Minion Fist Fights

[Rex Blunder]

Stale Pastries Do Zero Damage

 

[Campbell]

Here's the thing: No argument is going to satisfy those who do not like minions due to simulation-based concerns. They were included as a boon to those with divergent play agendas. If you don't want to use minions in your games that is your choice.

It might mean some stat blocks in the Monster Manual are useless for you, but I can't say it bothers me that much. There is always going to be game material that is useless for a portion of the game's audience. Life sucks - Get a helmet.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

After however many pages since my last reply, I still don't see minions as anything besides Wandering Damage the PCs have to pass the Minion Skill Challenge to overcome.

They are no different than using mobile traps. Mobile traps that use AC instead of DC for your skill check, and have a 1/'PC hit points' ratio for success/fail. But they have also managed to nerf the powers that have damage effects on a miss, which were in there so the players could be all awesome all the time. Except when they are fighting a minion. A normal monster with low hit points? Yeah, that one is dead. Not the minion, though, they get to survive an infinite number of miss-effects.

Give the regular monsters a damage aura which ends when they are bloodied, and let's stop pretending minions are anything other than Konami code cheese.

 

[Fifth Element]

Give the regular monsters a damage aura which ends when they are bloodied, and let's stop pretending minions are anything other than Konami code cheese.

Good to know you still want to contribute to the discussion.

 

[Andor]

Stale Pastries Do Zero Damage

I dunno. I've seen someone dropped by a well thrown 2-week old bagel to the groin.

 

[Sojorn]

I dunno. I've seen someone dropped by a well thrown 2-week old bagel to the groin.

They do, however, add sneak attack damage.

Sneak Attack
Once per round, when you have combat advantage against an enemy and are using a light blade, a stale baked good, a crossbow, or a sling, your attacks against that enemy deal extra damage. As you advance in level, your extra damage increases.

 

[jeffwik]

You're seriously going to tell me that it's metagaming for my character to notice that out of a horde of apparently identical demons who look like this: [sblock=Demon]

[/sblock]
70% of them die to a single hit from any weapon, even a blowgun dart, but the other 30% need dozens of hits to kill. And that pretty much every battle they've ever fought in had the same thing going on. For all 300 encounters of their adventuring career. But it's metagaming for my Int 20 Wizard to pick up on this, and wonder why 70% of all Wooly Mammoths can be slain with stale pastry?

Actually, yeah, I would say it could be. Because hit point damage doesn't reflect injury, it's valid to imagine a scenario in which those dozens of hits you're inflicting on the non-minion monsters aren't wounds the monster is accumulating. Rather you're wearing down its ability to fight and defend itself, until the last blow gets through its defenses and kills it. So every single monster is one hit, one kill, regardless of whether it is a minion or not.

 

[robertliguori]

But hit points are abstract. And they are even more so in 4E then they have ever been. Hit-point wise, you can heal all damage you have taken, despite having been knocked down to -half your bloodied value +1 and failed 2 death saves, with a short rest. Sure, you might complain about that too, but that is one of the premises of 4E.

In the end that means what hit points damage is all up to your flavor text. Some Orcs will survive 20 game-term attacks because they have so many hit points. You can describe them beeing stabbed in the guts 20 times, or buy evading each and every blow until the final one. Some Orcs will survive 20 game-term attacks because their defenses are high enough so that only the 20th actually connected, and since they had only 1 hit point, they're dead.

And the problem is - from the outside, you won't really know if you fought Orc type 1 or Orc type 2. The closed thing you can measure is "time between first attack and deadly death" (if you can even measure what constitutes an attack, if most attacks present multiple swings and maneuvers). Measuring this stuff in the game-world is very hard.

Hit points are an abstract measure of toughness, luck, battle skill, and the like, but they are a concrete example of the amount of damage it takes to kill someone or break something.

And if the system of D&D had a single attack and damage roll, your example would be true, and this would not be an argument. But since there exist concrete effects that are tied to hits versus misses, it's trivial to tell whether or not any given blow was a hit or a miss, no matter how it's flavored. For instance, if a secondary effect triggers on a hit, then even if the GM flavors it as a just-barely-dodged from the minion's perspective, the player knows it's a hit. Plus, you can always tie up a character and swing at it repeatedly; if its a nonminion, then it will take several max-damage Coup de Grace attempts to kill it, while a minion will squish.

The thing is, even if you abstract an attack into a round's worth of feints, maneuvers, and swings, the attack still exists, and it will still be known that you need to put a certain amount of effort into an attack to have a chance of connecting. We've seen attacks that trigger on hits and imply significant wounding happened with the hit (such as the goblin picador); this means that there is a limit to the amount of reflavoring possible for missed attacks versus HP-depleting hits.

 

[AZRogue]

Here's the thing: No argument is going to satisfy those who do not like minions due to simulation-based concerns. They were included as a boon to those with divergent play agendas. If you don't want to use minions in your games that is your choice.

It might mean some stat blocks in the Monster Manual are useless for you, but I can't say it bothers me that much. There is always going to be game material that is useless for a portion of the game's audience. Life sucks - Get a helmet.

You're correct, of course. The reflex to argue is difficult to overcome, though. For those who want minions to fall into some sort of simulation-based mold (as in, fit into the world somehow while still using the same stats as he has during combat with a PC, even though there's no reason whatsoever to know how minions survive when not being killed by PCs) there will be no answer. They weren't provided to model anything outside of combat. All this means is that some DMs will have a few more statblocks available than others. 20 more pages won't change that basic fact, I think.

 

[Cadfan]

You're seriously going to tell me that it's metagaming for my character to notice that out of a horde of apparently identical demons who look like this: *snip*
70% of them die to a single hit from any weapon, even a blowgun dart, but the other 30% need dozens of hits to kill. And that pretty much every battle they've ever fought in had the same thing going on. For all 300 encounters of their adventuring career. But it's metagaming for my Int 20 Wizard to pick up on this, and wonder why 70% of all Wooly Mammoths can be slain with stale pastry?

Yes. It is metagaming. Metagaming mixed with a healthy dose of straw man argumentation, though.

Do you seriously believe that monsters like woolly mammoths will be minions? I mean you, personally, the person typing under the screen name Andor. As an individual human being in real life. Not as a Mighty Forum Warrior who will say anything to win a fight. You personally. Do you think that Woolly Mammoths sound like a minion monster?

Everyone else is giving you a pass here on the hyperbole, but without the hyperbole your post is blank. So I'm not inclined to let it go.