Minion Fist Fights

[Lizard]

Now, a 3e elephant has over 100 hp. So I'm doubting that's going to happen.

And a 4e 8th level orc has 100+ hit points, and a 4e 9th level orc minion has 1.

So I fail to see the problem. I mean, it doesn't really make sense the 9th level orc minion MADe it to 9th level with only 1 hit point. Offstage, it wasn't a minion. When it gets stuck in front of the onrushing PCs, it becomes one. Otherwise, nothing makes any sense...

What's NOT going to happen is that 4e will have rules declaring "if the story requires the PCs to slaughter a herd of mammoths, then VOILA! They're minions!" This will not happen because D&D is a game where players have stats, and fight monsters based on those stats. Minions allow for certain types of fight scenes, certainly, but that happens in the overall context of the D&D game.

So, you ARE taking the view that minionism is an innate, not plot-imposed, condition? This puts you at odds with most of the pro-minion faction. Just want to be sure I'm understanding you.

The argument that 4e design principles magically transform monsters into minions willy nilly based on what the story demands without any outside context of consistent gameplay is Lizard-logic at best.

Yet, it's the logic others have used to sell minions. And it works.

Embrace the mammoth minion.

 

[Lizard]

Reads more like a hazard than a fight.

Perhaps it is.

"OK, there's a Horde Of Mammoths up ahead. It's a skill challenge. Success means you get through with plenty of time and refreshed as per a standard rest. Failure means you will be entering the final fight bloodied and with your dailies expended. How do you deal with the mammoths?"

 

[Rex Blunder]

I gotta go with Lizard on this one.

While I think he did it to prove the absurdity of the minions concept, Lizard has shown to my satisfaction that a high-level encounter with some mammoth minions could be Pretty Awesome™.

This use of minions is justified, in my mind, by the Rule of Cool.

(Note that on the Rule of Cool page, the second paragraph references "a herd of crazed mammoths". Coincidence?)

 

[marune]

I think I agree that mammoths or even dragons could be done as higher-level minions.

 

[Lizard]

I gotta go with Lizard on this one.

While I think he did it to prove the absurdity of the minions concept, Lizard has shown to my satisfaction that a high-level encounter with some mammoth minions could be Pretty Awesome™.

No, I did it to show that if you are going to embrace minions, it's pointless to draw lines. If you can accept that some 9th level orcs have 150+ hit points, and some have 1, then it's ridiculous to say "Well, mammoths aren't minions, that's just being silly!"

And if you CAN'T accept mammoth minions, then, in all honesty, I don't see how you can accept 21st level devil minions, either.

If I run a game with minions, anything I want to come in hordes will be minion-able.

(And the 'can kill it in one hit' logic doesn't hold. Again, look at the orcs. Can an 8th level PC reliably one-shot an orc chieftain? No. Yet he CAN one-shot an orc grunt who is, actually, of higher level than the chieftain. So it boils down to "Can my DM plausibly narrate me one-shotting this creature?" If your DM can't....find a better DM. 'nuff said.)

I mean, most D&D fights are narrated as a series of progressively nastier wounds, until the DM gets to whip out his thesaurus for the 'fatality' blow. Minions just skip straight to the fatality.

(Note that on the Rule of Cool page, the second paragraph references "a herd of crazed mammoths". Coincidence?)

Ideally, riding in zeppelins. Which are piloted by Nazi apes.

 

[Family]

I think I agree that mammoths or even dragons could be done as higher-level minions.

It's all about the tone of the scene (and the fun of it). Agents in the Matrix were L20 in the first movie, but Neo took on a 100 of them in the second. They were minions.

Uruk-Hai warband putting up a exceptional fight against Aaragorn in the first movie? Check. Hundreds getting moved down by him and Gimli in the 2nd? Check.

You just might be a minion if...

 

[NMcCoy]

Indeed, after reading over some of the stuff about minions one of my first thoughts was how awesome it'd be to have high-level Epic characters taking on swarms of dragon minions in aerial combat. Also, think about the potential in giving said dragon minions Resist All 20.

 

[pemerton]

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.

What is the basis for this generalisation? Yes, a certain sort of player will treat a non-simulationist ruleset as if it were simulationist. They should play simulationist games.

If what you say was true of all players, then there would be no players of HeroWars - which expressly states that, during the course of an extended contest, Action Points measure no ingame property.

Of course you can do that simulationistically. It's simply a matter of increasing the power of the heroes instead of decreasing the power of the antagonists.

What this won't give you is a horde of foes, all of whom are threatening (in terms of attack output) but some of whom are destined to fall before a single blow of the protagonists.

As I've said in another post, minion status is just like AntiFate points. It could be implimented in various ways. Minion rules are one such way.

They prove that if you use the rules we've been given, the result is pretty ridiculous. I'd call that a win for Team Simulationist.

Simulationism + Rules = Ridiculous. That is not a win for simulationism - its a reductio on it.

If you observe that a single normal attack with a shrukien (or similarly small-sized miniweapon) kills a particular class of creature 100% of the time on a successful hit, then minion status is visible in the game itself.

But there is not, in the relevant sense, a particular class of creature, because minoin status is not itself an ingame category. So what we have is that some orcs are lucky and some unlucky. But for the PCs (as opposed to the players, who can be expected to read the rulebooks) there is no basis for predicting whether any given orc will be lucky or not.

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.

This is not true, because D&D "damage" is not always physical damage. We know that some of it is the wearing down of a foe, the purely abstract reduction of luck, etc.

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.

<snip>

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.

But not all hits have to be treated as these sorts of hits. Welcome to fortune-in-the-middle.

Really, the problem here is that we have one set of people who expect the rules to document their expectations of the universe, and another set who don't. If you don't care that what the rules say happens in a given scenario are utterly at odds with what you think should happen, you need not worry about whether a given system is simulationistic.

But the rules don't say that a peasant with a spork can kill a demon minion 5% of the time, for at least two reasons: first, the rules don't define the spork as a weapon; two, the rules aren't intended for the resolution of NPC vs NPC combat.

I expect the rules to tell me how to play the game. NPC vs NPC combat is not playing the game - it is the GM generating backstory. (Now, if one of those NPCs is a PC-extension - eg a cohort or a pet - that is a different matter. We don't yet know how 4e handles such things. I'm pretty confient that it just won't be a question of taking the monster stats and applying them as if they were PC stats.)

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

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.

That would be one way to do it (perhaps in a game that didn't emphasise tactical movement or positioning so much) - much as HeroWars handles NPC companions, which simply add Action Points to the boss PC.

But I don't see how it's an objection to a mechanic that it (i) allows the story to involve hordes of foes and (ii) makes that horde mechanically easy to handle. If you think (i) is irrelevant, because you don't care for flavour text, then fine - but I think most RPGers do care about the flavour text. It what distinguishes an RPG from a wargame or an abstract board game.

Not the minion, though, they get to survive an infinite number of miss-effects.

Given they will never be exposed to an infinite number of miss effects, that counterfactual claim has no significance. One of the PCs will hit them (especially because some damage, such as Cleave, does not require a to-hit roll).

 

[pemerton]

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?

Correct. Just the same as Batman fears for his life when he gets shot at, even though he has never been fatally shot in any of the previous 400 episodes. Just as Frodo is anxious as to whether or not he'll survive the trip through Mordor even though every other adversity he's confronted he's narrowly escaped. You, the player, know that your PC is the hero. Your PC does not.

If you don't like that sort of author stance, you need simulatonist play of the 3E variety. But in such play, either (i) hordes of foes will kill you, or (ii) hordes of foes will never threaten you. You'll never get the play experience that 4e minions deliver. Whether or not that's a good thing I leave to you to judge for yourself.