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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 4221990" data-attributes="member: 49613">I agree with your post pretty much without qualification, up to this point.  At this point, my agreement becomes qualified.I can accept that within a fantasy world, certain people are picked out as people of destiny and so have greater potential (for triumph and tragedy) than an average person... in fact, that seems to have been the view of some cultures upon which traditional fantasy cultural tropes are based.  No problem.  I can even buy, after having certain insights brought to my attention, that certain denizens of the world are "minions"... peons in the aristocracy of Fate.But what I need at least, I suppose, is a "metaconsistency"... that if someone has 1 hit point (whatever the physical, metaphysical or cosmic meaning of that status) then they always have that, at least until their fortunes improve somehow.  Sure, I know very well the importance of DM fiat.  And I know that what we're discussing here is fantasy.  But there has to be some substrate of consistency in which those fiats and fantasies inhere... that substrate is the internal logic of the game world which is represented by the rules.That has always been the case with D&D.  As far as I can tell, that has been what gaming was since '81 when I started, and it was before then as well.  I very much hope that 4E still supports that approach to gaming, because it's bascially the sine qua non of me actually caring enough about the game to play it.  And I don't think that's too much to ask.I play in a semi-regular D20 Babylon 5 game.  Now, that's a game based on a show where starships move at the speed of plot and the whole thing was very cinematic, preachy, used story structure and had transparently manufactured sets (great show, though).  But the Ref does an excellent job not only of not railroading the group (which is really tough when they have easy access to FTL travel and what the Ref might be called upon to improv is virtually limitless) but of making the world feel "real".  There is a basic sense of consistency (or at least metaconsistency) such that you feel like you're interacting with something that is not merely a cardboard prop, but a thing with space and depth.  If that 'sense of reality', manufactured as it is, were not present, there'd be no reason to continue playing the game.So, to bring it back around to minions: I can accept that, at least in a fantasy world, some guys are metaphysical losers.  But I can't accept that they oscillate from "loser" to "winner" based upon their physical proximity to the PCs.  A guy is either a minion, or he isn't... and if he stops being a minion, that would have to be subsequent to doing or experiencing something of comparable importance to the status he is gaining.</blockquote>

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