Minions: Known or Unknown?

[Bayonet_Chris]

Minions

All of the creature types had their own miniature type, but I wasn't consistent with it per encounter. The players didn't know what they were until they hit them. It worked fine.

 

[LFK]

Mix and match, depending. In Khorvak's Tomb I described Kobold minions as pathetic, shabby slaves, and in other fights they've just been the soldiers who die in one hit, otherwise indistinguishable from the rest.

 

[Jhaelen]

It really depends on the minions. If they can be distinguished from the standard monsters because of their equipment, I'll point it out. If all are equipped identically, I won't.

 

[Tervin]

As the minions themselves don't know that they are minions, I don't think it would be fair to let the PCs in on it.

The way I see it, minions are just minions because they are unlucky. After all they can be just as dangerous with their attacks as other enemies. The difference is just that they don't have that ability to turn hits into near misses that abstract HPs imply. And to push it even further: They are only minions in that particular scene. They might very well have been exposed to danger several times before and dodged it, but this time their number is up. And if they survive this minion scene, they might see their roles expanded into proper villains.

(On the other hand, you can't turn a proper villain in one scene into a minion in the next - but that is another topic.)

 

[Nightchill]

I'm happy for the players to know. As combat veterans I assume their characters will have some knowledge of how tough/clever an opponent is from his stance, equipment, spatial awareness etc etc. So for humanoid opponents, the peons should be fairly evident.

For non-humanoid/monstrous/aberration opponents? Hm..

 

[Ginnel]

I'm happy for the players to know. As combat veterans I assume their characters will have some knowledge of how tough/clever an opponent is from his stance, equipment, spatial awareness etc etc. So for humanoid opponents, the peons should be fairly evident.

For non-humanoid/monstrous/aberration opponents? Hm..

Umm minions aren't less well equipped or less combat able or goofing around the place holding their weapons upside down. edit [this is reflected in the fact that the AC and attack bonuses can and in most cases should be around the same as non minions]

The only reason to describe a monster as different is if you deliberately want them to be in the game world not the game mechanics e.g. you could have an orc warboss with 2 orc taskmasters with whips hearding a yipping crowd of kobolds towards the players (of course the luckless kobolds need not be minions in this example either) or you could have the same orc boss with a number of orcish guards marching in formation around him armed with a variety of weapons (you would then mix up the minions and non minions)

In my take minions are the same as any other monster its just when the players hit and then do damage that is enough damage to take it out of the fight, the sword blow decapitates them, the dagger slits it's throat open, the light of magical energy burns into the side of it's face and it drops, the monster is bathed in a holy light, its exposed flesh searing from its bones and it drops to the floor.

 

[jasonbostwick]

Known. Aside from all the other reasons given (not wasting dailies, minions being present for cinematic reasons as a teeming horde, a desire not to feel like I am 'cheating' my PCs), the use of minions to speed up mass combat works both ways.

Minions having going down in one hit doesn't just mean you don't have to track HP, it also means players don't have to roll for damage against them.

I ran some encounters from KotS today to try it out, and after the third time someone rolled poorly on their damage roll against a Kobold and still killed it, I really didn't feel like keeping up the charade anymore.

With static damage for minions, it gives it away anyway once you get an attack in, unless you roll everything behind the screen.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I had a player not long ago who wasted his stunning fists on a monster he *thought* was dangerous but realy wasn't and was meant to be just a warmup. Thus, he had no stunning fists when he needed them later. I resolved that it makes the game more fun if you give players a pretty good idea of how tough the monster is that they're facing, particularly since the real character would be getting a ton of information from fighting the battle that no DM could ever fully communicate. Except of course in cases of purposeful deception by the monsters .

 

[pogminky]

I'll generally have minions not explicitly labelled, but any astute player should be able to work it out based upon in-game descriptions. Sometimes I might make it very obvious, other times I might make it less so depending upon the monster, narrative effect and player in question.

 

[Kraydak]

A little more detail on why I think minion status should be public:

Imagine an encounter with a boss and underlings. Frequently, it would be made with minions, but sometimes (the defining trait of the bad guys is toughness, say) you would use actual low-leveled normal monsters for the underlings instead. In one case, using an AoE daily w/damage on a miss is an awful tactical decision, and in the other it could be brilliant. The difference? Metagame. And metagame rules/design decisions should always be public.

This doesn't mean that people can't pretend to be other than they are. I am a big fan of 1e wizards carrying shortswords (or only the scabbard/hilt if they have encumbrance issues) and light cross-bows and pretending to be thieves. If anything, minions are annoying because they have a metagame status that should be public, which causes issues if the main bad guy is trying to use his minion-swarm as camouflage.