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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4217711" data-attributes="member: 1054">The same reason for all the head-go-splodey rules in 4e.Game balance.If minions die on a miss, then any 'roomsweeper' spell like fireball kills all the minions, no need to worry about you roll. Anyone with AE 'damage on miss' spells will just use their lowest level, otherwise useless, spells to wipe out the highest level minions. Thus, because Fighting Minions Is Fun, they have to be given wholly illogical, wholly inconsistent special abilities to keep them from being cleaned out by any character with access to damage-on-miss abilities, so that the Defenders can get to do THEIR shtick and stop the Onrushing Hordes.You know, I already own Feng Shui.About the only way one can make even the tiniest bit of sense out of this mess is to surrender all pretense that the game is simulating or modeling anything, and that, outside of their encounter with the PCs, minions have "normal" hit points and don't die when they stub their toe, but that "Minion" is a dramatic label, that the same individual who is an orc minion today might be a non-minion tomorrow if his role changes for some reason. "Minions" don't exist in the world; creatures are given "minion" status when the plot demands it, and they all dodge the fireball that singes the higher hit point chief in their midst because, well, the plot demands it. It's 100% handwaving, with no possible "realistic" justification, even with the amazingly loose definition of "realism" required for high fantasy adventure. Even M&M, which likewise has Minion rules, didn't have them be magically immune to area affects. (OTOH, there was no 'half damage on miss' in MM, that I can recall; you ended up doing much lower damage, on average, with AE powers because AE raised the power cost so much.)</blockquote>

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