Minions are alien visitors from another kind of game

[Mal Malenkirk]

Minions are 2FS-gritty monsters living in a 4FS-heroic game. They ignore half the game's variables. IMO, this is bad. Choosing gritty or heroic fantasy are equally valid choices, but once you've made that choice I don't think mixing them together works.

I have to disagree here; Minions aren't gritty. Your theorization is interesting but fallacious in its insistance that monsters need to follow the same rules of advancement for the gritty/heroic status to be maintained.

Gritty only involves the PC. For a game to be gritty, the PCs needs to face death in no more than a handful of attacks. Shadowrun, for example, is fairly gritty.

If the PCs are as tough as D&D 4e PCs are, gritty flies of the window no matter whether they only face equally tough monsters or hordes of minions.

In 3e, several monsters die in one hit. And commoners, who are 98% of the population, are all killed in one blow. It doesn't make the game gritty in the least.

On the contrary, minions are pure creation of the heroic style of gameplay. Every single game featuring minions rules I can think of is in the heroic genre. Fengshui and Mutant&Mastermind, for example. On the other hand there is no minions in Shadowrun or Riddle of Steel, nor any gritty game I can think of. Closest I can think of is WoD, but then this game isn't nearly as gritty as it pretends to be.

 

[hong]

Listening to the DM go on for 30 seconds about how "he goes 'ouch'" doesn't mean I've actually accomplished anything.

And if I've blown my daily or my per-encounter on this guy? Only to have to do absolutely nothing?

Yeah, I'm not really satisfied by DM verbosity.

If I've used my daily or per-encounter on someone, then yes, I expect the DM to narrate it appropriately. This can be either to invoke an "oh yeah" response if it worked, or an "oh " response if it failed. A significant resource use deserves a significant in-game description.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

Don't get me wrong; I do worry about this set of rules. I don't think anything in-game is going to tell the PCs "hey, these are minions; they only have 1 HP" and break the immersion. However, my players' awareness of the minion rule may cause a break in immersion and that does worry me. Hopefully, it won't be a problem. If it ends up a problem, I will come up with a houserule that handles the problem.

I think you'll find that it's not a problem. I've run games where the players knew about minion style rules beforehand or learned of it afterwards and they both really liked it. It adds a lot of excitement to big combats without bogging down the game to the speed of a snail.

 

[I'm A Banana]

A significant resource use deserves a significant in-game description.

It also deserves significant in-game effect.

Otherwise, we've got a lot of binary back into combat.

For something so trivial to be immune to the effect is kind of mind-badgering.

 

[RangerWickett]

I enjoy a narrativist game, so the bad guys should die when it makes for the best story. The characters aren't aware that they get stronger by killing things; nor that they have more magic 'hit points' that slough off when people stab them. Rather, they know that they've figured out how to survive by the skin of their teeth, and they've learned new skills through practice and study.

It's just part of the cinematic genre that some people get in the heroes' way for a few seconds before being dispatched, and these folks might pose some minor threat. You've got to have disposable mooks in order to have hit points, because hit points allow you to have the fights with the important guy last long enough to be interesting.

And with the right players, meaning the ones I like best, I'm totally comfortable giving the bad guy extra HP so he gets a chance to do some cool stuff too. Otherwise the fight with him isn't memorable, and I've wasted the players' time with a pointless villain.

For me the point of getting together with my friends for this game is to tell collaborative stories that are worth remembering. While occasionally one-shotting a bad-ass is memorable, generally a little finagling the rules can help make for better stories.

 

[brassbaboon]

I've only just begun reading about "minions" and like a lot of the other 4e rules, I don't like them because they seem to be an arbitrary means for the game designers to solve a problem the easiest way possible. They want a particular effect in the game (large attack by a horde of easily dispatched creatures) and they've manipulated the rules arbitrarily to allow the effect to happen.

Since I pretty much roll my own campaigns from scratch, I doubt I will ever use minions. If I want a mob of low-level goblins to engage the party so the ogre mage can get a few spells off, then I'll send a mob of low-level goblins. I don't need to manufacture some bizarre shadow-orc that is actually even easier to kill than a goblin. As far as keeping track of the damage that is done to the goblins by AoE spells or other things, hey, you'd be surprised how easy it is to develop some quick and dirty average effect responses and just plow through the encounter.

I've done this in 3.5e and in older versions for years. When the rules say the party doesn't get any XP for fighting the low-level horde, I just make up my own XP based on how hard the party had to fight to get through them. I am the DM after all.

 

[Ipissimus]

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.

-sighs- Start the combat with the BBEG, Guardsmen and PCs in the fight. Roll the dice for the BBEG, (probably a solo) and use the Guardsmen as redshirts. Severely maul any PC that gets in the way.

SHOW don't tell. More impact on the players. If you've ever played Baldur's Gate, think Gorion vs Serevok... or any number of the villains in in that series. Or the dude from the second game that nuked an endless supply of teleporting wizards after crushing an invasion of Rogues almost single handed.

 

[Ltheb Silverfrond]

It appears to me that the whole 'immune to misses' thing is to prevent players from metagaming. I haven't seen a power (yet) that, on a miss, would kill even a first level character every time. By the time the players are fighting, say, orc minions, they will not be powerful enough to one-shot normal orcs on misses. So, If you attack and miss and I say the undamaged orc Dies, you question why it had 1-8 hp, when his skirmisher friend had like 50.
Yes, this does sort of rob players of the effects of their powers, (especially daily powers) but it's a tradeoff between metagaming and fairness. Players already seem to get so many advantages in 4E that cutting the monsters a little slack here and there doesn't seem (to me) too out of line.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

People rarely if ever notice the nameless red shirts that get in their way between them and the BBEG. It's not because they're a part of the cinematic feel. It's because they're filler.

 

[Imaro]

One problem I forsee having with minions is the fact that a player can easily burn a daily or encounter power on a minion. Now some will say in reality a character wouldn't be able to tell a minion from a regular monster type, but then alot of per-day and per-encounter abilities should, in reality, be attemptable and even successful by a trained character more than once per day or encounter.

Anyway I just see this as leading to unexpected TPK's or even back to 15min adventuring days through what is essentially an unidentifiable wildcard that causes PC's to waste more powerful abilities, especially when mixed with non-minions. Add in the fact that the damage from a miss can't kill a minion and there's a very real chance PC's can accidentally mistake a minion for a more powerful creature. I guess I would feel better about this if it was in some way a strategy or tactics based problem...but it's really just a a guessing game unless players memorize the MM.