill". You can even adapt the concept to make two hit minions, or three hit minions. You don't even really need to change any other stats of the creature, although preferably, they shouldn't be as skilled or lethal as your BBEG.

 

[jmucchiello]

I think that minions should not have been given hit points at all, and that the ephemeral nature of their existence would had been better explained.

This.

Having used minions in other games (and previous editions of D&D), I just treat them as one-hit foes as I've always done. (And two-hit foes are Elite Minions )

 

[Engilbrand]

Rodrigo, I wasn't talking about people who disagree with minions. I said that 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.

 

[Victim]

I think that minions are too fragile at higher levels to be worth 1/4th of a monster. There are a whole lot of things that do automatic, no attack roll damage. Our group of PCs has no controller - on one low level adventure, we were in serious trouble because of a horde of Kruthik minions (plus bosses). Killing at best 1 guy per character per round was rough.

But then we picked up a fighter. And we found a Lightning weapon. And our warlock picked up Firey Bolt and a Rod of Reaving. Now they're not so tough; my warlord killed like 15 guys at once with his Lightning blade. With a Lifestealing weapon, our fighter generally gets more in temp HP than a minion deals.

And that's without a controller. Besides Cloud of Daggers, there are a number of other wizard powers that create a zone which does automatic damage. Blood Mages and Spellstormers can pop every minion within 10 squares. Stormwardens can pass out some automatic damage. Shadow Assassins kill minions that miss. Iron Vanguards can heal from killing minions - I've seen a group that COULD kill minions trivially leave them around so the IV with a Lifestealing spear could make better use of them for temp HP and healing.

It seems like minions at high levels aren't worth their XP. And if they're so easily killed and overvalued, then they probably won't be used in encounters as much.

 

[ryryguy]

I love minions, think they are a great mechanic for a variety of things.

I also feel a bit of reluctance about using paragon/epic minions - basically, minions for stuff that should be really objectively powerful. I suspect I'll still use them though, but maybe a bit less often. Also I wouldn't hesitate to just rule on the fly that the "scholar's walking stick" just doesn't kill the legion devil minion, sorry... the scholar should still have an at-will ability that will do it, so it's not really a big loss.

Finally I expect I'll sometimes use the notion that beating the minion does not necessarily mean it dies from that one hit. It means that it's out of combat. Usually this means dead, but not necessarily. For example, if there's some kind of running chase, "killing" a chasing minion just means you knocked it off course sufficiently that it can't get back into the chase. Or if the players have allies in a large pitched battle, the minion might not die from a hit, but it causes one of the allies to jump in and engage the minion, removing it from any further combat with the PC's. (You aren't rolling attacks for and against all the allies, they're sort of an abstraction here.)

These kinds of tricks might help with paragon/epic minion versimilitude issues.

 

[RangerWickett]

The minion rules work for me.

However, if I were designing my own system, I'd drastically alter the way hit points work. In D&D, we have AC, which is how hard you are to hurt, and hit points, which is how hard you are to wound. Why does a level 20 skirmisher monster have a high AC? Because apparently it's good at dodging. But then why does it have tons of hit points? Because at higher levels creatures don't die from wounds anymore?

I could accept the fact that hp = dodginess back when your AC didn't auto-increase per level. Now that it does, though, I don't like having two stats related to 'not being hit.'

If people had a preset number of hit points, and your AC and attack bonuses went up but HP never did, that could work, except that you'd have a lot of rounds of combat of missing, which isn't fun. But minions would just have low AC, making them easy to hit and kill (they'd have just as many HP as everyone else, though, so a lucky minion could fairly easily kill a PC).

Or you could have it so attacks and AC don't really increase, and the representation of dodginess is, say, Vitality Points. In that case, minions only have Hit Points, not Vitality Points.

For the system we have, the minion rules work, but I don't really like the other aspects of the rules. I personally think attacks and defenses shouldn't be that easy to increase.

 

[frankthedm]

Rodrigo, I wasn't talking about people who disagree with minions. I said that 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.

And I think Wyrmshadows understands them quite well. Higher level minions are very artificial and needed only because how the system has high starting point HP and slowly increasing damage. It takes far too many levels to be able to reliably one shot that 1st level 24-27 HP kobold.

 

[Scribble]

And I think Wyrmshadows understands them quite well. Higher level minions are very artificial and needed only because how the system has high starting point HP and slowly increasing damage. It takes far too many levels to be able to reliably one shot that 1st level 24-27 HP kobold.

I think he does and doesn't.

Like pretty much anything in the game, minions are somewhat of a taste thing...

I personaly love the categories of enemy thing in 4e, and think minions fit perfectly.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Minions are fun. They allow me to have swarms of foes attack the player characters without overwhelming them or making defeating them a tedious calculation of dealt damage.

I mean, I wouldn't even have dared to do 3.5 combats with two dozen foes - keeping track of hit point totals for each of them would have been a nightmare. Now it's no problem at all.