Minion Fist Fights

[Aria Silverhands]

No, what I'm saying is that (at least for many of us old timers) the game just plain isn't about stories. The whole "story game or board game" is a false choice. There is a middle ground between "My Life With Vampires in the Vineyard" and "Monopoly".

Stories have plot and an act structure. They have rising and falling action and a climax. They have a theme and motifs and maybe even an underlying philosophical agenda. A role playing game doesn't have to have any of that. In fact, I don't think that it should. Give me a world and a dude to explore it. That's what I call gaming.

There's a perfect game for you then. Oblivion. You can go play in your sandbox to your hearts content. DM's aren't there to provide a sandbox for players. I'm not going to DM for a group that just wants to run around wreaking havoc and killing . I'm there, as a DM, and a player... to tell a story. From beginning to the bloody end. That includes rising and falling action and the climax. There may even be side stories that have nothing to do with the main story. You can have a "sandbox" while telling a story.

 

[pemerton]

If it is some Bizzaro World version of Unbreakable where the vast majority of people have never been cut by knife a or been brained by a mop handle (because they would EXPLODE if they did)

But the problem is that I can't seem to think consistently of a world where the vast majority of people die from a cut.

This whole "'Minion' means a relationship to the PCs thing" is a total red herring. Minions can fight minions, like when the town guard minions fight the orc warrior minions.

If you insist on treating hit points as a measure of the ingame property of physical durability then you will find the minion rules hard to come at. Perhaps try Rolemaster, in which hit point totals really do represent physical durability.

But if, in accordance with 4e's development of the description of hit points that D&D has always used (a bit of luck, a bit of skill, a bit of constitution), you treat NPC hit points as a measure of the metagame property of capacity to stand up to blows from the PCs (as Fallen Seraph has emphasised, when PCs hit minions they don't merely cut them, they behead, disembowel or otherwise fatally dispatch them) then you will find your problems go away - when no PCs are involved you don't need hit points at all, and can resolve the conflict between the guards and the orcs however you care to (perhaps using wargaming rules if that's really your thing - I think that's how they did it in OD&D).

The reduction of hp is a representation of the character getting tired from dodging a deadly attack, or perhaps simply that they've used up a bit of their luck.

This is mostly true, except that it (like Gygax's essay on hit points in the 1st ed DMG) suggests that "luck" is an ingame property. I think that "luck" in this sense (and hence the hit points mechanic) is much better thought of as a metagame device, analogous to Hero Points or Fate Points in systems like HeroWars or OGL Conan. Hit points don't represent anything in game - rather, they set a metagame constraint on the narration. This then gives us a certain flexibility: we can describe both the 1 hp 9th level Minion and the 100 hp 9th level PC fighter as buff and butch, and we can describe the same fighter reduced to 1 hp as being on his or her last legs, without committing ourselves to the sort of inconsistency that would arise if we thought "9th level, 1 hp remaining" actually reprsented some property of characters in the gameworld.

This breaks down as soon as the possibility of the PC's having access to mind control magic occurs. Suddenly, you have minions fighting minions in quite ludicrous sudden death switches, which also happens to dictate that PC controlled minions use quite peculiar tactics, given that they are essentially glass cannons (relatively).

This is Kamikaze Midget's frequently voiced concern about monsters as allies. Together with the action economy issues, it is one of the tricky mechanical matters that the system has to deal with. I'll be interested to see how they handle it.

Part of the problem is, for many of us, "story" is the enemy of gaming.

If a DM hijacks the game session to tell his "story", it's a tempting thought to just defenestrate him.

You seem to be equating "story" with "railroading". Some people play RPGs so that they can, in play, contribute to the development of thematically interesting story. In this sort of play, the role of the GM is to provide adversity and to provide opportunities for those thematically interesting statements to be made by the players via the mechanism of play. Minions can allow for this; they are not essential to it, but (given the sort of story-telling one might try to use D&D to facilitate) they can help.

I like things to be "emergent", where simple but consistent rules create complex systems and stories. I don't approach any D&D campaign with a predetermined story which I'm going to "tell" to the PC's. The "narrative" is jointly discovered, and it can take surprising turns when combats or RP take unexpected twists.

I also like a story that emerges from play, although not one generated by the rules but rather one generated by the players making thematically interesting choices for their characters (and so guided more by metagame concerns than by rules that model ingame processes).

I'm not saying that one approach is or isn't better than the other. I'm just pointing out that 1 hit point minions aren't (as Korgoth asserted) an obstacle to meaningful play.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

If you like Hong Kong martial arts movies you'll probably have no problems at all. If you're strongly attached to the style of play in previous versions of D&D or you want to see things as being a simulation of our objective reality, maybe you will have more problems wrapping your head around this shift in the game.

So if Hong Kong martial arts movies generally make me want to crash a giant flaming asteroid into their city and irradiate the leftovers it safe to say this game is not for me?

 

[hong]

There's a perfect game for you then. Oblivion. You can go play in your sandbox to your hearts content.

The funny thing is, IIRC Oblivion has been criticised for being too plot-heavy compared to Morrowind....

 

[AZRogue]

So if Hong Kong martial arts movies generally make me want to crash a giant flaming asteroid into their city and irradiate the leftovers it safe to say this game is not for me?

Dude! You never grew up watching Kung Fu Theater?!? That stuff shaped my childhood, back in the late 70's and 80's, as much as fantasy and sci-fi ever did.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

The funny thing is, IIRC Oblivion has been criticised for being too plot-heavy compared to Morrowind....

I've not played Morrowind, nor Oblivion, but reference them based on secondhand opinions. From what I've read though, there was plenty of stuff to roam around and explore, destroy, or slaughter while avoiding the main quest. Add in user modifications and it opens up even more. Like creating a river of pumpkins that spill down over the hillside and crash into the village below.

 

[Zil]

Why would 90% of a typical orc tribe be minions?

Based on the Orc monster manual pages, that is what I would assume. You wouldn't have 90% of the tribe being made up of chieftains and Eyes of Gruumsh? Most of the tribe would be 'drudges' and 'warriors' and looking at the orc monster manual pages, those look like minion stat blocks to me. Even if we assume 25% of the tribe is berserkers, raiders or better, that still leaves a lot of 1hp minions.

Or you can stop looking at the monster manual as any kind of simulation of an ecology and instead think just in terms of the players story and ignore what goes on off camera. I think that is what we're supposed to be doing with 4E - creating movie like stories - not simulating reality (well, as much as Orcs ever could be reality ).

I can understand how it plays counter to the "reality" of previous editions of D&D (since you couldn't easily create a creature that was both good in combat but weak in the hp department).

Oh, this was extremely easy to do in 2E. The plague of kits allowed players to create these really top heavy characters who could dish out a massive amount of damage, but if you threw them up against tougher opponents to compensate for their combat effectiveness, they'd show their fragility and die too readily. It got to be very tricky designing adventures that didn't see lots of character death, yet still were a fun challenge. Sure, it could be done, but sometimes I'd miscalculate what the players would do in a situation and come pretty close to a TPK. The brown splat books in 2E really did break the game in that way and made it hard on the DM. I was actually relieved to switch to Combat & Tactics/Skills & Powers just to escape the splat books. Of course, there were a lot issues with that as well (slow, min-max paradise, etc).

IMO, I can't see it running counter to objective reality. Where one is stabbed is much more important than the size of the blade.

That wasn't really my point. My point was that 90%of the orc tribe has the staying power of a mirror image. One hit and *poof* - regardless of what you are using.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm not going to DM for a group that just wants to run around wreaking havoc and killing . I'm there, as a DM, and a player... to tell a story

Right, but Korgoth isn't.

And 4e would be a monumentally poor game if it also forced you to tell a story with it.

It would be a good game if it allowed you to tell a story with it, and also allowed you to just run around wreaking havoc and killing.

Fortunately, the designers are clever little apes, and they're making a game that enables both.

Which is why minions exist, and also why you never have to use them if you don't like them, because you're not telling a story.

Yay for those clever apes designing 4e! Hooray!

 

[FireLance]

I think the key problem with minions is that they are supposed to replace four creatures of similar level. They are thus simplified in order to require about as much of the DM's attention as a single normal creature. Among other things, they do a fixed amount of damage in order to minimize dice rolled, and are killed on a hit in order to reduce the need to track their hit points.

If the latter seems dissonant for the player or the DM, perhaps instead of minions, there could be another class of NPCs (mooks? underlings? followers? mundanes?) that are slightly more complex than minions and replace two creatures of similar level. They could have the same statistics as minions and still do fixed damage, but would have half the hit points of a normal creature of their role and level.

 

[hero4hire]

That wasn't really my point. My point was that 90%of the orc tribe has the staying power of a mirror image. One hit and *poof* - regardless of what you are using.

I think this is awesome.

Now I can finally play a cinematic LoTR battle versus hordes of orcs in D&D without it being tedious or drawn out!