Minions are alien visitors from another kind of game

[Irda Ranger]

Actually they're using three of the factors: their BAB, Defenses, and Damage output all scale, only their hit points don't.

Of course they do. If they didn't they wouldn't pose a threat to the PCs.

They could have written the HP calculation for Minions to be equal to the assumed base damage for PCs of a given level for an at-will attack and achieved the same effect, but at the cost of introducing a weird formula into the mix. The other option is to keep things simple and give Minions 1/4 the HP of a monster of given level, but this potentially negates the benefits of minions (for a DM) in that you're conceivably tracking a dozen monsters with 1-2 remaining hit points after a low-roll AoE attack.

You mean just like they double HP for Elites and double again (or is it 5x?) for Solos? Yes, I know. HP is the easiest tool available to the 4E devs to create these kinds of monsters. I get that.

Maybe it's just that I grocked the purpose of minions pretty quickly,

Don't be too quick to pat yourself on the back there. I grok it just fine; I don't like it.

As for the rest of your post I'm afraid I don't know what you're getting at, so I don't have a reply. Care to put that another way?

 

[Irda Ranger]

This is the first time I heard the argument that mooks/minions be equated with GRITTY. The minion concept comes straight out of cinematic stories (superheroes, Indiana Jones, Hong Kong action flicks..)

It's all a question of point of view: gritty for who? Combat vs. PCs is pretty darn gritty for the Minion.

 

[Ipissimus]

Minions have their uses, even in a gritty campaign. On one side, sure, you can use them to make the players feel all bad-ass. On the other side, you can also use them to show how bad-ass the villain is.

Take this hypothetical situation. Cries of 'THE KING HAS BEEN ASSASSINATED' lure the PCs into a room along with 10-20 guardsmen. BBEG is standing over the King's corpse covered in blood. The PCs and guardsmen face off against him alone... and in the first round he kills off all the guardsmen. Watch PCs crap their pants.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

Minions have their uses, even in a gritty campaign. On one side, sure, you can use them to make the players feel all bad-ass. On the other side, you can also use them to show how bad-ass the villain is.

Take this hypothetical situation. Cries of 'THE KING HAS BEEN ASSASSINATED' lure the PCs into a room along with 10-20 guardsmen. BBEG is standing over the King's corpse covered in blood. The PCs and guardsmen face off against him alone... and in the first round he kills off all the guardsmen. Watch PCs crap their pants.

It's a great example how to effectively use minions to set the scene.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Irda: I think you have an excellent handle on the game-and-statistic-aspects of this issue. I'm not sure that I understand why you're worried about the melding of the gritty (they don't feel that gritty to me, but whatever!) and the superheroic; can you elaborate on that?

I don't like the melding of 4FS and 2FS. They're entirely different types of games which have entirely different rules to support them. Take the example of a Ranger power that does Dex on a Miss. That power really reads "You do Dex on a Miss, unless your opponent is a Minion, in which case you do no damage." You need a special case exception to every rule in D&D that involves HP (which, in D&D, is a whole lot of rules). This probably increase the number of rules you have to know by 30% or more - just to cover the special case of "unless the target is a Minion."

So, there's two things I don't like about that:
1. It's more work. I don't want to do more work unless there's a good enough reason. "Good enough" is obviously subjective and you may feel it is. At the moment, I don't.

2. There's a rule-symmetry problem that's bothering me, and this thread is part of my exercise to nail it down. I need things to "make sense" within the context of the game. It doesn't "make sense" for a normal human to fight a Dragon with a sword, but within the D&D context of heroic fantasy it "makes sense" (to me, at least). I've played Classic, AD&D, AD&D 2nd, 3E and 3.5E, and everything has always had HP. I don't have an emotional attachment to the concept (I've played other games without them), but now we have a single system where some creatures have HP and some don't. It bothers me that such a fundamental concept doesn't apply to everyone. It's like saying they don't have an AC.

I'm going to sleep on this (it's 1:15 AM here). Maybe I'll be more cogent tomorrow.

Would seeing it in play help? Is this a deep-seated belief or a momentary reaction?

Can't say yet, obviously. I'll let you know in four months.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Take this hypothetical situation. Cries of 'THE KING HAS BEEN ASSASSINATED' lure the PCs into a room along with 10-20 guardsmen. BBEG is standing over the King's corpse covered in blood. The PCs and guardsmen face off against him alone... and in the first round he kills off all the guardsmen. Watch PCs crap their pants.

Those aren't Minions - they're plot elements. Minions roll dice. Would you roll any dice for the guards in this scene? I wouldn't.

 

[AZRogue]

The minion doesn't have to be believable to the DM, only to the PCs. Since they aren't looking "under the hood" they have no idea that some of the monsters they're facing will die with one blow.

Haven't you ever, as a DM, adjusted your monsters' hitpoints on the fly, after an encounter started to go bad due to bad luck or whatever on the PCs' part? This is the same sort of thing, only before hand.

Hell, for my epic boss monsters I would not even give them hit points. I would let the PCs hit him until it FELT about right, according to the flow of the encounter, and then let the next blow drop him. Best BBEG fights ever. The anti-minion. Just don't tell my players. They need their illusions.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

I don't like the melding of 4FS and 2FS. They're entirely different types of games which have entirely different rules to support them. Take the example of a Ranger power that does Dex on a Miss. That power really reads "You do Dex on a Miss, unless your opponent is a Minion, in which case you do no damage." You need a special case exception to every rule in D&D that involves HP (which, in D&D, is a whole lot of rules). This probably increase the number of rules you have to know by 30% or more - just to cover the special case of "unless the target is a Minion."

I disagree. The minion's hp in the statblock is all you need to reference.

 

[Boarstorm]

It's not a lot of new rules, it's one rule -- Minions take no damage on a miss.

You need a special case exception to every rule in D&D that

Yeah, it's almost like it's an exception-based rules system, huh?

Personally, I think a lot of the problems you're having is based on the system using different building blocks for monsters and PCs. Now there are arguments for and against both points of view, and once I would have agreed, but Charles Ryan (I believe) wrote a rather persuasive blog on the subject and I have to say -- I'm convinced.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

Personally, I think a lot of the problems you're having is based on the system using different building blocks for monsters and PCs. Now there are arguments for and against both points of view, and once I would have agreed, but Charles Ryan (I believe) wrote a rather persuasive blog on the subject and I have to say -- I'm convinced.

I have to say, having done both... I prefer exception based monster creation. It's a lot more interesting for me as a DM, easier to create monsters that fit the encounter/theme I'm trying to get across to the players, and keeps the players on their toes since they can't do any nasty meta-gaming to defeat the creatures easily based on name or appearance alone.