Minions and hps

[Aenghus]

Minions are supposed to die in droves, thats one of their major points. They aren't *supposed" to be a serious challenge.

It is true that they can be unsatiisfying for referees to run if they labour under the misapprehension that they actually have to be dangerous to the PCs all by themselves. But the threat should be the non-minion monsters in the encounter.

And just like magic items in adventures are supposed to be modified to suit the particular PC group, so also should the monster composition of encounters. If a party can easily deal with minions, this should be taken into account. Make more of the minions into artillery, keep them spread out, have them come in waves, substitute more normal monsters, reduce the xp for them.

The minion rules have been balanced to make controllers particularly effective in dealing with them. House-ruling minions may have unexpected side-effects on class and role balance. Reducing the numbers of minions occuring may impact adversely on the play experience of some wizard builds.

 

[Stalker0]

Minions are supposed to die in droves, thats one of their major points. They aren't *supposed" to be a serious challenge.

That's not really true. Minions have XP, and so an encounter of minions and normal creatures that adds up to 500 XP should be about the same difficulty as some elites that add up to 500 XP.

The complaint people have is that a level 1 encounter with minions against a level 1 party is far harder than a level 20 party against level 20 minions, due to the prevalence of automatic damage and larger area effects.

My personal take on it is to lower xp for higher level minions, so you have more of them per encounter. If that doesn't work, then I'm a fan of either of these options.

1) Auto damage provokes a saving throw. Fail and die.
2) Auto damage bloodied you, next autodamage kills you.

 

[James McMurray]

Minions are supposed to die in droves, thats one of their major points. They aren't *supposed" to be a serious challenge.

The books do not agree with your stance. The designers (or at least some of them) also disagree, as evidenced by the recent epic podcast.

 

[KarinsDad]

The minion rules have been balanced to make controllers particularly effective in dealing with them. House-ruling minions may have unexpected side-effects on class and role balance. Reducing the numbers of minions occuring may impact adversely on the play experience of some wizard builds.

Doubtful on both counts.

WotC put out a brand new 1.0 version of a product and called it 4E. Just like every other 1.0 version of a product, it does have design bugs. It's a bad assumption to make that WotC is omnicient and have completely balanced every rule.

The fact is that the minion rules and the skill challenge rules (and some powers and some magic items) are very balance suspect according to many people who have played the game. But, not to fear. WotC will put out version 4.5 in 3 to 5 years to fix it.

 

[keterys]

Aside: I think it'd help minions' case a lot if more were just better designed to actually do something.

Things like death attacks, ranged attacks, really potent melee attacks (ghoul minions being able to immobilize can make a big difference), etc.

 

[Aristotle]

I experimented with alternate minion rules at my last session. The rule that was used...

• Crit a minion = Dead
• Hit a minion = Bloodied
• Hit a Bloodied minion = Save
  • Save Roll 1-9 = dead
  • Save Roll 10-19 = still alive
  • Save Roll 20 = still alive, and no longer bloodied.

The results? Minions were a little more fun with very little additional book-keeping. They got some lucky save rolls though and stayed up way longer than I feel a minion should. I'll be reverting to the concept of hitting a bloodied minion is automatically a kill.

Oh... and bloodied minions make minion heavy fights a little more fun for characters with powers or items that depend on the bloody condition. That's a big plus for me.

 

[Ourph]

I've been experimenting with giving minions DR equal to 1/2 their level. It keeps bookkeeping the same as normal minion rules but makes higher level minions slightly harder to "pop" and therefore a little more balanced in terms of XP awards IMO.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I really have no problems with minions going down in one hit, but I have a problem with auto-kill from flaming spheres and other auto-damage effects. To me it makes it too easy to kill them. I want the characters to have to expend effort to kill them, or at least roll the dice, not just kill them in a way that looks almost accidental. A save sounds good, or perhaps making a regular roll to hit them with an automatic damage effect.

Thoughts?