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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4214944" data-attributes="member: 42582">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).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 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.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 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.</blockquote>

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