Minion Idea: Using Immediate Interrupts to avoid damage...

[Cor Azer]

I've been thinking about having a fairly large encounter for my 3rd level party, roughly consisting of pairs of goblins riding boars (1 set for each PC). Unfortunately, unless I make the encounter really tough and worth a lot of XP, I pretty much need to make the goblins or the boars minions (or both); much as I like the idea of minions and use them liberally, I don't know if I want their mechanics in this particular encounter.

So I was thinking... what if I made the goblins level 3 minions and the boars level 3 brutes of some sort, but gave the boars a mount ability: Deep Saddle (Immediate interrupt, when a rider is hit by an attack; at-will): Reduce damage against the rider to 0. Instead the rider is pushed 1 and knocked prone. I figure the fight should be around a level 4 encounter for the PCs.

This allows the minions to possibly take multiple hits, but only if they can keep getting back on the boar, and only one of the boar's two riders can be protected per turn, yet it doesn't really require any more bookkeeping than the regular minion rules. Teamwork by the PCs will likely be needed to take them down, which certainly isn't a problem in my mind.

For those who don't like the minion rules as implemented, but do like the idea of mooks, has anyone thought about using such immediate interrupts to reduce damage for them, whether in mount form, or simply built into the monster? Can anyone think of any gotchas that I may be missing?

 

[RangerWickett]

How often are the boars themselves going to attack?

I'd stat out each goblin-boar pair as one creature, perhaps with two styles of attacks depending on if it's charging or whatever. Each critter effectively has half the hit points of the whole package, and only one of them can attack per round. When they target the goblin, the HP is deducted from the goblin, and it works the same with the boar.

When either is out of hit points, the pair loses the powers of that creature. So if the goblin gets killed, the boar can't throw spears, and if the boar goes down, the goblin loses its charge power and has a lower speed. If the party tries to knock one off, say they have a power to let them stay in the saddle, and instead the entire pair is pushed, slid, knocked prone, etc.

Area attacks only deal damage once to the duo. Um, I think that's all the rules concerns. Basically, don't treat the boars as "monsters." Treat them as equipment, sort of like how it is for PCs. A PC rider has to share his actions with his mount.

 

[Cor Azer]

How often are the boars themselves going to attack?

Actually, the intention was to have the boars attacking quite frequently, mostly just running around and charging/goring stuff. One goblin rider would be doing archery stuff (spending his move action to light his arrows on fire), while the other would be trying to spear stuff (using a ready action to attack when the boar runs past a PC).

I was thinking the boars would actually be the major threat of the fight; I intend the goblins to be annoying, and not simply mooks, but not the same threat as their hulking mounts.

I'd stat out each goblin-boar pair as one creature, perhaps with two styles of attacks depending on if it's charging or whatever. Each critter effectively has half the hit points of the whole package, and only one of them can attack per round. When they target the goblin, the HP is deducted from the goblin, and it works the same with the boar.

When either is out of hit points, the pair loses the powers of that creature. So if the goblin gets killed, the boar can't throw spears, and if the boar goes down, the goblin loses its charge power and has a lower speed. If the party tries to knock one off, say they have a power to let them stay in the saddle, and instead the entire pair is pushed, slid, knocked prone, etc.

Area attacks only deal damage once to the duo. Um, I think that's all the rules concerns. Basically, don't treat the boars as "monsters." Treat them as equipment, sort of like how it is for PCs. A PC rider has to share his actions with his mount.

A PC rider shares with his mount, but I seem to recall the DMG suggesting that mounts count towards the XP for the encounter, particularly if they're providing more than just extra movement. And there's a similar note that if a PC has a mount of significance (again, more than just movement) that its XP be added to the encounter total to take it into account.

Combining the goblin riders with their boar mount as one creature could also become messy if I have the goblins scrambling onto different boars each turn. I'm expecting the goblins to be knocked off fairly easily, but the boars may keep moving away (or the goblins may be knocked further away*), so to protect themselves, the land-bound goblins may move to get on a different boar, particularly later in the combat when some of the goblins have been killed and the boars aren't carrying their full complement of two riders.

* The fight is also going to be taking place during a bit of a goat stampede as a hazard. The goats will be running in random directions, hitting PC and monster alike, and pushing them all over the place.

Now, I admit I might be planning the combat to be more complicated than it needs to be, but I think it'd be cool, and I hope my players might find the frantic happens to be fun (at least on such a one-off encounter; I certainly wouldn't try something like this is every fight).