Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Blake" data-source="post: 4193990" data-attributes="member: 57267">LOL, it took 30 posts to get to a red shirt comment <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Really, though, there should be NOTHING that tells the players who is and who is not a minion.There may be clues, and the players might make some accurate guesses, but I like to think of it as if the monsters/bad guys were real in a real world. If so, minions would not call themselves minions, or think of themselves as minions. In battle, they will still use the best equipment available to them, and use the best tactics they can. All this would make it hard to tell a minion from a non-minion.Cinematically, sometimes it's obvious. When Han and Leia led a bunch of ewoks against the imperial forces, those imps could be fairly certain that Han and Leia were heroes and the ewoks were minions. But, if there had been an ewok hero, some elite ewok with levels of fighter, then he would still look and act like all the other ewoks and would be indistinguishable from those ewoks. After a few rounds though, when most of the ewoks are bouncing spears and rocks off of storm trooper armor and barely causing any damage, but that one ewok over there has skewered a half dozen stormtroopers and is standing on their heap of plastic-armored corpses, the imps would most likely figure out their mistake and re-evaluate their initial impression of that particular ewok.A similar situation in Lord of the Rings. The orcs and cave troll bust through the door and find a few humans, an elf, a dwarf, and some hobbit minions. They naturally assume that everyone over 3' tall is heroic, and almost immediately the elf, dwarf, and all the humans start massacring them to prove their initial assumption was right. But then those little hobbit minions start killing them too. Enter the cave troll. He eventually decides to kill a pesky minion, and stabs him with a giant spear. But lo, that little minion doesn't die. Maybe those hobbits weren't minions after all.My point is, some things that look like minions might not be, and some things that look like heroes might really be minions.Putting them all in red shirts, or speaking less figuratively and simply telling the players "these guys are minions, but these guys over here are not minions" would be a mistake.It eliminates the mystery for the players, it reduces much of the strategy of the encounter, and it's unfair to the minions themselves - they don't think of themselves as minions at all.Not to mention, it lacks even a basic sense of verisimilitude. Might as well tell the players which enemies are pawns, which are knights, biships, rooks, queens, or king. Hey, if a minion gets all the way to the back of the PCs side of the battlefield, does it get to promote to a heroic queen?</blockquote>

Verification