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Message: <blockquote data-quote="That One Guy" data-source="post: 4444368" data-attributes="member: 64672">I remember a player in a game I was in turning to me and asking, 'Okay, so why do minions have just 1 hp?' My response was that, it's not that they actually have 1 hit point. It's that their actual hit points don't have any value. HP as a concept is an assessment of how much damage (emotional, physical, etc.) a person can take before they collapse (and possibly give up on living/die). A minion who is hit may still have enough blood in him that he could still fight, but his morale and adrenaline have given out. It just... dies. However, I actually am not 100% into how minions work in 4e. I imagine that it is a compromise between more complicated rules. Some things that I've experimented with in games are the idea of damage threshold minions and... fake damage. Threshold is that a single attack has to do a certain minimum amount of damage to fell a particular minion (Accidentally the anti-cloud of daggers). Fake damage is even if an attack misses against a minion, it still is described as a hit. Actual damage is a direct hit and kills it. An abstraction of this rule would be to give minions an actual hp value. When a roll would be a miss, they are given damage as a hit to that hp value. When they are actually hit by a direct hit from a skilled opponent, the enemy then goes down instantly. I think this might be moving towards a middle ground.I have an idea for a middle ground, but it involves charts and excessive complications that'd probably be much less fun of a compromise than the phantom damage variant. I guess I could throw that into the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?p=4444385#post4444385" target="_blank">house rules section</a>... check it out if you understand why minions can be distasteful, but want to squeeze their yummy goodness into a new more edible shape. Or something. Blame 4am.</blockquote>

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