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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7947888" data-attributes="member: 7006">I actually liked the idea of minions as a concept and used them relatively frequently when I ran 4E.  Especially at low-levels in the game, the minions rule was a time-saver.  The only thing that I eventually came to have problems with was that as monster CR / HP got higher, the disparity between the HP of a regular version of the monster and the minion version just felt wrong after a while.A "powerful" orc and a "minion" orc were close enough in HP that the idea of "one-shotting" an orc (via the minion mechanic) felt good.  Cutting through large groups of them did make the PCs feel powerful.  But when you started facing off against things like ogres, hill giants, or even more powerful creatures... the fact that a party of PCs would need to hit a regular version over and over and over, round after round after round again to kill it, but a "minion" version was still one-shottable... just didn't feel the same or sit as well with me.Had there been a very distinguishable narrative reason as we described them as to why these specific ogres could be one-shotted (they were non-combatants, they were children etc.) it might not have felt so weird.  But that usually wasn't the case.  Instead you were presented with a perfectly typical warband encounter of supposed ogre warriors, but when you then faced off against them... some of them had these huge pools of HP that you had to slowly whittle away round after round, but others dropped in a single shot.  When that happened I no longer felt the same feeling of being powerful and carving through large swathes of enemies... instead I felt like the game was gimping my enemies and thus my achievement for no logical reason.  A couple creatures requiring 10 to 12 hits to kill alongside a few that only needed 1 hit was just too disparate for my sense of reality. So I can understand the desire to just use standard HP totals for low-level enemies to achieve the same effect.  If you can cleave through goblins hordes by one-shotting their normal HP level but then sometimes facing off against a boss that requires only two or three hits?  That feels okay and I'm happy to go with it.  I just don't want the separation to be too great.</blockquote>

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