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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zinovia" data-source="post: 4517882" data-attributes="member: 57373">There are some big differences in 4E that preclude handling it in quite the same way you were doing in 3.x, but thanks for your post.  The wizard has low level area attacks that would *never* take out a normal creature at full health, but that are designed to pop minions.  Cleave now just does STR damage to the 2ndary target; it doesn't grant a second normal attack.I've used minions already in my family's 4E game, and while I know they are supposed to die quickly, they seem to be a little too easy to kill.  This will only get worse when we get into more effects that do automatic damage.I agree that an effective way to use minions is at range, but most of them have few, if any, ranged attacks.  If the minions spread out and use the terrain, they might be able to stay alive for a bit, but eventually they will need to get into melee and become cannon fodder as they were intended.  If you can get them into the midst of the party, the wizard can't really drop an area spell on them without frying her group members, and they will have a chance to get in a couple actions before dying.  Some of our combats have gone just that way, showing that the mechanic can work at lower levels.  From what I have seen minions do tend to encourage metagame thinking, and I'm not sure I like that aspect of them.  Perhaps I need to view minions as the unlucky peons that fate has decreed will die today, and not distinguish them as much from their more-normal brethren when describing them to the players.  Perhaps it won't be much of an issue once we stop fighting kobolds (KotS), since the players haven't yet learned what a lot of other minion types look yet, so they won't automatically know who the minions are.  Ignoring miss damage is a weirdness that will irritate players who drop a big daily on a group, only to see some of them ignore the "half damage on a miss" portion due to being minions.  Automatic damage shouldn't be taking them out in a single hit either.  Those are the main issues I want to address with some house rule or another.  The easiest way to do that is to adopt the rule (as suggested in this thread):1) Any targeted hit on a minion will destroy it. 2) Any miss damage or automatic damage to a minion will bloody it.  3) Any damage to a bloodied minion will kill it.  I still like the zombies getting a last swipe in before they die, so may adopt the zombie rule suggested by previous posters (fall to the ground, save to get back up, otherwise get in one last attack against an adjacent foe and die).  Since the second target of a cleave attack doesn't require a to-hit roll, it is automatic damage in a way.  I can see players using that to take out a minion with higher defenses, so that they don't have to make that attack roll.  If the second target of cleave is a minion, should it be killed or bloodied?  How have people been handling that aspect in your games?  I'm still contemplating the idea of a damage threshold, so that really low damage values won't kill a minion (just bloody it), but where to set that number is the big question.</blockquote>

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