Let's talk about minions...

[frankthedm]

Sadly, because of the way 3e weds HPs and attack ability, the math breaks down for this after a certain point.

Those hordes of Orcs you're mowing down aren't a real threat.

Good! That's why I'm gaining XP and wearing legendary magical armor! Most of their attacks should fail! The vast bulk of them should be green-skilled! Let their officers, veterans and captains be the only ones that provide a challenge! If foes the foes I face always have the same chance to hit me, I'm not getting better, I'm just running around on a hamster wheel with bigger numbers.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

It's also important to remember that mowing down minions isn't always about "feeling heroic."

It's sort of the moxie version of a guy flexing his biceps before a fight or two dogs barring their teeth...

The big bad guy doesn't know you have Moxie. In fact it's almost impossible to tell someone has it. Sometimes it's assumed, as people with Moxie tend to gravitate towards important positions, but this isn't always the case. There are also some learned sages who can tell... They tend to appear as old men wearing fedoras who can look at you, and say "you got Moxie kid..." while winking.

The big badguy just sees you as another shmuck that needs to be shown how powerful he is. So he sends his henchmen against you assuming you're just going to be kileld while he goes back to recojiggering his giant moon carving laser beam.

Mowing down the minions is equal to saying: "I don't think so jerkwad!"

It lets the big bad know you aren't just another shlob. You got Moxie.

Nah... not even Moxie can stand up against the forces of a DM who doesn't know when to end a campaign.

Well I ultimately agree with you in that fiction is full of drones that go down by the truckload under the flashing swords and crackling spells of heroes. No problem there.

Its the idea that giants, demons, and such powerful creatures can be mooks I have a deep problem with. I can see the average town guard having 10hp and going down with a single good shot from a high level hero (I'm not saying I can see them being taken down in the same manner by Jackie Chan wizards....that's weak). I have yet to see any precedent in any fiction that would presume to claim that it is good storytelling to have 16'tall giants being killed like they were 5yr old human children no matter how badass or full of moxie the heroes are.

I can't recall anything other than orc like cannon fodder going down by the dozen by powerful heroes. I can't see dragon, fire giant, vampire, ice devil, balor, or equally powerful creatures being one shot ever no matter how powerful the heroes are. If the PCs should be able to kill such powerful creatures easily, power them up don't just turn the enemies into crystal figurines.

I think there should be hard and fast rules on what should kind of creatures can be minions or we are really bordering on Yu-Gi-Oh type madness in D&D. Plus, the idea that non-warriors are able to do what the greatest warriors in the campaign can do is ridiculous IMO. Non warriors, in fiction or even in extremely over the top mythology, haven't been given that kind of power.



Wyrmshadows

 

[Spatula]

In the whole simulation/narriative debate, people (such as Scribble and Charwoman Gene above) seem to confuse what the simulationist types are looking for, with realism. HP are not realistic, and everyone knows that. What the sim side wants is concrete, internally consistant mechanics. The narriativist side has no versimilitude problem with ditching consistancy for a better story. That's all it comes down to.

Now... to make minions obvious to the players, or not? What are the drawbacks of each approach?

 

[D'karr]

Nah... not even Moxie can stand up against the forces of a DM who doesn't know when to end a campaign.

LOL. True, so true.

 

[Victim]

One general standard for DnD is that more powerful characters and monsters are basically more powerful all around. A high level enemy will usually have better defenses AND better offense than a lower level monster.

Minions and solos are all about breaking that proportional relationship.

Minions can have high level offense and armor, but don't even have the HP of low level creatures (they do, however, basically have the HP of old low level creatures). Using a large number of fully detailed low level monsters tends to make tracking HP, power uses, etc more difficult. It also means that the enemies have usually serious problems hitting higher level enemies, and the high level people have a trivial time hitting them. Using a booster monster - to use 3.x example, a bard twinked for Inspire Courage - to make the standard low level grunts more dangerous tends to increase the complexity and initiative dependence of the encounter. In some ways, you can think of a minion as someone using a berserk fighting style to temporarily increase their effective level at the expense of surviveability - that's why a normal ogre might be level 4, but the minion is level 8.

Solos are much tougher than normal and tend to have more area attacks, reaction abilities, and other tricks to spread their offense around, but they often lack the concentrated punch and high level defenses of other monsters.

To put things simply, minions are about answering "how can there be fights with lots of enemies without bogging the game down?" (minions tend to have simpler abilities, and no HP to track) and to a lesser extent: "how can I make groups of low level enemies not completely negligible threats?" (since low level guys usually become higher level minions - but not too much higher). And solos are about answering: "How do I make a boss monster that can withstand the gang beating the PCs dish out without making it so powerful that it can drop 1 or more PCs a round?"

 

[Cadfan]

I think there should be hard and fast rules on what should kind of creatures can be minions or we are really bordering on Yu-Gi-Oh type madness in D&D.

Why? Does the game really need an actual rule to say that there shouldn't be elder god minions? Isn't it enough that there just... aren't any?

 

[Scribble]

Well I ultimately agree with you in that fiction is full of drones that go down by the truckload under the flashing swords and crackling spells of heroes. No problem there.

Its the idea that giants, demons, and such powerful creatures can be mooks I have a deep problem with. I can see the average town guard having 10hp and going down with a single good shot from a high level hero (I'm not saying I can see them being taken down in the same manner by Jackie Chan wizards....that's weak). I have yet to see any precedent in any fiction that would presume to claim that it is good storytelling to have 16'tall giants being killed like they were 5yr old human children no matter how badass or full of moxie the heroes are.

I can't recall anything other than orc like cannon fodder going down by the dozen by powerful heroes. I can't see dragon, fire giant, vampire, ice devil, balor, or equally powerful creatures being one shot ever no matter how powerful the heroes are. If the PCs should be able to kill such powerful creatures easily, power them up don't just turn the enemies into crystal figurines.

I think there should be hard and fast rules on what should kind of creatures can be minions or we are really bordering on Yu-Gi-Oh type madness in D&D. Plus, the idea that non-warriors are able to do what the greatest warriors in the campaign can do is ridiculous IMO. Non warriors, in fiction or even in extremely over the top mythology, haven't been given that kind of power.



Wyrmshadows

Judge me by my size do you?

Moxie is indifferent. It doesn't care how cool you dress, how big you are, or how creepy you look.

Sure, sometimes Moxie tends to show up more often in certain types of people/creatures... Again no one knows why. Mayhaps their force of will is greater...

(in outside game adventure design, I somewhat agree with you that yeah certain monsters probably won't become minions in my game... But who are we to demand how others use the rules? If crazy dragon minions seem cool to them, more power to em... They're having fun...)

 

[Spatula]

I can't recall anything other than orc like cannon fodder going down by the dozen by powerful heroes. I can't see dragon, fire giant, vampire, ice devil, balor, or equally powerful creatures being one shot ever no matter how powerful the heroes are. If the PCs should be able to kill such powerful creatures easily, power them up don't just turn the enemies into crystal figurines.

That leads to problems of its own - namely the glass cannon PCs of 3e that can dish out tremendous damage but can't take what they themselves put out. Which you can solve by also ramping up survivability, but then you're back to foes that you can safely ignore because they pose no actual threat.

EDIT: my point, that I don't think I expressed very well, is that you could make the "crush waves of foes" scenes work by pumping up the player side instead of having weak bad guys, but you run into meta issues either way. In 3e for example, groups of weak bad guys could be easily killed, but a player could for meta reasons conclude that they need not bother, because such creatures are not credible threats to the PCs in that system.

There are solid game design reasons behind each aspect of 4e minions - they are the way they are for good reason. People that don't like the abstract nature have talked about giving them small amounts of HP to avoid the "soap bubble" issue. But an earlier iteration of 4e already did that (as evidenced by the RPG stats on the vampire spawn DDM card) and they ditched it. So, which is worse - the idea that players can (but probably never will) slap a minion to death, or having to track HP for large numbers of weak enemies? The 4e designers went with removing the hassle for the situations that actually happen, instead of going with increased bookeeping to account for theoretical corner cases.

Now, that tradeoff isn't for everyone, obviously. Some people enjoy adding complexity. But I think it probably works for more people than it doesn't, as lessens the work in running large numbers of weak foes, and that's what matters to most DMs - how can I accomplish X without bogging down the game?

 

[Cadfan]

In the whole simulation/narriative debate, people (such as Scribble and Charwoman Gene above) seem to confuse what the simulationist types are looking for, with realism. HP are not realistic, and everyone knows that. What the sim side wants is concrete, internally consistant mechanics. The narriativist side has no versimilitude problem with ditching consistancy for a better story. That's all it comes down to.

Actually, there's a second simulationist perspective, which I'll call the "black box" perspective. From that point of view, it doesn't matter what the rules are for minions because the players don't see stat blocks. All the player knows is that its an enemy who dies when he attacks it. He doesn't know why it dies, just that it dies.

From that perspective, minions don't have to have the same mechanics as other enemies. But my objection, explained above, still applies- while minion rules in general work from this perspective, there has to be consistency from the character's point of view. If he hits a minion with an extremely powerful area of effect (fireball on a miss), and it survives, it's identical ally shouldn't die to a very weak area of effect (cloud of daggers). Even if one area of effect uses an attack roll and the other doesn't.

Now... to make minions obvious to the players, or not? What are the drawbacks of each approach?

I prefer not to make them obvious, because I follow the "black box" approach. Players might figure it out, but that's their problem.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

In the whole simulation/narriative debate, people (such as Scribble and Charwoman Gene above) seem to confuse what the simulationist types are looking for, with realism. HP are not realistic, and everyone knows that. What the sim side wants is concrete, internally consistant mechanics. The narriativist side has no versimilitude problem with ditching consistancy for a better story. That's all it comes down to.

Now... to make minions obvious to the players, or not? What are the drawbacks of each approach?

Though as I posted earlier I am a fan of VP/WP dynamics because they are IMO much more believable than HP and allow for increased rapidity of healing and more dangerous combats. One cannot play D&D and expect hard simulationist realism...true. I don't want that either but like you wrote, I want consistance that goes across the board. As a DM I always have the freedom to describe, in a narrative fashion, anything I want. However, by the same token, throughout the history of D&D there has been a consistancy that assumed that whether it was the great dragon in the northern forests with 697hp or the 9hp orc irregular their hp totals always remain the same no matter who is looking at them.

HPs are an abstraction but have never been an abstraction that varies based on the relative power of the observer. This is a huge difference.

My players would never allow me to use minions and know about it...not that I would because, though I tried it, I am not a 4e DM. I don't see how after playing D&D for years with fixed, objective realities that suddenly wiping the floor with a dozen ice devil minions could ever feel as badass as actually defeating that many ice devils who actually have objective hit point totals. The fact is, until now, you had better be seriously badass before encountering numbers of powerful creatures. Now, moxie is simulated by making the badguys redshirt mooks designed solely to be cool.

Doesn't Exalted have the Rule of Cool? Minions are a rule of cool type construct designed to make people look good. In many years of DMing I have yet to encounted a problem with PCs being unable to look good by whooping up on level appropriate foes.

The players knowing who is a minion and who is not is completely a metagame abberation in the same way a player who would actually memorize the stats and abilities of the Monster Manual critters and have their PC act accordingly is a metagame abberation. PCs should be able to see who is less well armored, look less confident perhaps, or have the bearing of unseasoned fighters, but they shouldn't know they are guaranteed a kill.



Wyrmshadows