Minion Fist Fights

[Lacyon]

Send in the peasants to clear them out. 20 per dragon. Peasants are cheap.

Assumptions, assumptions.

Is this explicitly stated anywhere? Are there rules for "deminioning" someone?

This is quite possibly the first case I've seen of you not thinking hard enough about fantasy, Lizard.

 

[Fifth Element]

Send in the peasants to clear them out. 20 per dragon. Peasants are cheap.

What if we assume, just for a moment, that the PCs don't own hundreds of peasants to do with what they please?

 

[Wormwood]

What if we assume, just for a moment, that the PCs don't own hundreds of peasants to do with what they please?

Great. You just made me drop my suspended disbelief.

 

[hong]

What if we assume, just for a moment, that the PCs don't own hundreds of peasants to do with what they please?

Maybe peasants are cheaper than magic items, what with that 500% markup....

 

[LostSoul]

Because regardless of the purpose of the rules, players WILL treat them as descriptions of the universe, and to the extent they need to be told "Well, yes, according to the rules you could do that, but you can't, because that's not how the rules are supposed to be used", they will feel limited and constrained. If game balance is based on "People should honor the spirit of the rules", game balance is broken.

You can deal with the NPCs however you want - you're the DM, you decide what happens to them. You don't need to use the rules that resolve what the PCs want to do when you're only dealing with NPCs. You have the authority as DM to excercise that kind of fiat.

If the PCs want to have the NPCs do something for them, make the players roll the dice. Base success of the NPC's actions on the results of the rolls.

 

[Lacyon]

Maybe peasants are cheaper than magic items, what with that 500% markup....

I have a near-monopoly on the peasant trade. They're marked up far more than 500%.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Great. You just made me drop my suspended disbelief.

That sounds vaguely dirty.

Send in the peasants to clear them out. 20 per dragon. Peasants are cheap.

"Send the Irish, they cost nothing?"

So you'd say it would be acceptable in a campaign of D&D for the players to regularly sacrifice innocent peasants?
If I'd run an evil campaign, this might work. Off course, I think the PCs would only get XP for the Peasants (since they somehow convinced them to sacrifice them, but didn't actually interact with the monsters), or at least share the XP with the (now dead) peasants.

It might be a better example if we'd say that an NPC (maybe the evil grand vizier?) ordered the peasants to do this job. But then, isn't this a result that we might actually want? The villain is sacrificing people expendable to them, and the PCs are going to stop him.

So, even if we take these rules at face value for "game world physics", we still get acceptable results to tell interesting stories.

 

[Mallus]

Is this explicitly stated anywhere? Are there rules for "deminioning" someone?

Does there need to be? Wouldn't a simple judgment call based on the situation suffice? Put another way: should a hammer come with detailed instructions for not using it to pound dents into your head?

If game balance is based on "People should honor the spirit of the rules", game balance is broken.

Then every super hero game is broken. This includes D&D, BTW.

Also, all social functions are governed by etiquette. Expecting that players not go out of their way to break the game is no different from a party host having the (reasonable) expectation that his party guests won't trash his house (unless, of course, you believe that gamers are essentially an unsociable lot ).

I understand that there's always going to be tension between the players wanting freedom (read: power) and the DM wanting a manageable (read: controlled) game environment. But in the end the players have to be partners in keeping the campaign running. If they shirk this responsibility, if they're only interested in finding exploits, gaming the system, etc., then no rule system is going to help.

Unofrtunately, that kind of thinking is inherently simulationist and doesn't mesh well with anti-simulationist rules.

Not neccessarily. You can believe in a game as an engaging, participatory story. You can believe in it's characters and their motivations. You can believe it's fun to kill monsters with wahoo. None of this requires a detailed physics/economics/climatological simulator. Put another way: Ulysses is a good book --just go with me on this-- even though you couldn't use it to rebuild Dublin from scratch.

 

[Scribble]

If the players know minions die from one hit point of damage, they will rig traps that do minimal damage and set them off with themselves in range, knowing the minions will be fried and they'll be only slightly harmed -- and they'll ask why none of the locals ever thought of using very weak bombs to do the same thing.

So you're saying your players will intentionaly go about doing the more tedius and cuumbersome task as opposed to just attacking?

Let's all watch bob make a bunch of skill rolls arming a trap, oh he needs x to build the trap, well lets gop back to the town where we found that thing...

Makes a LOT more sense then just fighting them...

(City guards in 4e aren't minions, after all...a city guard with a 1d10 burst 2 explosive could clear out a dozen orc drudges and be barely scratched himself.)

We don't know this... I'd be happy if minion was the new commoner actually.

But in any case... I'll repeat soemthign I said earlier. Hit Points do not exist in a vacume. They are part of an overall method of determining how long one opponent can stand against another, but they are not the ONLY determining factor.

The minion rules are just a simplified math form of creating a creature that can stand for X amount of time against an opponent of X power.

It's no different then anything else in the game, just simplified so as to be easier to track.

Where does a game of tactical combat between faceless monsters and murdering plunderers with pretensions of glory gain from having a system that passes lightly over the details of that combat that is at the heart of it's function?

How does it do that? See above?

Minion rules are no different then any other game element.

 

[Andor]

Minion rules are no different then any other game element.

Except of course for how they directly contradict other existing game elements. Like the fact that in D&D a 40' tall giant is hard to kill. Unless he's a minion, then a well flung spork will do the job.