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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 4218670" data-attributes="member: 32164">Ah, I misunderstood which two-factors you felt remained in play. Partially, I think that's because minion damage escalates alongside their ability to hit and avoid being hit. The only thing that does not escalate is their ability to take damage. In essence, minions are creatures that don't obey the ablative nature of hit points.I see. So you would have been totally happy with a "minion template" that you could apply to a given creature. Such a template would, say, cut said creature's hit points to 1/4 of normal, halve the damage (and normalize the result to a constant number).As I pointed out with the orc examples, with the exception of the hit point situation, this is, effectively, all a minion is.Ah. But see, here's the thing. I already know what the more elegant solution is.* The problem with it is that it introduces ugly kludges that hurt the game's ability to properly model other areas.  So your point is that minions are created by altering the rules. Okay. I assume the second part is that there is a more elegant solution to characters that provide a reasonable threat but can still be taken out in one hit. You're right. But it involves changing the hit point system.The more "elegant" solution to the "stormtrooper problem" has already been done. You get it by replacing the hit point system with another system for tracking damage, such as the one from Mutants & Masterminds. Then minions are creatures which automatically fail their damage save.That's because the aesthetic gap here is one that not everyone sees. Again, you seem bothered by the game's interpretation of how "hit points" work. Characterizing them as "an abstract measure of one's ability to avoid taking serious injury" seems to bother you, and many others, who still seem insistent on the fact that metagame constructs like hit points must be observable to a character in the game world. The contention is that Bob can tell or observe the hit point damage a particular type of attack does. This is, again, predicated on the notion that "hit points" are quantifiable in the game world, as opposed to in the game.Let me explain again. Most of the time, in hand-to-hand combat, the result is death or serious injury, and there's no way to predict who will win. The master swordsman is just as dead when an apprentice stabs him in the lung as when his fellow master does it. The former is less likely to happen, but it can happen.There are games that model this well. Riddle of Steel is one. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is another. Heck, Shadowrun isn't too bad at it, nor is 1st-level in Third Edition D&D. The problem is that, like the real world, systems like this are very hard on characters (read: lethal). They tend to die - unless they get lucky. Moreover, these systems are fairly bad at making characters who are tough enough to face monsters like dragons, giants, beholders and the like, and still have a decent chance of survival.Hit points are a way of systematizing the "luck" or "good fortune" of characters in the game world. As such, they aren't "quantifiable" or "measurable" by people in the game world any more than "lucky" or "fortunate" is to us.That minion who died from one sword blow - well, that was tough luck. The hero who's been through several dozen battles and is unscathed - he must enjoy the favor of the gods. Or he has some greater destiny. He most certainly does not let people shoot him full of arrows as a parlor trick.Some people have a problem with this discrepancy between PC and "supporting character" being directly hard-coded into the rules. To them, the D&D rules represent some kind of alt-universe physics. They NEED this to be the case. If you are one of them, sorry, but I really don't think Fourth Edition is the game for you. *As I've alluded to since, the "elegant solution" is to ditch the hit point system entirely. Many of the current game "fixes" people are complaining about are bandaids to make the hit point system work properly in the context of the game. The routine argument is, "if the hit point system necessitates so many bandaids, why preserve it at all?"Easy. Any time your results depend on the result of a die roll, you introduce variability. If the variability is a binary condition (on/off), you create the possibility of a series of results that go nowhere. By contrast, ablative values produce more predictable results than binary conditions. Over time, your ablative values will drop, and the potentially swingy results of one die roll matter less. With a hit point system, you're able to predict, with reasonable accuracy, the mean number of rounds someone will last in combat. By contrast, binary conditions (like M&M's toughness saves) can leave someone dead in a few rounds or uninjured after 20+. They introduce a swinginess to the game that makes it mathematically hard to predict. And games that are mathematically hard to predict are hard to design for, except in a handwavey kind of way.Sure, over time, everything will average out. But you can get some pretty swingy results in the timeframe of a typical game.So instead, D&D opts to keep the predictable hit point system, and introduces the Minion rules, and others, as exceptions that offer new in-game options. Assuming you adhere to the "narrative" interpretation of hit points, the rules don't impact on SoD.I should point out that by "narrative," I don't mean "the DM lays out a story and the PCs walk through it." I mean, instead, that the rules of the game create situations similar to heroic narratives - with the rules intentionally biased in favor of the PCs so that they might fulfill the role of the protagonists, but without pre-determining what the results will be. Thus, we can still have a "game" where no one knows how it will turn out, but we can be pretty sure we won't lose half the party in the first scene. Similarly, the various NPCs (including monsters) in the "narrative" fill different roles, and as such, are governed by different rules. Sometimes, you want an NPC to last, but other times, you just want to threaten the characters with a whole squad of stormtroopers that poses a risk - but could possibly be wiped out.</blockquote>

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