Minion Fist Fights

[Korgoth]

There are some Rivers you don't want to cross.

Wait, what does any of this have to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

 

[Wolfspider]

Wait, what does any of this have to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Heh.

 

[La Bete]

Wait, what does any of this have to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Well played, sir.

 

[Hussar]

Look, I'm not bagging on 3e. I'm not saying 3e is bad at all. What I AM saying, is that by RAW, you cannot do what they are doing in 4e.

YES YOU CAN DO IT BY IGNORING THE RULES.

I shouted that so no one would say that I'm ignoring that fact. But, that's not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing, BY RAW, you cannot do minions. They break several 3e RAW rules. And, Andor and Storm Bringer, I know that you agree with me here because you admit to such. The fact that you have to invoke Rule 0 (which doesn't exactly say what you think it says in 3e) in order to do it shows you know I'm right.

Can you have 1 hp baddies in 3e? By RAW, no. By DM changing the rules - yes.

However, if you are changing the rules to get what you want, isn't that the same thing as having rules in place that give you what you want?

 

[Andor]

A house rule is RAW because of Rule 0? Try and make that fly in the Rules Forum. I triple-dog-dare ya.

Done. The consensus seems to be that the GM altering a creature's stats at whim is legit, although most feel that it should be done during encounter design and not fudged at the table. (Which I agree with in general.)

 

[Hussar]

Done. The consensus seems to be that the GM altering a creature's stats at whim is legit, although most feel that it should be done during encounter design and not fudged at the table. (Which I agree with in general.)

Heh, I reject your version of reality and submit my own:

Simply put: By the RAW, the DM is not required to follow the RAW. That does not make his houserules RAW.

YOu have a strange sense of consensus.

 

[hong]

You've apparently missed the many threads/posts where people are incredibly excited about the "freedom" 4e gives them, as if DMs haven't been handwaving rules/making up ad-hoc rules since, oh, 1974 or so.

Try to keep on-topic. We are talking about minions, not the many threads/posts where people are incredibly excited about the "freedom" 4E gives them, nor the many threads/posts where people go on undifferentiated rants about the other people being incredibly excited about the "freedom" 4E gives them, nor the fact that peanut butter is different to ice cream, nor indeed the price of tea in China.

The frack?

Hong, either stop posting late at night or send me whatever you're on, because this entire post made no sense, even by Hong non-sequiter standards.

It is very simple. Much of the earlier part of this thread was made up of various arguments about minions breaking suspenders of disbelief, dying after having cream pies thrown at them, the silliness of monsters like mammoths having 1 hp, and so on. But now, it appears that minions have been around since some obscure publication by some obscure author from some obscure company, and so these points of dispute can't have been very important after all. After all, if it was in 3E, and people were doing it all along anyway, the concept must be sound, right? So all it should take to get people happy and smiling again is for WotC to issue a statement saying yes, this was all done by someone else long ago, we were very naughty not to acknowledge it, and now can we all get on the minion boat please. And I don't know about you, but I like minion boats.

 

[hong]

Done. The consensus seems to be that the GM altering a creature's stats at whim is legit, although most feel that it should be done during encounter design and not fudged at the table. (Which I agree with in general.)

Nobody said it was not legit. The issue is whether it was in the rules.

Nobody ever claimed that rule 0 was illegitimate.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Done. The consensus seems to be that the GM altering a creature's stats at whim is legit, although most feel that it should be done during encounter design and not fudged at the table. (Which I agree with in general.)

It is legit, but still not RAW, as I understood it. Legit, because you can change the rules if you're the DM. Not RAW, because the Rules As Written do not contain the specific house rule the DM is making. Only the "right" to change something...

 

[pemerton]

But there is no difference. You are rolling a 'skill challenge' to shut off the damage that is taken on a somewhat random basis. It doesn't really matter whether it is a horde of angry orcs or one orc with the same hit points and same number of attacks.

<snip>

You are arguing that flavour text needs rules to support it. By definition, it is part of the story, not the rules. The only time I can see rules being needed for a story is in some story writing competition.

Just to be clear - are you claiming that there is no difference in the play experience one would get from playing an encounter with minions in 4e, and a variant of the same encounter in HeroWars in which the minions simply lend their APs to the real protagonist?

If that is what you are claiming, it is nonsense. Tactical movement is irrelevent in HeroWars. It is at the heart of the 4e play experience as far as combat is concerned. And to achieve this the minions have to be disaggregated from the boss and located on the battlemat.

As to whether or not rules are needed for a story - contrast Rolemaster, in which one story outcome of a combat between a PC and NPC swordsmen can be that the PC lost an arm and yet won the fight, with AD&D 1st ed, in which that is not a possible outcome (unless the NPC is wielding a sword of sharpness).

Other games - especially some indie games - obviously make the connection between rules and story much more intimate.

And yet, no matter how many times (one, ten, or a hundred) they are to receive damage from a miss-effect, it will never add up, but it will for the 2nd level Orc drudge right next to them. In effect, their hit points waver between one and infinity, depending on how well the player rolls their attack.

Their hit points don't "waver". You might want to say that, with every missed attack that would have dealt damage to a non-minion, their hit points grow. But that is not wavering, it is unidirectional.

Furthermore, given that every game session comes to an end, the hit point growth will always be to a finite amount. And given that, within 6 or so rounds it is almost certain that a fighter will cleave or otherwise kill the minion, I suggest that the upper limit to that growth will be somewhere shy of 1000 hit points (I haven't got enough examples of powers and damage in front of me to do any precise maths, but doubt that missed-attack damage is going to amount to more than 10 hits per round or so at low levels, or 50 hit points per round or so at high levels).