Minions are alien visitors from another kind of game

[N0Man]

I'm against the minions, personally. As I said before, a whole crowd of one-hit-kills isn't cinematic or awesome, it's filler.

Not cinematic? I have to strongly disagree there. Heroic action in movies constantly has a hero that just mows the grunts, meets the occasional tougher foe, and then has prolonged battles with a boss of some sort or another.

It happens in your cop or street vigilante movie where you have thugs who get knocked out in one punch, and then the hereo moves onto prolonged fight with a kingpin or his body guard.

It happens in the sci-fi films where a hero blasts down troopers or dispatches them in a single slash of a lightsaber, and makes his way to a confrontation with an evil jedi.

It happens in fantasy films, where your dwarf, human, and elven heroes are killing off dozens of orc foes, often in one well placed blow per orc, and then being confronted with a cave troll.

If 4E's system doesn't feel cinematic to you, I wonder what kind of cinema you've seen.

It's clearly WotC's intention to make the game feel heroic from the start. Minions aren't simply creatures with only 1 HP, but the grunts who are lesser in will, constitution, morale, and endurance compared to the heroes, and who will be dispatched in a single solid strike by the Heroes. "1 HP; a missed attack never damages a Minion" is just a simple easy to follow mechanic to represent that.

And again, if you don't like it, don't use it.

 

[ozprince]

Minions do make the Dragon breath weapon mighty fine.

 

[quindia]

I love the image of swordsmen tearing through waves of soldiers to get to the main bad guys. My problem with the no damage on a miss comes with spells. Many spells cause half damage and minor effects even on a miss. I think if minions are immune to these, I will either ignore the rule or avoid using minions in my games.

 

[N0Man]

Personally, I find epic and exciting battles aren't when the players have to kill a whole lot of enemies. I find things to be MUCH more awesome when there's only a few enemies, but all of them radically different and powerful.

Well that's your preference, and you're entitled to it. What I find interesting is variety, and players not always knowing what to expect or how things are going to work until they are in the battle.

I want my encounters to run the entire range. I want to do encounters of all the following:

* Big Bad Evil Guy as a Solo encounter
* Elites with various mixes of normal and minion henchman.
* Groups of Normals maybe mixed with minions.
* Some normals and a few minions... then time delayed a few more minions... and a few more... How many of these guys are there!?
* A group of 20 or so Minions flooding at the party at once.

Minions just give more options.

However, I'm not really sure what the point of debating this is though. It's a matter of preference, and if you don't like them I don't think that anything we say is going to make you suddenly like them. People have their minds made up one way or another. And if you don't like them, you can run your own games without them.

Or if you simply object to certain types of creatures being used as Minions (such as Orcs or something), then only use Minions sparingly, such as when being swarmed by weak and fragile skeletons or something.

 

[hong]

I'm against the minions, personally. As I said before, a whole crowd of one-hit-kills isn't cinematic or awesome, it's filler. Most of my players would be bored rotten if they had to run through a crowd of red shirts.

Personally, I find epic and exciting battles aren't when the players have to kill a whole lot of enemies. I find things to be MUCH more awesome when there's only a few enemies, but all of them radically different and powerful.

The Inverse Ninja Law requires both ends of the spectrum for proper functioning. The huge mobs of incompetent foes throw the singular, lethal BBEGs into sharp relief.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

I love the image of swordsmen tearing through waves of soldiers to get to the main bad guys. My problem with the no damage on a miss comes with spells. Many spells cause half damage and minor effects even on a miss. I think if minions are immune to these, I will either ignore the rule or avoid using minions in my games.

And what happens when you screw up and put a really high level minion in a group for npc's to fight for whatever reason and the pc's kill it with a "miss"? BUKU XP! I prefer to keep the no death on a miss. Just describe them as singed, beat up, bruised, worn down, etc.

 

[N0Man]

I love the image of swordsmen tearing through waves of soldiers to get to the main bad guys. My problem with the no damage on a miss comes with spells. Many spells cause half damage and minor effects even on a miss. I think if minions are immune to these, I will either ignore the rule or avoid using minions in my games.

True, but many special melee attacks cause damage on misses too. I don't think you should describe the spell as doing nothing, just not enough. Just like in the melee example.

This will even allow for the occassional super-minion, who takes half damage and reduced damage repeatedly from attack after attack that misses. Some people might be bothered by that, but I think that's fantastic. A minion who has been repeatedly scorched, grazed, nicked, splashed, but still hasn't received that one single solid blow to take him down. A hero among minions!

 

[N0Man]

And what happens when you screw up and put a really high level minion in a group for npc's to fight for whatever reason and the pc's kill it with a "miss"? BUKU XP! I prefer to keep the no death on a miss. Just describe them as singed, beat up, bruised, worn down, etc.

This isn't a real concern anyway. If you screwed up and put in a high level minion, it would have to be absurdly high for the xp value to matter much.

A level 13 Minion has the same XP as a level 1 Elite. Even a level 18 Minion still has the XP value equal to a standard Level 1 encounter's budget.

Besides, if you are putting Minions that are 15 or 20 levels higher than the players, it's not the game system that is at fault.

I don't think that the reasoning behind this was to prevent high level minions to be taken out, but rather just to make sure that a spell or ability wasn't a guranteed one-shot kill on anything, even a minion.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

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.

This, I believe, is the heart of why minions exist. This is why they are made of win and awesome.

Minions work great in Feng Shui, Exalted and Scion. Which just happen to be three of my favorite games to play. Coincidence? I think NOT.

 

[ForbidenMaster]

Minions die in one hit not because they are weak but because it is simply their time to go. If they are lucky enough to have survived an attack then obviously it isn't their time just then. However, with that said, it doesnt make sense if a noticeably week monster, that is one of very low level, can survive a high level attack that would normally kill it on a miss if it didnt follow the rules of minions.

So on the subject of a kill on a miss, IMO if a miss would normally NOT kill a monster of equal level then it should NOT kill a minion of that same level. However if a miss WOULD kill a monster of equal level then the miss SHOULD kill the minion.